Zoraptor

Not a massive fan of Sherlock*, but I actually thought the communication of thought process was fine. The fundamental problem is similar to trying to communicate synaethesia to someone who doesn't have it, ie how can you portray someone who 'sees' colours when hearing music? vs how do you portray someone with savant like deduction skills to someone who doesn't have them? However you portray it it will look odd because to a 'normal' person it is odd. I always find the hating characters thing to be interesting because for me it's only an issue if they're also badly written, otherwise love a good villain protagonist. In particular, I'm kind of baffled by the people who insist Walter White or Tony Soprano are good people just because they're the protagonist and are well written, and constantly make excuses for them on that basis... *like most Stephen Moffat series** its ability to maintain a plausible story got progressively less as time went on, and his version of the Reichenbach Falls was the epitome of seems very good on first viewing, but was an utterly awful idea in hindsight. **and a lot of other similar British series to be fair to him; eg Luther and even, eventually, Line of Duty.

Wait, so is the theory now that Russia infiltrated western intelligence sources to plant a story about incompetent Ukrainians blowing Nord Stream up in order to make the media look stupid when it's debunked? The keen Ukrainian amateur enthusiast with access to a hundred+ kg of underwater functioning explosive plus detonators and the ability to professionally forge passports is the equivalent of the Donbass miner building a T-72 in their backyard in 2015 and exactly as believable; and if you go by the media it's certainly not the Russians planting the story it's direct from our old friend anonymous source(s) in western intelligence/ law enforcement. And of course Lavrov thinks it's bollocks, it's very obviously the work of big p Professionals from an armed or clandestine service and they've already publicly stated it was the Brits. Agreeing with it it would be evidence it was planted, yet if he disagrees with it... yep, still evidence it was planted.

Oh no, 597fps in TF2 instead of 600! and I don't even play TF2. I'd say can't put a price on happiness but that is of course incorrect as I'd have to buy a new PSU and a new case as well. Nearly 200USD under MSRP on an XFX 7900XT Speedster Merc here now. If it weren't for the above I'd be severely tempted since it's only just above my upper ceiling on price. May have been an awful value proposition at launch but knocking a quarter off the price- and that for a pretty decent AIB- makes it look so much better. Which may well have been the idea of the high initial price, of course. Suppose I could take an angle grinder to my case, not like I've actually used any 3.5" bays...

Said it before, will say it again, I'd 100% buy a Yeston card if they were available here. It'd be like a little ray of sunshine peeking out of my case.

That describes about 90% of games journalism opinion pieces about as succinctly as it's possible to do. I don't think I've ever seen a sub profession as consistently unable to articulate their thoughts well- or alternatively, not having any meaningful thoughts to impart. In this case it's... pretty well written. His central premise though as expressed in the article title is certainly not supported by the evidence as presented, and is outright sensationalist in nature. (OTOH, discussion successfully generated and views successfully got, and ultimately that makes for a successful article) Andromeda at least had a heap of organisational issues due to poor oversight and leadership of a new studio trying to make a massive game on an engine that wasn't designed for what they were doing*. And whatever people say of C2077 it was a massive financial success, just not as massive as a bubble market- literally literally valuing CDPR more than Ubisoft on ludicrous projected sales of one game ffs- expected. Plus as was mentioned in the article it was saddled with some really dumb management decisions too, like support for previous gen consoles. *either ordered to or strongly suggested that they use it by EA management, too.

LDPR types love the Imperial Flag. So yeah, can't get much more crank-y. Which is ironic, because their own party's flag makes them look like Ukrainian larpers.

Ah yes. You can tell people who are deeply committed to western liberal values, democracy, freedom of speech etc and are implacably opposed to extremist ideologies like nazism immediately by... their desire to fire people they disagree with into the sun. Ho hum. Some videos coming out purportedly* showing the last road into Bakhmut now... and road is an extremely generous description. Knee deep mud and a lot of abandoned vehicles due to bogging and damage. And why not; time to check back on a popular theory ~a month ago- "Prigozhin and pals have been banned from mention in Russian media". Unsurprisingly, yeah, nah. *one at least has a geolocation, but I wouldn't count it as being overly reliable.

Georgina Beyer, the world's first openly transsexual MP. Prior to that was mayor of a pretty conservative rural town. Instrumental while in parliament to establishing civil unions and getting our prostitution laws out of the stone age- a law that was expected to fail by a decent margin. Gave a fantastic speech that changed a lot of people's minds and was good enough to get an abstention out of the only muslim MP (it passed by one vote, via that abstention).

