Zoraptor

Chechens, what are they going to do with Mariupol? It's not like the Uighurs moving into Jisr al Shugour in Syria; they literally have nowhere else to go. To be blunt that reeks of pretty blatant propaganda. Speaking of Mariupol since it's dropped out of the headlines, the surrenders there are ongoing for a third day. As of yesterday Russia was saying ~1000 and as of today DPR was saying 1700. 1700 would be towards the upper limit of what I expected, and may actually mean the 2000 claimed to be there is accurate- or it may be an inflated propaganda POW number to match an inflated Ukrainian number. The 1000 seems likely to be accurate though, given the count of buses and the 'evacuees' being uninjured so not taking up so much space. Also, no general prisoner swap deal was made* and the surrender was unconditional. Which is not overly surprising, as the Ukrainians may not even have 1000 POWs to swap, especially since they've done less publicised swaps multiple times before. *qualifier; for the uninjured. It's entirely possible the first batch of 264 are covered by a swap deal and were all injured, and that the Ukrainian MoD just let media interpret it wrong. That would also put pressure on Russia to adhere to an agreement they hadn't actually agreed to.

TLDR lol. OK, I actually read a decent number, and a depressing number of similar things apply to our 'left wing' government here.

The other issue apart from people using them as a source is that if the information is salacious enough other papers use them as a source. Then people quote the NYT* and The (London) Times and Grauniad to show that it's in all the 'respectable' press as well and thus has to be taken seriously. Case in point, Putin's phantom resignation in January 2021 where the ultimate source was... anonymous intelligence official, talking to The Sun; ie modern Kelvin McKenzie's left buttcheek. The flip side is state media, which isn't trustworthy but can be useful to see what the other side wants people to think. Tabloids though, the only thing you get from them is what they think will sell the most copy. *favourite newspaper of record moment: being told that a NYT article claiming unions were illegal in New Zealand had to be true because it was in the NYT who do exacting fact checking, and the legislation webpage of the NZ government saying they were legal had to be incorrect. Strangely enough the NYT reporter was actually wrong... and that was well after all the Nigerian Yellowcake etc fake intelligence laundering done through the NYT in 2002-3. There isn't any. It's possible that the UN or ICRC has some and they'd more or less qualify as unbiased, but they don't release such data independently and for the vast majority of information received will be aggregating biased/ controlled sources if they did release.

"Ukraine's defence ministry said that 264 defenders of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol had been evacuated to separatist-held territory in Ukraine's breakaway Donbas region" You can just say 'surrendered', Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, that's what it is when you're evacuated to enemy held territory. They're POWs who are going to be exchanged for other POWs, who also surrendered. Probably isn't quite over yet. Ukraine was claiming ~2000 defenders there fairly recently, and even though that was doubtless an exaggeration I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's another batch to come tomorrow. Not completely out of the question that some refuse to surrender too.

I'm kind of interested in watching that just to see how bad Picard has been. OTOH, nearly 39 minutes... that's nearly 39m more time than I really want to spend on Picard.

I always obey the road rules, but everyone else insists on driving on the wrong side of the road. Honourable exception: Sleeping Dogs. This is perhaps the most 21st century thing I have ever read.

Uh, yeah: "Shireen Abu Akleh: Israeli forces attack mourners carrying casket of dead Al Jazeera journalist". I mean, what can you say really?

Yeah, it's how long the 'near term future' is that is at question I guess. Three ways to interpret it: there will be (are?) some Arc graphics with piecemeal release for laptops earlier than the desktop line and they want to launch full suite XeSS with the desktop line They are having some implementation problems, or problems with the fallback implementations, andor it needs driver side implementation from AMD/ nVidia (which would be 'funny', but I wouldn't wholly discount it) Or, the big one: they promised XeSS and have to deliver it- but they only have to deliver it to Arc users. This would be the case if they've decided that they cannot compete with DLSS/ FSR. Despite my equivocation above the bottom option is the one I personally think is the case, but only on balance. FSR 2.0 being such a big improvement while still being easy to implement and Intel very likely getting some advance notice of that certainly makes option 3 a lot more likely. Hard to see any space for XeSS to slot into, now though to be fair to Intel/ Raja there certainly was previous, short of Intel splurging vast amounts of cash for actual exclusivity; and it's hard to see that considering how much they'd have to splurge. That leaves it very much looking like a tech solution without a problem to solve any more.

