Zoraptor

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.

Does Gerasimov usually attend? The only one I can find he was definitely at was in 2019. Certainly 2021 seems to have only had Shoigu and Salyukov. (I'd normally be more sure, but for some reason Gerasimov seems to be getting flagged as in dozens of articles he isn't actually in) "We are embarked on a long journey, helping Ukraine to become, as others, what we call now, 'new member states'." -- Herman van Rompuy, 29 November, 2013. So yeah, seeking membership was absolutely on the table.

Russia has very little actual capacity for an amphibious assault. They landed troops during this war, but not many, 1-2000 at Berdyansk being the largest. In a situation where the Ukrainians had a lot of troops around Perikop etc you also have reserve troops and troops guarding your flanks and those 1-2000 are going to have a hard time of it. The bigger problem is that you can't just wave your hands and put, say, 10000 soldiers above Crimea. They have to come from somewhere else. Do you want them around Kiev or Kharkov instead? Sigh. I didn't bother with the 'full quote' because I know what the compromise offered turned out to be. The 'compromise' the EU wanted was... Russia could still donate the 20bn (iirc) they were offering to bail out Ukraine. No RBK membership, but they could still provide the sweetener. Now imagine what it would have been labelled had the Russians suggested a 'compromise' where the EU and IMF still provided their aid package and took on Ukraine's debt, but not the association agreement. I'd have heard the squeals of outrage here, and most of the population of Brussels would need hearing aids. The edit part is extraordinarily sophist though, I'm afraid. If it were my opinion then sure, legit argument and I probably wouldn't even have that opinion in the first place without the quote- but critically, relevance is not based on my opinion of it, is it, since I didn't make the quote? No kidding, actual membership was not on the table in 2013. Barroso thought it was relevant enough to bring up though, that is absolute fact, as is that he explicitly frames it as one or the other. So, you're essentially telling the EC President that he was being irrelevant on something regarding the EU, not me. I know Wali said that recently, but I'm very skeptical that actually is happening on any scale. It supposedly happened with the soviets in WW2, but actual evidence of it happening is very scarce. Or he accepted the intelligence but showed skepticism publicly. Indeed, most of his comments on it were more along the lines that it "~wasn't helpful~" having outsiders shouting the odds when they were still negotiating, rather than that it wasn't real. You can move the people around fairly easily, but it's hard to organise. I don't think there will be anything like a 'full' mobilisation though, that's a million people, if they feel they need 100-150k more troops they'd try for inducements or prorogue the current conscripts while adding the next class; and that level of 'mobilisation' is handled regularly. The only difference would be they'd need new weapons rather than picking up those left by the last group of conscripts.

José Manuel Barroso, February 25, 2013: "one country cannot at the same time be a member of a customs union [ie the agreement with Russia] and be in a deep common free-trade area with the European Union". I think the President of the European Commission trumps the BBC as a source for EU policy, and it's 100% clear from that that the choice was forced by the EU, not the Russians. If he was going off the reservation you'd also expect that Herman van Rompuy, who was standing right next to him, would correct him. I can provide a long list of citations too, if you like, but all yours did was illustrate how bad the coverage was.

And that really is the thing. Pro EU people like to say that anti EU populists are there because of Russia and people vote for them because of Russian influence; because that means their views don't have to be taken seriously. Which ignores the fact that 'anti EU populists' have always been there, and they're only 'populists' because, well, such a disproportionately small number of mainstream politicians represent their views. Even when the EU was still the E(E)C and basically still just a trading bloc you regularly got 1/3 of voters not wanting to join. If Brexit had been a parliamentary vote it wouldn't have even been close; probably a 4:1 margin for staying in when the popular vote was ~1:1. And to keep it relevant, you can see that in all the current talk of NATO accession for Sweden and Finland where politicians who are and always have been disproportionately pro NATO want to accede by parliamentary fiat- and really don't want it put to referendum.

