Zoraptor

Kurds and Yazidis, right at this moment. What you say, it's not being reported? Weird that. Fun thing to remember: Erdogan's and his son made many millions buying oil from ISIS and hence funding them in their fight against... the US supported Kurdish YPG, among others. Indeed, one of the big reasons that Russia suddenly started bombing ISIS oil infrastructure and tankers back in 2016 after everyone had avoided doing it was that it massively hurt Erdogan in his personal finances, and he'd just 'personally' ordered Turkey to shoot down a Russian Su24.

In universe it's a product of human societal development and how it happened, and is (more or less*) justified. Star Trek's humans ended up in their 'enlightened' state after a whole lot of bad stuff happening with no one riding to the rescue. The argument is that you want the achievements and developments to be earned, or society doesn't keep up with them. In series it's pretty much always been a crutch for the writing- 'why don't they solve this problem easily with technology? I know, they can't use the technology because of the Prime Directive! Sheer genius!' *for all of ST being very progressive in many areas it's always had human exceptionalism on a massive scale. All the other civs in the galaxy and we need humans to make the nice peaceful federation (which is semi continuously in conflict with three empires because they're bad and not enlightened). Thinking the only way to get proper development is potentially via a WW3 like event showing how bad war is is... very human and has a lot of parallels with history. You can't really ever justify something as blanket as the Prime Directive though, it's far too narrow.

XeSS will work on other vendors' hardware, it uses some Intel specific accelerators but does have fall backs if they aren't present, unlike DLSS. Wouldn't be any point to it at all if it were Arc exclusive, especially with their delays meaning that a rumoured up to 3070Ti level top tier will be competing with Lovelace/ RDNA3 within a few months. There probably isn't any point to it with FSR improving so much either, but I guess you never know- and it may be a Tensor type situation where the accelerators can also be used for Other Stuff to justify their existence. Or maybe Raja is enjoying throwing money at things rather than having to count pennies as he had to at AMD.

Honestly, I blame Joss Whedon and people growing up watching his shows for this phenomenon, which seems to infect every single show with any pretension towards 'smart' dialogue. Everyone seems to want to write wise cracking ensembles, even when it isn't appropriate to (and they aren't good at it). The social gathering managed to remind me of Arnold Rimmer being invited to dinner with the officers in Red Dwarf; though that was meant to be cringe inducing. Guess at least Uhura didn't ask for her Gazpacho to be reheated. It's not worse than Discovery. I wouldn't usually give such a blanket and unequivocal statement, but typical Discovery acting made me think the actors were aliens having human emotions explained to them via an earpiece. SNW acting is just... a bit wooden, which is at least more appropriate than the 'smartass' dialogue. Episode was OK, but nothing more than that. Again there was a kind of interesting kernel there, obscured by the requirement of having at least 5 minutes worth of pointless action scenes*. The science really doesn't work either, but I'm kind of loathe to criticise that too much given how seldom the science actually works in any Trek. *also, both episodes have had fairly long disconnected from the rest of the episode character introductions/ vignettes. While that may be a good way to introduce the characters it does mean the actual time dedicated to plot is significantly reduced.

Prices will be at or below MSRP even in Europe if the price of bitcoin maintains its drop. We've already had decent AIB 6900XT for sale for bang on MSRP (taking our GST into account) despite them costing a decent amount to import. The only cards that are still inflated are 3080Ti and 3090s. Probably not a great time for AMD to be releasing cards with prices based on the inflated values, though they probably don't cost AMD any more. Pretty good reviews out there for FSR 2.0 too. Not quite as good as current iteration DLSS, but perhaps close enough considering its hardware agnostic and doesn't need tensors, plus will be default on every console. (Favourite complaint picked from internet comments: nice nVidia lets their sponsored titles use FSR, but nasty AMD sponsored titles don't use DLSS. Why is AMD so mean?)