Bringing up any Russian neonazis isn't really whataboutism since it's relevant and you can argue in good faith about which side is worse in that respect. Don't think anyone would argue that Russia is anywhere close to lily white on the matter anyway. Only becomes s problem when, like labeling everything as false flag, it becomes a reflexive defence mechanism. OTOH, there's been plenty of distinctly unflattering analysis on the number of neo nazis in Azov and the like and the overt support they got from the government in Ukraine before it became fashionable to label them all as just loving the iconography- eg by Bellingcat, usually a darling of the proUA side. Plus, of course, the plethora of memorials to and streets named after Stepan Bandera in western Ukraine. Uncle Rupes is a utter knob, but he's just playing a big C Conservative knob, not a nazi one. And it is very much playing, dudes married to an asian women (half his age, and after dropping his long term wife with whom he had his children; great conservative values there mate) after all. The actual nazi encouragement tends to come from the fringe networks; Murdoch has just found that conservatives are easy to get outraged. Fox and especially Sky* are pretty tame, comparatively. It's mostly that Murdoch owns so much Australian media... *Australian Sky, UK Sky is owned by Comcast now, NZ Sky was never owned by Murdoch.

That's a preserved random seed where the seed number for RNG operations is, uh, preserved, in the save game. On a short term basis it happens in quite a lot of games, it's really noticeable in Civ3-4 for example and even the recent civ clone Old World has a short term seed in the saves to stop save scumming. "The second method uses computational algorithms that can produce long sequences of apparently random results, which are in fact completely determined by a shorter initial value, known as a seed value or key. As a result, the entire seemingly random sequence can be reproduced if the seed value is known" to quote wikipedia.

It probably is true, because it actually does work. The biggest fortress in Belgium in WW2 got stormed by a handful of lightly armed paratroopers* at odds of 1:3 (yes, that actually is 1 paratrooper to 3 defenders, no typo, with the defenders behind meter(s) thick reinforced concrete and rammed earth). And to be frank, most actual descriptions of the tactics being used are reminiscent of WW1, but just not what most people think of as WW1- ie Stoss, not human waves. Stosstruppen were ludicrously effective, for WW1. I have the rather strong suspicion that the whole thing is rather deliberate as they know perfectly well that people are primed to think of WW1 along Pals Brigades walking into machine gun fire lines. *You can also make any description of equipment sound silly pretty easily- to whit, here's the equipment for paratroopers from WW2. Note the abundant and near ubiquitous trenching spades... The real problem is that it's Azov again, and they're part of the official Ukrainian military and have been for years. If they're part of the military they're your responsibility. Having said that everyone should expect at least some nazis in anyone's military. If you don't, you're not living in reality. More in mercenaries, since the recruitment is looser and there's often a certain... reputational enhancement from having hard arses there, even if they actually turn out as kind of pathetic most of the time. You don't expect a country to fold nazis into their military, and for the media to run a concerted campaign to whitewash them. Well, maybe you expect the latter. There are also, it has to be said, rather a lot of fans of pagan symbols, Jains/ Buddhists, norse enthusiasts and similar in 'regular*' UAF units. *regular in quotes because it does seem to be disproportionately meme brigades and foreign volunteers rather than genuinely regular ###th Brigade. Including at least one purported New Zealander, it has to be said. Kind of funny our media running interference though, Brenton Tarrant the Christchurch Mosque shooter was a proven Azov associate.

I'm pretty sure one of the games with 95% chance to hit but always seems to miss- new XCOM?- actually did at one point have a bug where the to hit probability was incorrect and could roll over to a very low chance to hit instead. That would have been a great one for rng paranoia.

Denis Kapustin/ Nikitin "White Rex". He's a notorious neo nazi. Founder of the Russian Volunteer Corps, which has been fighting for Ukraine since at least September last year, and has been mentioned multiple times in that context by western media (which, and personally I am amazed at this, they seem to have forgotten about, now. eg, NYTimes just one outlet who interviewed him) Picked mostly because it's from before 2022 or the last few days, so can't be accused by either side of being biased by recent events: "..Those guys slowly gathering before the fights? Their tattoos feature symbols with neo-Nazi connotations such as the SS runic insignia. Their t-shirts are from well-known far-right fashion brands. That man running around like he’s the manager? He’s Denis Nikitin, a notorious neo-Nazi who has personally trained far-right extremists across Europe in combat, and has been called one of the most dangerous figures on Europe’s far right. Here in Kyiv, at a venue owned and operated by Ukraine’s far-right Azov movement.. ..Nikitin, now based in Kyiv, has urged his followers to train up for violence against Muslims and migrants.." New Republic, July 9 2019.

