Zoraptor

Really? I would have said the reaction was absolutely predictable. You get pretty much exactly the same thing whenever HRW/ AI criticises Israel, just in exact reverse. Which is of course itself pretty funny, especially when it's the same person/ organisation taking the mutually contradictory positions.

Russia definitely had least to lose and in some ways are far more insulated- energy independent, most people own their own property, lots of raw resources people absolutely need; plus a population that (mostly) isn't used to or expecting a 'luxurious' existence anyway. Probably more of a politics thread thing, but the employment figures are pretty decoupled from economics this time around. We have record low unemployment* here spurred on by not being able to import slaves cheap foreign labour slaves during covid. We also have 30% of people who bought a house in the past year or so with negative equity and worse to come. That's an awful situation to be in when 10% of your population (not workforce) is employed building tatty mcmansions to exploit a housing bubble. Proper inflation is a lot worse for poorer people too, and not just via Vimes Boot Index. If you've got the money maybe you delay updating your car to the 2023 model or find you can live without the latest iPhone model... *not actually, New Zealand had full employment up to the 70s but for some reason that doesn't count

One does not joke about Temuera Morrison's physique, certainly not using culturally inappropriate references to popular media. It's an imprisonable offence with a 6 month minimum sentence here. One does it using culturally appropriate references to homegrown media, like "Too much KFC; not not enough gym work" (instead of "Too much weights; not enough speedwork". Actually one of the tamer scenes in Once Were Warriors, but there's a naughty word and a beatdown so no hotlink)

Japan said some missiles flew over Taiwan, don't think Taiwan has said it though. So far as I've seen they just said that missiles landed to their SW and NE, assuming shortest route that would not be over Taiwan proper. The wording from Japan also seemed a bit weaselly (ie was it over Formosa Is./ Taiwan proper, or over some minor islet, held by Taiwan? There's a pretty significant difference in terms of escalation). I doubt we'll get an invasion of Taiwan anytime soon since China is risk averse*. A bit of face loss for Xi which most of his people won't hear about ultimately doesn't matter. OTOH he does probably want reunification as his ultimate legacy, and control of all that lovely tech manufacturing. But the one thing that can threaten him is an internal revolt, and that risk goes up a lot with economic turmoil and that would inevitably follow any military reunification. Still, pretty stupid move from Pelosi in terms of external politics and pretty much the definition of virtue signalling. Made no practical difference but just made people feel good about themselves for a bit. And all when they want China's support (or at least to avoid their antagonism) when it comes to Russia trying to break bits off another country. *but not immune from ill considered decisions- see them trying to get support from India, having spent much of the past few years provoking them (with predictable and actually quite painful economic backlash) and while financing infrastructure in Pakistani Kashmir. Right or wrong on Kashmir, India sees that much the same way as China sees the US financing Taiwan, ie provocative, at best.

99% of the time Headline: in country's territorial waters --> Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nmi; not Territorial Waters of 12nmi Headline: in country's airspace --> in their self declared Air Defence Identification Zone, air traffic control area or similar, of arbitrary size; not within actual Airspace of 12nmi Helps keep the blood pressure nice and low.

Kind of surprised it wasn't the Flash movie getting the chop since it's very late- not quite Gilliam Don Quixote level, but still- and Ezra Miller has had some, uh, issues recently. Would be ironic if his only (?) appearance as a standalone Flash ended up being in the TV show.

September 15 seems to be the favoured date for release on the rumour mill.

Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became SecDef under Bush. No idea whether Gilead supplied the drugs for the Bush program though. Ultimately, that's probably a better use for aid than most of them even if some of it went to ~cronyism. Having babies born with HIV because mothers weren't given a prophylactic dose was utterly moronic. I'd be loathe to criticise it even if Rumsfeld got his pockets stuffed with cash.

Seems like it wasn't allowed to be broadcast after all.

Oh yeah, I'm certainly not disagreeing with that. I'd far rather see any media attention on the 'racism' aspect being used to illustrate deadlier diseases than monkeypox though, as it really is pretty small fry (and as previous, does have a mostly effective vaccine available too).

Why would you want an easy explanation in lore when you can make a complicated scientific one*? I believe the 'official' (not sure how official) explanation for Watto and the Geonosians is that they're full of hydrogen and thus a lot lighter than they appear. *one of the funnier things about Star Wars and science is that you get almost no information on how things work, they just do; and the one time you do get information it's hated by most fans, ie midichlorian counts. Dunno whether he would have got more or less criticism if he'd just called them mitochondria instead of pseudo portmanteauing them with chloroplasts.