To be fair, none of the AP staff died in the bombing. Though also to be fair, the AP was also rather surprised that the building they'd been in 24/7 for, hmm, 15 years was supposed to suddenly be a hotbed of militants that simply had to be demolished for military necessity*. *otherwise it's a War Crime anyway, to whit: Collective Punishment

I assume they'd be accelerating the timetable somewhat now from the seemingly lethargic last decade- and to be fair the last few years have had some notable outlier factors, not least the company being sold which probably put a damper on major decisions being made. ESO and FO76 are also now 'complete' and self funding/ resourcing (presumably) rather than in full development and directly competing for development resources/ money/ attention with the SP suite of games, and that ought to help things along too. But yeah, 5-6 years would be shortest practical wait for F5. It would be very surprising if it were quicker and not at all surprising if it took even years longer. Either way, plenty of time for a smaller scale game to slot in, and plenty of motivation for MS to use the IP.

The rumour makes a lot more sense than most though, simply from a return on investment proposition. It's been 11 years since the last SP TES game and 6 since the last SP Fallout. Potentially you'd have nothing but Fallout 76 for... maybe 13-14 years before a Bethesda developed F5. It's also a setting with a lot of potential for non FPS RPG approaches. Get Arkane to make a stealth orientated Prey/ Dishonoured type thing, do a more tactics/ squad game, a strategy game. Plenty of options, and they can be done at a smaller scale to fill in the release schedule. The problem with Bethesda just deciding to do it is you have to ask yourself why they didn't think of that themselves years ago. Answer being, that they must have thought of it since it's so obvious, but decided against it. Presumably for good reason, since an accelerated TES/ Fallout schedule --> more money. Personally, I'd be surprised if Bethesda wasn't making a Fallout 6 already, but it's a long time away and behind two other titles in queue. That suggests maybe 5-6 years still to wait. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the studios and the IP, I'm sure they'd like to see some return/ use on the 2nd most important of those before 2027. [goddamit man, proofread your posts]

It was certainly an interesting experience being in the education system literally while someone's place in history was being rewritten- when I started in primary school George Grey, 3rd Governor of New Zealand was largely revered for his role, by the time I left he was largely reviled. And that was over the course of 13 years. In that case neither view was really deserved, while a lot of bad stuff went down while he was in charge it was considerably less bad than the norms for the time; and he seems to have been genuinely sympathetic and interested in Maori (so long as they weren't anti England), learning the language and writing books about the culture and legends so was definitely not the out and out racist a lot of revisionist types try to paint him as. He did unfortunately end up stealing rather a lot of their land, but with rather more justification and rather less brutality than, say, the near contemporaneous Zulu Wars.

My personal philosophy is to play it how you like, and it doesn't really matter what the system intended- especially since most of the time you're guessing what the intentions actually were. The reflector shield was put in for a reason, after all, as were the anti magic scrolls. It's not like it's cheating to use them, or anything else short of manipulating the game files (even then, no one should really care if someone else 'cheats' in a SP game). I was quite interested to see how it worked though if you didn't have the magic bullet type solutions available, but personally I found it super annoying so only did it once. I don't overuse summons or abuse the rest system, but that's because I find they make the game too boring as they are the solution to every combat problem.

My first reaction was that Reagan couldn't possibly have been 40 years ago, but of course he was. I think this is the first time I've officially felt old.

Funnily enough, I think my experience with Picard and Discovery actually led to me liking SNW more which is kind of the complete opposite. It's not that there aren't flaws, but they're a lot less (at least so far, after the grand total of one ep) than in the predecessors. I also tried hard to remember the vast quantities of handwavium required for many plots, even well regarded plots, in the classic treks. That 'goodwill' can only last so long when the shows lack the strengths that the classic treks had though, and if SNW becomes a chore it'll get dropped too.

Parkinson played Ernest LeClerc, that video is his in programme brother Roger LeClerc (actor Jack Haig). That's a minor mistake though, like showing a video of René Artois, who was executed by the Germans, instead of his identical twin who survived the war. I do wonder how them being boys from Nancy would go down as a joke nowadays, guess they might get away with it due to Kaye being gay himself. I would be irremediably triggered by a Herr Flick video with Janson instead of Gibson though.

