Zoraptor

Dunno about that, after all the US didn't actually start sending lethal aid to Ukraine under either Obama or Biden, it was the guy in the middle who did that. He'd have put pressure on Ukraine to have made a permanent settlement of some sort for sure, but he'd also have put pressure on Putin to accept it. Whether that would have been worse for the country than what it has now is an open question, but probably not. It would probably have been better for the US too in retrospect. Nope, clearly Putin's fault, to whit "..no wonder Putin sought to weaponise corruption in Ukraine" -- Anthony Blinken. Pretty much sums up current US diplomacy that that's an actual factual quote rather than made up to make him look silly.

Artillery wise Ukraine has also outright lost a lot of systems. 40% of donated m777 and m109s if you go by Oryx (more if you go by Lostarmour, which reflects the biases involved). Even higher proportion of Krabs most likely. Caesar and PzH not so much, but they're also there in far fewer numbers- and PzH allegedly isn't on the front line much due to reliability issues. (Ukraine has a lot of issues to deal with- less motivated troops, better Russian tactics/ responses, better Russian systems and the Russians catching up/ surpassing them in drones- but the biggest problem for Ukraine in terms of sheer balance are the glide bombs. Doesn't seem any accident that the Russians have been advancing constantly- slowly- since they've been in significant use. Building fortifications to defend against 152/155mm shells with ~10kg of HE is relatively easy, not so much when it's 320kg. Especially so when there are thermobaric variants and for the really tough nuts F/K/ODAB1500s. Not the sort of tactics which will get you much in the way of plaudits for genius or flair, but effective and without an effective counter. And all the comments from Ukrainians on the ground in places like Avdiivka have implied that they're absolutely awful for morale in addition to the physical damage done. HiMARS/ ATACMS/ Storm Scalps/ JDAMs etc might garner the upvotes on twitter or likes on reddit but they aren't being used anywhere near the 70-100 per day that the UMPKs are. Maybe... 1% of that, which is probably generous, and only the JDAMs have anywhere near equivalent scale. Apart from that... the very occasional Tochka or Krim and not much else)

Well, if you polled the general public for name recognition Patrushev would almost certainly be behind even someone like Dugin. Who it isn't even certain has actually met Putin, let alone influenced him. Certainly behind Lavrov/ Medvedev/ Shoigu/ Prigozhin/ Gerasimov/ Zakharova/ Mishustin who all have (had for Prigo) fairly prominent public roles. If you know, say, who the head of the FSB is and what the SVR is without looking them up you'd know who Patrushev is; but then that requires more than passing familiarity. If you don't... (yes, any article on Putin's inner circle isn't complete without a prominent mention of Patrushev. Those are by their nature infrequent though, and since he's 'quiet' even those who read them will still tend to remember the forementioned people a lot more)

Technically a promotion for Shoigu since he's going from implementing policy to setting it, at least in theory. Practically... it probably is a promotion. Patrushev is one of the biggest influences on Putin few people have heard of and very highly trusted. Apart from chairing the security council for 16 years he was Putin's* first appointee to the head of the FSB- and Putin's replacement there. If he weren't Putin's age he'd be a solid contender for a designated successor. Anyone replacing him is going to be similarly trusted. Only caveat is if Patrushev's new unannounced position supercedes the security council head in some way, which it might. *technically Yeltsin appointed him, but that was late stage 'may have had some blood in his alcohol stream' Yeltsin where Putin was running everything.

Lots of reports of fighting along the Ukrainian/ Russian border in Kharkov and Sumy oblasts. Actual progress or lack thereof is rumours* but the fighting is genuine without seeming particularly significant, yet. Always likely to be the problem with the Ukrainian raids, if Russia stations troops there Ukraine has to as well so there's very little benefit, and it gives Russia the ability to launch raids as well plus obfuscate any larger scale operations. *varying from the al Sahhaf-esque 'not a metre has been lost' to the entire RDK running away leaving a massive gap in Ukrainian lines.

I have three old Avalon Hill games I 'inherited' from my dad- Gettysburg, France 1940 and 1776. Plus three years worth of Strategy & Tactics magazines (76-78) mostly still with the games that came with them. Guess the excellent Sid Meier's Gettysburg covers a computer version of one of them at least; and I'm sure I played another good Gettysburg game a few years ago too but cannot remember the name for the life of me. I am grateful I'm too young for SPI's Campaign for North Africa; I'd never have been able to resist buying it for the memes. Then again, nowadays simulating Italians needing more water supplied because they love pasta (an actual factual rule of the game, for anyone wondering) could be done a bit more simply via computer.

