Zoraptor

There clearly were some issues with WoT that were more or less unavoidable due to covid and the actor for Mat quitting. The other two excuses of needing more run time and a bigger budget though... they didn't use the time they had well and they didn't use the money they had well. More of either probably would have ended up with a bad show that had 10 episodes instead of 8 and was more expensive to boot. You're not going to fix bad writing with more time, you just get more bad writing. Case in point, most of an episode being wasted on the utterly peripheral Stepin plot. (Ironically the one thing that may well have helped was if it wasn't an Amazon series. The Witcher was a far better show despite having similar problems, and so were the HBO shows (and I'd include stuff like the His Dark Materials there, not just the GoT series). The bad showrunner for WoT is 100% Amazon's fault, and ultimately most of the avoidable problems stem from him being picked and being out of his depth in pretty much every facet. If you're going to do a big budget complicated series nothing beats experience)

1200-1400 would definitely have been higher proportion wise thanks mostly to Temujin, Timur etc. There's also a cost in terms of the near 600% (!) mark up on US LNG being sold to Europe. A mark up so large that contracts with other buyers are being systematically broken because the penalties are far less than the windfall profits. Then of course there's bafflement about not getting wholesale support from those effected... The US is also, as always, leveraging its currency's status to protect its own economy while shafting everyone else's. Typical 'socialise the costs, privatise the benefits' from Yellen really; if we're all in this together that means not running everything apart from aid to Ukraine as a sole benefit to the US.

Not many people know this, but originally RoP was going to be a young Aragorn series and that actor was brought on board to play young Boromir rather than Elrond...

Was going to edit it in, but meh... Got a bit of a laugh from this article. "“Sauron can now just be Sauron,” McKay adds. “Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He’s evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he’d overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open. We’re really excited. Season two has a canonical story. There may well be viewers who are like, ‘This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!’ In season two, we’re giving it to them.” " Nothing says Sauron can be Sauron quite like comparing him to a succession of other characters who aren't Sauron and seem to have been picked solely because they're the most critically acclaimed televisual villains of the past 20 years. And, I guess, the most acclaimed film villain of the same period (if you count a single playing card in BB as being an appearance by the Joker). If there's one Soprano that would make a good Sauron it's Livia anyway.

No. If nothing else sunk costs are almost certainly too high. There is also, of course, the example of Wheel of Time which has somehow got renewed for three years despite being so bad even Hurlshot finds it hard to say anything nice about and having an even less experienced/ competent showrunner.

Most people internationally will know him as Hagrid or from the Bond movies, but he was absolutely brilliant as Fitz in 'Cracker'.

To put it in perspective we've got no FEs, and the cheapest card is 2200USD equivalent. Even taking off the GST that's still 300USD above the msrp.

Oh wow Wenduag betrayed me, again. I am stunned by this turn of events.

Any media commentator suggesting India was ever going to vote any other way is... an idiot whose opinion is worth nothing. Simply wouldn't have the necessary background to be even slightly credible, spouting wishful thinking and nothing else. Though to be fair, their vote has nothing at all to do with Ukraine per se. The public comments are mostly just window dressing, but even if they weren't there was literally no chance of them voting any other way.

I'm playing on the default difficulty now and haven't changed it for any particular encounters. Core was just too annoying for a first play through. If i do a replay it will be on core, with a lot more metagaming since I'll know what to expect.

There are at least two bridges with piles more than 120m deep. 2nd Penang Bridge Malaysia and the Padma Bridge Bangladesh. The deepest on the Crimea Bridge is a mere 90m. That's water + mud depth + 20m into bedrock; going into bedrock renders the mud volcanoes moot.

