Zoraptor

The formal non-aligned status that was recently revoked was implemented in 2010, iirc. Yanukovich mainly used Europe/ NATO to wangle concessions and benefits from Russia.

I suspect the 'is she going or not' stuff was basically just trolling and the decision had been made a fair while ago- as with Missy claiming to be the Rani in some alternative takes. My only real problem with the special was that it was derivative not just of the obvious external stuff (Alien, Inception) but of a fairly recent Dr Who episode. The whole concept is a bit too convenient given the problems Moffat's run has had with internal consistency, just blame anything that doesn't make sense on it being a dream. Cute, perhaps too cute. Still, enjoyable.

He theoretically has no money because it is all in trusts and the like/ owned by his wife who is separated (or if you're cynical, 'separated') from. Practically he still lives in the most expensive property in the country and drives some ludicrously large vehicle. The illegal spying had no effect on whether he was going to get bail or not, and hasn't really effected the extradition hearing with the US- indeed, rather a lot of people insist that it never happened and it's all a plot, and if it did it was OK because it only happened to bad people and not me. And that despite it being admitted. I rather hope he stays around, he amuses and knots the panties of many people here who very richly deserve some strangulation of the nethers.

Yeah, I suspect plenty of people are reading and enjoying. I never played any of the Gold Box games though I do own PoR, but it was a recentish acquisition, so it's good to see what they were about.

Yeah, the 'emergent stories' for want of a better term (maybe After Action Reports would be better) were the best part of Stalker. Going after the Brain Scorcher having fought my way through the Red Forest I turned it off with 17 rounds left for my one remaining decent condition rifle and armour that was falling apart. OK, I thought, that was intense but at least it's over now, I can go back and get my equipment fixed up. Heh, thirty odd new Monolith targets later I made it out having killed most of the enemies with a silenced .45 pistol only to find more enemies outside. So I did the only sensible thing and ran away screaming like a little girl while popping whatever medkits I had left. Overall Stalker fits right into my intersection point of 'reality' and 'fun'. It's realistic enough that I can suspend disbelief but not so realistic that it becomes a chore. I put it in the same sort of category as Thief, it isn't hyper realistic but then I don't really want hyper realistic from either. The only immediate advantages I can think of the AI having were no ammo limit and that radiation didn't seem to damage them. Otherwise AI sprayed bullets all over the place at any range, outright missed with high accuracy weapons and fairly frequently got caught in anomalies and the like if in a firefight. Grenades were certainly annoying, especially in CS, but obeyed basically the same rules for AI and you. The problems were mainly those you get in any game, the AI doesn't have to think about self preservation at all so has no sense of resource management compared to you.

Pigeonholing all SJWs is about as sensible as pigeonholing all GGers, and really is drawing a long bow. Some will do it for ideological reasons, some for bandwagon jumping, some for deeply held beliefs unrelated to any formal ideology. There are some general observations (GG tends more towards libertarianism, antiGG more towards authoritarianism) that are true, but they're pretty broad distinctions and applying them broadly can be... annoying, I find it annoying when people label GG as being 'right wing' for example. Hot wheels has totally trolled Brianna Wu by claiming that he needs patreon to hire an assistant to look after his cat! It's either a travesty or the funniest thing ever.

I thought the ballistics in Stalker were absolutely fine. I one shotted the RPG-7 wielding guys in the Pripyat stadium with a Vintorez, and that has catastrophic bullet drop since it's subsonic, you just have to take it into account (which you do in reality as well). Then again, I really do hate 'laser beam' bullets and always hitting exactly where I aim in games, because I know perfectly well that I miss what I'm aiming at frequently when firing a real gun, even when I'm convinced I'm going to bullseye it. Most suits have night vision built in, so night is primarily an issue in the start. Then again, I actually use a mod that makes the nights darker because I thought the original settings too bright. And you do have a flashlight too. I think, it's been seven years since I played SoC unmodded.

I had my first crash last night, and have had one other bug where an enemy went indestructible. Not bad at all. I do wish they had more of a Jagged Alliance 2 type turn based system than the Fallout one they went with to add some depth to the combat (things like interrupts) and I do find myself wishing that the NPCs and other systems had a bit more depth- but then again, there's an awful lot of NPCs to give depth to. At this point I'm finding it a bit easy as well, though the one time I ran into some military types two of them had me down to one active and two outright dead in the first round, so there clearly are more difficult encounters out there. Overall I thought it was pretty good and still have that opinion. I suspect I won't finish it and very likely won't replay any time soon as I will get bored at some point, but I've already got my money's worth.

No quibbling about technicalities? How many posts would we be left with in the forums if we gave that up?

