Zoraptor

For a bit of balance, there were a few places where I thought Rowling fell down when it came to planning and related matters, all towards the end of the series. The revelation of horcruxes seemed to be rather... not exactly abrupt, but it kind of needed more fleshing out earlier so that you don't just get a big expositionary sequence from Slughorn. It was clearly planned, but the execution was not great. Similarly and worse while the Deathly Hallows were introduced individually early on their significance mostly seemed to be a way to drive the plot of the book (movie). If someone told me that Rowling had picked them semi randomly because she was having difficulty getting people where she wanted them to be organically I'd have certainly believed that, with the possible exception of the wand (and even then the 'rule' its significance relied on was ?new? to DH? very iirc).

The 'Kharkov offensive' was clearly never intended to actually take Kharkov. All sources including western/ pro Ukrainian agreed that Russia was only utilising a small fraction of its available forces, and that hasn't changed. The WW3 thing isn't hyperbole. Can't get much closer to WW3 than Russian troops massing on the outskirts of New York.

For Lupin, Snape had a very easy way to get him killed (or killing him) had he wanted to since he was making the potion that stopped him from transforming. But the one time it failed it was Lupin's fault, for not drinking it. The issue with Sirius was a bit more than a mere childhood quarrel. Apart from anything else Sirius actively tried to get Snape killed as students and tried to use his supposed friend Lupin to do it in a deniable way. That's how Snape knew Lupin was a werewolf. Under those circumstances- plus him being convicted of effectively killing Lily Potter, though I don't think we knew the significance of that at the time- it's unlikely anything short of God Himself proclaiming Sirius innocent would be enough.

I ended up catching the 'highlights' of the debate. Far worse than I imagined in some ways, in others almost exactly as expected. I mentioned Mr Bean previous, and watching that I far too often had 'Bean cringe' where vicarious embarrassment* made me want to hide behind the couch. Managing to pick one candidate that lost to Trump was astounding, and it looks like the Democrats have somehow contrived to do it twice. It's certainly not that that was a vote winning performance for Trump- if his opponent was a pot plant we might be getting President Cyclamen next January based on his performance- but that had to be hugely demoralising for the democrats, especially anyone considering holding their nose to vote for a candidate they don't really like or want. It may still be possible to generate enough antienthusiasm for Trump to get the vote out but it's going to be far more difficult to have enthusiasm for Biden. There doesn't seem to be much self reflection in the Democrat hierarchy about how they got here either, much the same as blaming Berniebros and anything/ anyone else for Hillary losing. I actually agree with Bruce, this was not a surprise to anyone except perhaps Democrat bigwigs living in their self reinforcing circle. That was a terminal performance, there is nothing that can be done to fix it. The only hope is that Trump contrives to do worse. *at times it was far worse than embarrassment, it was far closer to pity. As one of the people the BBC interviewed for their report said, at times it just felt cruel and a bit sad.

Looked it up on that font of all knowledge wikipedia and have no recollection of having watched it. Which would be odd given the amount of extremely average scifi I've watched over the years. Speaking of which, I watched two more episodes of Discovery without any major gripes. Also without any major reasons for praise except for the lack of negatives. They're both rather contrived, but meh, so's Darmok or The Inner Light if you want them to be. No doubt some will hate the time travel though, and that did have one glaring omission..

I missed the debate completely. Not sure I really want to catch up from the descriptions. The weird thing is that he wasn't that far off. People were researching sunlight (UV) treatments and using lavage at least as a treatment at the time. (Very little chance Trump was thinking of that though. Very little. And as with his shilling of horse dewormer, dangerous to say even if he had been that extensively briefed) Hard to get away from Trump being real when it comes to him being funny. You can laugh at easily mockable characters like Mr Bean as is, but if you had to potentially deal with a very real President Bean it would not be funny. A fictional Trump... well he'd probably be thought of as being a US Alan B'stard, more a unrealistic overdone caricature than mockable per se. (Of course Tory politicians somehow managed to make Mr B'stard look toned down and reserved over the next 30 years, ho hum)

