Zoraptor

Not just UK and US. The divide is mostly US/ UK and most of the Eastern European expansion members vs Germany and France. It's basically those who want NATO to be the be all and end all of European defence and thus need it to have A Perpetual Enemy to give it purpose, and those who want it supplanted or supplemented by a European Defence Force- that Russia could eventually be part of. That's why you have ludicrous statements like Russia being ready to invade at hours notice despite having a third of Ukraine's troops in the area and have had the same pattern of imminent invasion playing out roughly every 6 months for 7 years; in order for NATO to be capital N Necessary you have to have someone opposed to it, and the only candidate is Russia. It's extremely easy to stoke tensions when you know that there's not actually an invasion imminent, if anything Ukraine trying to tamp down tensions is evidence that they think things are going too far, and Putin may actually have been backed into a corner. Fundamentally though that's why Russia can never be allowed to join NATO- both Yeltsin and Putin tried, and the USSR tried to join as well in the 50s- and no concessions or limitations can ever be made to lower tension. You need the threat and you need the tension, else what's the point of NATO? And then you get the European Army France and Germany want instead.

I don't think there's anything surer than MS having tried to buy Steam. I'd be extremely surprised if they didn't have a standing offer now.

ISIS prison break in Syria is in its 5th day. May involve as many as 800 militants being freed, pretty much definitely 500. Of course they're being surreptitiously backed up by Turkey, as always, who drone struck the head of SDF Intelligence in the middle of things as a break from blowing up random Yezidis in Sinjar. Three years and pretty much nothing has been done about the prisoners except ignoring them and hoping the problem goes away- except, of course, western countries deciding people who grew up there and got radicalised there aren't actually their problem and should be foisted on impoverished countries like Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh and New Zealand via citizenship cancellations. (Note: that Al Jazeera article is actually pretty rubbish in a number of aspects, as they have a very heavy pro Turkey slant as do most of the commentators- especially Charles Lister- they reference, but it is a bit more in depth than the far more dry BBC equivalent. It's pretty much impossible to suppress ISIS in the Badiya permanently because it's like a scaled down Afghanistan in pretty much every respect. So no outright mountains, but lots of very rough terrain, caves and any operation to try and force ISIS out would be too porous; they just relocate temporarily. The problem in SDF areas is similar in effect, but for opposite reasons. It's mostly dry, flat, wasteland. Sure, you can put checkpoints in but they'd just get driven around or use smuggler routes- and checkpoints also make lovely targets for suicide bombers and massively annoy the local populace who then can't go anywhere without being stopped. Drones are useless too, so long as they aren't stupid enough to drive in convoys, since there are enough legit users to hide among. Finally, of course, the reason why there are tensions between the Deir ez Zor arabs and SDF is that those arabs literally literally were ISIS 5 years ago, and only switched sides when it became clear ISIS would lose. And, allegedly, when bribed to by Saudi Arabia. But hey, Turkey hates the SDF so gotta talk about dissension in its ranks in the hope it's true; same as the thousandth uncorroborated report of Iranian and Russian backed forces fighting each other because they want that to be true too)

Those aren't exactly great examples in this context, but you can take it as read that Russia has ignored or abrogated its fair share of agreements too and is most definitely a kettle. Point being of course that for some reason you only ever hear about said kettle in the media, and not the pot doing exactly the same thing. The Helsinki Accords and Budapest Memoranda don't have force of law, though as agreements they're fine to cite as examples. The former is irrelevant as a plus for Ukraine's position though as it is trumped by the Crimean Sovereignty Referendum of 1991 in which 94% of Crimeans voted to leave Ukraine. An approved referendum is a legal way to secede, and that makes the Helsinki Accords apply in Crimea's favour*, not Ukraine's. And yeah, the referendum was both approved and ratified by the Ukrainian SSR. Of course, that is never mentioned in the western press, nor is Ukraine sending in 70,000 troops and enacting Direct Rule in 1995 when the Crimean Parliament tried to action it. Indeed, Ukraine literally changed their constitution to make secession impossible after that, requiring every single oblast to majority vote for anyone to leave. The latter of course is a plural set of agreements and more properly referred to as the Budapest Memoranda; but strangely only the Ukraine one ever gets mentioned, and only recently. Reason for that being of course that the west is currently sanctioning Belarus, to whom another one of the Budapest Memoranda applies, in contravention of article 3, to whit "Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, [Kazakhstan and Ukraine] to influence their politics". Of course, that was flagrantly ignored by the west with regards to Ukraine too, when they had a Russian friendly government; and it was most definitely ignored by Russia when convenient as well. Not a treaty and never really worth the paper it was written on, for both the west and Russia. The 2007 Friendship Treaty was abrogated multiple times by Ukraine in 2014, even prior to Crimea agreeing to join the Russian Federation. They voted overwhelming to ban the Russian language (to be fair, in a moronic fit of revolutionary zeal with Svoboda brown shirts overseeing proceedings immediately post coup, but still) and voted multiple times for other measures that contravened the agreement. Let's also be frank, a Treaty of Friendship with Russia is intrinsically incompatible with joining NATO and handing Sevastopol Naval Base over to the US in exactly the same way a US- Canada Friendship Treaty is incompatible with Canada joining the Warsaw Pact and announcing that a purely defensive Soviet submarine pen up the St Lawrence was a great idea. And those were both things the post coup Kiev Government said they would do. *Of course the Helsinki Accords are in many ways a very self defeating issue to bring up anyway, since there's a very obvious counter example in Kosovo where pretty much every metric is worse than Crimea. Seized by force by NATO, quarter of a million Serbs ethnically cleansed under their aegis to make an Albanian ethnostate (one of which already exists anyway), and never even had a rigged referendum let alone a legit one. Completely against the 'rules based international order' that they want others to follow, and such a very obvious case of "rules for thee but not for me".

That at least has very little to do with Erdogan himself. Kurdish independence is utter anathema to every party in Turkey except the HDP and even they don't formally want secession, just more rights. Erdogan is also perfectly happy with Kurds running bits of his neighbours, so long as they're Uncle Toms like the Barzanis in Iraq and will sell him (well, his son) oil under the table. 'Kurdistan' is the perfect example of carrot dangling in foreign policy though. In the cold war it was the USSR dangling it for the PKK to get an insurgency going in Turkey, since then it's been consistently used by the west in Syria, Iraq and Iran- and while it hasn't been used by them in Turkey it's certainly one of the big reasons for tensions between Turkey and the west. It's pretty easy to judge how far they are willing to take that support in practice though, by the response to the Iraqi Kurd independence referendum. Pretty much zero international support bar thoughts and prayers from Israel- who'd support literally anything and anyone that weakens an arab state, hence the support for ISIS aligned Jaish Khalid ibn Walid in Syria- and the attempt was crushed with embarrassing ease by, well, the same Iraqi army that surrendered Mosul to a couple of hundred guys in Toyota Hiluces.

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.