I'm certainly not a legit tactics only fundamentalist personally, and most of the time I just use the reflector shield for the beholders/ flayers as it's the least annoying option for a potentially very annoying enemy. I did do it the 'proper' way once though to see what it was like, and played using SCS where the reflector shield is near completely nerfed. I also did very gamey things like buy/ retain every fireball wand in BG1 for the last battle so I could nuke Sarevok and pals from orbit as soon as possible, and then flood the survivors with summons.

I wouldn't say summons (skeletons/ undead specifically wasn't it? as they're immune to confusion and harm type spell effects?) is the 'proper'* way to win though, that's more of an exploit usable against pretty much anything and everything in the game. Not as much as the reflector shield, but even the relatively nerfed BG2 summons come close to breaking the game if you overuse them. *Fundamentally Beholders shouldn't really be beatable by summoning a load of L1 skeletons, or everyone would do it and they wouldn't be a problem. They should be beatable by exploiting their weaknesses and protecting against their strengths. That's what I'd regard as the 'proper' way to win.

At this point I suspect Avowed might have to be regarded as the closest to a PoE3 we're going to get any time soon. On the face of it InXile would look more likely for a fill in Fallout between Bethesda titles as they have a lot less on their plate as Obsidian has Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed already, and both must be in full production mode. I wouldn't know about InXile doing a New Vegas title though, their Wasteland games would suggest they should do a squad based RPG rather than a fps/ 3ps. So more Fallout Tactics 2 with a lot greater emphasis on talkie RPG aspects. If I were Microsoft I'd probably want to have a lot better spacing time wise between Fallout titles, something like 2-3 years, and keep the named series to the studios they're associated with, ie Obs and Beth. And while the more 'tactics' type of games aren't generally top dollar money spinners they can be very useful if you want people on gamepass and the like, since they'll attract a different audience and are long enough that most will take multiple billing cycles to complete them. So have InXile make Fallout: Arizona. They could just about reskin Wasteland 2 to do that anyway.

Does that extend to all single use items? I cannot imagine trying to fight, say, Kangaxx without them. I know that's optional content not compulsory but that fight without item 'exploits' results in your entire party being Imprisoned most of the time and just isn't worth it. There's also the Beholder mazes where the 'proper' way to win, ie not just using the reflector shield and having one guy solo it, is to use potions of clarity and the like. disclaimer, haven't played BG2 in years, so very much iirc. Some of the decoctions are impossible to obtain the ingredients for due to story choices, similar to how you can only get the Big Praying Mantis potion in W1 if you choose to fight it in the prologue rather than going with Triss. Those I can remember offhand are a couple of 'monsters' in Novigrad; a 'changling' who is impersonating someone and a succubus. Choose to let them go instead of killing them and you cannot complete the relevant decoctions. And if you're playing a 'proper' Witcher you probably do let them go.

lol no. I actually think the AU does a decent job, considering the circumstances, and serves a reasonable purpose. It's just not designed for situations like Ethiopia. For that you need the UN- which hasn't done anything more than hand wringing either.

I'd say that the game proper isn't too janky at least now, but for as much criticism as the swamp gets in W1 the opening chapter is definitely worse quality wise and makes a very poor first impression; and yeah, it's so very, very janky. Chapter 1 has: lots of houses, so lots of v e r y s l o w level transitions, almost all the actually broken dialogue in the game, dialogue that isn't broken but is clearly badly translated, and dialogue that badly effects both quests and world building. There are also some really baffling gameplay choices like having the player fight an archespore while drunk (and not having any Wive's Tears, potentially), annoying respawns, and the ludicrous end boss. That boss Barghest in particular was hilarious, and epitomised the problems since roughly 20% of people did what I did, used aard, got a lucky stun, and won in the first 5 seconds and thought the battle was stupidly easy. The other 80% died repeatedly and thought the battle was ridiculously hard. No one- at least seemingly- thought it was well designed and fair.

