Zoraptor

Completely irrelevant, since the munitions being sent are, what, M864 155mm shells (hence the "running out of conventional ammo" justification which would be bizarre if ATACMS/ Cruise Missiles were being supplied) from... 1987, not ammunition for cruise missiles or ATACMS. And their failure rate, per your own Congressional Research, is up to 30%. Unless that too is pro Russian propaganda. I'm not one to usually defend mealy mouthed PR officers but in this case she's being completely accurate- if they're used specifically against civilians it's a war crime, because using any munition used specifically against civilians is one by default whether you have signed the CCM treaty or not, since civilians are by default a protected category that should not be specifically targeted. There is, as always, rather a lot of wiggle room where military targets and civilian are mixed and that's always the claim made when they are used in civilian areas. Same with thermobarics since they were mentioned as well, though there is not additional treaty effecting their use. Its use on civilians is specifically banned by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (1980; specifically ratified by the US in ~2008). Fine to use against military targets though, but unlike WP/ thermite it doesn't have other uses you can use as justification to get around the CCCW's more stringent/ specific protections for civilians than the default.

Not inherently a war crime since the US is not a signatory to the relevant treaty (nor are Ukraine or Russia); unless they're used indiscriminately/ disproportionately in civilian areas. So merely sending them isn't 'illegal'*. But yeah, it will be a war crime since Ukraine has regularly been using cluster munitions in attacks on Donetsk city since 2014 (per NYT, so not exactly pro Russian). Probably more embarrassing than the two facedness of the posturing is the rationale: running out of conventional ammunition to send. *internationally at least because there's a well akshually about the whole thing: sending CM with a dud rate of more than 1% is illegal under US Law (Consolidated Appropriations Act 2010, for anyone wondering, signed by notorious peacenik GWBush), and even the Pentagon claims 2.5% for the munitions being sent. A recent Congressional Research Service report however gives, hmm, 10-30% as observed dud rate.

It's be Kurd related, if it's a quid pro quo situation. May not be though, the whole delay may just have been Erdogan posturing for electoral benefit- and that election is been and gone. Most of his supporters are stupid enough to believe him if he says it was a great victory with major concessions achieved, even if in reality he folded like a deck chair.

Super awkward <--> bizarre, and I'd say it was super awkward, not just run of the mill awkward like Miranda butt shots. It was the most bugged part of the game, the models were uncanny valley, they were very obviously intended to be a bit more, hmm, Witcher 2 than they ended up being to keep a lower rating hence the absolutely ludicrous underwear, they didn't really work if you were a dwarf and the overall reaction to the scenes elicited either outright laughter or staring incredulously. Or both. End effect: Barbie and Ken doll (or half scale equivalent, for a dwarf) sex scene, but done oh so deadly seriously. Certainly not as disappointing as the inability to enslave nations with necromancy, but just as certainly not the grimdarkesque atmosphere they were trying to go for otherwise and more something you'd expect as satire from Team America.

Can Larian out bizarre Dragon Age Origins sexy time? It's quite a challenge... (I guess I could watch the video in question to judge for myself but it's far more fun to just lol at the description)

That fight seems to rely entirely on luck. Probably the most annoying of my entire playthrough. Most of the time even if you lost you got some useful feedback, with that one the feedback was that nothing worked. (IIRC when I did win after, uh, one or two party wipes, no one had died so it was entirely an all or nothing result*. Just not a very well designed fight at all *not sure if I posted about it here, and I'd stand to be corrected if I did)

You'd be taking your life into your hands since it would be a Fatal 4-Way. Though maybe that term is TM'ed by the other lot. Wait, so you were women's champ then became men's champ?

