Zoraptor

Oh no, not Elnor! I'll be cuing up the Sarah McLachlin tonight in his honour. Amazingly, he's the only OC from Picard S1 whose name I can actually remember. A bit like K** L*** from ME3 I'm not sure if it's because he was an effective character (uh, no, I don't think so) or just awful enough to stick in the brain.

Stoltenberg's done that at least twice in the last week or so and he's been told no agreement has been made by multiple countries, including the US. May have gone rogue, more likely some sort of good cop/ bad copesque schtick. Annual debunking of Bruce's entirely inaccurate analysis of Assange Follows: Reminder that Julian Assange was told that he was fine to leave Sweden and would not be facing charges. Then a new prosecutor reinstated them, leaked massive amounts of information including victim statements, for which there were no prosecutions. Reminder that Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks by Britain, in 2019. So he's now in his 3rd year of extra detention explicitly due to the US charges. Oh yes, and because Bruce is big on The International Law or only when it suits him? he's being held under Arbitrary Detention per the UN since... 2015.

I'd kind of presume that most of the non bulk advanced stuff (ie not ATGMs) has... countermeasures against being simply sold off- that is likely part of what the NATO special forces mentioned in the leaks are tasked with. Not like there's a huge amount of advanced equipment anyway, and much of the newish stuff is like the Caesar- just a gun on a truck with a guidance system the French were selling to the Russians a couple of years ago, so not much to learn from. Even if China started supplying stuff (and frankly, they almost certainly are already, to an extent) it won't be J-20s or Type 99+s or anything else remotely 'interesting'. Old ex Soviet knock offs with plausible deniability and consumables like ammo and rockets, or things they can pass off as being supplied by DPRK/ Iran etc only, most likely. Depends a lot on Taiwan and general western relations though, but even if they get sufficiently annoyed there they still won't be supplying the good stuff, just more openly supplying old systems. End of the day there's nothing in something like a Type 80 tank anyone would be particularly interested in, 30 odd years later. If you were as the US you could, well, just buy a Pakistani or Sudanese one, after all.

Non issue for China, since they wouldn't be sending/ selling their advanced stuff anyway. Far more significant issue for the west who have sent some advanced stuff among the older junkers that makes up most of the aid, and will probably be peeved about Iranian knock offs of Javelins and NLAWs turning up at some point much like they were a bit grumpy about Toophans (ie cloned TOWs) and cloned drones. Should also be noted that while China has been saying they won't sell weapons to Russia, to the west, they've been publicly saying the exact opposite to the Russians- with the sure knowledge that some people in the west can speak Chinese/ Russian. Given the Chinese penchant for trolling they're probably not selling anything to Russia, but selling them to the D/LPR under the spirit of US arms sales to that internationally recognised integral part of China, Taiwan.

Funniest thing about Norway in WW2 was how close it came to them being a co-belligerent on the Axis side- literally the few days difference between the Allied invasion plan and the German one. Strangely enough that Allied invasion plan of a neutral country... isn't widely publicised. Indeed, if certified military genius Winston Spencer Churchill had been in charge 6 months earlier he'd have had the UK fighting Germany, Italy, the USSR and Norway simultaneously by June 1940. Potentially France too, and they'd been his ally a week prior. Thank god for Chamberlain, and you won't see that thought expressed very often. Winnie sure had some good speeches though.

You don't, but you also really don't want your own side knowing either. If Zelensky says 7:1 losses in Ukraine's favour* and that isn't the case then you have two issues. Firstly, it shows he lied about that so trust is lost and he's less likely to be believed in other things which may be true. And secondly if the ratio is 7:1 Ukraine is winning since Russia will run out of troops first- if it's closer to 1:1 then Ukraine is losing, since they'll run out of troops first. That's bad for morale, and you end up with people who don't want to fight because there's no point dying for an inevitably losing cause. Not necessarily a massive number and those people clearly exist to an extent already anyway, but it also doesn't have to be a massive increase or absolute number to have a significant effect in terms of numbers of surrenders or drop in combat effectiveness. That also drags down the effectiveness of those who are willing to fight. A collapse in morale is far more of a threat to Ukraine than outright military defeat. End of the day the Russians/ Ukrainians will probably have a decent idea of opposition losses already, anyway, albeit a bit too positive for their own side. *7:1 can be 'true' if you go by raw reports. The trouble with raw reports is that everyone is John Rambo when it comes to raw reports and massively overstates their own effectiveness.