At the parade, gave an interview to TASS and was sitting at Putin's right hand during a interview/ statement thingy at the Kremlin. Bit of overkill in terms of proof of life, political or otherwise, really. The people at the table of the interview wotsit other than Putin did rather look like they were worried the ghost of Beria was about to leap out from behind the curtains with Makarov in hand if they so much as twitched though. (Only 'interesting' thing was him being described as "acting" Minister of Defence by TASS which would be a bit odd for someone in the job 10+ years. Then again TASS' translations to english are not always perfect)

Very similar situation there to Arkane I would have thought, they made games that review well, generally, but didn't sell well. Hi Fi Rush had great word of mouth, but it still took 5 years to develop and didn't sell (or 'sell', for gamepass) as well as its reviews or word of mouth implied. The main difference seems to be that Tango got chopped off earlier in the process, before making a Redfall but after the founder left.

Long history of this happening. Recent example: Embracer. Older example: EA's Bioware deal also included Pandemic Studios, which they obviously wouldn't have bought if it wasn't a bundle deal since they closed it down in the first major round of layoffs post acquisition.

End of the day, if you enter into a contract in any other field and find you're losing money you can't arbitrarily decide to cancel the contract, with no consequences. If your options are literally literally shutting down a server or going bankrupt... your company is figuratively literally in the crapper already. Otherwise you're just trying to dodge obligations that you don't think you should fulfill because now they're costing you money- and often trying to get people to buy [sportsgame_currentyear] instead of playing [sportsgame_currentyear--] they'd otherwise be perfectly happy with. Software companies have got away with a load of crap you wouldn't get away with if you were selling sandwiches, beds, cars or even service contracts like catering or cleaning just because it's software. So your Suicide Squad game released 3 months ago as a GaaS and sold appallingly? Tough noogies, that's the risk you take as a company, Warners. It costs you money to run the servers for the 27 people playing it you say? That's the risk you take. You can tell how hard up WBD is, Dave Zaslav only took home 300mn in pay and stock options over the past three years, wonder how many servers even 1% of that would keep running... [yes, I know it isn't shut down, yet]

Can't believe it needs to be said, but it is Bruce: mods are always use at your own risk. Eh, that's a massive non sequitor. If a company goes bust it also can't repay its debts, doesn't mean the laws saying it has to repay its debts are stupid because there are circumstances where they can't and don't. Gift cards, warrantees, obligations for items to be in reasonable working order and more all can- and usually do- go poof if the company does. You're not going to have lost the source code yet still be supporting a game, you need the source code for that, and the summary specifies reasonable working state when support ends. For physical goods that's a usual requirement under consumer guarantee legislation, no real reason for it not to be for digital goods*. So no trying to sue Looking Glass Systems or Paul Neurath personally for an old copy of System Shock 2 not working due to SafeDisc: it worked fine, when support ended in 2000. *indeed, the guarantee of reasonable working order for a reasonable timeframe already applies to software here as digital delivery is not excluded from the Fair Trading nor Consumer Guarantees Acts- and it cannot be contracted out via EULA. Even used to be mentioned specifically in the Steam Subscriber Agreement. And now that I check, still is:

Heh, is there any better illustration of the absolute mess that is Gamebryo than F4's loading times? The loading times are linked to frame rate, and the frame is limited to 60 because otherwise minigames, physics etc get screwy because they're linked to frame rate too... (If needed in future there is/ was a mod that 'fixes'/ helps with the issue by uncapping fps only during loading screens, whether it works still after the next gen update who knows)

It's still Biden's best play politically since the votes he's losing from students getting beaten up and abetting Netanyahu* killing kids, medics, journalists and volunteers, bombing hospitals, blowing up hospitals, demolishing universities, using food and water as collective punishment and weapons of war may be lost votes for him but at least won't be gained votes for Trump. That makes them half the political value of pro Israelis since they would (potentially) vote Trump. *probably Biden's biggest actual problem. The irony is that by giving unconditional support you've actually given away all your influence and told Bibi he can do whatever he likes. Hence the immense embarrassment of having ABlinken talking about how the current ceasefire offer is extraordinarily generous while you have Netanyahu saying he'll invade Rafah with or without it, deliberately undermining everything. Just makes Biden look incredibly weak and utterly spineless.