Yeah, can't really agree there. One of the things that Rowling did very well (all imo and ymmv, of course) was to illustrate the difference between someone being merely 'mean' and being 'evil'. Snape was mean, vindictive, grumpy etc, but we never saw him do anything evil- similarly, we saw Draco do a lot of 'mean' stuff but when he had the option to do something actually 'evil' he didn't. And Snape was counterspelling Quirrel as far back as the Philosopher's Stone. That isn't proof absolute of her always having a specific plan, but he was clearly always intended to be set up as an antagonist rather than a villain. It would be pretty difficult and almost certainly more clumsy to have set everything up in the first few books. That is probably the biggest issue. Other similar(ish) series like Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire use the same limited 3rd person perspective, but have multiple people's perspectives rather than one* which allows for more nuance; and whatever else HP is a ~teenage schoolboy. So in ASoIaF you start off with Jaime obviously being the bad guy (and he is one of course, he's just not the worst guy) because you see everything from Eddard's or Catelyn's perspective, but once you start getting Jaime's viewpoint you can at least understand him more. That isn't really an option available to Rowling even if she'd gone the multiple pov route due to Dumbledore and Snape simply knowing too much, but she does at least repeatedly have Dumbledore saying how much he trusts Snape, which is fairly close. *I have noticed some people have difficulty with those perspectives clashing and thinking it makes the writing inconsistent; I've always kind of wondered if it's due to Harry Potter despite there clearly being times when Harry is wrong about something that he strongly believes via his own perspective.

Watching the Slovenia-England game almost put me back to sleep.

Pretty skeptical about that- it was reported yesterday without any actual evidence and there's been basically nothing since. Fighterbomber was one of the main sources and while their reliability for Russian losses is good their record for losses inflicted by Russia is nowhere near as good.

Is the tragic Homelander backstory different from the one they gave him in S1? That really was all the explanation needed for him. It's probably rate as a decent TNG S1 episode, which isn't a bad rating for Discovery. You're certainly not going to be thinking about it for years to come but it was OK. Ironically, the TNG episode they're using for the framing is one you kind of did think about for years, because it was one of those episodes that should have had major consequences but didn't like warp drives degrading subspace or whatever it was. My main gripe with the Discovery ep was the mandatory shoehorned action sequence; drone technology has gone backwards massively since today if that's the best they could do and the whole scenario was over contrived to get them into that situation. At least that is a major issue in all Treks though. I kind of presume they aren't going for a Kirk/ Picard comparison with their new command pairing but something a lot closer, ie giving Burnham a taste of what commanding her was like to her superiors...

While there are no doubt a few people who think Homelander is the good guy I suspect Amazon Marketing regularly embiggens their number and effect. They know Homelander is a massive draw for the show, and that sort of controversy will get people wanting to see what he's done now to garner such a reaction.

I wish reporters would sort out their phrasing since using patriot missile, patriot system (battery) and launcher as if they're interchangeable is confusing at best. (I'd suspect most patriot missile production, which is the actual subject, is already going to Ukraine. It was one of Saudi Arabia's complaints that they had to jump through hoops to buy old missiles at a 250% mark up to defend against the Houthis while Ukraine got theirs for free- or 'free' since I'm not sure whether their cost came from genuine aid or via loans. Guess from their perspective at least the Houthis have found someone else to lob their missiles at)

Despite everything he did for years I recognised him mostly from Kate Bush's video for Cloudbusting. (From the same album as 'Running up that Hill' from Stranger Things, which I imagine a lot of people would be familiar with)

What can I say, just thought You Oughta Know my views on Bloodlines 2. You Live You Learn, after all.

Don't think there's any reason not to take Paradox at their word on this; they're a bit more polite in their phrasing but the gist is that it was not saleable, and not likely to get saleable in a reasonable timeframe. Which does happen, especially if the game is ambitious. They're probably keen to avoid another PR disaster too. Kind of ironic that the previous post is a trailer for a game by The Chinese Room, given Paradox has them trying to rescue something from Bloodlines 2. Though whether it's rain on your wedding day ironic or actually ironic will be known in a couple of months. I'm not sure anyone expects Bloodlines 2 to be good at this point but you never know.

Neither Serbia nor the Dutch are close to being the worst. Luis Suarez probably wins the title, solo, for Uruguay. Diego Garcia and Kosovo, obviously. There's even an ICJ ruling for Diego Garcia, plus one of those embarrassing UNGA votes where the noes are close to single digits (six).

Huh. I'm now kind of wondering if Ann Way was Matt Smith's grandmother or something, because that's an uncanny resemblance.

The only one which is in the least bit surprising, and not much considering its geographic position, is Serbia. Though they'd also be pretty surprised to find that they're now in the EU...

