Zoraptor

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.

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...

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)

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.

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.

Certainly not off of one of those. Then they'd get (A)bort (R)etry (F)ail'ed on disc 97,482/ 101,272 after waiting months for the cargo ship to deliver the floppies.

Now now, there are 'only' 84 of them. They do have dlc bundles for this release, with EUIV you had to choose manually. Amazingly, the discounts on the bundles are actually progressive (albeit slightly) so, uh, the more you buy the more you save.

Yeah, but it was the only thing I can think of that would mean it would require an SSD since you'd design around the fast streaming of assets. Though I guess min specs doesn't mean it won't run at all, just that it will run at an arbitrary not well enough to be acceptable. Having checked though it definitely isn't Direct Storage related since even NVMe is only specified for C2077 Ultra settings. So a crusty old SATA SSD should be fine, just not a crusty old platter.

The SSD requirement will also be added to Cyberpunk 2077 with the new expansion. Definitely looks like the new normal and (I presume) is Direct Storage related.

Crusader Kings II released and base game available for free. Not the normal style claimable giveaway though, you have to 'buy' it for zero dollars- the dlc, of course, ain't available for zero dollars.

Don't get me wrong, Indian pizza can be great and we have a few here, albeit mostly fairly conservative fare like korma/ butter chicken/ tikka. I've also made pizza with left over homemade Raan before and it was top notch. Also rendang and a Sri Lanka yellow curry and they were pretty top tier too. I certainly don't care about the spiciness either. Vindaloo on pizza though... dunno, has the same effect on me as when someone suggested chocolate onionello as a new variety once: very good evidence for the existence of satan, and despite me liking onions and chocolate separately.

Pretty sure the Big Bradley Pile Up was due to artillery, and if 16 is the total losses that alone accounts for roughly half of them. Kind of funny seeing western experts criticise the Ukrainians for sending in more Bradleys to rescue the crews of the first lot as if the west wouldn't do that, but apparently that's soviet doctrine and the west would dispassionately write them off. Guess anything that works is going to be due to glorious NATO tactics, anything that doesn't will be due to them not unlearning peasant soviet doctrine.

Sounds more like something you'd get from a vindaloo than a pizza, to be honest. Or a vindaloo pizza, I guess, though I'm fairly sure their creation is mentioned in Revelations.

I mean, they said they didn't want to invade Iraq all the time; they were being forced- forced I say!- to do so by the presence of wmd. By the same token Russia didn't want to invade Ukraine either, they were forced- forced I say!- to. Dunno how well the offensive is going, Petraeus made a bunch of predictions none of which have been borne out- mostly combined arms from the Ukrainians which we haven't seen at all, and that they'd break through in 2-3 days, which hasn't happened- and they've lost a lot of documented hardware let alone what hasn't been documented. Not as well as hoped, one suspects, but certainly not over yet.

Ultimately the logical reason was the same as the US one for invading Iraq- they could, they thought it would be successful and the benefits would outweigh any risks. Everything else is detail. There is rather a lot of detail in both cases, but it's also been a bit done to death.

I haven't read it, no. Only got translated to english last month, and my Estonian is... well I used to be able to say hello/ please/ thanks at least. The first three Dragonlance books though were great, when I was ten.

A decent amount of destroyed equipment on the Ukrainian side is to be expected given they're attacking, the style in which it was lost and it being far enough behind Russian lines now that they can pose casually with the wreckage would be a lot more worrying. Strangely enough (not really), the tactics used by Ukraine seem to be exactly the same as those used by Russia at Vugledar, with the same result. Attacking fixed defences is hard, and you don't have that many options of how to do it.

It was ~380USD with our 15% GST added. 7600s are actually not too bad value here either, since no one is trying to sell them at MSRP let alone inflated prices.

