Zoraptor

WoT S2E4&5 TLDR: up and down, especially in terms of continuity consistency- far more obvious when you write the reviews after watching the next episode, probably should have done that from the start- but still OK.

I'd agree that Catholic Church analogues are 'lazy' (though I'd suspect the writers would call them 'familiar' instead). But they're not unrealistic because Belief is not founded upon Logic. They're parallel/ immiscible concepts. Or to put it another way people here don't think "wow, it's a miracle that my molecules don't fly apart/ collapse", but it is. You have to have exactly the right level of Fundamental Interactions for us to exist and you need that combination to have occurred from an infinite variety. Obviously it has, or this post wouldn't exist, so reading this is a minor miracle. Hope you all appreciate it. Similarly turning water to wine with a spell may not be thought of as a miracle in a magic world, but it is. I can't think of a single world where basic real world physics doesn't exist, and that says you cannot turn one set of atoms into another (well, you probably can, but if you're mucking around with subatomic physics then there's a relevant Clarke quote instead) Kind of disagree with the Jesus miracles, while he had some one off unique spectaculars he performed other miracles too, like healing. Not much practical difference between healing lepers or the blind or cripples and a Heal/ Cure Disease spell, and that was definitely a repeatable skill rather than one off.

Eh, hard disagree. Historically 'our' Catholic Church 100% believed in 'magic' and still does- in the end God Did It/ miracle events are magic. It's a belief system, it doesn't have to be consistent because people's beliefs aren't consistent. The only difference with lots of obviously extant gods is that worship is the focus, not belief. And quite often the situation is the same as here even if there is magic- no direct Divine Intervention, you either believe because you believe, or you don't. Mostly though, if someone wrote our existence as a fantasy novel there would be loads of people saying the same thing, but in reverse. "Why are there so many religions in this world when Science exists? I can go outside and curse Zherem, lord of the sky, and he'll hit me with a lightning bolt; ea sum, quod erat demonstrandum. There nothing happens but people still believe in God/ Allah/ Thor/ Apep/ Toutatis/ Vishnu etc? Makes no sense." Human nature isn't logical.

Jordan used limited viewpoint 3rd person 99% of the time- it's the limited part that is important rather than the 3rd person. IIRC some of the intros/ outros are written as omniscent in parts ('God view'/ absolute narration, ie this happened or that happened, not Rand or whoever thought that happened). But otherwise while the writing is in 3rd person we only see or hear what the viewpoint character sees or hears, and get their (unreliable) internal narrative on why they did whatever and what they thought of things. That's also why there are a lot of ample bosoms- Mat, Perrin and Rand are 18-20 years old and heterosexual, they are going to notice ladies' chests, and they are the protagonists so you get their viewpoint a lot. If it's, say, Egwene, she doesn't notice them anywhere near so much. Now there's a guy who could write an annoying character who was not intended to be annoying.

He's got a type, that's for sure. Part of it is the world design being fundamentally different from ours with women having a lot more intrinsic power and men with that power being Dangerous. Same thing said about the Ashaman later: it's hard to tell people they have the power to shake the world yet they should also walk and talk softly. And yeah, it's kind of telling that the women people tend to like in Jordan's writing are those that don't have/ don't want power- like Min. Or at least don't want the power for the sake of it, like Nynaeve. Or are willing to give it up for The Greater Good (the greater good) like a certain Brown, or Moiraine who is both the latter. The ones people tend to dislike are exactly those who'd be obnoxious in the real world too- Elaida, Cadsuane, Egwene, Elayne. The hyper ambitious prodigy upset someone's better than her generational talent and willing to squash anything for her ambition (Eg); the princess of the people who is 'down with the poors' and actually massively out of touch and spends books getting 'her people' killed utterly pointlessly because she thinks she's invulnerable, and worse, had a chapter spent on her bath (El); the plethora of Aes Sedai who are so impressed by their title that they expect reality to morph itself around them (would be quicker to list the exceptions); Faile, who's... Faile. I'd like to use the 'Justice' Red Dwarf line and say that's her crime but also her punishment but... she's Faile, so she's everyone else's punishment. Most of them are well written though, within the limits of Jordan's writing. Elayne is deeply annoying and one of the worst for overinflated plots (which is Jordan's main problem, imo), but the character annoyance at least is mostly because she's exactly what you'd expect from someone who is massively privileged and thinks she's progressive. The classic example is not her constantly swallowing her veil in Tanchico because she has her nose in the air or being chased because her 'perfect' poor person curtsy came across as sarcastic but her thinking her mother was universally loved as Queen and everything was Gaebril's fault. Well no, we see Caemlyn in book 1, and Morgase is not popular, even then, it's specifically said multiple times that white heavily outnumbered red. If she were real world she'd be doing things like going to 'Feed Africa' rallies in her designer clothes and jewelry and wondering why people were rolling their eyes, after all she'd posted dozens of time to #StopKony2012 what more could people expect?

