Zoraptor

Netflix has cancelled their Resident Evil series after one season. Which, from what I've heard, may well have been one season too many.

You can always go for the New Zealand model of education. Have high fees, have low wages- especially for anything seen as 'vocational' where obviously people want to do their jobs for the benefit of society, so will, equally obviously, accept permanently awful wages and conditions! Wonder why everyone with a useful degree leaves the country and many never come back and thus never pay back their loans, and every, say, nurse is either on the verge of quitting or a south asian import (and after a few years the imports quit too due to the stress). Plenty of money for staff, but heaps of vacancies because the wages are too low. Then be baffled by the 'skills shortage' and why everyone has gone to Australia, the UK, US, Dubai for twice the money and far better conditions- yes brits, even in the NHS. All from the geniuses who didn't think pumping $50bn into rich people's pockets would result in either a housing bubble or inflation (couldn't give it to poor people of course, that would be inflationary...)

WW1 western front strategy game: you turtle for 3 months while your opponent zerg rushes you, then you swap roles and try zerg rushing him while he turtles- wash and repeat for everything except the first two and last four months of the war. I have a great idea for DLC too, Italian campaign selling each battle of the Isonzo (and run out of money/ motivation before getting to the 12th/ Caporetto where something actually happened). Really, pretty much anywhere else would be better than the western front. Let's start with Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck in Tanzania...

A serving NZDF soldier has been announced as killed in Ukraine, though there are no further details to hand so far (except that they were meant to be 'on leave' rather than active duty).

little bit more (or less?) work and you could have typoed it to septical instead. Dunno, I suspect they wanted someone reminiscent of the, uh, 'original' Viserys's (ie Harry Lloyd, who was also in Doctor Who- and pretty memorably too, for a one shot villain) unusual looks, and if so there aren't that many options. Both Smith and Lloyd stand out in everything they're in for not having a conventional look and for some very distinct mannerisms. Personally I don't find that distracting, but that is very much a Your Mileage May Vary situation. Have to admit I kind of wish they'd gone with Tom Felton, or Jason Isaacs... Eh, the nudie/ sex scenes in early GoT didn't exactly have much purpose either- in general*- except to keep casual viewers 'interested' during some lore dumps. Which you can do without naked Esmé Bianco. I'm not exactly Captain General of the Social Justice Army but some of the GoT sexposition was really, really cringey. OTOH yeah, the violence suffered from huge expectation inflation over the course of the original series with them constantly feeling the need to top the last thing, and just ended up silly in the end. Not a good sign if it's already in shock for shock's sake territory. *no doubt HotD suffers here because Khal Drogo/ Daenerys and Jaime/ Cersei were absolutely critical and both (? iirc) were in the pilot episode. After that though...

The reviews are out for the Saints Row reboot and they're not exactly glowing. Which I don't think will be a major surprise; and while some of the tech issues might get ironed out by the 1 year beta period on EGS the complaints about gameplay and especially characters and story will be a lot harder to fix.

Most assassinations take a lot of planning but aren't all that complex when it comes to the actual, uh, execution. Driving up to Dugin's car on a motorcycle and hitting it with a limpet mine or spraying it with bullets sounds more simple, but it still involves almost all of the planning. You've only really got one more significant step involved here, and that's getting access to the car as setting up a trigger system for remote or timer detonation isn't difficult, even backyard terrorists can do that. You can get around the car issues by cloning the fob though. Which is neither difficult nor expensive, and then the car thinks you're its owner and so does anyone casually walking by. After all, you're not going to smash the key barrel out with a screwdriver like a 13 year old. Bomb under driver seat, then rig it to accelerator or gear shift (if required).

Cheers Bruce, perfectly illustrates the point that "Problem is journalists reading asterisking wikipedia and referencing each others' bad references instead of actually reading/ listening to Dugin himself" I mean Wow, one whole journalist. If you want an example of actual handwaving, can't get much better than that. Thing is, if you, say, called Cheney "Bush's Brain"- or "Bush's Rasputin"- people might disagree, but there would also be a lot of evidence you could point to in support of it. With this there's... *crickets* when you look for similar evidence of Dugin being "Putin's Brain", let alone things like an aide or confidante. Certainly Dugin himself is consistent on one thing, that he's only an indirect influence. Guess "Putin's episode of Neighbours on in the background while he fixes dinner" while more accurate doesn't quite have the cachet though.

