Zoraptor

I think it was mentioned here, but not sure, and can't be bothered checking. I'm only really following the TV series by diffusion rather than deliberately so I kind of presume most of the stuff I hear comes from here. OTOH, pretty sure Mat not being in the last two episodes did come from elsewhere, so... (I am interested enough to at least do a re-read. I'd read up to book 6 multiple times, but can't remember reading the later ones more than once. Having read a few random chapters from those later books my recollection of the later series' timeline is not great, though I remember most of the actual events OK)

That news is a month old- apparently he's not in the last two episodes of S1 either though I'm not sure if that's confirmed or rumour. Guess at least there's a potential reasonable in universe explanation for Mat's appearance changing.

As a person of culture and taste I have never owned a console. I did rather enjoy co-op Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance and SSX Tricky on the PS2, but- fortunately- since that was a flat console I have been assured that my purity was maintained.

From what I remember from usenet back in the day you'd be far from alone. I think Moraine instead of Moiraine was more common, and Edmond's Field a bit less but they were probably the three biggest and most consistent misreadings. Hmm. More big WoT spoilers

Yeah, you'd have to think that most of book 4 would be in. Way too much world building. There's plenty that can be cut or repackaged in the later books, and much of the stuff that takes a lot of time to do there via writing should be able to be done a lot quicker televisually.

WoT Spoilers More major (and later book) spoilers

Galatians 4:16.jpg B5 has some amazingly good top episodes and the main arc is great- up to a point- but it's got a load of problems that become more and more evident once the mystery is gone. That's why I'm for once reasonably keen on there being a remake since a lot of the problems should be readily fixable.

The Black Hole was the first movie I can actually remember watching (on a flight from New Zealand to the UK, I must have been 5 or something and from what I remembered it was not really aimed at 5 year olds and seemed an odd pick for an in flight movie given they were shown on the old central projectors). I had no idea what it was called up until a few years ago though. No top ten from me, as I hate making movie top tens. Games, sure, why not. TV shows, yeah, ok. Movies... do I pick the ones that are technically best, that I liked the most or which were most memorable? Maybe the ones I'd take with me to watch if marooned for a year? Whatever I do and whichever order I pick I'm instantly unhappy with it for some reason.

For that academic level is well outside any pretension of expertise I might have. I've seen plenty of popular media up to think tank level articles claiming that China has peaked or is peaking over the past 20 years though. Mostly focusing on demographics, 'middle income trap'/ not enough internal market type stuff and claims that Chinese manufacturing was inevitably going to move to [place] as costs in China increased/ China was cooking the books, the growth wasn't real and it was all going to come crashing down. Of course, in that sort of analysis you don't really have to back anything up with proper data, and they're largely intended to be disposable, not be remembered specifically and say what the audience wants to hear because the author has to fill his weekly opinion piece with something. I'd agree that Xi is less risk averse than recent previous leaders of China. That's largely predicated on him not wanting to quit gracefully as he was supposed to and wanting to neuter the parts of the party that could remove him. Invading Taiwan is a whole order of magnitude more risky than anything else though. I can see an invasion happening if Taiwan decided to proclaim independence, and that is to a large extent what the posturing is meant to head off because if that happened he would almost certainly feel compelled to act.

Supposedly it's TPM version that is the problem, same as with Zen original. And for anyone who doesn't know- and pretty unsurprisingly- there's a workaround for using unsupported hardware with win11, direct from MS.

Personally, I don't think China will invade Taiwan. Not because of any military deterrent though. The ultimate problem that Taiwan has is that while the Chinese have air superiority they'll be able to degrade AA and anti ship capabilities pretty cheaply using Artsakh like tactics. Sure, you can fire off missiles, but you'll lose the launcher and won't be able to replace them. You may also have to shoot at very low value targets- the Armenians shot down literally dozens of ancient biplanes; in the end they had the choice of not using their AA, in which case it might as well not exist, or using it and having it blown up. Chinese leadership is risk averse, and the risks of invading Taiwan is one thing that could get Xi outright removed in the medium term and tarnish his legacy permanently. The legitimacy of the CCP is almost completely based on sustained economic improvement, and the results of a Taiwan invasion would see the Chinese economy implode. It wouldn't be great for near everyone else either, but a lot of societal domestic issues are ratcheted down by ~10% growth (even if nominal) within China and a whole generation+ has known nothing but such growth*. The counter balance to that is Xi wanting to leave a permanent legacy, and the big short term nationalist boost that a successful 'reunification' would garner. But in that Erdogan makes a good comparison- nationalist boosts to popularity wear out pretty quickly, and you need more and more of them more and more quickly to get the same effect. They aren't an answer to potential longer term economic woes. *It also has to be said, we've heard that China has peaked about as long as that too. That will be true at some point, inevitably, but it's been the geopol equivalent of working nuclear fusion for the past twenty years; always coming, never arriving. To be fair, plenty of people talk up US government debt as a similar ticking time bomb, and it hasn't gone off yet either.

Please people, it's Sam Neill. Not Sam Neil. All famous New Zealanders have two ls in their name if they have any at all- see also Edmund Hillary (and not Edmund Hilary), the world renowned apiarist Hillary Clinton was named after. Thank you all for reading this very important message.