Sigh. I bet they didn't take Bernouilli/ fluid dynamics into account. Obviously Geonosis has increased atmospheric pressure and density, so it's more like falling through water than air and the descent is significantly slowed. Indeed, this is clearly the case if one observes carefully- consider, Geonosians can fly on Geonosis when they would never be able to on earth and Padmé clearly hits the [whatever Anakin is riding] at relatively low velocity. There simply is no other explanation. Well, besides George Lucas not caring about physics, which is clearly ridiculous given the respect he gives to scientific consistency otherwise like making sure there's no sound in a vacuum and that lasers are light constant and cannot be seen unless they're hitting something. At least one other planet also clearly has very high atmospheric density in Star Wars, and it's far better known than Geonosis- Tatooine. We see Watto flying there with his diddly wee wings, so it must be an absolute pea souper in terms of density.

I wish they'd get outraged over Malaria then. At least Monkeypox is low infectivity and has a vaccine already (bonus, since it's the smallpox one we'll get to see antivaxxers' heads explode if it's brought back). It's still 200 million cases and 700k deaths from Malaria each and every year, but it's barely mentioned.

That's the definition of tenuous. (1) Images are simply too low res to tell what is shown. (2) The colour palettes don't match. (3) The time of day/ image incident angle don't match either and give a very distorted height perspective- which is extremely easy to prove. Open the images [1] [2] in separate tabs, and switch between them. Buildings appear to ~treble in height over the course of two days... He's also got the image alignment wrong (near the south wall, not north) but that's just nitpicking and has no practical effect (and is a mistake I've personally made at times too). Have to lol at ISW again though. It may sound like I'm slamming the the initial guy (Oliver Alexander) but he does appropriately use equivocal language "appears" "possible" etc for things that may or may not be correct- but in the ISW summary they've become plain old definite 'open graves'. Alexander may even be correct, but he'll need more images from subsequent days to correct for the biases, and higher resolutions. The fundamental problem with such things is that if someone isn't willing to go on the record and you're getting it from a journalist you have very little idea what was actually said and how (with the proviso/ assumption that no one is deliberately lying). You could very easily have one source saying "it wasn't HiMARS, so it wasn't Ukraine" and another saying "it wasn't HiMARS but we can't rule Ukraine out" [as it could have been a M31 class rocket fired from a M270 instead of HiMARS, since I know that both systems can fire the same rockets]. There are also pictures of physical evidence despite what the sources claim- though nothing that couldn't have been planted.

HiMARS warheads are 91kg, but only a third of that weight is explosive. There are also some videos of demos for HiMARS' M31 series warheads available publicly, and the explosion is not huge; it's mostly designed to impel the shrapnel that makes up the bulk of its weight*. If we want to get technical only about 60% of that 30% is actual actual explosive too, an RDX derivative, so in the 18-19kg range. The rest is ~20% plastic and ~20% aluminium powder- which together make a rather nice fireball, though it's amazing how many experts manage to omit the latter when it's (in)convenient**. It's also amazing how many people insist that there would have to be a crater because a tin roof wouldn't trigger a warhead when, like many munitions, you can fuse them to explode above ground- and that is the recommended fuse for light fortifications like a cinder block building (plus anti personnel use, iirc). While the roof is corrugated iron or equivalent the building construction is pretty solid looking otherwise, decent foot thick cinder blocks or similar. As anyone who has dealt with explosives to any degree knows, they're lazy. They'd far rather peel back a light tin roof than knock over a heavy wall, if they have the option. The pattern of damage to the walls also seems consistent with shrapnel damage from HiMARS warheads, but not from explosives placed in the roof. That's relying on a few Russian supplied photos though, so mileage may vary appreciably in reality. *presuming, if it were HiMARS that that is the warhead they'd have used. There are alternatives, but they don't fit the scenario. **possibly the most silly objection anyway, since it's extremely likely that the main source of fire was secondary, from bedding and the like, and pretty much any explosive could set that off. I don't imagine the Russians are particularly careful to buy non flammable stuff, and typical cheap synthetic bedding burns ridiculously well and ridiculously hot, if briefly. Not surprising as chemically they're similar to components of napalm. The exterior pictures also clearly imply a sustained fire, not an instantaneous one, since there is soot char around the windows similar to that seen on the Moskva. The Russians have supposedly invited the ICRC, whether they follow through or not or have constant to permanent delays though... Frankly even autopsies are unlikely to fully answer the question. If no bodies have shrapnel, sure, but it wouldn't be too hard for the Russians to bring in bodies that had been hit by HiMARS and claim they were there, nor for pro Ukrainians to say that is what they did even if they didn't.

