Zoraptor

I will never stop being confused why people perceive the most outlandish and emotionally-charged intentions behind my posts, and surely you must understand that from my perspective, when I ask a question and the response may as well be "lol u mad? calm down bro," then I can't help but wonder if it's an attempt to dodge out of the question. It's because you do seem overwrought- it's not like the forums have been overrun with Correct the Record folks, they're far too busy shilling on reddit/ facebook for that. Your post would make far more sense elsewhere than here where you are largely preaching to the choir since neither candidate is popular. (Trump also is doing at least a good impression of an idiot, Hillary is basically sitting tight waiting for him to self destruct. There's currently a lot less to actually discuss about her, either positive or negative)

To be fair, he'd be more or less right. It isn't the Kurds attacking themselves, but most attacks in Turkey are PKK (or their splinter group/ 'splinter group' TAK) rather than ISIS. TAK even uses suicide bombers, though both Kurdish groups attack the military or state apparatus primarily and don't go for solely civilian targets like a wedding.

Editorial boards are at very bias agnostic. They just set the tone for what they think their readers/ watchers want- and it's pretty clear CNN think their viewers want Hillary and don't want Trump. That is bias. It's business sense as well, or kind of, given CNN's viewer numbers have been in decline for decades. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with 'public good', that's endearingly naive. Clinton isn't being called out, really. There was barely any coverage of her most recent 'misspeaking' about the emails controversy, and CNN deflected everything on the emails/ DNC to it being the Russians' fault and how that meant that Trump was obviously a Russian stooge. Whereas, of course, the ledger implicating Manafort turning up was unimpeachable evidence and the direct donations of Pinchuk et alia to the CF- more than Manafort was supposed to have distributed, alone- were unmentioned and irrelevant. So, ledger turns up implicating Trump aide at a very convenient time from a government/ oligarchy that has been the heaviest donator to the CF; coincidence, absolute coincidence so much so that we'll not even mention it as it's absolutely not interference in the election cycle; however unsupported (and they are unsupported, in regards to Russian government involvement specifically since the two hackings groups didn't even know the other was there) accusations that Russia was leaking DNC/ Hillary emails shows obvious collusion and is worthy of ad nauseum repetition. Obvious deflection to try and get people to talk about another story rather than the inconvenient one. They aren't talking even a quarter as much about the actual big Russian hacking story, them hacking the NSA and stealing their tools. Something which is basically confirmed at this point and is actually and confirmedly a national security issue.

Like Ukraine. Clinton Foundation, ~10 million dollars from Pinchuk, nary a peep. Indeed, despite there being some comments about countries like Saudi contributing Ukraine has been the CF's biggest donor over the last few years, that same Ukraine which is ~bankrupt and whose oligarchs are meant to be being cleaned up. And the 'link' with Trump isn't even Trump, it's Manafort who so far as anyone knows just did lobbying. Plus of course there was barely any mention of Clinton staying in the 2008 primaries because 'Bobbie Kennedy got assassinated' when there was the coverage of Trump's ' assassination' speech. Oh please. CNN is abjectly pro Clinton, and to pretty much the same extent as Breitbart is abjectly pro Trump. I don't even see how it could be argued otherwise, except in degree. And I say that as someone who would never vote for either, even if I could. Certainly Trump does dominate the airwaves and Clinton has an absolute strategy to avoid anything that could blow up in her face but when was the last time CNN seriously challenged her- 2nd most disliked candidate of all time, of all time!- on anything? No press conferences for 8 months, flip flopping issues, CF donors, emails etc etc. Almost complete silence on all of them from CNN, certainly no negative coverage. As for Politifact, they're kings of the technically accurate summary so far as Clinton is concerned. I may have joked about it before but I do seriously suspect that they'd rate her saying she was a banana as mostly true because humans and bananas share a majority of their DNA.

Yeah, it is. Or close enough for such a flightpath. He's wrong anyway, but not for that reason. (blah blah 'Oblate spheroid' blah blah projection blah blah Mercator blah blah stretches latitude bands to match the equator's width little distortion of longitude blah blah. And Ukrainian airspace being closed to Russian bound flights is the actual reason Erdogan diverted anyway)

We're up to third in the medal table!. I can feel my latent nationalism swelling fit to burst.

The 'likely' remasters will probably have the dlc bundled. Inquisition got an Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called pretty quickly so they seem to have shifted their policy a bit on the idea.

Pretty much zero social media/ SJWish coverage here either, then again we don't get US commentators at all so far as I can tell, mostly Brit/ Canadian/ Aussie if not NZer. Closest we've come to such coverage is stories about athletes and officials being robbed or about favellas, which are at least 'proper' news stories. I've seen a few such stories on the BBC though at least they've been mostly limited to their social media focussed programming where they do fit.

