Zoraptor

If there were to be an invasion- still very unlikely imo- Russia would want a border on the Dniepr* and a strip along the south coast. They certainly wouldn't want, say, Lvov except in exceptional circumstances. The Dniepr is defensible, and has lots of nice strategic assets like dams for leverage. It would basically be a crescent with its bottom edge on the Black Sea and its top against Belarus. A rump Ukraine is far less dangerous even if it did get into NATO. Having an aggressive, dishonest and expansionist alliance with a habit of abrogating and canceling treaties and agreements they see as limiting plus which was established with the express purpose of being anti Russian a hundred km from absolutely critical strategic sites like Rostov na donu or Smolensk is not something they want- and even if that view of NATO is not objective truth it's certainly how Russia sees it. *probably leaving a small Ukrainian bridgehead for the trans Dniepr part of Kiev.

Theoretically the Russians have up to 3 million troops that can come help them. The Ukrainians can bring in reserves too, but yeah they are screwed if it comes to an all out war. Not least because a decent number of troops will simply switch sides when push comes to shove, as happened in Crimea, and despite people trying to convince themselves otherwise. If it's all out war then formal arms supplies are pretty meaningless, as they'll just get bombed. You aren't going to have RAF transports flying to Kiev if there are Russian Su35s flying overhead however much of a chub it gives reddit generals to think so; they're only doing it now because it's safe. The west will cheerfully fight to the last Ukrainian and the US will happily fight economically to the last Euro, but that's the point the line will be drawn. The trouble with mentioning figures like 3 million is, of course, that a 'build up' of 100k troops then looks utterly stupid as it's 3% of that number. Indeed, the 100k figure meaning an imminent invasion looks stupid in pretty much any context that has, well, context. That's fewer troops than the US used in Iraq against a smaller enemy both area and population wise, and which had a smaller and less well equipped army, and where most major population centres were in a straight line alone the Tigris/ Euphrates valleys, and where a significant majority of the populace hated its leaders. 100k is 1 Russian soldier per 20m of border with Ukraine. Or roughly 1 Russian soldier per 150 Ukrainians in the most 'likely' occupation scenario. Or 1:3 odds for an attack against, supposedly, a well trained and armed Ukrainian army which has had to practical purposes infinite time to dig in and prepare. OK, so they'll have no air force after 48 hours, but still... Yet you have 'experts'- and despite the air quotes not just reddit generals but people with actual qualifications on the BBC etc- talking about imminent multi pronged assaults launched on, let's say, 45 minutes notice from Belarus, Crimea, Donetsk and Belgorod capturing Kharkov, D'prov', Mariupol, Odessa, Zhaporizie and half a dozen other pretty significant cities right on down to the Moldovan frontier and right up to the Dniepr; and doing it in a few days to a few weeks. Then they'll say how much the Ukrainian army has improved since Ilovaesk or Debaltseve. Their scenarios make no sense and have no internal consistency at all, yet get regurgitated acritically everywhere without even the most basic scrutiny. Given the performance of the western trained Afghan or Iraqi armies- or more fairly, the Georgian one in 2008 where they couldn't even take the Roki Tunnel or Tskinvali against 500 Ossetian militia and the survivors of a Russian peacekeeping unit- them losing badly and fairly quickly is pretty likely if it came to proper shooting, but that would require way way more than 100k troops from start to finish unless a really, really significant number of Ukrainians switch sides or immediately run away which we're told won't happen... And this all very likely completely unnecessary verbiage anyway, since we've had similar imminent invasion stories every six months since 2016.

It's understandable though. A lot of the popular mods for things like SS2 or BG2 or Deus Ex are all about rebalancing things. And while a lot of people love the cheesy mage battles of BG2, the silly over the top mage/ kensai dual class builds etc etc there are others who think they're just stupid and detract from the game. The classic example would be if you asked someone if they wanted off archetype builds like a 'smart' fighter to be a valid build in an RPG; they'll probably say yes, because fighters shouldn't have to be muscle bound morons. That sort of build is basically a self handicap in D&D though, and especially so in 2e like BG2. But when you actually apply the system to make a 'smart' fighter viable you then get people complaining about how that effects the systems and makes everything play the same or whatever. The other classic is trash mobs vs challenging fights. People will say they want meaningful, challenging fights. What they really want most of the time is trash mobs they can blow through quickly to make themselves feel awesome, and boss fights they can win with more difficulty to make themselves feel awesome. Every fight being a tactical challenge is not something most people really want, but it is something people feel like they have to say.