Point really was that dogs tend to look sad and depressed whenever things don't go their way and that isn't really indicative. No biscuit? Sad. Won't let me in? Sad. Bath? Sad. Upcoming bath? Sad. Walk? Tired; sad. No walk? Energetic; sad. Dyeing the dog's hair is stupid, but it would still be stupid even if the dog were running around frolicking like it was a pet food advert, or was a poodle off to a show.

While she is an idiot for dyeing the dog I do have to say that every single time I have had a dog sitting in a bath tub it has always looked 'unhappy and violated'. Doesn't mean it ain't going to get washed though, if it needs it.

Why respond at all? He's pretty obviously just spoiling for a fight, and in that respect he's definitely the Monty Python Black Knight- doesn't matter how many bits you chop off he won't stop and will always insist he's winning.

In the end Germany lost because Hitler was an idiot. He made three genuinely good decisions in the whole war, going with Manstein's plan for France and the hedgehogs in late 1941/2, plus appointing Speer. Otherwise it was a litany of stupid, from keeping ideologically pure incompetents (like Goering) in position to constant goal post shifting (eastern front) to reinforcing failure (Tunisia), declaring war on the US, obsession with bigger and greater wonder weapons and turning potential game changers into too little too laters (Me262). That's really all that needs saying Pretty much all international power politics is cynical power play rather than humanitarian rescue mission, the latter is just to add palatability for the general public. Having said that, the Russian intervention in Ossetia had (at least) as much humanitarian pretension as, say, the NATO intervention in Kosovo had. It's not like if Serbia decided to reintegrate Kosovo that NATO would be all "well now, we'll have to set up an international commission or something to discuss how naughty you're being, hope you Serbs enjoy Pristina in the summer in the meantime though" either.

El oh el. Even OSCE agreed that Georgia attacked first and disproportionately, and that there was no Russian build up beforehand- and HRW state unequivocally that Georgia ethnically cleansed around 200,000 ethnic Ossetians in the 90s civil war. The west has no obligation to help someone who starts a fight, nor to help ethnic cleansers even if they are their friends. Georgian War of Wanton Aggression in South Ossetia was in August, 2008 Barack Obama, inaugurated January 20, 2009. Obama, so bad he retroactively turned the Bush administration into a bunch of peaceniks!

Playing Dead State. It's enjoyable enough and I certainly don't regret spending the money on it (might have, marginally, if I hadn't kickstarted it but bought it full price) but it is what I'd call an 80% game- it's 80% of the way towards being excellent but everything is just a little bit more flawed than it should be, from combat to conversations and the character system. I haven't hit a single bug so far though, so in that respect it is excellent.

Or I think those that remained loyal to the occupiers were Quislings and those that didn't were True Heroes and Patriots. I actually think that the circumstances don't matter much at all so didn't mention them- as I said, there's always a justification that can be had for barbarity. You can try to (further) justify it if you like, but that really just proves the overall point. Strapping people to cannons is a punishment designed to give a painful undignified end beyond the mere punishment for a crime, for mere execution a bullet suffices.

Team America was OK. The skewering of the Mike Moore/ bandwagon celebrity culture was pretty good (as was the supermarionation overall), but unlike SP: BC&U they rather ducked the reciprocal skewering of gung ho militarism. Should have been better. Don't really know what to think about Sony though. On one hand I tend to think that doing a movie about assassinating a real world head of state of another country is generally bad taste, even as a comedy, on the other that's not enough reason to want things banned. In the end I don't really feel sympathy for either the DPRK or Sony. The DPRK could have at least gone after the egregiously bad Red Dawn remake though.

Unreliable information is almost always worse than no information because resources have to be wasted either checking up on or worse, acting on that unreliable information to determine that it is unreliable. WW2 is replete with such examples, Hitler convincing himself that D-Day would be at Pas de Calais due to the inflatable armies or Operation Mincemeat convincing him that Greece and Sardinia would be invaded rather than Sicily. Though it is absolutely certain that some- usually large- proportion of information gathered by any intelligence method will be unreliable and that much of the rest will be irrelevant. The problem is very seldom too little information, it is almost always too much information and determining which bits are accurate or even relevant.