Lol no. I mean, what can the AU do, practically? What would the EU do if Bavaria was rebelling against Germany, with the support of France?*, ** Impose peacekeepers, because you can bet Ethiopia won't approve them? So... 100k peacekeepers maybe from, uh, ??? Who is going to send their soldiers to potentially die in Ethiopia, a country that is infamously hard to fight in and whose army is, for Africa, well armed and trained. The only keen contributor would be Egypt as they'd get a chance to 'accidentally' blow up the Grand Renaissance Dam while there, and there's zero chance they'd be approved as that would be seen quite rightly as a literal invasion. The peacekeepers will also arrive from and be supplied via, hmm. Sudan, currently suspended from the organisation and as keen to blow up the GRD as Egypt? South Sudan or Somalia, both abject messes themselves? Eritrea, Ethiopia's ally? Kenya, Ethiopia's ally in Somalia? Or are you going to try and run everything through Djibouti, a country that benefits massively from being Ethiopia's port? So, you need Ethiopian approval you won't get and peacekeepers no one will send without that support. The only good news is at least the supply question is therefore irrelevant. OK so sanctions then, which are globally renowned for their lack of effect. And would be impossible to implement politically anyway. *Colloquially known as the years ~1550-1813AD, if you take a broad definition of Germany **Not, of course, intended as a direct equivalent, just an illustration.

Yeah, even as someone who was not particularly surprised we got no announcements it was certainly still a case of no news is good news. War declarations or mobilisation up the stakes and make a quick (and at least relatively low destruction) resolution a lot less likely.

I actually found the W1 swamp fine, on replay. The key is to be able to minimise the number of times you go there, and hence the respawning, which of course you don't know how to do first time around. But if you're only going there 3 (?) times it's a lot more palatable than going there maybe a dozen times. But, any level which is as obnoxious as the swamp on a first play through is by definition poorly designed. You shouldn't have to metagame quests and the like to make it acceptable, and swarms of annoying potentially 0xp monsters respawning is nothing more than bad makework, really.

If you include Neanderthals as human- which imo we should- brain size decreased significantly when we ate/ boffed them out of existence as they actually had a bigger average brain size than H. sapiens sapiens. And by a reasonable amount too. The brain thing was always interesting to me given that while there's a preponderance of evidence that brain size is very important for intelligence on the macro/ species level, there has never been much that it's important on an individual/ micro level despite the best efforts of phrenologists; ie the brains of geniuses are not significantly different from 'normal' people in size terms. It seems to be far more about how well the brain is organised, and that is a lot harder to quantify than just volume alone.

Supposedly 88 is the modern 'magic number', so four full seasons rather than 5. More is definitely preferred though, and some fairly recent series have had getting to 100 as a contributing factor to a renewal such as Person of Interest* which got a half season renewal for S5 and 103 episodes total. Series with niche appeal were always a bit more exempt from it too, though Magnum or MacGyver (reboots) likely wouldn't qualify on that basis**. Probably the most famous of them is Star Trek, but also Battlestar Galactica (original/'80) and even The Prisoner (original; with only 17 episodes). *probably a good indicator of how much streaming influences things too; we don't actually have syndication here but PoI has been available uninterrupted for streaming almost continuously since its last episode- it just swaps which service it's on every couple of years (TVNZ on demand --> Netflix --> Neon (and its parent Sky pay TV) currently). WB is still making money off of it in ways they couldn't have 10+ years ago. **though who knows, I have still have a soft spot for the original series of both so maybe in 30 years the reboots will be seen as classics too, and we'll get reboots of them.

CNN (International) usually covers the parade, briefly. As does BBC and AJE. We'd be talking maybe 15s as a filler report most years though, unless something interesting was expected to happen. You'd be getting CNN (North America) though which has identical branding but different content and I suspect would have rather less of the, well, International about it. Someone watching in NZ or South Africa would have a difference experience. That really doesn't seem likely at all. If the Russians were planning something from Transnistria you need a good reason for trying it now rather than back in February or March when they had troops only about 100km away along a broad front. Odessa is also more than twice the size of Mariupol.