There's a very good reason the western governments have shut their pie holes. The deliberate, callous and vicious targeting of civilians from Russia has managed to kill about ~9700 people over ~82 weeks. The surgical, proportion, necessary and humanitarian Israeli bombing has killed 3700 people (with 1000 still buried) in 2. Plus the Israelis are committing absolutely blatant war crimes like cutting off water to civilians. There's no way not to look like a hypocrite when the bombing campaign you've excoriated is killing people at 1/12 the rate as the one you're supporting. And unlike Yemen, it's being done under the eyes of the media. Worse, anything they say makes Russia look good, by comparison, because now everyone has a direct comparison to what the deliberate targeting of civilians actually looks like, and what the forced transfer of civilians actually looks like, and what collective punishment and cutting off the essentials of life actually looks like, and what systematic targeting of protected entities actually looks like. What are they going to say, What About Mariupol? (1) Holiday resort compared to Gaza, and not even the unrealistic cheerleader for western exceptionalism thinks that Israel will be rebuilding Gaza and (2) WhAtAbOuTiSm. They've got no way to attack Russia over this that isn't a bigger L for them. (Casualty figures are from OHCHR)

Yep. Resemblance is uncanny. These are words I never though I'd write: Elayne in the tv series is an active improvement on the books, so far, and pretty endearing. Really.

WoT S2 E2/3 Well, Nynaeve has chosen her Mythic Path now as well. I bet no one would have gone for Lich... TLDR/ non spoilers: not bad. I'd be struggling to say it's good, but at the same time if the whole thing was this quality there would be a lot fewer complaints. Not much outright praise, but a lot fewer complaints. The main issue is with them generating conflicts 'artificially' to get emotive scenes. And aspects of the visual design.

Had a chance to look at Israel's evidence on the Al Ahli strike in more detail and... they have the missiles launching from two different places 4km apart. Pretty much zero doubt about it to, completely mismatched description and location provided*. The cemetery mentioned is almost next door to the Ah-Ahli hospital. Its furthest extent is ~120m away. Their trajectory info however shows launches from about 4km away, in a ?Olive Grove? next to the coast (rough location; the Israeli circle is not exactly precise, the cemetery is just visible at the northern extent on a 1440uw monitor, so that will vary as resolution does). Something agricultural anyway, and there are no cemeteries nearby. We now also have confirmation from the Archbishop of Canterbury that Israel ordered the hospital evacuated the day before, a point that was in dispute with some. Credit to Britain's Channel 4 too, for remembering that Israel also has air burst munitions, not just ones that leave big craters. *The reason for the mismatched locations are pretty obvious and already stated: the launch has to be close by or the propellant has all been burnt up accelerating the rocket and you don't get the big immediate fire observed. Hence the nearby cemetery as location. But that doesn't match any other details since the rocket would not be moving quickly if it had traveled only 120m, so no whistling sound- maybe an active rocket sound, but we didn't get that- hence the more distant location. Build your own scenario out of bits, even if they're mutually contradictory. May also be a vestige of their previous release of missile launches with a failure that was meant to show the incident but was actually from 40 minutes after.

Should have left in the "don't bother replying part" in. The trouble with someone who always believes they're right is they're utterly pointless to engage with because their only actual purpose is maintaining their ego. Good laugh quoting someone from Bellingcat. They still have articles up insisting that the Khan Sheikoun CW attack was from a missile (ctrl f 'rocket': all the eyewitnesses), and that anyone who said it was a missile was a Russian plant spreading disinformation. Physician heal thyself. At this point is it really rhetoric? You can certainly argue the 'want' part, but comes a point where if you're continually making things worse the 'want' becomes irrelevant. To use an analogy the practical difference between a surgeon who is incompetent and one who fails deliberately is non existent, for the victims.

A story as old as time. Or at least as old as Chris Avellone's Arcanum Let's Play.