I have no idea whether reviewers/ professional critics said it was generic and formulaic, that's just how I found it. I'm not actually sure whether I've read a single review of TFA, since I saw it late and actively avoided spoilers. I certainly don't count things like having a female protojedi or black stormtrooper protagonist as being original though, I just don't care about such things. I could probably compose a list of what I thought was generic about it if wanted, but I'd really want to have seen it twice before doing so which I haven't done. In any case I did like it well enough; I watched it for big explosions and cool fights, not for originality.

Has studio meddling ever turned a bad film into a good one? Realistically, TV- or games, if they ever release non movie tie ins again- is where Star Wars would get genre shift and new approaches. SW movies are meant to do billion dollar box offices and shift hundreds of millions in merchandise, not challenge the viewer or give them anything other than exactly what they expected. TFA was perhaps the best example there could be, cobbled together from all the good bits of the previous movies rather than bringing the slightest bit of originality or risk. I enjoyed TFA well enough but it was utterly, utterly generic, formulaic and unchallenging and expecting anything else from a SW movie is not realistic.

I contributed to the (failed) kickstarter for Outcast 2 and Outcast is one of my favourite games so I'll no doubt pick the sequel up.

That... would immediately convince me not to vote Libertarian. Indeed, it's the sort of thing we get regularly from the Greens here (on economics) and instantly convinces me not to vote for them. Then again, I am triggered by bad statistics. (Always compare like with like. Both Trump and Clinton have far greater than the 15% poll support required to get into the debates anyway. Considering they're the two most disliked candidates in polling history we can safely assume that any D/R candidate will be there with the 15% rule even if they weren't be there by fiat. In other words, it's the cumulative systemic issues that hamstring 3rd parties; struggling to get to 15% support is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.)

Yep, Mike Jackson- and it certainly didn't hurt his career either since he ended up Chief of General Staff/ military head of the British army.

There are considerably more touch rugby players in New Zealand than there are full contact 15s or 7s players- though football (soccer) is most popular. Touch rugby is a very popular sport since anyone can play it and there's far less size discrimination than in the contact varieties, and here at least it's often played in summer when it doesn't compete with winter sports. It would probably make a decent Olympic sport, can hardly be worse than some of the things already there anyway. Big question about the rugby 7s is, of course, whether the US will defend its 92 year reign as Olympic champions... Not really feeling the Olympic spirit yet at all, haven't watched anything except some of the opening ceremony despite (or maybe because of) 10 channels of coverage and theoretically decent viewing hours. Apparently we've already won a medal in shooting, so well done that lady shooter, I guess.

Russia had the power to do stuff, especially on the UN front where it could have stopped the ICTY's formation. Putin would not have approved it, but Yeltsin was in power in 1993 and he seems to have genuinely believed the west's PR and was perhaps hoping for a Marshall Plan equivalent. Well, he was a moron and a drunken sot after all, and much as I dislike speaking ill of the dead. By the time he found out that the US was- literally- willing to start WW3 over Yugoslavia (per Wesley Clark, who makes Yeltsin look positively enlightened, ordering James Blunt to attack Russian paratroopers in Kosovo. Thankfully he did try and order British troops to do it and they told him to **** off. What is it with American generals called Clark being idiotic glory hounds? Mark Clark was exactly the same going for Rome in WW2.) he was already on the way out. ICTY also can't really be said to have been created to legitimise the west's bombing since the bombing happened well after the court was established. It certainly has been used for PR and post facto justification though, and definitely handed out ludicrous and politicised decisions. Still, it is definitely ironic how much those Yugoslav decisions have come back to haunt the west. Like much of Bill Clinton's presidency it looks far, far worse with the perspective of a couple of decades than it did at the time because you can see all the consequences. Putin himself and active Russian revanchism is largely a result of Yugoslavia. And the reputation of international tribunals is certainly appalling outside the western bubble.

The correct analogy would be whether Stalin ordered the 'holodomor' famine, not the gulags. Thing about Nazi Germany was that it was horrendously inefficient and obfuscated despite their reputation for efficiency- even their air force had two parallel 'armies' associated with it, for example. The bureaucracy itself was efficient enough, but there were many multiple competing layers so it's possible that Hitler wouldn't know. And while the nazis tended to document pretty much everything there still isn't a smoking gun that Hitler ordered the holocaust and that could mean no conviction for that in a civilian trial. Even that hardly matters though, there was plenty of stuff he was clearly and provably guilty of besides that and his best chance at any trial would have been insanity plea or inability to stand trial, not an acquittal. But in any case the Nurnburg tribunals- which were where he actually would have been on trial, assuming the Russians allowed it- were military and required less proof than civilian ones. If Keitel and Jodl were found guilty there then there's no doubt at all that Hitler would have been too.