Witcher S3 pt1: I could have sworn that someone here had written something about it I 100% agreed with, but apparently not, or my powers of observation have deserted me... Anyway, this was a frustrating watch. There's something decent trying desperately to break out of a shell of mediocrity, and failing, again. Spent most of the first episode trying to remember what happened in S2 despite watching the extended recap, and really, there was about two episodes worth of actual plot for 5 episodes/ 5 hours run time. The dialogue itself generally isn't awful, and the acting is actually pretty good for what they had to work with but the overall direction (and to an extent Direction) lets everything down. Way too many threads in too many places, and it's largely a self inflicted problem since the core trio are constantly getting pointlessly separated which bogs everything down further. Also lots of ham handed character introductions; even with knowing most of the characters beforehand it's confusing and must be far worse if you weren't familiar with them. Overall it gives that feeling you get when something is very badly paced of being simultaneously too long yet also too rushed: absolutely needed someone with a bit more competence in charge but at least it's better than Blood Wotsit. It's also done no favours by being split into two halves when it's pretty obvious- I'd expect even to those who haven't read the books or played the games- that everything will kick off in the second half.

Ah, so they've maintained consistency with the source material then, excellent for immersion. (I suspect being a writer for a wrestling game is a lot more difficult than people might think, since so many promos etc rely so heavily on the wrestler(s) delivering them. Mark Henry 'retiring', Steiner Maths or Hurricane/ Rock depend utterly on the people delivering them with utter conviction despite them being... just a little silly when you write them down)

Played in the movie by Jeff Goldblum, and hides an alien defeating trojan inside a version of Skyrim for Samsung Fridge Alien Navigation Devices... Did anyone really expect the engine to be anything other than Gamebryo++ with a new renderer?

Cognomen system > any ordinal system. Really shows you've achieved something in life- and you get well known but probably apocryphal stories told about you 1000 years later, eh Basil Bolgoroktonos...

OK, seen the first two SNW episodes now. First one is... ok. Dragged down a bit by the very silly framing used to get the Enterprise there and has some pretty overt nuTrek tropes too, but still, ok despite that. It's not going to be an episode anyone remembers in a few weeks/ months time though. Second one is, yeah, well written- probably even very well written- for the vast majority. Got to say though, it has a lot of the same Trek flaws that a lot of otherwise good episodes have. Note, not specifically nuTrek flaws in this case, since the same thing tends to happen a lot in every Trek show except (to an extent) DS9 with its more rigid narrative. So not an absolutely top tier episode in my eyes because some of the consequences don't ring true, but not far off.

It doesn't, since I accepted the gift and romanced her. (Annoying Iomedae was an absolute bonus)

The accusations of the Brits using colonials as cannon fodder aren't really well supported at all. Well, except for the Sepoy Rebellion, and that was a different kind of cannon fodder. They were extremely profligate with colonial troops on many occasions but they were almost always more profligate with their own (eg Gallipoli, 3x as many 'real' Brits died as Australian/ NZ). That wasn't, of course, because they were nice and cared deeply for the colonies, there was a healthy dollop of them thinking that coloured colonials would be useless troops anyway* and worse, the Sepoy Rebellion had shown they could be... unreliable, and you need to be very careful arming people who might decide Germany (or whoever) isn't the enemy they want to be fighting. *then they got repeatedly spanked by Lettow-Vorbeck during ww1, whose main force was Askari, not German...

If that's Murdoch related distrust Sky (UK*, which sky.com is owned by) hasn't been owned by him in ages, Comcast bought everyone else out in 2018. They certainly don't have the same overt agenda that Uncle Rupes had, more a standard corporate one, and though Sky News (UK) aren't 100% reliable they certainly aren't anywhere near the Daily Heil or Scum level to just make things like that up or massively misrepresent them wholesale. *He still owns the (utterly awful) Sky Australia though.

Once Upon a Time was actually pretty good within the limitations of a US network TV show; ie went on far too long, kept characters way after their sell by date so all the plots felt recycled pretty quickly and used up all the good ideas in the first couple of seasons etc. But that's what happens when you're trying to write 22 episodes a year for 7 years or whatever it was. OTOH, Fear the Walking Dead went right down the toilet when its OUaT writers/ showrunners joined, so mileage obviously varies more than a Volkswagon. Haven't seen either SNW episode yet due to time constraints. Watched the 2nd episode of Dead City though. Not bad at all, and a lot more my sort of thing than either the main show or Fear had given in years. Mostly due to Jeffrey Dean Morgan I think, who has 5 minutes of the best scenery chewing I've seen anywhere in years.