Nah, it's what the average person says when you show them a south african url and ask which country it's from. Sounds like the company is now managed much the same as Zimbabwe though.

The Swiss list includes the Council of Europe, European Commission, the European Council* and the European Parliament. Technically of course that's only the EU three times over, plus each individual country, but it's lol time anyway since the Swiss claimed they were- direct quote- "countries" who supported the communiqué. Of course population wise the combined 70 are dwarfed by those who turned up but didn't sign, let alone those who didn't turn up at all. They couldn't even get the Vatican to sign it. *yes, there is a Council of Europe (this is the one not quite the same as the EU, eg it has Norway, UK and others) and European Council for anyone wondering.

The core gameplay loop of Stardew Valley's first year is just about perfect for me. There's always something to do, and often slightly too much to do per day. Then it rains, and you spend the day catching fish or 'clearing' mine levels instead. There's always something that needs upgrading and you feel like you're making progress every few days. The trouble is by the 2nd year it starts to feel like make-work instead, or becomes trivial because you've automated everything, and you've done most of the tasks in the community centre. I've never even made it to Ginger Island or whatever it's called, I always stall out sometime in spring year 2. Still one of my favourites though since getting to that point is, well, great.

I particularly like how the list of "countries" supporting the proposal includes the EU, 4 times. Probably the only theoretically Russia leaning country to turn up that supported it was Serbia, the others (Brazil, KSA, India etc) did not. Almost exactly as expected in every respect really, though Ukraine's energy infrastructure must be in a real mess if item #1 is them getting the ZNPP back.

More like indentured servant/ serf than welfare recipient. An awful lot of western 'aid' is in the form of loans after all, not actual aid. Just talking about peace doesn't really do anything if the talk isn't realistic- and the talk was a lot more realistic 2 years ago from both sides, before Boris Johnson got involved. They spent 20 years talking peace in Afghanistan or Vietnam and in the end victory was made by facts on the ground and that despite actually having peace agreements there; and well, Palestine has had the odd talk about peace over the years. For as much as people think drop feeding military aid/'aid' to Ukraine is about boiling frogging Russia it's also very much about doing the same to Ukraine. Just one more wunderwaffe and you'll be at the doors of Moscow, keep fighting; they're out of [equipment type] now, keep fighting etc...

It's not exactly surprising. If you go from importing 90% of your cars to making 90% of them yourself (specific figures made up) it's theoretically great for your economy which is why 'bringing the jobs home' is an attractive election slogan. Making lots of weapons is great for your economy too, hence why everyone is so keen to make and sell them. Russia has a lot of specific advantages that mean it cannot be smothered economically around producing almost all the raw materials it needs itself; sanctions encourage them and in some cases require them not to export as much and to make more value added stuff at home. They also have the advantage of having had obvious western enmity for years and learning from the like of Iran in how to cope. End of the day sanctions don't really do anything apart from being an annoyance, if they worked North Korea and Cuba would be obedient US clients and they aren't. (Nominal gdp figures are rubbish anyway. If Britain made and sold Big Macs at a million dollars a pop and sold precisely two of them it would be better for its GDP than Russia selling 1.8 million at a dollar each, and it would look like Britain was doing even better if they stuck prices up 25% and still sold the same two big macs. Practically the 1.8 million Russians are doing better though; hence the use of Purchase Price Parity GDP where Russia is ahead of the UK and 4th overall per the new data (currently 6th on wikipedia's list). Of course, for most actual people the relevant measure is GDP PPP per capita...)

Hmm. I Haven't played BG3 either, but on the evidence of OS/2 I'd have to hand the award for more memorable companions to Dragon Age as well. I played both Original Sin games more recently than any DA game, yet can remember nothing about the OS1 companions and very little about those in 2 (lizard man had a girlfriend, skellington was written by Chris Avellone, dark passenger in one of the girls?). There are also a lot less of them, so they ought to be easier to remember even if they were less the focus in Larian's games. I didn't like Inquisition much as a game- if it were a colour, it'd be beige- but I can remember more of its companions, and not only that Sara's (?) face was melted into an eldritch horror. I haven't played Origins for ages and can still remember almost all the companions there, if not all by name ('old lady mage'). Of course being Bioware there's a fair bit of cringe that the memories hang on like Leliana singing or Morrigan's granny undies or Sara's face, but then the worst sin in writing is not being bad per se, it's being boring/ forgettable.