Yeah, they're definitely the same crowd and taken at similar times since you can see the people in white shirts in both pictures despite the second being taken on whatever the digital equivalent of a pinhole camera is. Best interpretation for CNN is that the picture was the best one they had and was meant to be illustrative rather than literal. Rule with such pictures is the same as with 'unnamed sources', if you don't have corroboration from something else you're right to be deeply sceptical because you can stage either very easily. Happens all the time with sporting events that you know didn't sell out but have apparently full crowds, they've just made sure the people who have turned up sit on one side and the other side has all the fixed cameras.

I'm very much meh on the announcement of console versions personally- no objection to them in principle but it's not a great look for a project that was pitched as PC and which has had issues during development. Problem is that we simply don't know if any of those development issues were caused by it actually being a multi platform title long term (even since inception) or were maybe caused by a decision to go console part way through development, or if the development issues were completely separate. If either of the former were true then there's no way that KS funds weren't used for console development at one point even if they later got it covered by the publishing deal. I tend towards it being as stated by InXile, with the addition that the publisher deal probably helps with some extra funding due to the extended development, but it doesn't really look good to anyone who is sceptical of them.

Eh, he definitely had a nationalist agenda and a lot of bad stuff went down during the wars. Problem was always that other people's (primarily Tudjman's, but to an extent Izetbegovic) nationalist agendas and bad stuff were conveniently ignored- to actively supported- by those who condemned Milosevic. In any case, after the Op Storm verdict the ICTY had lost what few scraps of credibility or impartiality it ever may have had. 250k Serbs spontaneously left Croatia during it but that was complete coincidence, honest guv! Kosovo being the 2nd largest source of refugees in Europe- just behind Syria- is simply the stinky brown dollop crowning the utter craptacular mess the international community has made of Yugoslavia.

At least they're not yet recycling actors within the same show (though the police captain on Flash comes close, since he was on Arrow beforehand and they're shared universe). When they shot Hercules and Xena here they'd regularly use the same actors for different characters even within the same season, though they'd often make a nudge-nudge joke/ reference about doing so. And occasionally jokes about roles they'd had on NZ TV that no one else could possibly get like marrying Gina and Leonard to each other. Vancouver is a bit more extreme though, there must be a dozen shows shooting there. If that happened here we'd have literal queues for filming locations.

The dead female russian crew member of the Mi8 was fake by the way. It's a stock/ demo photo/ id.

We've got some great forums here, haven't we people? Believe me, I know forums, and this one is great. Something something build a wall around the forums something something make Bioware EA pay for it. I wonder what happens to the NWN2 forums, would be ironic if they ended up here after being off site so long.

Trump's music should clearly be 'Voodoo Child' instead of 'Real American' as a sign that when elected he'll institute a new World order. The way things have gone with this campaign I was half expecting the joke suggestion of a Trump/ Bollea (Hogan) candidacy to actually happen. More insanity: we now have the once in a lifetime experience of George Soros and The Koch Brothers supporting the same candidate, who supposedly wants to get big money donations out of politics...

I mean, when the games that aren't immediately taken are just the ones that nobody around here has ever heard of, how can you blame us? The ones people have heard of (...and have heard of them for not being terrible) usually get taken in like less than 24 hours...I don't want to take a game I don't think I'm ever gonna at least try, so I don't. I'm sure others feel the same. Dunno, I would have thought the Star Wars games, the Sega pack and Tropico 5 at least would attract someone and fit the bill for being heard of, at very least. Some might even say they're good games. I suspect the problem there is that everyone who wants them already has them, or won't take them due to thinking gabe is the devil and steam his little hell on earth, or runs out of impetus before reaching the bottom of the list. If you want a suggestion for lesser known but good games I'd suggest Quadriga (roman charioteering simulator, here's a very good write up by Tim Stone, the one genuinely great bit of RPS who liked it so much he reviewed it twice) or Ultimate General Gettysburg for a sort of Total War approach to, well, Gettysburg. It's a little rough around the edges still but it's certainly worth free no money down.

The airbrushed 4/5 view Hillary poster is also reminiscent of nazi (specifically SS) propaganda posters too, such as those for the Nordic Legion. Normally I'd say that it's a common propaganda shot but a search for SS propaganda posters uses that particular angle extensively while the equivalent searches for US or British have almost none with the similar angle. Soviet propaganda posters on the other hand also use that angle extensively, though not as extensively. (Specifically the Hillary one made me think of Reinhardt Heydrich who had a penchant for publicity shots that look very similar to it just with things like a swastika as a 'halo' instead of US flag style stripes. Then again, if you can say nothing else positive about nazis at least they had a great PR department that made them look cool)