1) The loss of the canals/ drinking water and irrigation effects pretty much only areas held by Russia. Once again, Russia brutalises Ukraine by... punching itself in the face, eh? 2) The Russians evacuated all the civilians on their side earlier once they made the banks a closed military zone, so they don't have (m)any to evacuate. 2a) Which might look suspicious, except they built their defences in those areas, and those defences now don't exist and a lot of their soldiers got caught in the flooding. You'd think they'd build their defences back a bit, eh. 3) Empty canals are a lot easier to bridge for Ukraine, should their offensive go well, and indeed may not even need bridging at all once empty. 4) The drained reservoir will be easier for Ukraine to cross to the north, after a while 5) The lower Dniepr will be safer to cross too, since it cannot be flooded again with the dam gone. And very much unlike if the dam was still there There are plenty of reasons for Ukraine to do it, though I do not think personally they did it deliberately, on balance of evidence. There is however no reason for Russia to have done it beyond this is bad, Russia is bad therefore this <--> Russia. Everything about it is a net negative, for Russia. Hence the requirement for yet more OMG but Sauron. Still actually kind of glad we got another 'orc' post. Not because I get to ask (rhetorically, back seat moderation is at best tiresome) again if the boards would tolerate the use of the racial slurs used against Arabs or Vietnamese* when they were fighting the west. The thing about orcs is, they're fantasy and don't exist. If you have to justify something using fantasy and racist epithets you're fundamentally not on solid ground. *answer: no, at least for the Vietnamese, since that term is on the naughty list. As for the HiMARS 1) it was a Ukrainian official saying they used them to attack the floodgates and why- to show that they could destroy the floodgates, a test which was successful- and I quoted him from a impeccably western and pro Ukrainian source. 2) The section they attacked most had the roadway collapse the day before the dam did, and was the clear point of failure. 3) They don't have to have hit the dam on Jun 5/6 to have caused the collapse, they don't need to have done it deliberately in the sense that they intended the dam to fail; all they have to have done is do enough damage that it failed, eventually. 4) Despite knowing of the potential damage they released more water upstream than usual 5) The Antonovsky bridge doesn't have billions of tons of water behind it 3 also has the advantage of not requiring anyone to be a cartoon villain to make sense. Nah, I didn't think the invasion would happen, but I've always said there was a logical reason for it. Not one I personally agree with, but you don't have to agree with reasons to recognise that they exist.

330USD equivalent. Not really good value in absolute terms, but 25% under what they were selling for a couple of months ago so a decent end of line discount.

Even the extremely pro Uk ISW has the dam collapse starting at least 20 minutes before that and up to 50 minutes before. That's also a non determinative method- it doesn't say who did it, and isn't even determinative for it being due to explosives; they're just seismographs and pick up any ground disturbance such as volcanic activity and earthquakes. With 18bn tons of weight behind it- ie 100x more than the Mohne Dam blown up by the Bouncing Bombs in WW2- a dam failure is definitively not going to be trivial in terms of ground disturbance. [belated edit: for reference purposes, 2 on the Richter scale is equivalent to the explosion of 56kg of TNT, per USGS. Which is utterly useless for determining anything] My new favourite big brain take is that it couldn't have been an external attack, because Zelensky said that was impossible HiMARS and Storm Shadows aren't explosive enough. Which is incorrect, HiMARS are enough per the Ukrainians themselves, let alone Ukraine having other weapons with bigger warheads, but nevermind. The really funny thing is all the people saying that the Kerch Bridge attack was carried out by a boat- in order to avoid the homicide/ suicide bomb stigma- have suddenly forgotten about Ukraine having that capability, as soon as it became inconvenient... The most damning (uh) evidence is the roadway collapse, at the point at which we know Ukraine was attacking the dam, happening the day previous. That certainly appears to have been the initial point of failure, and the only side we know damaged the structure there is Ukraine. One other definitely didn't have a good time of it since it took a direct hit, just no aftermath footage since the drone decided to follow the moving vehicles. The Russians are really odd when it comes to footage though, they obviously have a lot and a lot of drones but insist on releasing it as if it were edited by a 5 year old who has raided the sweet jar. Some of it you even wonder why they bothered, the Ka-52 gun cam footage has fewer pixels than Space Invaders.

Update: refunded, no issues. No replacement option due to there being basically no 6750s left in New Zealand and no plans to import more prior to the release of 7700/7800. God does not play dice- but xe does play Uno and just loves the Reverse card.

Very amusing, now Bruce is complaining about governments spuriously classifying things. All we need now is for Kobus van der Snowden to leak the report and for Bruce to think he's a hero for doing so...

The leaks had ~100 NATO SF on the ground. Just not officially, as soldiers. Indeed, technically, one of the New Zealanders killed there was an ~active NZ soldier too (Dominic Abelen; contracted to the army but 'on leave')