Some of the Javelins the US sent ended up in Russia. Ukraine supplied North Korea with rocket engines too- though there have been extensive efforts to cover that up, including labeling them, ludicrously, as 'soviet' to imply Russia sent them and despite the USSR not existing for decades before they were sold. The NLAWs are old and expiring, and much like all the TOWs that made their way to the moderate head choppers in Syria they'd cost more money to dispose of than to transfer and make someone else's problem. People might care if John Smith of the British Army gets blown up by malfunctioning kit, they won't care if Ivan Smithovich or Henna bin Muhammed do. Gotta say, I find the messaging around Ukraine absolutely hilarious because it's so very very muddled. Can't take land by force- except the Golan Heights, Kosovo, Jerusalem and Western Sahara, of course, they're all fine. Ukraine has developed so far under the western aegis and everyone is happy now corruption is gone- its economy is worse than Moldova's now, and it still has uncontrollable brain drain and rampant corruption. The Ukrainian army is western trained and armed so will provide a massive obstacle and cost to Russia- but 100,000 Russians are enough to launch an imminent invasion, at the small matter of 1:3 odds. Russia has nothing to fear from NATO, has no say on where we deploy and anyway our deployments are purely defensive- but every Russian deployment near a NATO country is wanton aggression; their fault for putting their country in a stupid place and they should stay at least 500km within their own borders.

Yeah, White March was a massive improvement and Deadfire built on those improvements too. Deadfire is a good game, if it has an intrinsic weakness it's still the Quest for Balance, though it's toned down a lot from PoE1. The irony with that is despite all the balancing you hit the level cap (pet peeve of mine) with about a quarter of the game to go- and it's worse for PoE where I hit the level cap in part 1 of TWM. Most of the issues with PoE1 have been covered- too much of everything, really- but I think that the fundamental problem was, paradoxically, that too much effort was put in. So it was too big, had too much writing, too much combat and everything had been exquisitely balanced. But, balanced gameplay is one of those things that people say that they desperately want, but don't actually want (well, excluding multiplayer type games). What they want is something that is interesting, and not too imbalanced. If you look at well regarded RPGs and hybrids from the late 90s to early 2000 you see... System Shock 2, hopelessly imbalanced; Deus Ex, full of exploits; Baldur's Gate 2, full of exploits and not very balanced; Planetscape: Tournament, where literally (and seemingly literally literally) no one likes the combat. And the successful contemporary RPGs have much the same pattern- the 'fun' of DOS2 is finding the appropriate ludicrous exploit for a particular battle, not its finely balanced systems because they aren't balanced at all.

US bombed Tabqa Dam in Syria despite being on a no bomb list. With 3 2000 lb bombs, no less. That's the small matter of 9.6 km^3 of water that could have been released down a densely populated river valley. They also then droned three of the experts sent to repair it, during a truce, and swore blind that no bomb had been dropped and no one had been droned... If one hadn't been a dud that would likely have resulted in the largest single incident civilian death toll since Hiroshima if not since the Tokyo fire bombing. To be fair, it was the notorious Talon Anvil task force- which systematically abused command and control shortcuts and completely disregarded civilian casualties- that ordered the strike rather than the normal chain of command, so it's just possible that the command did not know about it at the time. But if anything having rogue operators trying to kill 100,000+ people without knowledge let alone oversight from command is worse than command merely lying about it.

Kind of? S6 spoilers for anyone lagging, no book spoilers though as I haven't read them

Hobbies: playing Cornelius Hickey from The Terror Season 1 and attempting to blow up James I of England.

Why not milk the Gabe is God crowd for as much as you can? If people insist on only buying on Steam they're asking to be exploited if not by devs/ pubs then by Valve; and why would developers be 'nice' to Steam when they leverage that market dominance and the presence of so many steam only drones to keep their cut higher than anyone else? The simple solution for someone who wants to play it is to (1) but on Epic to save yourself 50% or (2) rent it on gamepass for ~80% discount- legally you're renting it from steam anyway, you just aren't being charged monthly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the EU will actually block the sale on competition grounds. ARM/ nVidia will be blocked too, for that matter.

9 rings for mortal men doomed to die, 7 rings for the dwarven kings on their thrones of stone, 3 for the elven lords sipping chardonnay in their treetop swimming pools, one ring to rule them all, hash naz grimbatûl etc etc and yeah I can't be bothered looking it up. The elven rings were made by Celebrimbor alone, independently of Sauron, so don't have a corruptive effect though they are bound to the One Ring in terms of power output. The Dwarven rings exacerbated the users' negative racial traits- greed, mostly, with a bit of jingosim- but their stubborn nature could not be overcome by them alone. And yeah, men are feeble and corruptible, so for them it's wraith time. Wouldn't be at all surprised if the Dwarven Rings barely get dealt with at all though.

