Keyrock

Rough loss for the Bucks. They were the better team and led for most of the game then Jimmy Butler turned into Jason Voorhees and murdered them. I don't understand how the Heat keep doing this every year. They're in these series than on paper they have no right putting up any sort of challenge then they wind up winning or at least pushing the other team to the very edge. The Bucks are clearly the better team and yet here they are on the brink of elimination.

Wait, there's a chronology and a story to the M&B games? I've always just played them as a sandbox, I didn't realize there was any lore. Anyway, for years I've been meaning to replay Morrowind. I've been keeping an occasional eye on the OpenMW project and they're currently in the release candidate phase of version 0.48; they're on RC9 at the moment. OpenMW has been at the point where Morrowind is fully playable and basically feature complete with the original game for a while now, 0.48 introduces post processing effects to spiffy up the visuals a bit. Once 0.48 is fully released I'm going back to Vvardenfell.

I just realized I missed a real opportunity by not doing this for my previous joke:

I wonder if @the_dog_dayshas already purchased tickets for the Superbowl Big Game?

Wacky finish to game 4 of Dubs vs Kings with Steph pulling a Chris Webber and calling a timeout when the Dubs were out of timeouts. They hung on to win so it's all good. This is definitely the most entertaining series of round 1.

How long until Ubisoft fires 2/3 of their staff and has AI make all the copy paste activities on their maps? Would we even notice a difference?

This is difficult for me to answer because I didn't start paying much attention to politics until roughly a decade ago, when I (sort of) got my **** together. Before that, I was too busy being a **** up to give it much thought. My answer may be surprising as he wasn't a terribly effective president in terms of enacting his policies, but Jimmy Carter seems to be the most genuinely good human being of the former presidents still alive. He's been vocally anti-war and pro diplomacy his entire career and not just lip service, he really tried to de-escalate conflicts, wasn't effective sometimes, but he did try. He's dedicated much of his life to humanitarian work and he seems to live a relatively modest life for a person of his prominence. Jimmy Carter is the last president I can think of that I would call a genuinely good man. To be clear, I love America. I criticize our government precisely because I love America and I want us to be better. For all our atrocities, we've never done anything even remotely as horrific as, for example, Stalin. I think it's really difficult for anyone to be a good president right now because the corruption in the District of Columbia runs so deep. Special interest groups are so ingrained in the system and the military industrial complex wields so much power that when someone with real ideals tries to become president their own party will cut them off at the knees (e.g. Bernie Sanders, twice). We'll probably see that repeated with RFK Jr. this time around if he manages to gain any traction.

Obama is charismatic and a terrific public speaker, plus his PR game is on mother****ing point. Those factors go a long way toward creating an illusion of a warm, gregarious, just man, when in reality his regime committed their fair share of atrocities. I think he ramped-up drone bombings more than anybody ever and the absolutely heinous stuff the US has been helping to do in Yemen started under Obama. The coup in Ukraine that led to Zelenskyy gaining power, and has had no small part in leading to the subject of this thread, that was an Obama regime project too. I have no doubt that had Snowden taken Obama up on his plea he would have been subject to a kangaroo court. I'm honestly surprised that he hasn't had an "unfortunate accident" yet.

In terms of pure power efficiency something RISC-V based might be the way to go. Obviously, OS and application compatibility is an issue when you step outside the x86 and ARM ecosystems, but in that regard, as a Linux weirdo, I have a leg up, given that when a piece of hardware comes out, no matter how niche, someone out there with enough interest and skill will port Linux and it's many applications to said hardware and then it's out there in the aether because open source (try to beat that run-on sentence). Indeed, in a few years, when the battery on my current phone starts to die, I will consider a phone running RISC-V with probably a custom version of Linux. I'm not a power user with phones, I use it to make calls, send text messages, and watch an occasional video, that's pretty much it. I'm growing increasingly frustrated with Android and wouldn't mind distancing myself from "Do No Evil" Google, but I have no desire to have anything to do with Apple's walled garden either. Speaking of efficient, and getting back to AMD, 7040U Phoenix ultrathin laptops and handhelds should be hitting the market any day. I've seen some dubious benchmarks out there that look really promising, but nothing reliable yet. Being able to run pretty much anything at 1080p at ~20W is the dream.

He's held in the UK on behest of the US. The US may not physically be holding him, but, for all intents and purposes, the US is holding him.