They would be, but you'd have to balance the need for air superiority vs being able to sink the boats on the water. Every plane attacking the landing craft is one that isn't concentrating on AA or enemy planes, or on defending carriers from attack, and every plane lost in those attacks can't be replaced in the short term. Too many losses and the carriers can't even defend themselves properly, and the Chinese can replace landing craft (and resupply aircraft, AA etc) a lot quicker than anyone can replace carriers.

Can't see Lanfear being all that important in the appearance sense in the TV series- unless they end up doing Age of Legends flashbacks or similar*. Elaida seems a reasonable guess, given the casting of Elayne. *spoiler it, for safety sake

Meh, if Taiwan is invaded it's taken. Just plain and simple too close to China. No one should have any illusions about that. It isn't the difficulty in taking Taiwan that stops China, it's the consequences for doing so. The classic role of the carrier in any conflict involving close to parity powers (largely forgotten when they've been consistently used against 'weak' powers over the past 70 years) is to sink the other side's carriers- and provide local air superiority outside the range of your land bases. Difficult to sink the enemy carrier known as Fujian province, and the entirety of Taiwan would be under an AA umbrella situated there let alone the mainland airbases. Good luck getting air superiority there using carriers alone within a realistic timeframe to save Taiwan. OTOH, if you want to enforce a retaliatory blockade, or shoot up some small airbases illegally stuck out in the ocean or whatever...

Now that's a reference that will leave a lot of people confused. For anyone wondering: Officer Crabtree (One of the best bits of acting I've seen in anything was him singing in that atrocious accent while mispronouncing every word and playing the piano. I have difficulty doing one of those at a time)

My entire knowledge of furry subculture comes from one guy on a forum nearly twenty years ago who loved randomly posting about chakats, fursonas* and the like for the reactions he got- mostly, I think he found the pearl clutching and claims about portents of the imminent doom of the human race hilarious (and I certainly did). *I was going to post a fun "what's your fursona?" quiz, but I'm not sure which is best (and sfw) has nazi rodents as an option.

No need for a search engine, you can get all the answers you want- and more, so very much more- on wikifur.

The correct term for a snake 'furry' is a scaley. Yes, seriously. And obviously nazi rats' ultimate enemies should be commie chakats...

We don't really know how the FB system works of course, but it's certainly implied that they run all the verification off a master server rather than locally. The average FB employee getting locked out of their office ain't a big deal, but it seems to be intrinsically dumb for critical infrastructure, especially for access to hardware that controls the local network (and hence IoT). That makes the whole thing vulnerable to both malign action and hardware faults, and makes it hard to fix when they happen. You can only presume that they'd have some sort of master override for emergencies but really, for critical infrastructure there should be a separate ringfenced system. That would certainly be cheaper than the value of the stock losses from having your system crash for a few hours. Seems to be a bit of a paradigm that connectivity is good for the sake of it, and it isn't for everything. (Attitude wise it kind of reminds me of Fukushima having their back up emergency diesel generators in a basement below sea level and hence prone to flooding. That might be convenient for daily operation, but the whole idea is to design around managing the extraordinary, not the ordinary)

Objectively FB getting hacked would be bad news for everyone given their Orwellian tendencies and propensity for making dummy accounts on non users. Subjectively, getting hacked couldn't happen to a nicer company and maybe, just maybe, someone might decide that deliberately adding security holes to everything so employees of TLAs can do a bit of virtual panty sniffing on the side is idiotic. Don't think it's anywhere near confirmed though, and it's pretty easy to fake having hacked FB since a lot of the account data is fundamentally public (and of course they'll happily sell it themselves to pretty much anyone, so you could get genuine FB data by hacking multiple 3rd parties). Thought and prayers to Raithe though, without fbcdn half the meme content of the internet is down.

Relying on the Internet of Things for critical infrastructure? literal lol. Honestly, I'd have actively gone out of my way to avoid buying pointlessly Connected devices even before every second company started getting the ransomware treatment*. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner: "no sympy" Good for consultants though; they go/et to advise everyone to stick everything on the internet for $$$, then they get to advise everyone to take everything off the internet also for $$$. *obligatory reminder, mostly done using hacked CIA tools exploiting mandated backdoors...

"Pandora Papers" leaks show wealth of some prominent leaders. Not exactly news in most cases though, anyone who didn't know Aliyev was looting Azerbaijan probably didn't because they didn't what Azerbaijan is or who its President is.

Yeah, but there's a reason why people don't use "national debt" (well, they do, as a synonym for government debt though "government debt" is a far better term for it). If you want to make people pretty much everywhere wet themselves try using the figures for unfunded government liabilities... There are multiple reasons why China- and Japan's is ludicrously large in to gdp ratio terms- debt isn't as much of a concern; very high levels of private savings and in China's case the small matter of ~3T in simple currency reserves which makes their practical government debt only ~35% of GDP. To be honest the current talk about things like Evergrande bringing down China's economy is a bit ridiculous and pretty much directly equivalent to all those 2014 articles assuring people that sanctions would drive Russia bankrupt in months. The government could pay Evergrande's entire debt with cash in hand, if they needed to. China's economy is artificial and a house of cards but they spend a lot of time and effort gluing the cards together; and you'll go a long way to find an economy that isn't a house of cards built on flim flam and bubbles anywhere at the moment. What's the figure for the US derivatives market? More theoretical money than actually exists in the entire world's economy you say? Countries with an average house 20x the median wage and 'cooling' at an annual increase of 20% (wages, 2%)? Money printing, free debt etc etc. Everyone is propping themselves up.