No you're not blind, the article was about the attempt to blow up Dugin. Two different issues in the post, 1st was about Dugin, 2nd was about the Grey Zone stuff- they've been posting again as of yesterday. The former... yeah, nah. He's spoken out extensively against Putin in very similar vein to how Girkin/ Strelkov has- he's not going far enough, too populist, too conservative and averse to risk (should have gone to Tblisi, should have invaded Ukraine in 2008 too etc), listens to liberals (like, uh, Medvedev*) too much- something he's repeated many times. Much like Girkin/ Strelkov probably not enough for Putin to bother doing anything about though, as he just isn't very important. Which actually actually makes him a near ideal target since he's got a ludicrously undeserved high profile in the west, but is nowhere near important enough in reality to warrant special protection. The latter... yeah, that's kind of lol really and one of the reasons my opinions of media coverage are so low. He's got far more in common practically with, as above, Girkin/ Strelkov than Putin. Far, far, far more, and despite the fact he'd probably hate the comparison. He's also not an 'aide' or confidante as described in multiple articles, he- by his own admission- has actually barely even met Putin. He's also wildly divergent in terms of even how much 'intangible' influence he claims to have, ie how much he claims Putin follows his dogma. Sometimes contradicting himself on that question in the same interview. Which is because Putin, of course, isn't really following Dugin much at all, it's just that Dugin described the blatantly obvious Eurasian strategy in a book the media has picked up on. Problem is journalists reading asterisking wikipedia and referencing each others' bad references instead of actually reading/ listening to Dugin himself. *ok, technically arch nationalist and complete fruitbat Zhiro was an example of an actual Russian Liberal, but he was talking little l liberal, not big L

Yeah, that was referring to the Grey Zone people (who have now posted something) not Dugin. Yeah, guess it would be fine then if someone blew GWBush up with a car bomb? Probably wouldn't be fine if they blew Jenna or Barbara up instead though, now would it?

Looks like someone tried to assassinate Alexander Dugin, but only succeeded in killing his daughter. Seems they didn't get them either.

The military stuff doesn't really sound like suicide missions. If you don't want to do dangerous missions then staying home is the easy solution- or read 'Homage to Catalonia' or a history of the Spanish Civil War for experiences in prior ad hoc/ international formations to get your expectations right when it comes to leadership. Though there were certainly contemporary rumours that some international units suffered 80% casualties in a day in Severodonetsk that article doesn't really substantiate it much at all. The more 'civil' stuff like looting is not much of a surprise. Even if it weren't illegal it's really, really stupid when one of your big worries is civilians giving away your positions to the enemy to give them more reason to do so. Overall though, does kind of make you wonder how that (supposed) Polish fraudster didn't get shot by a 'Russian infiltrator' or accidental discharge at some point. Also kind of has to said, much as this is being trumpeted as showing how great freedom of the press is in Ukraine to put some positive spin on, the report had apparently been sent to a bunch of international organisations too- so it was going to come out whether they wanted it to or not.

Orville Finale- non spoiler version, I liked it a lot more I should have May have had my criticisms but overall a very good season which only really suffers a bit by comparison from having some competent Trek competition for the first time. Hope they manage to wangle a S4.

We saw him yesterday. Guess they really wanted to dispel that rumour, since he's on the rubble of the building in Popasna that was hit.

Like most artillery Ukraine has they're being fired outside spec pretty often. Saw a video today of a 2S7 going boom because of a critical malfunction from over use. While they have a lot of call on their limited amounts of artillery it's counterproductive to fire it too much as the thermal expansion of the barrel will make it very inaccurate, you get way more wear firing too hot so even a cooled barrel doesn't function as well, and far more critical malfunctions (in the case above, explosion of the shell in the breach --> destroyed piece, and dead crew; less rapid firing and more care and they'd still have both). OTOH 100 shells per day would be... rather poor performance. That's a shot every 15 minutes on average.

It's all rumours and completely unconfirmed. Only confirmed fact is she left suddenly. And didn't do too badly since she got a role on another show quickly (which just so happened to be another Fox show 'Prodigal Son').