No, that's precisely why they have no significant issue with the EU. Because... it's easy to influence. And as above, they know there's zero actual chance of Ukraine joining. Whereas when Ukraine first talked about joining NATO they probably had to hose down the walls at the Pentagon after all the spontaneous 'celebrations'. Sigh. A few hours ago you were railing against Orban being an autocrat as well- someone who is, well, in the EU. There's no serious suggestion that Putin would actually have lost an election at any time though, especially to 'pro western' candidates. Have fun with the actual alternatives, Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky, both far more revanchist than Putin, both of whom would almost certainly have outright invaded Ukraine in 2014 instead. If they'd been Yeltsin's successor they'd probably have invaded the Baltics to stop them joining NATO... There were, of course, protests in Russia in 2012 as well. Some even, rather amusingly, tried labelling them as 'pro democracy'. Pro democracy people waving... Soviet and Russian Imperial flags? If you want there to be significant pro western electoral sentiment in Russia you need to build a time machine and go back to roughly 12 months in the 90s before Yeltsin asterisked everything up- doing what the west told him to, to be fair to him, difficult as that is. Otherwise; (1) all attempts to influence us or our friends are bad, by bad people. You can tell, because they're trying to influence us. They do it because they're weak [if we want to feel better about ourselves] or strong [if we want to advocate for buying more shooty pew pews or instill fear] (2) our attempts to influence others are good- and only for the benefit of others. We'd never use our influence for bad reasons. We're just nice like that, unlike them. (3) ...why do some people think we're a bunch of judgemental narcissist hypocrites? Could we have done something to make them think that? No! They're... just victims of disinformation! Or maybe they've been paid! Perfect, recent example: Solomon Islands signs defence agreement with China and the toys being ejected from cots in Canberra and Washington at above escape velocity, while wondering why they aren't getting fulsome support outside of the old ANZUS troika. If you want the west to be the unequivocal good guys build that time machine, go back to <2000, and get NATO to offer Russia membership. Good luck though, the one thing an alliance needs absolutely is an enemy, and NATO policy has always been to make sure Russia stays that enemy.

No. They don't have an issue with the EU for three reasons. (1) It's not very effective (2) they'd actually like an EU army, as that weakens NATO and (3) Ukraine is not getting into the EU anyway. 45 million extra people whose country has a GDP/c 60% of Belarus's? If nothing else the Ukrainian agricultural sector alone would bankrupt the CAP (or whatever they're calling it now). No. They. Didn't. Really, it's not that hard to actually check these things. The EU made it an 'us or them' situation, not the Russians. The EU stated that their offer was dependent on Ukraine refusing to join the Customs Union with Russia. The Russians did not put any such stipulations on their end, and said that so far as they were concerned they could sign both. Let's take the emotive names out of things. New Zealand wants a FTA with Samoa and Fiji. Samoa says it's fine with us having both. Fiji says we can have one with them, or one with Samoa. Clearly in that case Samoa is unreasonably blocking out agreement with Fiji by saying... they're fine with it? Haha no, it's Fiji blocking it themselves. [for the more directly relevant, up until 2014 New Zealand was looking to join the Russian free trade bloc itself, while still negotiating TPP etc]

They definitely made money off of Tomb Raider (and Deus Ex, to a lesser extent) but not as much as they wanted, and not as fast as they wanted. IIRC the only title using a 'classic' Eidos IP to actually lose money semi recently was Thief. Of course, SE's solution to the studios not being profitable enough was licensed Marvel games that they somehow contrived to lose- apparently- $200 million on.

