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Everything posted by Zoraptor
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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.
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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)
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Random video game news... the critical eyes have it
Zoraptor replied to Hurlshort's topic in Computer and Console
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? -
Random video game news... the critical eyes have it
Zoraptor replied to Hurlshort's topic in Computer and Console
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.
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Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Part 6
Zoraptor replied to bugarup's topic in Computer and Console
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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cinema and Movie Thread: flickering images
Zoraptor replied to Chairchucker's topic in Way Off-Topic
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. -
Cinema and Movie Thread: flickering images
Zoraptor replied to Chairchucker's topic in Way Off-Topic
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.
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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...
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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)
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Random video game news... the critical eyes have it
Zoraptor replied to Hurlshort's topic in Computer and Console
Elite (1984) had 8 galaxies worth of planets, on one floppy. I'd expect most of Bethesda's to be about as in depth. -
Watched the new Walking Dead spin off and it was... ok. Possibly even more cliché than I expected and I expected it to be very cliché- eg opening scene: stealth zombie still manages to surprise someone after xx years- but also manages to add some surprises like, uh, Zeljko Ivanek playing against type as a scenery chewing foreign loony tuner with nary a bat in his belfry randomly killing people for the lulz. The whole idea of the show is kind of bonkers but at least it leans into it instead of being deadly serious. Plus whatshername, the annoying one from Picard, gets eaten which is also a positive.
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Meme answer: Bhutan. So awesome Bioware ran a marketing campaign around it. Actual Answer: also Bhutan (It's not that I don't respect Europe or the US anyway, it's more that I get more than a little tired of western exceptionalism. Everybody indulges in a bit of "you're aggressive, I'm assertive; you're argumentative, I like a good discussion etc" but you get a lot more of it from the loudest voices and you don't get any louder than the west. Nor do you get as many people believing any other voice preaching moral authority, nor as many who are insistent they're right even when provided with evidence they aren't) Heh, you should read the accounts of people who have had Israeli soldiers squatting in their houses and the state of them afterwards. That's one of those things people just don't think about when it comes to soldiers because it's kind of icky. The one which gets me is people always seem to be surprised at the near literal mountains of empty water bottles in any Saudi position the Houthis overrun and use that (rather than, well, their terrible performance) as an indicator that they're 'bad soldiers'. It's 40 degrees and the soldiers aren't going to pop down to the local recycling centre to drop off their empties...
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Heh, too many Vienna Conventions I think, and that's only the ones from the 1960s. The relevant treaty is the VC on Diplomatic Relations (which has been signed by everyone except South Sudan and Palau and is probably the cornerstone of international diplomatic law) not the VC on the Law of Treaties, which RSA and a decent number of other countries hasn't signed. (not being entirely serious anyway, but I'd suspect that it would be more relevant that Poland, and Spain previous for Morales, had signed even if RSA hadn't)
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Europe: I don't understand why the 'Global South' hates us. We stand for the Rules Based Order! Also Europe: Vienna Convention doesn't apply to Africans or South Americans.
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That is 100€* for a load of unnecessary guff like portraits and music (though I do like the music). It's 60 odd for the gameplay dlcs. And to be scrupulously fair, the base game is pretty decent by itself from what I remember from ten years ago. *or 97USD here, which is kind of whacky pricing given that we're meant to have the gst added now.