Zoraptor

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.

Or 400,000sqm. Even at a mere (ohoho) 1m deep on average that's 400,000t of water. If it would take you an hour to walk around it's not really a pond. And I wasn't comparing it with the NK dam in terms of size- that would be more comparable to the Tabqa Dam/ Lake Assad in Syria- I was comparing it in terms of something that didn't happen despite months of being told it was imminent with something that actually did, and did actually force evacuations and danger to civilians. Not the first time Ukraine has done it either, since at very least they blew the dam at Sviatohirsk as well, when they lost that position. I am also somewhat amused that some of the more... hopeful pro Ukrainian mappers have them launching successful counterattacks across the flooded area. Nobody begrudges being hopeful, but sheesh, come up with something which isn't contradicted by your own side guys.

No, because Syria isn't in Ukraine. I was comparing the constant kerfuffle about the Nova Kharkovka dam and the imminent/ ongoing war crime that never actually happened there, with a pond. Though calling a body of water (or two, if they blew both up) larger than one km a pond is a bit disingenuous unless you grew up in Kensington Palace or something.

Looks like Bakhmut is pretty much done now. Bunch of small towns to the north confirmed or near confirmed as taken today, and all the high ground there too. They'd need a pretty big counterattack very soon to stabilise things, and it doesn't look like it's going to happen. The dam there has been blown (specifically by Ukraine, so we don't get any reflexive accusations of war crimes) to flood the city's river, and that only really makes sense as a way to discourage pursuit of an active retreat. May have left it too late though, since even some proUA types have Bohdanivka as contested and that would make the exit route from Bakhmut... uncomfortably narrow (location if anyone is interested) with the last road unusable. Not a particularly important place in and of itself whatever either side has said at various times, but there certainly were a lot of Ukrainian troops there at one point and it protected some far more important areas (Kramatorsk/ Slaviansk to the northwest, Kostiantinivka to the southwest).

RoP won't get cancelled, they'd have to pay for the license anyway and that's a ludicrous proportion of the series' costs- even without all the other sunk costs they have like moving all their sets from NZ. Plus a cancellation would almost certainly be a resignation issue for senior managers responsible for it and Turkeys don't vote for an early Christmas. I'd suspect RoP has been more disappointing financially for Amazon than anything Star Trek has been for Paramount, full stop. Beaten handily by Clarkson's Farm of all things...

Zhukov wasn't popular in 1941 though, he got picked because unlike pretty much everyone else he, at least, had one actual factual win. And maybe because Stalin post his breakdown recognised that if he'd listened to and followed Zhukov's advice earlier the situation would have been a lot better*. Zhokov is also kind of... embiggened, reputationally. People love having 'supercommanders' in their histories because that makes a good story- see the adulation for the decidedly average (but far better than most at the time) Timoshenko in the west during 1941. Stalin got out of the way of a bunch of other generals too. The crucial thing was that post 1941 breakdown Stalin didn't really interfere much with Stavka in general, unlike Churchill and Hitler with their equivalents, or logistics or design as Hitler did. When he did it tended to be a problem, it was just that, well for example, wasting thousands of lives in 1945 in the lead up to Berlin plain couldn't make a difference to the ultimate result of the war, by that time. In any case, I'd struggle to call anyone who regularly liquidated their management team 'a good manager'. Can't really learn and improve if your brain is decorating the Lubyanka wall instead of thinking. *though, of course, most of that does come from Zhukov himself so grain of salt needed.

lolwut. First time I've ever seen Stalin described as a good manager. And he got lied to all the time. Best you can say is that unlike Hitler he got out of the way of actually competent people when he really had to and had fewer pet project failures in WW2 (so not even counting Gallipoli/ Dardenelles) than Churchill did.

Rasputitsa is unlikely to help much in Bakhmut. Indeed, with the current situation an early melt/ rains would probably help the Russians there (though it would be the reverse in an active pursuit, so it might be militarily worthwhile to hold on as a delaying tactic), since any Ukrainian retreat would have to be largely cross country. If the Russians are in Yahidne and can't be dislodged quickly... that's it really, elevated position over Bakhmut proper with straight line of sight to the last road in and out, and well within mortar and atgm range. And even some pro UA maps have them there, now, indeed pro Russian mappers like Rybar seem to be if anything more conservative on the gains. As above, you'd hope so. I do rather like the idea that Biden came to Kiev partly to tell Zelensky to withdraw since dropping hints wasn't working, and the timing seems to line up with a meeting prior to the publicised speeches/ walks etc. Meh, believe it when it happens. Buying up even more Russian gas/ oil and financing infrastructure for it, yes. Having said that though: Whatever happens, antagonising both your strategic enemies at the same time is moronic and yet that's what has happened. If you wanted to deal with China as a priority- sensible, they're a far larger long term threat than Russia- you should have parked the conflict with Russia 18 months ago when it could be.