Thing is, Russia has never really had a problem with the EU, just NATO. They were fine with Ukraine joining the EU back in 2014 when Yanukovich was in charge, and they're fine with Ukraine joining the EU now. This, really. People talk about Bucha as if it's uniquely brutal when we're well within living memory of something like My Lai, which was nowhere near as much as an aberration as people would like it to be- which shows the level of killing you can get if it's deliberate policy. And where at least the perpetrators were punished for their crimes via... 3 years house arrest for Lt Calley was it? We're within living memory of British troops gelding suspected Mao Mao rebels in Kenya too, for which no one has been punished either. Then there's the French in Africa training the Hutus for example, and god forbid any mention of Belgians in the Congo. You have a situation where the civilians are 'the enemy' then every country ends up targeting them, whether it's deliberate policy to or not. That's especially true when you have a bunch of guys fighting out of uniform. Which is of course why you're meant to wear them, and why fighting out of uniform is itself against the GC- and that did happen a lot in the early stages in Ukraine. The whole thing is a classic vicious circle of escalation. Perhaps the best recent example is actually Afghanistan. The primary problem there was that every step taken to target the Taleban negatively effected civilians- and indeed, most of the Taleban's actions got blamed on the occupier too. Yeah, the incompetence and corruption of people like Ghani didn't help, but the ultimate reason why the whole house of cards collapsed before the US even formally left was that for all the 3.4tn dollars spent what the majority of Afghans got from the coalition was people being randomly blown up, randomly detained, randomly stopped etc etc and all the old problems too. Doesn't really matter if every single incident involving civilian casualties actually were an honest mistakes instead of heinous warcrimes to the people who were on the receiving end. Good luck trying to tell your troops to sit back and take it though, but as soon as you respond incidents like those involving the Australian SAS are absolutely inevitable; and just as inevitably they make a bunch more civilians see you as the enemy. I mean, we here had a highly publicised incident involving civilian casulaties in Afghanistan. It probably didn't involve deliberately killing civilians, but that didn't matter to the guy whose 3 year old daughter got killed. Indeed, years later they still absolutely loathed us when interviewed, and it's impossible not to accept it as justified loathing. All that and we didn't even verifiably get a single Talib. We just killed 6 people, injured 20 more and blew up a dozen of their houses. Why? Because we had a guy killed by an IED and Something had to be Done, and that was Something. No matter that it actually made things worse...

I was being a bit facetious about it... (very mild spoilers; unless you're majestic) Uh, kind of? There's some violence there, and the cause of it was mostly a classic nuTrekism (covered in the spoilers in the previous post) where the problem could easily have been avoided but then you wouldn't have the 'dramatic tension' that they wanted. And there is a bit of playing fast and loose with some Trek 'laws', though they do set up the justification for it, um, well actually. OTOH the set up for the main plot was actually kind of interesting and resolved largely without melodrama- some speechifying, but not overly stultifying speechifying- or overt stupidity. I can't really go into too much more detail without spoilers though. (If it were the 1st nuTrek episode released I think I'd actually be pretty enthusiastic about it, as it is I expect all the old problems to creep out of the woodwork later)

So I watched Strange New Worlds Ep1. It was, to be fair to it, better than merely OK, though there are definite signs of old problems (see spoilers). If I'd seen it in isolation I might even think it was good, but the expectation is very much there that any potential will be squandered. There is though at least some suggestion that they may, just may, have taken on board some of the criticisms of Discovery by doing really basic things like, well, actually introducing the bridge crew even if they aren't all 'important'. I do kind of want to criticise them for sending the top three ranking officers on an away mission- which I'm sure never happened, certainly not once, in any earlier Treks- and there was at least one obvious plotting problem with that

My short take would be that they wanted to take a lot of territory quickly- which, broadly speaking, they did- to spook Ukraine into a quick political rather than military capitulation. The problem came when the political capitulation didn't eventuate and their efforts were far too diffuse to be effective militarily. That explains pretty much everything of how they went about it though; trying to take Kiev, airborne assaults, not really trying to compartmentalise things by blowing up bridges and infrastructure and the like. It was all designed to leave a more or less intact Ukraine with a new Russian friendly government/ Russian friendly conditions imposed on it. And it also has to be said; as much as I thought that trying for Kiev was a stupid idea* from the outset and a political rather than military decision there were a lot of people expecting it to work, not just the Russians- there were multiple assessments that Kiev would fall in days from western military analysts. *at some point I will probably do something with more detail on what I think they should have done, but it actually wouldn't be significantly different from what I said before everything kicked off.