Hmm. Watched WoT S2E1 and it was OK. Non spoiler tldr: too many threads as people are in too many places but mostly made sense and introduced a bunch of actually recognisable book characters pretty well. Note: for the spoilers I'll be ignoring any prior knowledge I have of S2, but not prior book knowledge Also: good news! Nynaeve is no longer an assassin/ cleric multiclass.

No, it's really easy. You just say it wasn't actually your narrative, it was someone else's and in any case you were just repeating it for the sake of academic discussion. Then they're wrong, they jumped to conclusions and you can keep your ego intact, which is after all the important thing. See "Russia will be bankrupt in 6 months" in 2014 for how that works. Or you can admit you're wrong- when you are wrong- and not be worried about the crushing ignominy of it all because... there isn't any crushing ignominy.

Yeah, the break up theory doesn't really work though. You run into two fundamental problems. That the explosion is already too small, yet if it's a rocket that has broken up then, by definition, there's even less of it. You also have the question of what it's broken up into, ie, has the warhead fallen off? Has the rocket motor fallen off? And the fundamental issue which applies to every rocket based scenario: people don't really think about how rockets work. They look at numbers and think: this is plausible, based on that number. I mean, if every bit of propellant went up it'd make a big boom, wouldn't it? Yes it would! Well kind of, but that forgets that every bit of altitude or velocity gained by the rocket uses... propellant. Once it's used it can't explode or ignite on the ground. In order to get fast it has to fire its rockets for a significant period to generate either velocity or altitude, the propellant does not respawn as the rocket falls. (What Israel really needs to do is show that a lot fewer people died than the number claimed, if they can do that then you can also scale down the explosion size etc and put it down to dark making it look larger. Difficult though, since the hospital was run by the Anglican Church/ Episcopalians and you thus have to convince people that they're lying about it, not just Hamas. As it stands the failed rocket is utterly incompatible with the number of victims)

Eh, you could drive a truck through the Israeli story. Literally. That's why you had them blaming both Hamas and PIJ. Essentially: Hamas announced they were going to attack Haifa. This requires Fajr-5 or equivalent, due to range; about 140km. That has a lot of propellant, and a big(ish) warhead (see below for size) and would be a plausible candidate. This was too early for them to have struck the hospital though. Similarly, evidence for the missile falling posted as evidence was from after the attack (and later deleted by Israel) PIJ launched Qassams (technically Quds-101, their version of the Qassam) at about the right time. Can't be a Fajr-5, because they are big (6.5 m long, 1 tonne weight, so not man portable) and the firing site per Israel was a cemetery. That's quick set up with no launcher, so ~2m Qassam. But a Qassam is, well, comparatively tiny. Typically 1/14th the size of a Fajr-5, and similar proportion of range, and up to 50kg total weight. It's shorter range and smaller payload than a grad rocket and it's easy to look at the damage one of those does in Ukraine or wherever, lots of options. Not even slightly comparable. In order for their Israeli version to be accurate the missile has to be big enough to cause the damage observed, so it has to be Fajr-5. This is why you have Regev blaming Hamas and citing the claimed attack on Haifa as evidence, and IDF blaming PIJ who did not announce any such attack: it allows the two to be conflated into PIJ launching a Fajr-5. Now of course some would say that the difference is that after a failed launch the propellant is still there, and that did the damage. Well OK, in theory, but it does rather beg the question given the scale difference in damage: why bother with a warhead at all if the propellant is that destructive? Just pack the thing full of that instead, and don't bother with the warhead... Israel does not just have two air launched munitions that make craters 7 and 9m wide they've got plenty more including some designed not to crater (to prevent collateral damage, ironically). The phone(?) intercept is almost comical. Thank goodness Israel was listening in as they said exactly what they wanted them to and handily repeated all the salient points. Shame Hamas and PIJ didn't do the same thing 11 days ago, eh? And of course there's the plethora of other ancillary evidence: the warnings to evacuate hospitals made by Israel, Bibi's SM advisor posting it was an Israeli strike then deleting it, Netanyahu's light vs dark tweet from just after the attack. Doesn't have to be an attempt to kill hundreds either, just a 'door knocking' equivalent intended to force those demanded evacuations of hospitals gone badly wrong because in those circumstances a car park was not a low collateral location.

I think I have to watch and report back about S2 now, should be tremendous outrage bait at least.