Kurds and Yazidis, right at this moment. What you say, it's not being reported? Weird that. Fun thing to remember: Erdogan's and his son made many millions buying oil from ISIS and hence funding them in their fight against... the US supported Kurdish YPG, among others. Indeed, one of the big reasons that Russia suddenly started bombing ISIS oil infrastructure and tankers back in 2016 after everyone had avoided doing it was that it massively hurt Erdogan in his personal finances, and he'd just 'personally' ordered Turkey to shoot down a Russian Su24.

In universe it's a product of human societal development and how it happened, and is (more or less*) justified. Star Trek's humans ended up in their 'enlightened' state after a whole lot of bad stuff happening with no one riding to the rescue. The argument is that you want the achievements and developments to be earned, or society doesn't keep up with them. In series it's pretty much always been a crutch for the writing- 'why don't they solve this problem easily with technology? I know, they can't use the technology because of the Prime Directive! Sheer genius!' *for all of ST being very progressive in many areas it's always had human exceptionalism on a massive scale. All the other civs in the galaxy and we need humans to make the nice peaceful federation (which is semi continuously in conflict with three empires because they're bad and not enlightened). Thinking the only way to get proper development is potentially via a WW3 like event showing how bad war is is... very human and has a lot of parallels with history. You can't really ever justify something as blanket as the Prime Directive though, it's far too narrow.

XeSS will work on other vendors' hardware, it uses some Intel specific accelerators but does have fall backs if they aren't present, unlike DLSS. Wouldn't be any point to it at all if it were Arc exclusive, especially with their delays meaning that a rumoured up to 3070Ti level top tier will be competing with Lovelace/ RDNA3 within a few months. There probably isn't any point to it with FSR improving so much either, but I guess you never know- and it may be a Tensor type situation where the accelerators can also be used for Other Stuff to justify their existence. Or maybe Raja is enjoying throwing money at things rather than having to count pennies as he had to at AMD.

Honestly, I blame Joss Whedon and people growing up watching his shows for this phenomenon, which seems to infect every single show with any pretension towards 'smart' dialogue. Everyone seems to want to write wise cracking ensembles, even when it isn't appropriate to (and they aren't good at it). The social gathering managed to remind me of Arnold Rimmer being invited to dinner with the officers in Red Dwarf; though that was meant to be cringe inducing. Guess at least Uhura didn't ask for her Gazpacho to be reheated. It's not worse than Discovery. I wouldn't usually give such a blanket and unequivocal statement, but typical Discovery acting made me think the actors were aliens having human emotions explained to them via an earpiece. SNW acting is just... a bit wooden, which is at least more appropriate than the 'smartass' dialogue. Episode was OK, but nothing more than that. Again there was a kind of interesting kernel there, obscured by the requirement of having at least 5 minutes worth of pointless action scenes*. The science really doesn't work either, but I'm kind of loathe to criticise that too much given how seldom the science actually works in any Trek. *also, both episodes have had fairly long disconnected from the rest of the episode character introductions/ vignettes. While that may be a good way to introduce the characters it does mean the actual time dedicated to plot is significantly reduced.

Prices will be at or below MSRP even in Europe if the price of bitcoin maintains its drop. We've already had decent AIB 6900XT for sale for bang on MSRP (taking our GST into account) despite them costing a decent amount to import. The only cards that are still inflated are 3080Ti and 3090s. Probably not a great time for AMD to be releasing cards with prices based on the inflated values, though they probably don't cost AMD any more. Pretty good reviews out there for FSR 2.0 too. Not quite as good as current iteration DLSS, but perhaps close enough considering its hardware agnostic and doesn't need tensors, plus will be default on every console. (Favourite complaint picked from internet comments: nice nVidia lets their sponsored titles use FSR, but nasty AMD sponsored titles don't use DLSS. Why is AMD so mean?)