Yeah, Ayn Rand is technically a decent enough writer, her problem is that she was writing, basically, religious texts for her personal philosophy ie Objectivism. If you love Objectivism you tend to think her writing is fabulous because you like the content and excuse any technical limitations, if you don't like objectivism it's the reverse and you think it's rubbish written terribly. There's a lot of language in fantasy writing which is inevitably, um, anachronistic Any wording based on real world figures like odyssey, herculean*, sadism, caesarian or idioms based on real world things that doesn't exist in that fantasy world. It'd be pretty difficult to write any novel of length wholly without using such terms, even if you were careful. *kind of weird really, they're both Greek but we use the latinised Hercules/ Ulysses in general for the people, but while an arduous task is herculean a long trip is an odyssey rather than a ulyssey...

Dunno, I have seen plenty of objectivists like Sword of Truth; and the writing in that really does make Salvatore look like Goethe.

..then they impaled babies on their helmets after turfing them out of their incubators. And I know I get all my economic news from analysts for the, er, dailyhodl. Nothing says authoritative study of the important trends of the day like, hmm, using a fricking reddit meme when naming your website.

I suspect one major factor* in US considerations for a ceasefire is worry about the cascade of countries dropping USD trades- not just Russia, but China and even ostensibly US friendly countries; and that has been massively accelerated by events in Ukraine. These sort of things tend to rapidly gather momentum once a critical mass has been reached, and while the US would definitely survive without dollar dominance it would make some stuff... considerably more difficult. Like financing the military on credit, or exporting the inflation from quantitative easing. The EU came out saying that they wouldn't seize- only freeze- Russian state assets for similar reasons last week. Freeze the conflict and you can freeze talking about the sanctions etc and hopefully status quoism reasserts itself. Oddly enough, countries aren't keen to store their money places where it might get taken by geopolitical whim, nor to use a currency that an external party can block you from using in attempts to ruin your economy/ trade. *along with distraction from China and a few other things. For events in Ukraine specifically, major concern would be that a failure in their counteroffensive --> general collapse in morale and a far worse end point than a negotiated settlement, now.

The problem with efficiency is... well, if you're after efficiency you should pretty much only consider a chip from a plucky start up company from Cambridge UK, or one of its many derivative designs, rather than anything from Intel/ AMD (though both, of course, have an ARM license and indeed AMD's NSA back door vector PSP is actually ARM rather than x86). You certainly shouldn't be using a 7600+ though at least unlike most earlier Ryzens it has 2xRDNA cores so you save on a mandatory GPU for browsing etc. On desktop gaming though efficiency is just nice to have for most people, it's nowhere near the top factor. That's Intel's calculus for its ludicrous top end power inefficiency. OTOH if they found the same variation on laptops it would potentially be massive since they often have their utility limited significantly by power draw. Speaking of which: While I 100% agree with the latter there's a pretty big difference in draw/ efficiency there's a certain irony in saying that a single chip analysis shows similar efficiency at 95W, given the context of the rest of the post. (I mostly nit pick this because analysis on laptops of the equivalent mobile chips shows a pretty significant efficiency advantage for the, er, 7945HX over the, um, 13980HX, on performance per watt basis)

Jared is the lead in the CW 'Walker' series. I presume The Winchesters shoots in Vancouver as Supernatural did and Walker in Texas so there would be some logistical and scheduling issues with him appearing on both even on a very limited basis.

I have some questions about how functional a Mandalorian helmet on a Togruta would be. (I'll add it to my list of big Star Wars questions below "How does Watto manage to fly with wings that size?")

There are a few ways the 4 episode rumour could be right. They could have lowered the episode count by making the episodes longer; 4x2 hour 'movies' for a LotR series would make a lot of sense in some ways (and not much in others, the RoP episodes were already long, after all). Or they could have split the season into two four episode halves (ie S2A/ S2B) to have something to show annually, if it were taking longer to film than expected. I very much doubt that is what has actually happened though and yeah, actually reducing the minutes shot seems... unlikely. They do likely have a lot less of a blank cheque now though. A lot of their money was spent very badly in S1.