Double post, but it's looking very likely that it was a JDAM. Pretty close to an exact match on sound and explosion size- and none of the scenarios thrown up by Israel or others (errant missile, disintegrating missile) come close to a similar match. and from Gaza ('missile strike' is [sic] if it's JDAM)

They've got a few Kiwi players with Dutch heritage playing for them, like Logan van Beek himself. None of them particularly close to making our side though, and with only a few thousand domestic players it's a big upset. Irony is, if the ICC ('world cricket') had had their way the Dutch wouldn't have even been there as being not good enough. Tangentially related, but it will be interesting to see Cricket at the Olympics. Kind of odd that the US/ LA of all places pushed so hard for its inclusion but I guess nearly 2bn extremely committed subcontintental fans have a lot of pull.

It's pretty much par for the course for Paradox. Their main studios tend to do well when they stay in their lane making the same strategy games over and over and their forays outside that are at best variable, results wise. How many major hits have there been from non PDS studios either under Paradox directly or with them publishing (not just distributing, so no PoE or Mount and Blade)? Cities: Skylines and... that's it. Maybe Age of Wonders, if you stretch the definition a bit? Magicka maybe, a decade ago? Not many, in any case. They just don't seem to be very good at managing external projects.

No proof, but Israel's made an utter mess of the response. Can't decide on who launched the supposed failed rocket (IDF says PIJ, Regev says Hamas, Netanyahu apparently blamed ISIS(!)) and the video of the missile shown by Israel's official state twitter account is from nearly an hour after the hospital was struck. Plus most of the Hasbara got stuck saying it was a legitimate hit and casualties were all due to secondary explosions from stored munitions for the first two hours- when the hospital was run by US Episcopalians and British Anglicans, so not exactly Hamas. All the telltale signs of scrambling to find a narrative that works. The explosion shown could have been from a palestinian rocket but it's... very marginal. It looks too large by far (albeit in the dark, which always makes explosions look larger) and would be like 1.5 M31 HiMARS rockets destroying a decent sized building containing high hundreds of people; it might just be possible, but it's not at all likely. Far more likely it was at least in the multiple hundreds of kgs range so was a GBU/ JDAM (or marginally, rocket like a Popeye), and that means Israel. Pretty embarrassing for Biden. His meetings in Jordan are just 'postponed' according to the US, but the other parties (King Abdullah, Abbas) say they're cancelled. So it will just be going and shaking hands with Netanyahu, which isn't going to get his meetings uncancelled any time soon.

From that, you may not want to watch S2. Based on spoilers/ memes rather than watching, but I'd be pretty confident even just from them.

~1700, officially. Always 'funny' when civilised 'surgical precision strikes' manage to kill at a far greater rate than 'indiscriminate and deliberate' targeting of civilians. Yep, Israel is killing civilians at more than 4 times the rate Russia is. And that's as conservative an estimate as possible: using Ukrainian government figures for civilian deaths rather than OHRCR (use them and it's close to a full order of magnitude) and Obama'ing it by assuming that not one single man killed by Israel was a civilian. Also, not including the dead from the hospital blown up today. At least those 500 (if confirmed) can take comfort knowing they were killed precisely, I guess. To be fair to Mr Harris it is a transcription of a podcast, and what works when said doesn't always work well when transcribed.

Meh, that's complete garbage. Basically a long 'essay' designed to make Mr Harris feel good about how much better the Israelis are at killing civilians. I particularly like the human shield accusations. Israeli soldiers regularly use Palestinian children as human shields, Mr Harris actually thinks that's morally superior because they aren't using... their own children. Yeah, such moral superiority. (On the more general issue, I'm always amused by accusations of one side 'not fighting fair' by hiding among civilians. Well ok, and maybe Israel should destroy its planes, drones, missiles, tanks, helicopters etc in order to also fight fair? No? Well then. And I'm fairly sure the dead don't care that they are 'collateral damage' from precision weapons; the people who care about that distinction are people who want to feel good about themselves for supporting it. I'd be interested in Sam's view on the moral equivalence of cutting off water to 2.2 million people, I suspect it'd put Simone Biles to shame with its gymnastic dynamism)

I'll probably watch it at some point when Amazon gives me a month free Primevideo or something. Consensus does seem to be that it was somewhat better, while repeating a lot of the same mistakes (and with an equally nonsensical final episode, which would be quite an achievement).

It's exactly the sort of overwrought title you'd have got from the press at the time- for our press the All Blacks are either incredibly awesome and just intrinsically better; or they're disastrously mediocre and their form a sign of the coming Apocalypse, never anything in between- so I'd definitely believe it happened. Just longer ago than remembered.