To be fair, none of the AP staff died in the bombing. Though also to be fair, the AP was also rather surprised that the building they'd been in 24/7 for, hmm, 15 years was supposed to suddenly be a hotbed of militants that simply had to be demolished for military necessity*. *otherwise it's a War Crime anyway, to whit: Collective Punishment

I assume they'd be accelerating the timetable somewhat now from the seemingly lethargic last decade- and to be fair the last few years have had some notable outlier factors, not least the company being sold which probably put a damper on major decisions being made. ESO and FO76 are also now 'complete' and self funding/ resourcing (presumably) rather than in full development and directly competing for development resources/ money/ attention with the SP suite of games, and that ought to help things along too. But yeah, 5-6 years would be shortest practical wait for F5. It would be very surprising if it were quicker and not at all surprising if it took even years longer. Either way, plenty of time for a smaller scale game to slot in, and plenty of motivation for MS to use the IP.

The rumour makes a lot more sense than most though, simply from a return on investment proposition. It's been 11 years since the last SP TES game and 6 since the last SP Fallout. Potentially you'd have nothing but Fallout 76 for... maybe 13-14 years before a Bethesda developed F5. It's also a setting with a lot of potential for non FPS RPG approaches. Get Arkane to make a stealth orientated Prey/ Dishonoured type thing, do a more tactics/ squad game, a strategy game. Plenty of options, and they can be done at a smaller scale to fill in the release schedule. The problem with Bethesda just deciding to do it is you have to ask yourself why they didn't think of that themselves years ago. Answer being, that they must have thought of it since it's so obvious, but decided against it. Presumably for good reason, since an accelerated TES/ Fallout schedule --> more money. Personally, I'd be surprised if Bethesda wasn't making a Fallout 6 already, but it's a long time away and behind two other titles in queue. That suggests maybe 5-6 years still to wait. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the studios and the IP, I'm sure they'd like to see some return/ use on the 2nd most important of those before 2027. [goddamit man, proofread your posts]

It was certainly an interesting experience being in the education system literally while someone's place in history was being rewritten- when I started in primary school George Grey, 3rd Governor of New Zealand was largely revered for his role, by the time I left he was largely reviled. And that was over the course of 13 years. In that case neither view was really deserved, while a lot of bad stuff went down while he was in charge it was considerably less bad than the norms for the time; and he seems to have been genuinely sympathetic and interested in Maori (so long as they weren't anti England), learning the language and writing books about the culture and legends so was definitely not the out and out racist a lot of revisionist types try to paint him as. He did unfortunately end up stealing rather a lot of their land, but with rather more justification and rather less brutality than, say, the near contemporaneous Zulu Wars.

My personal philosophy is to play it how you like, and it doesn't really matter what the system intended- especially since most of the time you're guessing what the intentions actually were. The reflector shield was put in for a reason, after all, as were the anti magic scrolls. It's not like it's cheating to use them, or anything else short of manipulating the game files (even then, no one should really care if someone else 'cheats' in a SP game). I was quite interested to see how it worked though if you didn't have the magic bullet type solutions available, but personally I found it super annoying so only did it once. I don't overuse summons or abuse the rest system, but that's because I find they make the game too boring as they are the solution to every combat problem.

My first reaction was that Reagan couldn't possibly have been 40 years ago, but of course he was. I think this is the first time I've officially felt old.

Funnily enough, I think my experience with Picard and Discovery actually led to me liking SNW more which is kind of the complete opposite. It's not that there aren't flaws, but they're a lot less (at least so far, after the grand total of one ep) than in the predecessors. I also tried hard to remember the vast quantities of handwavium required for many plots, even well regarded plots, in the classic treks. That 'goodwill' can only last so long when the shows lack the strengths that the classic treks had though, and if SNW becomes a chore it'll get dropped too.

Parkinson played Ernest LeClerc, that video is his in programme brother Roger LeClerc (actor Jack Haig). That's a minor mistake though, like showing a video of René Artois, who was executed by the Germans, instead of his identical twin who survived the war. I do wonder how them being boys from Nancy would go down as a joke nowadays, guess they might get away with it due to Kaye being gay himself. I would be irremediably triggered by a Herr Flick video with Janson instead of Gibson though.

I'm certainly not a legit tactics only fundamentalist personally, and most of the time I just use the reflector shield for the beholders/ flayers as it's the least annoying option for a potentially very annoying enemy. I did do it the 'proper' way once though to see what it was like, and played using SCS where the reflector shield is near completely nerfed. I also did very gamey things like buy/ retain every fireball wand in BG1 for the last battle so I could nuke Sarevok and pals from orbit as soon as possible, and then flood the survivors with summons.

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.