I've just got to the Abyss proper. Beat Playful Doohickey on the way- probably less annoying than those augmented demons if only because I got ~60k xp instead of 240 a pop. I don't really like that style of battle though since you tend to end up using tactics cheesier than a Swiss dinner menu (in that case apart from the obvious buffs and death ward, summons, more summons when the first lot get oblierated, and spamming hellfire ray and boneshatter over the course of ten minutes while the melee/ ranged people missed 95% of the time). Quite an amusing experience though the first attempt when I didn't have any death wards left watching 100+ hp and 8 levels go with each hit. Only thing I've done in the Abyss so far is pay a house call to Minagho then let her go after she blubbed about me being a big meany. Which was probably fair enough since most of the game has been incidentally chasing her around after she ran away. Also helps that I had zero sympathy for that inveterate whiner Vhane and her chosen assassin flipped on her after trivial pressure.

The footage from under the rail bridge which was in a tweet MW (iirc) linked was far better in terms of perspective than the footage along the road bridge. It's pretty clear from that that the direct damage to the road is where the truck was (visible from ~23s, easiest to visualise position using the light pylons, though note that the one closest to the truck on the right side is completely destroyed). The blackened section of roading is exactly where the truck was, and, in my most humble of opinions, pretty conclusive by itself that it was a truck bomb. There are a bunch of other factors too like the explosion shape, its size and especially the lack of a sizeable explosive displacement wave standing against it being sea borne and indicating most of its downward explosive force was deflected away from the water (specifically, by the road) rather than being detonated in it. That video is where the 'bow wave' shown in the BBC article come from, though for some reason they didn't reproduce the entire video. Probably because it's pretty clear that if the truck was 'behind' where the explosion took place the bow wave looks to be even further back than that. Long straight roads are awful for visual effects/ perspective alterations like foreshortening- perhaps the best illustration is if you use the traffic cam video the bridge looks like it rises very steeply into its main span over the ship channel when in fact it's very, very gradual.

It's certainly not just the BBC*. We get a lot of US/ Brit/ Australian media as sources here and that reluctance has been notable in all of them. It is a reluctance/ pattern rather than an absolute though, it's not like I've literally literally seen no one in the media as a whole saying it was/ could be a suicide attack- there just hasn't been a single article on NZ TV or in the papers that I've seen saying it though. 'Truck bomb' seems to be as close as they can get themselves to it with a large dollop of 'but it could have been anything'. The oddest thing is that those articles I've seen which do consider an overt suicide attack in those terms always seem to throw out the 'maybe the driver did not know' as a better alternative. Suicide bombing may offend the western palate, but turning someone into a 'suicide' bomber without them knowing ought to be regarded as far worse than that, not better. At least a suicide bomber would have known what they were getting themselves in for. That really shows how much the reluctance is about using the term 'suicide bomber' with its long history and associated emotional baggage rather than the method itself. *functionally, that article is outright propaganda, whether it was intended as such or (almost certainly the case, to be fair) not. Which is why it was specifically singled out. In terms of conscious motivation the writer may well believe he's being objective but having said that, actually checking things like the payload of a ship drone took me about 2 minutes. And it could have taken them that long too, if they'd thought of it. That they didn't does not speak well for the writer(s), whatever the practicalities of the reasons.

The Kalikke/ Kanerah romance(s) from Kingmaker actually were dlc, weren't they? Not sure if that's technically a threesome or not though, since they're in the same body. Protag/ Camellia/ Wenduag would be up there with a Jaethal romance in terms of things I'd do just for the lols.

Come now, it's not like all the romance options are bonkers cannibals though. Only two of them? No, I don't want to know the answer... That also has to be the funniest 'romantic' interaction this side of the unintentionally hilarious DAO sexy time cutscenes.