Not usually the biggest fan of our local papers' political cartoonists, but I love their one today with Prigozhin crossing the Rubicon and doing an immediate U-turn back to the other side. Alea iacta fuerat, or something. Of course they immediately lost my goodwill by making it impossible to link to directly...

Reminder, last time it turned out that Ukraine actually did attack the ZNPP* despite claiming it was Russia shelling themselves, they just made an absolute hash of it. With the dam gone they will be able to drive most of the way there and get direct fire support instead of having to use RIBs and artillery only. *The Times article itself only seems to show up on DDG with a dead link, hence linking via a 3rd party article.

They were already gone from the actual front from the start of June, replaced by regular troops. That's why there were so many of them around in the rear areas.

I mean, it would be a good way to see who sticks their head up at the sniff of rebellion but if this is a work Putin and Prigozhin should retire from politics and start up a wrestling promotion.

No, I'm pretty sure they're two separate things. Rey had just bought the game, and was going home to beat his kids. The best evidence for that is that Rey has beaten Dominik up multiple times on live TV, we've never seen them playing WWE2k13 together though.

What, the guy who can't waite (sic) to go home and beat his kids? So proud of the fact too he still has the tweet up: His son would make a far better subject, everyone likes a story of overcoming oppression and coming out on top, plus it has a prison storyline so it'd be like The Shawshank Redemption or something.

There's no disputation that Stalin* deported the Tartars. Still, more moved back than left originally, so it was 'only' a deportation. 'Fortunately' from a statistics standpoint we can compare with other groups that got 'deported'- with the air quotes to denote the euphemism- like the Armenians (80% death rate). And Putin is resorting to importing Volgar Tartars in order to... I really dunno, own people on the internet? That must seem extraordinarily weak even to you. Nevertheless I went and checked the demographics for Tartarstan to see if there was some sort of funny business going on... +80k Tartars, and a proportion increase too. If they are moving it's not having an effect on their numbers there, so probability is the claim is bollocks. I guess at least you've dropped the claim of Tartars being 90% of Crimea's population in 1939. And you aren't claiming the entire Tartar population has been surreptitiously deported, now, like one 'expert' did here. So some credit due. *I really hope this is a pointless footnote, but 100% not a Russian.

That has been debunked multiple times here. And yes, it gets repeated a lot in the media and by so called 'experts' but that doesn't mean you have to believe it without actually checking. Crimean demographics at wikipedia, since it's handy. There hasn't been a Tartar majority in Crimea in 150 years, literally. Stalin's genocide resulted in 40k more Tartars being present in 2001 than 1939, and the current Russian genocide of them has resulted in the Tartar population increasing both in absolute numbers and proportionally...

Eh, the Hunter Biden thing is a bit chicken and egg. There was very clearly an orchestrated effort to suppress anything and everything about Hunter B's laptop in the run up to the last election, which would not have happened if he were Hunter Smith- and definitively wouldn't have happened if it were Donald T jr's. It seems extremely unlikely that there was no input on that from the Democrats/ Biden campaign and it was a wholly spontaneous and apolitical reaction to protect the poor benighted masses against 'fake news'... but at the same time, if he were Hunter Smith people wouldn't have been interested in his laptop anyway, so there would have been no kerfuffle to suppress. So it very much depends on which side you look at. (Anything Hunter did wrong is his responsibility though, it only becomes Biden sr's if he tried to protect him via illegal means. Which seems fundamentally unlikely, and even less likely that it could be proven even if he had. Some... reaction against people who actually thought Hunter's conduct was fine and everything about him was fake news is to be expected, but I can't recall anyone here acting like that. There were rather a lot elsewhere though)