That was more snark than a serious suggestion. Hardly matters whether they get fined anyway except for the embarrassment factor; it's like .2% of their profit so not even a rounding error. (would have thought the potential issue would be all the cards they sold direct to miners rather than Joe Bloggs using his 3080 for it, they could hardly claim no control/ knowledge of end use then. Relies on if nVidia had said that crypto wasn't significantly impacting their business like they did last time though)

10th anniversary of Sleeping Dogs today (well, technically it was yesterday here due to date line shenanigans). I'd be kind of hoping that Nordic/ THQ/ Embracer do a sequel of that sometime instead of nobody asked for this remakes of Gothic, except I seem to remember that Sleeping Dogs was one of the few westernish series SE didn't sell.

Orville s3ep9 spoilers

Dunno why anyone uses Rotten Tomatoes for reviews anyway, loads of shows end up with 100% ratings because all the reviews are 'positive'. I still haven't seen the last episode of Orville S3 (depressingly difficult to find 75 minutes time to sit down and watch something) but I suppose I should do some comments for ep9 which I have seen

The only reason I think they might- and I agree, it's certainly not likely- is because there's now an oversupply of fab capacity. Per the recent rumour about nVidia they're going to be charged for that capacity whether they use it or not. In that case it may make sense to do a refresh, claim fastest/ coolest/ whatever console etc. The counters to that are far stronger though- with the design/ production lag they'd have had to have guessed there would be excess capacity quite a while ago and done the work as a contingency for it to be ready on Zen4. And if they'd guessed that a while ago they'd probably just not booked the fab capacity in the first place. It's also, obviously, not a great time to be trying to sell a premium product during a recession when many people are worrying about spending money on the real basics.

The +50% perf/ watt alone ought to be a big improvement for something like the Steam Deck, certainly. Since Zen4 have integrated graphics albeit RDNA2 we'll also get some idea whether stuff like 3d cache is going to provide extra graphics bandwidth, and longer term there's layering memory in to the APU too... I'd presume any RDNA3 APUs will be a while away, maybe Q1 2024, and probably reserved for Zen4+/ refresh or Zen5 unless MSony* want to do a console refresh. AMD certainly hasn't seen integrated graphics for gaming purposes as worth doing as a priority- outside of the consoles- up to this point. They were still using Vega up until recently after all, and retaping is expensive. *does of course depend on what volumes Valve is selling of the SD, and whether they're willing to pay R&D costs like MSony did.

I don't think I've seen what is known about RDNA3 summarised well before but there's a pretty good summary here. Not much on actual performance though of course, since it's not dealing with rumours.

That scene looks decidedly impractical for live action, but that doesn't mean you have to use CGI. The other option is to rework the scene or cut it completely if CGI can't do the job well. In some cases not having it at all is the better option. (Have to say, that wasn't the worst CGI animal I've seen by a long shot and was nowhere near as bad as I expected. Out of context the scene does seem rather silly though, which I certainly wouldn't expect from a Predator movie...) Someone needs to set his feet to the coals so he actually watches/ obtains that first cut tape of Event Horizon which someone supposedly found before he starts anything else.

That's an impressive attempt at goalpost shifting at the end. Let's run through the relevant sequence though, shall we? "They also betray a pretty crappy understanding of humanitarian law, ie it applies to those you like, not just those you don't. Ultimately the reason why you shouldn't use protected civilian infrastructure for basing and why it is a warcrime unless it's of military necessity is because it erodes the protection for every school, including those that are still used as schools. That's why both Hamas and Ukraine using schools as bases is bad, and a war crime, and despite Hamas' bases being a lot closer than the one at Bakhmut." -- me in direct response: "You know what else is a war crime? This entire Russian war against Ukraine. Nothing of this school-schmool thing would have happened if not for Russia's imperialistic delusions backed by tiny waxy garbage man's issues." --bugarup to which you replied "This is a very salient point. All the other atrocities stem from Russia's initial atrocity.." This does not exactly mesh with your example of a car accident, now does it? If someone said Bob punching Fred after a car crash was assault and the reply was "all the other actions stem from Fred crashing his car" not just as a point, but as a salient one it would be obvious that that was justifying Bob's actions. If you think it's just common assault for which Bob is responsible then you don't mention the car crash- or at very least say it doesn't justify Bob's actions in any way. If you mention the crash then you're obvious trying to reduce Bob's responsibility for the crash by saying that without Fred the punch wouldn't have happened. And again, this is specifically not how humanitarian law works in the relevant situation anyway.