Yeah, I think that claim needs a big Post Proof or Retract. I'm not particularly familiar with Ukrainian cities, but it would be quite literally impossible to actually hit part of a New Zealand city tens of km away from civilian infrastructure- and our cities are very low density, unlike Ukrainian ones where even fairly small towns have highrises (well, midrises I guess. Lots of 5+ stories anyway). It would be impossible to hit a city even 10km away from civilian infrastructure and specifically, stuff that would be legitimate military targets via dual use- electricity substations, transformers, rail (lol, blowing up our rail would almost be a net benefit), bridges etc. New Zealand's military is a joke and not part of an active war, but most of our cities have military bases within tens of km too- eg Papakura military base south Auckland, Whenuapai (West Auckland) and Devonport (central Auckland); Burnside military base Christchurch and well, Wellington is the capital. 'Funniest' thing has been watching desperate attempts to make it not a suicide- or worse homicide, if the driver was unaware- truck bomb and to avoid the term completely. Imagine an article on a truck bomb from an arab or muslim source not mentioning the term 'suicide attack' once. Guess suicide attacks are only carried out by brown people with bad religions. The whole thing is much like that attack on the prison. Get a bunch of mostly unnamed experts to say that HiMARS are incapable of being incendiary. Despite having a load of aluminium powder specifically added in order to enhance incendiary effect... That way you get the BBC article on how the Kerch Bridge attack happened. Not only no mention of 'suicide attack', but an expert whose main aim seems to be to work back from the conclusion that it was unmanned. It's not from under the bridge sunshine, you can see it didn't immediately collapse so you'd get deflection if it were. The damage is where the truck was, and deflected down on the right side with the raised 'railing' destroyed wholesale, exactly where the truck was. It's detonated over a weak point to cause it to collapse from, for want of a better term, cantilever stress. Of course, people do rather like to mention that drone that washed up in Crimea earlier as a potential candidate, kind of, including that BBC article. While it clearly wasn't actually a mantas t-12 the size (~1x3.5m) seems pretty similar, and the warhead on the t-12 is a staggering 65kg. Of course, if you actively stated that that explosion was caused by 65kg of explosive everyone would think you were a gibbering moron who must have been lucky to have written the sequence of words down correctly; but you can certainly imply it was without mentioning the warhead size... Absolutely. I agree with the gist of the NYT article personally, but 'unnamed source' is never convincing unless there's corroborating evidence as well.

You'd have a chub for half an hour thinking about all those dead russians. Then throw a wobbly when all those NATO bases go up in mushroom clouds. That isn't quite as stupid as whoever it was suggested that the US nuking Moscow (the city, not the ship) wouldn't get any retaliation, but not far off. You know you're off the deep end when Bruce is the voice of reason. Yeah Bruce, I think a direct attack on Russia might just be seen as an act of war.

It's the theatre in Mariupol which was used as a bomb shelter. Which is, of course, why every offensive war is justified domestically by claiming it's actually a defensive war intended to protect the homeland or whatever.

This game has the weirdest difficulty spikes. Did the entire ivory sanctum on a single rest, yet then you go do some random questline (Blackrock? Black something anyway) that's on the to do list and get stomped hard by a random squad of augmented demons. And that quest fails if you don't do it before going off to stop the local demons from using crystal therapy (presumably that's the chapter transition)? Camellia's plot line is hilarious. Shame she isn't into girls, really. No doubt you'd end up feeling pretty stupid if you thought telling her to stop would work, but it's pretty obvious it won't and I'm willing to sacrifice some non existent people on the altar of over the top silliness.

Have a look at the sec cam footage from under the rail bridge and from about 23s on you can clearly see that the road markings and much of the right hand side of the road- where the truck was- has been obliterated. Also the road is clearly sagging down, rather than lifted up as it would from an explosion below, and the explosion is not deflected around the road as it would be if it came from below. I haven't seen the discussion you're referring to specifically, but I'd put money on them looking at the section which has partially collapsed into the sea which is visible in the later stills and still has intact markings. There's actually an entire section behind that has fallen into the sea completely, which is where the explosion occurred. You aren't going to see road marking damage on that because the section simply isn't there to be seen but as above it's visible on the initial video. The explosion also occurred at an inflection point on the bridge- where it starts to rise to pass over the ship channel; most obvious on the road sec cam footage. That's always a weak spot as you cannot set the sections flush with each other, and suggests very strongly a manual trigger to specifically target that weak point. Let's be frank here, most of the theorycrafting is desperately trying to find a way that it isn't a suicide attack, but something unmanned. If it were in Afghanistan, Syria, or even Russia a few years ago and we got this footage there would be essentially zero doubt what had happened, it's just because people don't want Ukrainians to be blowing themselves up like ISIS/ Al Qaeda/ Chechens/ LTTE etc that there's arguments going on.

