Zoraptor

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).

Honestly, if they were going to go there I kind of wish they'd just gone at it full Spartacus style and just made everything ludicrously over the top and stylised. Apparently a lot of it was actually filmed too, and got cut for testing badly. The Gitara prologue definitely was and later got replaced with the obviously cobbled together prologue we got. Looks like it simply was not a very well run project even before covid.

The full draft script for WoT Ep1 has leaked, though a decent amount of it had already leaked over the last few months.

Elayne is pretty funny if taken as a parody of 'enlightened' nobles and how they see themselves*. There's certainly far too much of her for the depth of the plot she's involved in, and she's an awful person who gets a lot of people pointlessly killed because she thinks she personally is invulnerable. *And that's how I tend to think she is intended to be taken, especially with some of the in jokes about her (eg her constantly getting a veil caught in her mouth when others don't- because while she may think she's down with the common man she's actually looking down her nose at everyone, she just doesn't realise it).

That I actually find more or less likeable because it's completely relatable. It's also very easy to forgive such things when the stakes are on the 'badger released on the common during Bel Tine, hilarious or not?' sort of level and from people who aren't really mature. It's a lot less easy to forgive- and a hence a lot less likeable- when things are done for obviously selfish reasons and the stakes are massive after 2 years away from home.

Her looking Aiel is fine, their racial characteristics are 'blonds and redheads' and Tigraine was blonde. Going from a pampered princess in her early twenties to a proper Aiel fighter who can solo multiple armoured guys while having contractions a few years later stretches credibility somewhat and is only really acceptable for the standard reason that implausible things happen all the time in WoT- Rota vult. And even that is a stretch, given all she actually has to do is make it to Dragonmount and die. OTOH, it's exactly the sort of thing that I'd be ignoring if the rest of the content was good- in the books a different daughter heir becomes an accomplished tight rope walker completely randomly after all, and without even the excuse that it had to be due to prophecy... Obviously I agree pretty much completely with everything. The only caveats I'd have are with how hard it is to translate pov to TV, and that all the female main characters (counting Egwene, Nynaeve and Moiriane) in WoT aren't really 'likeable' early on, largely because they're viewed from the pov of Rand and Perrin in the books (exc Egwene, to an extent, though as I've said before I find her most likeable early on). Probably the best example of how pov effects things is Mat, who a lot of people don't like in the early books because he's seen through Rand's pov and is complaining and always saying he'd leave if he could- but, when you do get his povs he complains incessantly and is always on the verge of running off; yet somehow always ends up doing the right thing anyway. So a lot of people dislike Nynaeve in the early books because she's an authority figure to the boys and was a young woman authority figure in her village trying to order people three times her age around, or Moiraine because her intentions are opaque and the boys don't trust her. Some modification to their apparent personalities to make them more likeable is not a problem when you have a switch to a more omniscient pov because they actually are more likeable than the povs have them as. I'm not actually sure the show tried that at all though. It's far easier to make them 'likeable' instead of likeable by having them do all the cool things. And yeah, with that approach you end up with Superman very rapidly because you have to have them doing cooler and cooler things and get into a spiral of plot inflation. Given the content of ep8, power wise there already is absolutely nowhere for them to go upwards except into the completely stupid.

He was meant to be running honeypots for Mossad, though there isn't any actual evidence, just a load of speculation. Ghislaine has a very proximal relationship with Mossad though, through her father who was definitely one of their assets.

Not sure there really is a formula for economic success any more. At least raw materials (inc food, and for Russia, energy) are things that will always be needed. Most of the Service economies are bubbles waiting to pop, underpinned by fantasy and money printing.

Is Bruce a Star Trek Discovery writer putting his favourite obsidz board member into the show as a tribute? I think this is conclusive proof for that theory.