Taika Waititi with Rhys Darby automatically means a combination of utter deadpan and completely over the top. Kind of weird that it works so often, really. (And the trailer has Jethro Tull in it. My dad would like to put in a request for the next promos to feature something from The Incredible String Band or Steeleye Span, thanks HBOMax. And could you please decouple yourselves from Sky here too, if you're taking requests?)

Well of course when there's finally some momentum up to get rid of Bobby Kotick as CEO he goes and sells the company to Microsoft with no doubt a solid chunk of cash going to him above and beyond the value of his shares. Looking forward to Obsidian's Call of Duty RPG. Guess at some point they're going to run into regulatory problems with buying up companies though, especially in the EU. Actiblizz may be on a pretty obvious downslope, but it's still got as big chunk of the market.

Yeah Witcher S2 was a big step up from S1 in pretty much every respect. Dunno how much of a budget bump they got, but it also looked very much like a premium product, which at times it decidedly didn't in S1. The quality was enough that I could hand wave away some of the concerns with plot contrivance... The comparison to Wheel of Time is also pretty stark. Both had covid troubles, both took significant liberties with the source material and the like but Witcher was a quality product and WoT was a cheap looking badly written incoherent mess.

Ultimately, entry is always at the discretion of the host country. There isn't a capital R Right of entry unless you're a citizen or permanent resident (or Schengen and similar), there's only a privilege of entry. Most of the time you won't get Ministers interfering as there's no reason to and they have better things to do than read random immigration/ visa applications but they have the ability to in most places. Indeed they can approve applications that have otherwise been rejected if they want to as well as reject them. I don't think there's much doubt that this was a 'political' rejection designed to try and staunch the embarrassment of having the court overrule the initial rejection and keep Djokovic in the news instead of Scott Morrison's covid disasters, but it's within the law. Under normal circumstances a rich and powerful person who'd made some errors on their paperwork would get an override approval from a Minister instead, if they were important enough, but these aren't normal circumstances.

I think he's been re-reading Robert Jordan. If the Wheel of Time game had been a faithful recreation the ultimate weapon would have been spanking rather than balefire.

Expanse S6e6

They're WHO figures for 2018. [should say, I haven't directly looked them up to check, only seen them cited as such] Most of the world's socialist countries have the best food security they've had in their history, now. You can say what you want about Mao- and let's be honest, most of the negatives are richly deserved- but China hasn't had a major famine since his reforms despite very very regularly having them before hand. Of course that's partly due to the Green Revolution and international freight, but there are still plenty of places that do get famine. Most of which are, well, capitalist. The bigger argument is whether China is actually socialist or not. The main objection is the same one there is to most such simplistic quasi propaganda*. The lens is very seldom turned the other way, and either way you do it if you work back from the conclusion you want you can 'prove' anything. In an alternative reality where the USSR won everyone is reading articles talking about the failure of capitalism due to the truly staggering amount of starvation in British India, all the dead Chinese from Opium grown in India while said Indians were starving, all the food exported from other parts of India while other Indians were starving, how them dying was fine because "they breed like rabbits" (not one of Churchill's more quoted aphorisms, for some reason), and, why not; how the exquisitely capitalist opium trade lead to 80 million deaths in the Taiping Rebellion. Which is of course simplistic, but then you can hardly get more simplistic than Socialism -> Starvation. *Look at Belt&Road. At least with that you get the infrastructure you paid for, onus is on you to make sure you actually need it, eh Montegnegro. Always easier to whine about the contract later though. The IMF and WB on the other hand were notorious for lending to countries and having their leaders embezzle pretty much every cent. Even nowadays their lending is at least as much to prop up western economic interests as anything else. Get food insecure countries to grow coffee so they can buy the cheap, subsidised, EU/ US agricultural staples that are uneconomic for them to grow themselves because, well, their competitors are massively subsidised.

In order to have real changes you'd need some sort of attitudinal sea change in Australian politics where currently being hard on refugees is seen as a badge of honour by both major parties. Practically, that's very hard to see while Murdoch still controls most of the media because Labor would be the party to shift attitudes, and as soon as they show any signs of doing so the Murdoch media declares open season on them. Status quo also has a lot of inertia due to the involvement of various private prison/ security contractors like Serco, Paladin and friends who are making bank off of them.

