Zoraptor

Hah, nobody out jargonic wankers me: SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle Based Improvised Explosive Device for anyone wondering), technically, assuming the driver wasn't going to try bailing or whatever. Though the nitpicking/ pedantry is kind of irrelevant since it clearly isn't a (S)VBIED at all. I'd be vaguely interested in how the Hasbara types tried justifying the driver doing a 3 point turn and heading away as SVBIED behaviour, but only vaguely. End of the day it all resolves down to "Israel is the good guy" and variations on the Narcissists' Creed anyway.

More children have been killed by the IDF in three weeks than in all other conflicts combined since 2019, per Save the Children. IDF attack on Reuters reporter in Lebanon was deliberate and followed established pattern, per RSF. Also deliberate campaign to target journalists- and their families- in Gaza. IDF says to evacuate along road, sticks tank there and fires at civilian vehicles, geoconfirmed by BBC. Not surprising they wanted to keep the phone/ internet blackout going really. Guess we won't get the moral outrage for the brown people with funny religions though, unlike similar events in Ukraine which got played over and over. More likely to get told how sad it made the Israeli crew feel, how they were forced into it and how that makes it a Hamas war crime. IDF is most moral army in the world and everyone should unite to fight the barbarians, says modern day Gaiseric.

Media are grumpy at the refereeing. Personally I agreed with just about every decision which is way more than usual and think the media are whining. Wasn't surprised Cane got a red, wasn't surprised Kolisi got a yellow. It was a close match, but I'd struggle to call it a good one partly due to the rain. ABs did a lot better than I expected at the start of the tournament and could easily have won with a bit of luck, but thems the breaks.

That sums up half the MoD's assessments. Reduced to fighting with shovels and the 'counter' offensive failing due to grass... their SM guys aren't going to be mentioned in the same breath with Clausewitz et al any time soon.

For anyone wanting to visualise it CNN has some handy satellite before/ after comparisons. They're a couple of days old now though.

Right hand drive truck on right hand side of the motorway? Would be fun getting it back onto the correct side.

In the town itself it's probably lack of systems as well. You're not going to be towing in any m777s along that road, nor unarmoured SPG/H systems. Which leaves tanks and the relatively few SPGs with decent armour and speed- which will still constantly be within ATGM range let alone artillery, lancets and commercial drones. Since you're in a ~6km deep bottleneck the enemy artillery will always outrange your equivalents too, except for small mortars and the like. They can fire at your front from 6km behind the rest of the front line, you can't do the same. Ukrainians seem to love fighting in bottlenecks for some reason. Loved it in 2014/5 at Ilovaesk and Debaltseve, loved it at Bakhmut, loved it in Avdivka. Love it so much they even created their own around Verbove. In all the early three they should have retreated far earlier than they did too.

Sounds pretty much exactly like the 'counter' offensive. Right down to the 'pointless' flag planting. Attacking prepared positions is hard for both sides, more news at ten.

WoT S2E8 On the positive side, it's far better than the previous season's finale, despite my multitude of complaints. On the negative side that's largely because of just how bad s1e8 was. Worst episode of the 8, though it's always hard to judge season finales fairly. Series negatives: number 1 by far is the persistent lack of care to detail and what changes actually mean going forward, plus the related issue of all the nonsensical drama. Nothing seems to have been learnt from GoT either, where that sort of thing ended up collapsing the series into a complete thematic and narrative mess. The OC additions are not compelling and time could have been far better spent elsewhere. They want to use iconic book moments but don't want to do the work to make them work. It's far too much the Egwene and Moiraine show. Positives: far better overall than last season despite that and I'd go so far as to say I more or less enjoyed most of it despite the fristration. Lanfear and Ishamael are good, though Lanfear is always exactly as 'evil' as the plot requires. The acting is pretty much all good, most of the sets are a vast improvement and it certainly doesn't look like Xena despite the massive budget most of the time, unlike S1. The scripting in terms of words said is also generally fine, it's just the context of them which is too often bad. They really, really, have to work on the plotting and planning, and maybe just maybe cut out some of the fanboying for pet characters. Just a tad, lest we get a million jokes about renaming the 3rd book The Egwene Reborn. Will I watch S3? Probably, at least if they give me another free trial period for it. Actually paying might be a stretch.

It's genius really. Get rid of the people you don't want, get them and another bunch of people you don't like to kill each other, and all after those two groups got on relatively well for 1500 years. Then 80 years later you can pat yourself on the back and proclaim how tolerant and progressive you were and how you can't understand why people don't like you, must be hatred of your freedoms not that you gave land where people were already living to another bunch of people. You can also say how Jews and Muslims have always hated each other, so it was all inevitable and Jews needed a homeland to escape Muslim persecution.

The books also had a cliffhanger ending that lasted 3+ (real life) years when a building fell on Mat and he then wasn't in the next book at all... It isn't really the cliffhangers that are the problem, it's that such events too often don't spring organically from the plot. I've had this problem with a bunch of TV shows recently where they just want maximum drama and think it doesn't matter how little sense the set up makes to get it.

WoT S2Ep6&7 TLDR: they're just about OK, in isolation. I have seen Ep8, and it as with S1's it makes the season retroactively worse though to nowhere near as great an extent. Indeed while I couldn't in good heart recommend the first 7 episodes I don't feel either affronted by them or that I wasted my time watching them. By this point there's no getting around the plotting again being distinctly and obviously wobbly in places though. The plot weaves as the plot wills, I guess, but it would be nice if the plot weaved because the characters and events were consistent instead. General observation: there's an infamous clip of a late Dr Who (original) episode where Sylvester McCoy as The Doctor decides to climb out a window and stand on a ledge for no discernible reason except to create a 'cliffhanger' ending. The equivalent happens all the time on this show.

They did the same to their Jewish population as well. Irony being that a lot of them went to Muslim countries since they were more tolerant. Still pretty relevant, since Israel is clearly trying to remove Palestinian Christians just as much as Muslims hence their systematic bombing of churches as well as mosques. (actually a pretty good example of history based propaganda too: a lot of sources say many of the Jews expelled from Spain went to 'Greece', which didn't exist for another 300 years. They went to the Ottoman Empire, but it sounds better saying 'Greece and Italy' since they're Christians and show how tolerant Christianity 'really' is. Of course, England and France had already expelled their Jews to steal their money/ cancel loans...)

It's clearly an upper case K rather than a lower case k though. Upper case K --> Kelvin, or absolute temperature so it's Good Guy Intel accurately representing that their chips run at 2+ times the surface temperature of the sun. (Some might say it's that way because they just use all caps because they want to shout about how good their chips are and it actually is the abbreviation for kilo. To short circuit any such discussion may I point out first that the chips are lower case i5/7? Checkmate, Inteltheists)

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.