There does seem to be a certain amount of, hmm, posterial discomfort about that display. To be fair to Mr Rosenberg he does actually mention the Ukrainians doing the same unlike a lot of others. Interesting read that, though I rather doubt a lot of the issues can be solved via software update. Bit of 'have hammer, so nails solve all problems' situation. (If you have a transmit signal to a drone or GPS it will weaken very very quickly as distance increases as a basic physical process about which nothing can be done without reworking the laws of the universe. Software updates can't effect that. You'd hope for the expensive stuff they'd already have obvious stuff like software to get GPS and INS talking to each other to help vs spoofing/ jamming of the GPS signal; that's fundamentally why they retain the INS system after all. Pretty much the whole point of a drone of the type(s) used ubiquitously in Ukraine is that they're cheap and easy. Even if they're 'only' 20% effective... well, they're still cheap at 1/5 working especially so if they take out a million dollar+ system. What are you realistically going to do, take them apart before use and put a military grade receiver in plus proper I/O, flashable memory for the software updates... new CPU? FPGAs? AI adaptive module? etc? At some point it kind of defeats the purpose of them being cheap and easy, especially so if it's going to drop back down to one on five working again after two weeks)

Technically correct, I guess. The juxtaposition of British Bobbies managing not to shoot some guy waving a sword about while having a psychotic episode vs The New York Basij Department turning up in Full Tactical for a fight with a group of peacenik hippies could not be stronger. (well, maybe the bobbies wouldn't have been so lenient if the sword wielder had been an unarmed Brazilian electrician. After all, the commander of that Op- Cressida ****, with wholly appropriate damnatio memoriae via the naughty word filter- actually got promoted a year later) lol. Citation Needed. And actual citation showing they weren't students, not some mealymouthed CNN article repeating what the University head had to say. The student paper's livestream seemed to recognise an awful lot of the 'paid agitators' as fellow students.

"Columbia is a far different place today than it was in the spring of 1968 when protesters took over University buildings amid discontent about the Vietnam War, racism and the University’s proposed expansion into Morningside Park. After a weeklong standoff, New York City Police stormed the campus and arrested more than 700 people. The fallout dogged Columbia for years. It took decades for the University to recover from those turbulent times..." -- Columbia News Kind of hilarious, now. Plus ça change, plus ça même chose in action I guess.

Both stories could easily be true: there are muddy conditions, and the Abrams is a very heavy tank, plus the 47th was off the line until it got firebrigaded back into the Avdiivka front a couple of days ago. So it was an ideal time to upgrade their Abrams with what had been learnt from previous losses and current state of the art countermeasures*, and the Abrams is a notoriously hard tank to maintain. Then with the problems Ukraine is having around Avdiivka they had to be rushed back. Information based on 'anonymous insider' sourcing is of course fundamentally suspect, but in this case it was at least consistent with other factors. And to be fair to AP, while the 47th is back on the line there's no (caveat: that I am aware of) recent footage of them using their Abrams whereas there was a fair bit in their previous stint in and around Berdychi. *M1A1 Abrams 'Testudo' incoming? Would certainly be a laugh.

Abrams have apparently been withdrawn too. Did better than the Challenger where we saw one knocked out and another up to its turret in mud and everything else was publicity shots before they got pulled. If jamming is the problem it will effect ATACMS as well. End of the day they're old systems, and GPS signal is intrinsically and unavoidably extremely weak at earth level.

The general problem is that if you try to satirise something you hate, you almost always just end up ridiculing it instead. Which may appeal to people who agree with you, but to others just looks nasty. (The thing about someone like Cohen- not really my cup of tea, but still- is that he'll give bad people rope to hang themselves with satire wise, but in the end the vast majority of the time they make themselves look bad- and you get the occasional person who comes out of it looking like an absolute legend. It's also the difference between something like Airplane! where the writers clearly loved disaster movies for all their faults and the majority of movie 'satires' whose purpose just seems to be to hate on everything they're satirising)