More or less, the British Empire ran on basically three different approaches. Get native leaders to run things for you with tame soldiers/ police. If not that then support the second strongest ethnic group against the strongest. If neither of those two work then the gloves are well and truly off, including torture- though the British were hardly the worst* and despite the White Man's Burden rhetoric were considerably more prosaic and realistic about things than the US with their manifest destiny/ messiah complex and uncomfortable and incompatible mix of naive idealism and sociopathic application. *US ain't the worst either by a decent amount too, comparatively speaking it would probably be Belgium, or early Spain. But, Britain has had a long history of doing things at very least equivalent to what the US has done, up to recently and historically- as have most imperial powers. The counter insurgency work against the IRA certainly employed a lot of informants and such which were effective, but also employed arbitrary arrests and torture. The response to the Maomao insurgency in Kenya involved copious torture which has only recently been somewhat admitted, and for which there will be no punishment. They essentially invented modern 'legal' collective punishment via the Boer War concentration camp. The Sepoy rebellion in India involved such humane punishments as tying prisoners to cannons then firing them through their bodies. And of course ten of millions of Indians starved on the British watch. It all tended to get justified similarly as well, as being stuff that at least 'worked'; even when it didn't. People argue so strongly that torture works as a moral insulation; it is essentially cognitive dissonance, not wanting bad words applied to people/ countries you like, wanting them to be better than others and yes, to have done bad things for The Greater Good (the greater good). The Harvard study on the use of waterboarding as torture illustrates it pretty well. Prior to 2004 waterboarding was almost always referred to as torture by the US press- afterwards it almost never was. That is why some people so desperately want the US either not to have tortured or for it to have all been worth it. But if it doesn't work and provided no usable intelligence then you have to accept that you just had a bunch of our guys waterboarding and raping prisoners with dogs for absolutely no gain. It doesn't make a lick of logical or objective sense, but makes a whole lot of subjective sense. There's also pretty much nothing you can do to persuade people that they're wrong about it precisely because it's so interwoven into a person's fundamental beliefs.

Insurance companies should (and do here even though we have universal/ single payer healthcare as well since they have to give value added over that system) subsidise basic checks because insurance companies should be concerned about the far higher ambulance-at-bottom-of-cliff costs associated with operations, stays in hospital and long term stays on expensive medication than the minimal fence-at-cliff-top of going to a doctor once a year. That's especially true for young children since they're both more susceptible to problems and will have to live with any long term ones for a long time. Prevention is almost always cheaper. Meh, I'd give everyone one free GP visit a year, I'd bet the incidence of the very costly but mostly preventable stuff with high prevalence here like late onset diabetes would plummet.

Wonder if Valve will ban Hotline Miami retrospectively now, for the children. (They should make Hatred: Steam edition with all the humans replaced with skeletons. It'd make me laugh.)

It's rather indicative that the west thinks it's going to work anyway. Hitler couldn't break the Russian spirit with Stukas and Panzers, yet Obama thinks sanctions will work? Plus, of course, it's a balancing act: the best organised opposition groups are not the pro western groups which are largely seen as stooges and 5th columnists outside of the very restricted circles in which western people orbit in Russia, they're the Zyuganov/ Zhirinovsky Communists/ Nationalists. Or the military. And from the western perspective they're far worse than Putin, far far worse. They shouldn't be aiming for 'regime change' because it's a stupid policy by any measure- but then western foreign policy is hardly replete with nuanced and well informed examples of sense, rather it's full of stuff they could hardly have done much worse if they'd tried.

To many practical purposes France left NATO once already, in 1966 under De Gaulle. Retained political integration but removed its military, indeed its military was only reintegrated by Nick the Hungarian in, iirc, 2009.

The question looks daft to those of us not indulging in the "skeleton journalists are controlling popular opinion" conspiracies. According to the graph/ stats it went up 2192 places in a day and got all its 13000+ votes, in a day- albeit Valve's graph making skills are about as bad as an unedited MSXL abomination from a 10 year old/ the software engineering in their client so it isn't absolutely certain that is what it means. That would certainly and already count as 'positive reception' from fans, indeed that is theoretically/ supposedly what GL is actually intended for in the first place, to gauge fans' reaction and desire for the given game. Plus of course Valve's absolutely deliberate monopolism makes it very difficult to succeed without them in the first place unless you're minecraft, Blizzard or EA and puts it into a whole different kettle of fish from Target/ Te warewhare banning gtaV from their shelves. When people talk about curation on GL/ Steam they almost always say it in the context of all the shovelware RPG maker rubbish and yes even outright scams/ broken games which Valve is happy to stock. WarZ (or whatever the scam DayZ clone was before its name eventually changed), Unity based Early Access 'games' using only stock assets, old games that cannot be played because the copy protection is still active yet the developer has not supplied even an emanual to get the answers for it out of. That is what people want curated, not a bunch of morality goons running around inflicting their morals on others and telling people what to think. FTR I think Hatred looks moronic and I have no desire whatsoever to play it, but asterisk me if that means I think other people should be prevented from playing it.

Apparently the Dail Fail is the most read enewspaper anywhere. No, really. It is accurate, China > US economically, for PPP rather than raw size at least.