Doubtful even the 2014 Ukraine army would have outright lost by now, assuming everything else stays the same, as the initial Russian plan was too unrealistic. What the Russians were banking on was lack of will to fight, which they shouldn't have been since the Ukrainians actually had plenty of that in 2014- you can compare the Donetsk Airport Cyborgs with Mariupol, for instance, and most of their military disasters there came from not wanting to retreat when they ought to- and that they'd be as badly led as then. There's a decent amount of evidence that the Ukrainians were badly led now too in places, such as the Russians strolling out of Crimea like it was a picnic, but that was more than balanced by the Russian strategy being hugely... over ambitious in other areas. Kiev urban area is 3.2 mn people. You couldn't take that (quickly) with the entire Russian invasion force unless close to literally no one decided to fight back. As it was they dissipated all their momentum in the south too trying to achieve the unrealistic in the north. Russia actually is across the Dniepr anyway, it's a bit of a silly milestone. Being across the Dniepr north of Kiev was disastrous, and they've been across the lower Dniepr for 2 months at Kherson (and Nova Kharkovka for that matter). Yep. Erdogan went from 'personally ordering it' to it 'all being a US/ Gulenist plot to bring him down and sour relations with Russia' in a year. Russia even outright blew up 33 Turkish soldiers with nary a peep of criticism of them from Turkey. That's diversionary- on both sides- as it strategically unimportant. If nothing else the Russian border is right there, even if Russia withdrew without a fight Ukraine would still need to keep most of its troops there or risk having the Russians walk back in later. Ukraine has made no progress around the areas that might actually threaten Izium though because there the western Russian defensive line is along highly defensible river and swamp.

Not really alluding to anyone, except nebulous 'people' in general. And to be fair to people in general, rather a lot of them wouldn't even have been born in 1999. Thing is though, Putin's Russia has been so stable, relatively speaking, that people in general do forget how unstable it was under Yeltsin. Apart from the bankruptcy in 1998 he also had 5 Prime Ministers in 4 years from 1996-99, as opposed to 6 (including of course a certain VV Putin for 4 years) in the next 22 after he'd gone. He'd got rid of the VP, he was beholden to a load of oligarchs whose power makes the current crop look like children, he didn't have a succession plan, he didn't bother building a Party at all, and he really was a few vodka shots away from a drug/alcoholic coma for pretty much his entire time in office. We only knew who his successor was for sure on 1 Jan 2000, since after his resignation he literally couldn't fire Putin any more. Allegedly, the reason Putin was picked so far as Yeltsin was concerned was extremely simple; he promised not to go after him once he'd left office so his family could keep all the money he stole and he could die in peace. He'd never have got the same from Zyuganov or Zhirinovsky who outright hated him and may well have formally brought back the death penalty just for him. And his approval ratings and those of his political friends were subterranean- 2%- so there was no point any of them standing. If Putin dies Mishustin takes over temporarily, that is known. It's also very strongly suspected that he won't be the successor but just interim. There will be a successor who stands in the election after that, and one who has already been decided on. But there's literally no point in saying publicly that it's say, Medvedev, (who it likely isn't either) because all it does is 'reassure' westerners and make him a target immediately. Really though, most of the 'concern' from the diplomatic/ media side of the west is, basically, concern trolling. "Russia is so unstable, I wish we knew who Putin's successor is [and as above we actually do, at least in the interim] so maybe it wouldn't be quite as bad, but we don't, so you can see how unstable Russia is" sort of thing.

People tend to forget how quickly Putin himself came on the scene. August 1999 was when he was appointed PM, prior to that he was unknown at a national level; not much over 4 months later Yeltsin resigned. And Yeltsin was extremely paranoid about succession, so much so he abolished the VP position. Last thing I'd be worried about is no succession plan, because it would be stupid to have a public one. The succession plan failing on the other hand could be a disaster, but at least the British Tabloids assure us that the Russian nuclear arsenal doesn't work, so there is that.