Yeah, that I rather like. Technically it's probably bad design being able to stumble on a lich so early, but meh. It's interesting, and gives you something to aim for. I love the Piranha Bytes games where you spend 1/3 of the game running away from overgrown domestic fowl. Is it great gameplay? Again, maybe not in the technical sense and it's probably deeply annoying if you're playing because you want to feel awesome from the start. OTOH, once you start dealing to the overlarge turkeys and start beating up the mutant porcupines or velociraptors you actually feel kind of awesome, and like you made an improvement. If you're stuck fighting the 20th perfectly balanced encounter for lvl 10 parties and 'anticipating' moving on to the 20 perfectly balanced encounters for a lvl 11 party on the other hand... I literally can't imagine anything more pointless.

I found IWD2 to have the same basic problem that PoE had, perhaps unsurprisingly- everything felt over designed. I'd actually agree with IWD2 having a smooth gameplay experience, it's just that to me that is pretty much synonymous with, well, being boring. Which is the worst sin possible for entertainment, far worse than merely being bad.

That only means it wasn't grads, which was pretty obvious to anyone since they're an inaccurate saturation weapon. Anything precision can hit with that accuracy, by definition, which includes HiMARS and some Russian stuff like Krasnopol. Though really, if it was the Russians the only thing that would make sense is to do what the Ukrainian official claim is: (they) just plant(ed) explosives; bring in parts of missile casings later.

It's not exactly a video that can be shown on the news, and if you can't show it you can't talk about it much except to say it happened. For some, like the Brits, there may be... other factors at play too. Difficult to shout too loud when castration was used as colonial policy well into living memory.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to appreciate Icewind Dale. The game is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical combat mechanics most of the gameplay will go over a typical player's head. There's also David Ogden Stiers' nihilistic narration, which is deftly woven into the plot progression - his character's philosophy draws heavily from literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of the gameplay, to realize that it's not just combat- it says something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Icewind Dale truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, having giant skeletons that explode into snowballs which is itself a cryptic reference to the snowball fight in Witcher 3 The Wild Hunt I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Black Isle's genius unfolds itself on their monitors. What fools... how I pity them. And yes by the way, I DO have a Yxunomei tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. (Funnily enough on pure gameplay I 100% agree with HoonDing on order, though I'd probably put the self mutilation before BG1 and have an entire lower category for SCS)

ComradeYellow may be a bit of a numpty, but as Bruce says that's about as metaphorical as it's possible to get, and obviously not literal. It definitely isn't him rejoicing in the death of people in the last few posts. That's not how GPS works. A GPS receiver only receives a signal. It then decodes it and gives you position on a map. It doesn't send data back. You can broadcast/ narrowcast/ send your position somewhere else having decoded the signal, but it isn't obligatory. As one of the replies says, it's very likely to be a back up system anyway.

Alien3 is one of the movies that benefits most from its director's cut (or whatever they call it in that case). Literally made no sense at all in its theatrical release. It suffers mostly from two factors (1) it's 'thematically' a sequel to Alien, but worse in pretty much every respect and (2) in actual sequence it's a sequel to Aliens, but is significantly different*. That manages to alienate (ohoho) both sets of fans pretty effectively. Resurrection... well. I know it isn't great, but I can't help but watch it whenever it's on. Closest comparison is probably to Starship Troopers**. I know ST has an utterly unsubtle political critique (which A:R doesn't have), I know that it has 'bad' acting, I know it has 'bad' scripting. I still enjoy it though because in that particular case I just don't care that it's stupid. Everyone looks like they're in on the joke (except Caspar van Dien, and Winona Ryder for Resurrection; and them not being in on it and taking it serious just makes it better) and having great fun, and for me that goes a long way. Probably the same reason I love Sleepy Hollow as well, loads of good actors producing more ham than a pig abattoir. *and immediately and unceremoniously dumps the Aliens characters, which a lot of people hated. I don't really get the attachment though personally. **or maybe Bad Taste which is even more stupid, has a less sensical plot but is even more fun. Way more obscure than ST though even with the Peter Jackson factor.

They've had a CDPR goodies give away before, maybe it doesn't show up for those who already have it? Or they released it early.. They obviously have something planned as it's their 20th anniversary.

Iberia was 1000 years ago. Even if you push it as far as you can it's still 500+ years. Most of Africa was still colonised well within living memory.

^^not yet, apparently. Tony Dow alive, death announced in error. Sadly, sounds like it was very much a premature announcement rather than an outright mistake though.