@xzar_monty I applaud the mainstream media for not complying with the feds and releasing that information back then. I wish the mainstream media still had integrity and the cojones to do that today. Thank God there are still independent journalists out in the world that still do their jobs. On the subject of Edward Snowden, the man is a hero in my eyes. I'm pro whistleblower. I'm thankful there are people out there exposing the crimes that people in power are committing abroad and/or to their own constituents. The US government likes to portray themselves as a beacon of fairness, like we're so evolved beyond the barbaric practices of the tyrants of yesteryear. Hilarious. The feds condemn other nations for the mistreatment of journalists while they bully and intimidate our own and they've held Julian Assange for over 4 years without a conviction, heck, he hasn't even been formally charged with anything. The US government conducts imperialist operations around the globe assassinating people, staging coups, installing puppet governments, all the same stuff the Romans did 2000 years ago. They do it under the guise of "spreading democracy" and in some cases that may actually be true, but other times it's not. All of this is nothing new. This is all standard operating procedure for sociopaths in power. I'm thankful there are people out there around the globe willing to risk their livelihoods and in some cases their very lives to wipe away the holier than thou veneer.

I thought that was where he explained who and what Tom Bombadil was.

So, I heard the newest advert from the Trump folks (I doubt Trump himself had anything to do with it, it's his supporters) making fun of DeSantis for apparently eating pudding with his fingers. I was like hang on, why is that bad or embarrassing? I've done that before, I've eaten all kinds of things with my fingers. God supplied my with a pair of rather handy and functional utensils at the ends of my arms, why wouldn't I use them? I mean, I wash my hands before I eat so my fingers are clean. What's the issue here? Anyway, I'm not a DeSantis supporter, I have no plans to vote for him at the moment, but that's neither here nor there. This isn't about politics. I got some pudding and I'm going to eat it with my fingers to stand in solidarity with my fellow finger pudding eaters. We will not be shamed!

Makowiec with rum soaked raisins and topped with chopped hazelnuts: I cook fairly regularly but I very rarely bake, however this came out spectacularly good.

I decided to do some baking (food thread post incoming? ), which is not something I do often. Anyway, I decided to kick this baking project up a notch with rum soaked raisins and so I soaked some raisins in Kraken Black Spiced Rum for roughly 48 hours. I strained the superfluous rum into a glass and, not wanting good alcohol to go to waste, drank said superfluous rum. Turns out, raisin flavored rum is super delicious! Surely someone has thought of this before. It's highly likely that someone out there produces and sells rum soaked raisins. Soaking raisins in rum isn't exactly difficult, but it does take time and never ever underestimate the power of laziness. So, those same people that produce and sell said rum soaked raisins should also sell the raisin flavored rum, on account of it being super delicious.

There are a bunch of things in the files, some of the bleakest are that the death toll is MUCH higher than what has been reported in mainstream media, the pentagon does not expect Ukraine to retake the territories they've lost, and they don't expect any diplomacy for the rest of the year.

I find it interesting, if unsurprising, that the mainstream media here in Murica is fully concentrating on smearing the leaker of the pentagon files (he may well be a racist but that's not the point) and not talking about what's in said files. Thankfully, there are independent journalists out there still doing the job that journalists are supposed to do and the information in the pentagon leak is out there (it's rather bleak). The guy from the pentagon told the press not to disclose the information and the mainstream media is shamefully complying, like the good doggies they are. Here's a bone good doggie, here's a treat for you. D'aww look at you wag your tail, adorable! One of the most important functions of a free press is to hold the government accountable. They should not be working hand in hand with the government. When the press tells the public what the government wants them to hear and stays silent on what they don't, well, we have a word for that. Propaganda.

#LightTheBeam

Yeah, that was a bit too general on my part. But I am also of the mind that I don't see this ending any other way than with Russia annexing the regions they set out to annex to begin with. Not without other nations getting directly involved, and other nations getting directly involved is a path that has the potential of all of us winding up dead via nuclear winter. I'm not a fan of of Russia taking chunks of Ukraine, but I absolutely, positively do not want Armageddon.

In a weird turn of events, the Democrats are the ones that are pushing to keep this war going, while the Republicans are the mostly pushing for a cease fire and getting a diplomatic end to this war. That could, of course, just be because the Democrats are the ones in power right now. Were a Republican administration in charge, they may well be beating the war drums just as hard and the Dems would be playing the part of the contrarians. They all play for (mostly) the same team anyway. The whole left vs right thing is a distraction. The real teams are Team 1% vs Team 99%, they always have been.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying the Ukrainians don't care about their land, I'm saying we don't care about the Ukrainians. And by "we" I mean the current administration, not ordinary Muricans, us regular folks don't really have much of a say in this. As far as whether I'm "one of those leftists", I'm actually a libertarian. Make of that what you will.

People kept telling me that Giannis really busts his ass out there. I didn't know this was what they meant... I'll show myself out.

The hegemony of the US Dollar is coming to an end, that's for sure.

Exactly. The winners in this war are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and so on, plus the politicians that the aforementioned military hardware companies are bribing to continue sending "defensive weapons" to Ukraine. The longer this goes the more they win. EVERYBODY else loses. “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” - Major General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history at the time of his death in 1940.