They could have picked a better ytimg since there ain't nothing wrong with a Mosin Nagant, so long as they're used for the right job and have a scope rather than ironsights. They're far more accurate over considerably longer distances than most ARs- which aren't really designed for accuracy but rof- and unlike other similar era rifles use a cartridge that is still widely available in the 7.62x54. Indeed, it's still used by the highly regarded Dragunov/ SVD series of sniper rifles as well as medium machine guns (not just infantry weapons like the PKM but also including those on most tanks/ ifvs etc). You wouldn't particularly want to be sitting in a trench facing a stereotypical human wave attack using only a M N since it's bolt action and thus has a slow as treacle firing rate, but if you're sitting further back picking targets off in a trench they're as good as many and better than most. They'll also penetrate most body armour set ups, and at decent range- which isn't true of 5.45 AR rounds. Mosin Nagants are also being used by Ukraine extensively for similar reasons- along with Maxim guns, designed even earlier and using the same round.

Well, you could theoretically get close to working it out. Or at least work out the top end and a plausible scenario. per Nielson, 9.4bn minutes of RoP watched, 557 minutes series length --> 16.8 million full series equivalent views in the US in 2022. That's the upper limit, and assumes that around 34mn people watched exactly 2 minutes then quit --> total viewership of ~51mn. A more plausible scenario would be quitters watching on average the first 2 episodes each (132 minutes). That would reduce total series watches to, hmm, around 12 million? and partial series watches to around 23 million* for about 35mn total viewership. Then try and extrapolate out to world wide. RoP definitely has a bit of Tall Poppy Syndrome about it, but, a retention rate of 37% really is poor verging on disastrous. It implies the audience for RoP S2 in the US would be ~12 million max. Retention rate is of course a very limited measure practically since it doesn't measure enjoyment or whether people maintain their subs based on liking it, indeed while I hated WoT with the burning passion of a million suns I watched to the end, so even I'd be included in a positive metric. It even looks like I subbed to Prime specifically to watch it. *head maths, too early in the morning here to solve accurately. It's going to bug me though, since I am at least mildly interested in the answer 9.6bn minutes under that scenario, so pretty close.

There's no reason why anyone would be unless there were special circumstances. If a random Chicagoite were lured into an Embassy and dismembered while alive that would get coverage too. "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" Good old Apocryphal, quote to fit any situation. And that one really does fit. People are way more likely to feel bad about the death of someone whose name they know and whose picture they see repetitively than about a long list of names or a big number; it's just human nature.

Yeah, leaking on Discord makes a break from traditional leak vectors like, uh, the war thunder forums. Operation Mincemeat before Sicily is likely what you're thinking of as that was a 'leak' of the entire invasion 'plan', found on a dead 'officer'. Operation Bodyguard before D-Day was more traditional.

That depends entirely whether you're talking from a realpolitik or personal morality perspective though. Most (well... all) countries do so from the realpolitik one or a variation thereof- US domestic political considerations in this case. Trouble with the moral approach is finding a major world leader who hasn't murdered someone, under the definition by which MbS has. His was just more obvious and publicised than others- and let's be frank, if he was not buddy buddy with Trump and Khashoggi didn't work for the WP it would likely have been put down as 'just arab things, what can you do?'. What Biden is effectively saying is that Saudi is far less important to the US than, as just one example, Egypt- whose leader had thousands machinegunned on his direct orders post coup, and despite this Biden has been buddy buddy with at, say, COP27, November 2022- or any other country that has such a leader that the US doesn't criticise, should be fine with being used as a football in US domestic politics and should still do what they're told despite this. And it's mostly so because a climb down from Biden would be... politically embarrassing, domestically. You can't really get past the appearance, certainly if you're MbS, that the US isn't consistent and his main crime was being too pally with Biden's domestic political rival. And of course if the US or west in general applied their stated standards even handedly most of their own leaders would be in jail too, but that goes without saying. Or not.

That's probably the least significant sign that MbS is peeved given that at least is just political theatre so far, with just a semi veiled threat to cut investment. OTOH in practical terms in the past month we've had: Reinstatement of ties with US enemy Iran Reinstatement of ties with US enemy Syria A significant cut in oil production when the US wants the market flooded First ever visit of a Russian warship, returning from... a much criticised (by the US) exercise with US enemies China and Iran If you ran down a checklist of things guaranteed to annoy (but not unduly provoke) the US it would look pretty much exactly like that.