If it's too big for a truck bomb it's too big for pretty much anything else. The 1983 Beirut truck bombings used ~10t of explosives, a pretty decent sized ballistic missile like a scud has about 1t, and many have half that (eg Hrim, Tochka). If you've got a rated 20t truck you can put 20t of explosives into it, after all. Alternative would be a boat, though the 'boat' people are pointing at on twitter is clearly a wave (and due to displacement/ buoyancy the boat would have to be a significantly bigger than a truck to carry the same amount of explosive). The 'secondaries' are the gas line (and possibly the fuel train, since I haven't seen all the videos), which is why it looks like a big fire rather than an explosion. Everything looks like an explosion from the north due to the high wind.

After 30 years and not far off a dozen appeals New Zealand's most infamous case of satanic child abuse/ Moral Panic has been quashed. That case alone remains responsible for the dearth of male teachers here even three decades later. I was at school in Christchurch at that time and the two things that I remember vividly were how few people- even those you'd expect to, like the stereotypical anti gay rugger buggers- believed the accusations and how extremely badly regarded the parents of the 'victims', the experts and police were. While the evidence was never presented to the jury the highly bizarre allegations of things like blood orgies in the (physically and literally non existent) basement and babies being microwaved leaked extensively. The jury, of course, only heard the parts of the children's interviews that were plausible. I'd also note that despite what that article says the parents were actually mostly 'liberals' rather than conservatives of either big or little C type, though the police were deeply conservative. Including, ironically, the lead detective who bonked multiple mothers of victims- not a joke, he had relationships with two and Police Emergency Retirement Funded when a third complained about him propositioning her while drunk; and years later was still talking about how the case came about because of people ignoring christian values. Nothing says Christian like using accusations of sexual abuse and your job position to get your end away, I guess. Peter Ellis, the guy convicted, died three years ago. In an uncharacteristically sensible move the appeal was still allowed to be heard despite that. Sadly, while many of the 'victims' recanted (or were "in denial", according to most of the prior appeals' findings) some are still convinced they were abused thanks to incompetent experts and, to be charitable, overly protective and gullible parents. To be uncharitable, around 500,000$ was paid out in compensation to the victims' families, while those who refused to take part in the witch hunt got nothing.

It's a bit more than that. Erdogan is a big fan of neo Ottoman irredentism/ revanchism and its antecedents/ precedents (eg Misaki Milli). That's a claim on big chunks of Iraq including Kirkuk and Mosul, big chunks of Syria including Aleppo, a lot of Greek islands, a big chunk of Armenia and Georgia and Bulgarian Thrace that he sees as perfectly legitimate. Turkey has already invaded Syria (twice, and outright annexed Iskanderun after a bogus referendum predicated on Misaki Milli), Iraq and Cyprus; two off those under Erdogan's leadership. It's very unlikely any of them are getting the Turks out any time soon. Turkey is always threatening Greece though, and nothing ever comes of it. Erdogan is a lot more shouty than normal because his economy is imploding as he counters runaway inflation (a mere 83%) by, uh, continually cutting interest rates. That has also resulted in the Lira losing 80% of its value vs the USD in the past 4 years. He's lost control of the three largest cities in Turkey and needs to appeal to nationalism to not lose the upcoming general election.

Great, now I'll have Creedence Clearwater Revival stuck in my head for the next week. At least it's a great song (and pretty relevant too). Guess I should be glad the tooth collecting clan wasn't called 'Barbie Girl' instead.