Ah yes, Blake's 7 sfx... we need an invading alien fleet and we have literally 50p left in the series budget. Let's raid the staff kitchen for some random utensils. End result: one of the invading alien ships is quite literally an egg beater with a bit of painted papier maché over it. Disproportionately influential though, and Avon is still the best character in TV scifi nearly 50 years later. The irony is that its Federation was pretty directly based on Star Trek's and is not that far off where the Fed has actually ended up in nuTrek.

Star Trek Discovery is to end with season 5. I'm sure its fans will be devastated, both of them.

le sigh. Both these guys have had interviews, as part of the UAF, with western media. The guy on the right- callsign Fortuna- with fricking CNN. Reflexive claims of false flag whenever Ukrainians do something wrong is almost as annoying as everyone with so much as a skerrick of critical thinking being a 'Russian shill'. Even better, the guy on the left is exactly the sort of guy- self proclaimed- who'd be immensely proud of things like shooting up civilians cars, and think it was the height of bravery and publicising it a great idea.

I meant 4070Ti. If the 7900XT was 250NZD cheaper than a 3070Ti even I'd be buying one. (It's a little over 800€ equivalent for reference 7900XTs here. Which puts it at 50USD under USMSRP despite the long journey and small market)

7900XT is 250NZD cheaper than the cheapest 3070Ti here, or $100 cheaper for an AIB. Think it's still hard to argue it's good value in absolute terms, but relatively it is. Top end pricing is always stupid whether it's CPU or GPU. The top x3d chips for 7000 were always likely to be bad value for money because every top end chip is bad value for money. Even if they'd had both ccds with the 3d memory* how many games or other applications would use 12-16 cores? Similar for Intel's top end offerings. Platform costs for 7000 series are also still ludicrous. *Really though, the top two skus always looked like they would end up being pretty stupid once it was known they'd one have 3d cache on one ccd only. You can make a case for the 7950x3d for certain use cases, 7900 version... maybe, if they'd had a 8x3d+4 vanilla set up, but that was never going to happen practically. End result, yep, have to gimp the 7800x3d so it doesn't out perform the 7900 version and at that point you'd be better off not doing the 7900. Or selling them as 7600x3d instead, maybe. Wouldn't be overly surprised if we end up with them and the 7900x3d retired at some point, dependent on how easy they are to implement.

eh, we already have the 7900XT as overpriced trash. Or had, amazing what selling under MSRP does for value. Really though, the situations in the GPU space with nVidia and CPUs with AMD aren't even close to comparable until AMD has 80% market share.

Yep, that's how Bulgaria ended up delivering ATGMs to Al Qaeda (delivered them to the CIA, who donated them to Al Qaeda and friends in Syria via Timber Sycamore ). Not exactly news anyway Serbia has been supplying Ukraine for a while. Not really politically expedient to admit that though.

14 series won't be HEDT(?) I don't think they're even having a desktop version(?) It would be Arrow Lake/ 15 series before a consumer chip based potential HEDT from Intel.

There are meant to be at least two releases (or classes of release maybe, haven't really been following it) below that which would be more appropriate for HEDT.

Yeah, I don't agree with Sarex here but cfr is a tad biased towards buffing the US' reputation. Middle quintiles is not the recognised definition of middle class, well, anywhere; middle class is top quartile, in terms of income. That's a really basic mistake to make, though my evaluation of cfr is poor enough that I suspect it isn't a mistake, but is a deliberate. Their data actually shows most recruits come from blue collar and working class. Though really that's exactly what you'd expect (along with a lot of people from military families) since those are the largest demographics. This also makes a nice comparison with the Russian losses map and illustrates exactly how propaganda works. The cfr map of military recruitment uses absolute numbers to show that poorer states aren't over represented in the US. Guess what happens if you use absolute numbers on that Russian map? You guessed it, Moscow turns black, Tuva turns green and suddenly it's ethnic Russians seeming to die disproportionately. Which is as unsurprising as California, Texas, Florida, New York and other high population states contributing most recruits to the US military, and Moscow has something like a fifth of the Russian population. Always smelled like a psyop that.

March? derbauer did a preview of one, though I think the general consensus was that that chip isn't really HEDT but well into workstation territory (ie requires a server MB, server RAM etc, expensive otherwise too).

Ah yes, the British supermarket with its huge section dedicated to tomatoes, in winter. I know the shortages are a bit more... dramatic than just tomatoesbut last time I was in the UK the dichotomy between climate change rhetoric and people wanting year round luxury foodstuffs like strawberries and tomatoes- which are ludicrously energy inefficient out of season, especially strawberries that don't even last more than a few days- was pretty jarring.