It isn't really appreciation for Russia that informs RSA's position, it's that the ANC really doesn't like the west at all because while we may have been quite loud shouting how reprehensible apartheid was we were busy supporting them, practically, because at least they weren't red. Hence their regime only collapsing once the Cold War was over and they weren't needed any more. Plus really petty crap like Mandela being on a US terrorist watch list until, lol, 2008. As for Bruce... well, maybe majestic will grace you with his Bruce.txt if you ask nicely. Suffice it to say that the only thing Bruce has ever approved of the ANC doing was Cyril Ramaphosa- now President- ordering the police to machine gun strikers at a mine he owned. That, Bruce loved.

I picked it, but I don't think it was the game's fault per se. On the meta side Bioware was completely in their M Night Shylamalan phase with the plot twists for one- Melissan--> Aribeth--> Revan* for their previous three games- and in game they laid it on a bit thick with people observing that your technique had something wrong with it as well, especially since JE was not a long game so you tended to get those observations close together. It was a lot better done than the average Bioware twist was though. OTOH by that point I was heartily sick of the repetitive Bioware trope NPCs and wanted something a bit more than martial arts kotor with Wuxia veneer and SW stuff excised so JE is far from my favourite even among Bioware games. *heh, the Bioware twist was so well established by then that after the first dream sequence in Kotor I restarted with a character named... Darth Revan. Which lead to some funny dialogue later.

Enemies 'winning' in cutscenes having been splattered in gameplay is a bit of a Bioware tradition, see the first encounter with Malak in K1. Hmm, and while I've expurgated most of the game from my memory I'm pretty sure the same thing happens in Jade Empire too, via your 'flaw', though at least that is a more creative and well set up way to deal with it than 'u lose lol'. It's just that Malak (and I can't even remember who the JE main bad guy is except he used to be your mentor) is merely a boring antagonist as opposed to K** L*** who is a charisma singularity that makes everything associated with him worse and worse and worse. Sometimes I even wonder if he's actually a good antagonist he generates such a negative response, but having your playerbase want to take a drill to their frontal cortex in the hope of hitting the bit containing memories of KL is not really ideal, they might hit their memories of Jade Empire instead. OTOH, it's a less annoying fight than Letho v1 in TWitcher2 which is a legitimately difficult fight, that you then... lose by cutscene. Ho hum. On a completely different tack, I am here to spread the Good News about Terraformers. Every once in a while I hit an indie game bought on a whim that makes the money spent on mediocre ones or ones that don't quite work worthwhile; and Terraformers is that game. Just perfectly crafted to my tastes. Basically just a really simple colonise/ terraform Mars tile game, but much like Chess or Go the simple systems result in a whole heap of underlying complexity. 100% unequivocal recommendation to anyone who likes turn based strategy (and, just to be equivocal, doesn't mind there being no (e)X(terminate) in their 4X, and some potential RNG unfairness).

Yeah, my feelings about Midsommar are, hmm. Some sort of combination of its plot feeling soulless and paint by numbers while being very obviously aimed at being quasi arthouse. Kind of like going to an expensive fusion restaurant and being served an expensive and obviously well crafted dish with a lot of thought put into it that doesn't really work as, well, actual food- you've had an experience, a lot of obvious effort has been put in and it isn't bad per se, but it didn't fulfill its actual intended function. I could certainly see how anyone wanting said metaphorical food would find very little to remember about it.

Speaking of Jordan Peele movies I watched Get Out recently during a binge of horror films on Netflix and enjoyed it a fair bit; certainly one of the better 'with social commentary' type horror movies I've seen. Not as good as its reputation maybe, but not far off at all. I also appreciated that it didn't treat you like you were stupid and pretty much told you the set up from the start, if you paid attention. cf Midsommar, which is otherwise fine and really rather nicely shot, acted etc, but where it's blindingly obvious where it's going but you aren't 'supposed' to know it for nearly 90 minutes of film. Binge included The Mist, where I still hate the ending but like everything else apart from the forced stupidity of the pharmacy raid, and the two Quiet Place movies where I should have hated the gimmick but in the end it just worked in practice. I may have to trade in my curmudgeon card as I even liked the Netflix movie whose name escapes me- hmm, Malevolent per my viewed list, guess I like Florence Pugh in horror movies or something; and where even the name suggested mediocrity and forgetableness- and I watched specifically on the basis that it would be an awful but potentially fun train wreck.