Zoraptor

IgorsLab has a good write up of the current issues around 4090 power failures/ fire hazard . tldr; nVidia's 12VHPWR adapter has a significant design flaw that can cause the connection to break/ melt/ catch fire at high voltages. It isn't a flaw with the standard in general as some have suggested, just nVidia's implementation; so anyone using PSU supplied/native cables should be fine.

I'm getting the sense that advocating for a dlc of nothing but puzzles was actually sarcasm? Hit a bug at the end of Enigma which leaves me unable to leave. Not the only bug I ran into in that last fight either, which isn't great given it has an intrinsically annoying design. Good news is that now I get to replay it, if I want to! Also hit the level cap at the end of that fight, which I generally loathe in RPGs. The puzzles were... far from the worst, though they're also very, very far from good. Most adventure games I've played had less intuitive ones, though that's not exactly a high bar to pass and that's kind of adventure games' thing. The real negatives are the masses of repetitive monsters (many with annoying abilities) and a lot of backtracking. I'll spoiler the last bit, since I wouldn't want anyone else to miss out

The issue there is that her UI is treated like the other animal companions which of course cannot cast spells, ie collapsed by default. And no, I didn't go and check if Thog the horse and Dino Nychus the velociraptor could cast spells last night, because that would be silly. You also don't level her up as you do for everyone else so you don't get to 'see' her getting spells. It makes perfect sense that she does from a lore/ world point of view though so yeah, but the game doesn't exactly give you much reason to think about that in context or on a more meta basis. Also did some more Act 5 stuff

80 hours with her as my companion and it's now I find out Aivu can cast spells? (Not like I have any cause for complaint, she's a dragon and can talk, of course she can cast spells)

Nelson Mandela actually said it was fairly significant at least in terms of the sense of solidarity being shown, and the SA government put a lot of effort into attracting rebel tours and the like for their rugby and cricket teams at least (football of course being popular with the wrong people for apartheid RSA to care). Practically, all it achieved was the boycott of the 1976 Olympics and triggering a near civil war in New Zealand. Don't think there's much chance of FIFA doing anything to Iran, just look at who they've got hosting the thing. Probably the most ironic choice for a replacement would be Azerbaijan...

Iran isn't manufacturing drones in Syria. What they would be doing is assembling them from component parts sent from Iran (which is, indeed, what the SOHR says). They will definitely not be assembling them then sending them on to Russia, nor shipping them to Russia via Syria. Those will just get flown in over- or shipped via- the Caspian.

I really must catch up on HotD.. The commentary I've seen around ep9 certainly makes its end sound like a throwback to later GoT's penchant for 'cool' scenes that made zero sense. (I almost certainly will catch up since it's now only a months sub; guess the two free eps did work in the end...)

Barrage balloons used a similar principle. Supposedly- personally, I am extremely skeptical of the claim- they brought down several hundred V1s over Britain in WW2. Nets are impractical though as you can't balance the size/ weight/ strength requirements.

I liked her work in Saints Row 3. Was kind of disappointed whichever twin it was that survived* didn't make it back for SR4 (well, excluding the very beginning). *Viola apparently, and Kiki was voiced by someone else despite them being identical twins

The aircraft are expensive, and pilots take a long time and are expensive to train- and yeah, if the planes cannot fly or crash too much they're potentially worse than useless- so reliability is certainly as major factor in a successful military aircraft as well. It just cannot be the main focus, as it often clashes on an absolutely fundamental level with being a good military aircraft. That fundamental difference is... well, for example a safe and reliable civilian jet might have a max speed of .8 mach or similar. A fighter might have 3 times that. Even by base physics (ie excluding fluid dynamics, and at high speed that plays an ever increasing role as airs behaviour gets increasingly water like as speed increases) you need 9x the power/ thrust to get 3x the speed. That requires highly engineered jet engines and specific design adaptations which are inherently less stable/ safe at low speeds (esp landing/ takeoff) like delta wing or significantly swept wing designs (--> reduced wing area/ edge to reduce drag at high speed -->--> reduced lift at low speeds, no way to avoid that except to an extent swing wing, and that introduces other potential issues which is why it's more or less abandoned as a concept now). You can of course design a fighter that flies at .8 mach instead, it will just be near useless, as a fighter, against any design that places safety as a lower priority. Still plenty of subsonic planes in other roles though. It's a balance, but militarily a plane that can do its job properly rather than maximising safely has to be #1 priority. As much as it cannot do its job if it's crashed or is constantly being serviced it also cannot do its job if it's useless for its job- and that's true even if it's 100% reliable and requires almost no maintenance.

They'd probably do better if they used the full alignment spectrum for the choices rather than just good/ evil/ lawful/ chaotic. "It's the law here so slavery is OK with me!" is pretty clearly far closer to the Lawful Evil approach than the LG, might as well specify it as such. Especially when they already have multiple options for the same alignment in some conversations. I did a fair number of evil choices in the Abyss- when in Rome, do as the Romans do after all; and many of the good options seemed dumb in the context of the abyss- and most of them weren't particularly stupid, certainly not the way they were in Baldur's Gate. Obviously there are a lot of "murder everyone while cackling maniacally" type options too though but that issue would be 'fixed' if they were CE options rather than just evil.

The primary concern for civilian craft is not killing the people on board- if for no other reason than anything else is bad for business, per Boeing's MAX fiasco or the later DC series. Then you have size, efficiency, reliability etc but safety really is top priority 99% of the time. The main concern for a military craft is that it does its military job. If you're designing a fighter you want fast and manoevrable which are intrinsically less safe than slow and sedate and allows for less margin for error in pretty much every design and response parameter. That's balanced out somewhat by rigorous training and a vigorous maintenance regime but it can only be balanced out somewhat. Many modern fighters literally cannot be flown if the flight computer fails and the only option if that happens is to bail out. Takeoff and landing are when most crashes occur whether civil or military, since that's when you have least margin for error. [non exhaustive; there are a bunch of other factors too like having to simulate war conditions which contribute as well]

That is one hell of a lot of dialogue/ cut scenes to start chapter 5 proper.

Military aircraft crashes are pretty common. eg John McCain the presidential candidate lost 4 aircraft as pilot- though you could forgive him for two of them. He nearly lost one more as well.

I have run into the same bug Gorth had in the Midnight Isles. And, of course, that is despite checking that the patch notes where the first item is that issue being fixed... On the positive side that is the first out and out bug I've had (thought I had another, but that was just a quest with unclear instructions and not being flagged as needing to be done before the chapter end. Yes Owlcat I'll randomly chat to a generic Baphomet Cultist in a random room in the brothel to progress it despite 99.9% of generically named characters having nothing to say). Finished Chapter 4. I think I liked the idea of the Abyss a lot more than the execution, it probably sounded pretty cool written down but tended towards annoyance after an hour or so.

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.