I finished the DLC for The Outer Worlds recently. Objectively I'd have to say that they still had the same problems that the base game had- generic mobs, generic combat, generic loot, generic (albeit themed) locations- they did feel a lot better subjectively, and they certainly didn't skimp on content. OTOH, it had the same problem PoE2 DLC had; you hit the level cap way too early and while their plots are pretty good if you want to finish the main game there's a lot of, especially in TOW, generic endgame stuff to wade through without even the promise of going up any levels to liven it up. Still, the game has a lot of potential for improvement but the basics are there, so if they can carry and enhance the level of improvements from the dlc through to the sequel they should end up with a very good game.

At this point I'm not really sure why they aren't just allowing everyone back into Australia instead of limiting things. Restrictions make sense when you're covid zero (or covid near zero like us or Western Australia, so fair enough if they don't) but you'd need thousands of cases from returnees a day to make a blip when you're getting in the realm of 100k domestic cases daily.

It does have to be said, the Australian rules are pretty weird, now that they're not even approaching covid zero- 120k domestic cases, and that with saturated testing capacity so it may be a lot higher. They were meant to be going full let it rip on the international arrivals front fairly soon and one of the reasons omicron got out so quickly there was that NSW had already relaxed isolation rules for international arrivals. They have so many domestic cases active it's barely worth worrying about a few imported ones, especially for someone who could probably afford to build himself a hospital if he got sick. Still, you really need to dot the i's and cross the t's with Australia's Border Force, and anyone who has dealt with them previous should know that. Djokovic has already had covid, the media made a big deal about him organising a tournament (tournaments, as it turns out, though they were cancelled part way through the second of five) and it then having an outbreak there involving him and his wife. IIRC Australia does have an exemption policy for proven recovered cases based on natural immunity, but that would be (just, checked and it was late June 2021) outside the 6 month accepted time frame for an exemption anyway. Might explain some of the confusion and possible basis of an appeal though.

Technically that was just for playing at the Open, not getting into the country. Getting into the country is a Federal matter in Aus, and they're the ones making and enforcing the rules. Still, pretty stupid of the Open organisers not to make it absolutely explicit that that was the case, and there do seem to have been some... flexibility in terms of who the rules were enforced for at the Federal level. (I don't think there's any doubt that the whole thing was engineered to make Australian PM Scotty F. Marketing look decisive in the run up to an election where the last couple of weeks even had Murdoch press turning on him for his abject failures in dealing with covid. It's just way too convenient a set up)

Dunno, if we hadn't had S5 I would have been on the extra time needed bandwagon tooting the horn and waving a flag. It's certainly not a Wheel of Time type situation though where I'd be confident that extra time would just result in a longer bad product.

Expanse s6e05 Not a book reader so no book spoilers.

In order to have a successful transition to Democracy you need certain things to be present. Most of which aren't in Kazakhstan. You need lots of CIA involvement and slush money aid promises, a border with a western aligned country for agents provocateur to cross and a convenient figurehead to have been set up to 'win' the 'election'. See Guiado, Hadi, Karzai etc. Kazakhstan has none of that. Minus the sarcasm, in order to have a successful transition to Democracy you also need certain things to be present. It's kind of pointless listing them because none are absolutely necessary, and in this situation they're irrelevant anyway. The practicalities and realpolitik are that they cannot succeed. Revolutions work when the ruling party/ class either cannot or will not fight effectively, or when the military and police refuse to act. You can supplement either of those with not having a far more populous neighbour who is willing to prop up the status quo (or tear it down, though that doesn't apply in this case). In this case the leadership won't go, the military and police won't switch sides, and Russia doesn't want anarchy- and, inevitably, another islamist insurgency- on its southern flank and in a country where a quarter of the population is Russian. And Kazakhstan, especially with Afghanistan gone, is strategically irrelevant to anyone who would actually support them, except as a way to poison the well for Russia. And that means Syria 2.0, ie no real attempt to change things positively for the general population beyond lip service and self serving White Man's Burden fabulism such as the myth of the 'moderate democratic opposition' which would sweep to power on the wings of hot air and wishful thinking vs the reality of the opposition being nutbar islamists armed by the- and to be fair to them, they did a fantastic job of their actual aim of asterisking the country semi permanently- CIA with TOWs etc from day one; but an awful lot of anarchy generation and maintenance because it will cause trouble for others. Theoretically yeah, aux armes citoyens formez vos bataillons go chop up some kleptocratic oligarchs and hooray for all that good liberté fraternité and egalité stuff. Practically, anyone encouraging the protesters is supporting a bunch of people committing suicide, at best, or who are going to get another 250k people pointlessly killed at worst (though this won't happen though, for the above reasons).