I'd be pretty confident that if PoE2 didn't have full VO at launch it would not have got it later since it was not an immediate financial success unlike DOS and Elysium. Doesn't bother me personally either way. I'd suspect the full voiceover was more an issue for JES and than the devs in general since it would have been a lot of extra supervision*. End of the day most of the dev work for dialogue had to be done anyway- dialogue scripting, any triggers or other scripting, branching and dependencies all have to be done whether voiced or not. So in theory it would 'just' be adding the triggers for the sound files with appropriate timings. Easy for me to say of course when it's not me doing the extra work... *even something as 'simple' as making sure the polynesian type names would be pronounced correctly and consistently. My experiences with tourist pronounciations here is that they can be creative, even with a guide. Asking the way to Ka-ee-tah-ee-uh took a little while to process despite all the sounds being correct (Kaitaia, a town in Northland). Not the sort of thing you'd want to be dealing with with it being extra work you didn't think was necessary and when already rushed.

It's not just a French decision whether they engage in combat. They'd be being sent to a war zone and would make a tempting target. It's very easy for a Think Tanker to say the Russians would never dare, but with no NATO involved most of the deterrent is gone and the calculus on the Russian side may well be that the best way to get the troops out is to kill a lot of them and make it politically untenable. That's the thing Think Tankers tend not to consider- at some point, escalation becomes less of a risk for Russia than not escalating. Kill a few hundred Frenchies, decourager les autres; do nothing, encourage others to sends troops... If the French Sector of West Berlin was held unilaterally by the French you can guarantee it'd have been the Soviet Sector very quickly, especially when the French didn't have nukes.

While Article 5 is what gets invoked it's actually Article 6 that is relevant. per NATO: So France couldn't invoke Article 5 for the Sahel as it isn't their sovereign territory under their jurisdiction- also the case for Ukraine, of course, they'd be in or over the territory of a Non Party. For that matter, also true for the Falklands War since it was south of the Tropic of Cancer so Britain couldn't invoke Article 5 even if she wanted to. Lest we forget, there are already NATO troops on the ground anyway, just unacknowledged. Wasn't that long ago people were yelling at the Germans for revealing it with their rationale for not sending Taurus. It's extremely likely some have died already too, and been passed off as 'training accidents'. The talk of French Foreign Legion troops being sent is fundamentally because, well, no one cares if they die.

Well now. You can read the actual Bloomberg article on the matter here, via MSN to avoid the pay/ nuisancewall. If you do you'll see why JPost fails to actually link to its source. I mean it looks like it links to Bloomberg, but it actually links to another JPost article, and says its source is the nicely nebulous 'Bloomberg TV'. Which is a slight red flag for it having been manipulated by the Military Censor. A red flag hardly dispelled by the rest of the article*. The actual Bloomberg article says repeatedly that the 'Axis of Resistance' including Hezbollah has not been significantly degraded and retains its contacts/ coordination etc with Iran. *in actuality the Syrians absolutely loathe the Israelis, especially so the Syrian government. They might be compromised/ the intelligence source via other means, but all Bashar al Assad would give anyone for leaking that meeting to the Israelis would be a one way trip to Sednaya. If they even bothered with that. There have been a lot of extremely badly sourced and to be frank utterly delusional 'Syria/ Russia forces fight Iranian proxies' articles, tweets etc over the years.

They didn't even think IJO actually existed at the time but was just used by anyone attacking the US and France in Lebanon. It was all a bit fraught given the genocidal rampage by western and Israeli supported Phalangists at Sabra and Chatila had happened only six months prior. So the obvious candidate was a Palestinian upset the US was running interference for 3000 civilians getting murdered. Plus ça change, plus ça même chose there. In any case it's fundamentally a poor example because there was retaliation once they'd decided who had done it. The guy who they think ordered it got blown up in Damascus by a CIA car bomb, and there was also another infamous incident (which the US denied involvement in; the CIA had 'just' trained and supported with intelligence the 'anti terrorism' task force that did it) where 80 civilians in Beirut were killed by a car bomb aimed at another person they thought was responsible.

That isn't even the correct wikipedia article Bruce. Which about sums that post up in terms of its accuracy. The US did nothing about its embassy being bombed then because... they didn't know who had done it. Arms wise, a pending ICJ judgement of genocide against Israel would be a massive problem for Germany (and Britain, France) as it would mean they'd been abetting it, especially since the ICJ prelim was that there is a case to answer. Though I'd suspect Lexx's objection is more moral than legal. In any case, the retaliation seems to have been a damp squib, and almost literally so. Hopefully that's the end of it.