Agiel

Perhaps ActiBlizzard should take some pointers from Simon Sinek:

For those like myself who are eagerly awaiting Metro: Exodus...

STALKER-likes seem to be the craze these days.

Not playing right now, as there's other stuff on my plate, but I suppose for some that's not much of an excuse given the only $7 cost of entry: Be interesting to see this get polished up some more, as it looks to shape up to be stronger than many AAA FPS showings. Assuming that the purported sole developer doesn't get snatched up by one of the big names and further development of this gets put on hold indefinitely.

Oldie, but goodie:

Aegis BMD has much wider coverage than either THAAD or Patriot, as it is purpose-designed to intercept warheads outside of the Earth's atmosphere, so in addition to providing coverage to both Romania and Poland it can provide several more opportunities to intercept notional Iranian missiles targeting cities further west that may also be defended by other BMD ships (among them some frigates in the Royal Danish Navy). The Romanian site is perfectly positioned to defend France and Germany for this scenario, ditto the site in Poland for the UK and Norway. Cruise missiles may have proved to be potent first strike weapon... in the 1980s when Soviet look-down/shoot-down shoot-down capabilities left something to be desired. At sub-sonic speeds a Tomahawk cruise missile would take close to two hours to reach a target using a dog-legged flight path, which is simply too long and provides too much time to be detected early (even assuming there isn't an SVR/GRU mission out of the embassies in Poland and Romania to monitor the sites) for what is a time-sensitive mission such as a decapitation strike against Kremlin and military leadership. And if it does have Moscow in its sites, well, which is it? The vaunted double-digit SAMs that ring Moscow can easily knock out cruise missiles out of the sky? Or the Tomahawk is such potent weapon system that it so dangerously undermines Russian security? If slotting in existing Tomahawks into the Aegis Ashore facilities is the fastest way to add offensive capabilities then it would make more sense to use W80-0 warheads that used to arm old TLAM-N, all of these warheads have since been dismantled in 2013. Even if there had been some W84s kept surreptitiously in reserve it still doesn't change the fact that re-introducing nuclear armed versions of these weapons is far easier said than done, as these weapons would require significant re-design to accommodate PALs, safety features, arming mechanisms, and additional electrical systems to provide power to all of the above, as compared to the SSC-8 missile of which it is generally thought that it could reach INF ranges simply by the crews topping off the fuel tanks to the brim. The minimum time to introduce such a weapon has generally been pegged to be at least five years, if it would ever happen at all since as Paul Selva has said the US military has long favoured air and sea deliver methods.

The Aegis Ashore system is in Romania, which isn't close to Kaliningrad. The Polish system isn't operational yet. ...or SS-N-30 launch from a Kilo-submarine of the Black Sea Fleet. Either which way both Aegis Ashore facilities are fixed sites, which make them poor platforms for offensive weapons. Ignoring the fact that I mentioned earlier that making a new, nuclear-armed variant of the Tomahawk is actually a significant undertaking, and not simply a matter of simply swapping out the payload. Most frustratingly for those in the know is the fact that development of such a new system based on Tomahawk is at minimum going to take half a decade, and far longer for some notional "Pershing III". The actions of a confederacy of dunces: a head of state beholden to Kremlin (damn the purported "pee tape," the real evidence of Kompromat has been staring at everyone in the face for over three decades) and an NSA that bristles at international agreements whatever the shape and form, against the recommendations of the United States' own military, as General Paul Selva put it: "There are no military requirements we cannot currently satisfy due to our compliance with the INF Treaty. While there is a military requirement to prosecute targets at ranges covered by the INF Treaty, those fires do not have to be ground-based.” It doesn't change the fact that Putin has wanted out of INF for over a decade, and for good reason: missile development is about the sole military arms industry that has largely remained largely intact since the collapse of the Soviet Union (the much touted Su-57 has had its procurement of a mere 12 airframes deferred yet again into 2020, with every indication out there that the can will be kicked to the right again. Translation: The money isn't there after the Indians decided to cut their losses on an aircraft that would have been state-of-the-art... in 2005). The RSVN alone fields seven different types of land-based ICBMs compared to the USAF's one, and three different types of SLBMs against again the USN's one. But hey, surely the Russian people are willing to have the pension age moved past the average life expectancy in Russia, after all, "What's good for NPO Novator is good for Russia."

And as I've said before, there's close to zero sense to put Tomahawks in a _fixed launcher_, especially so close to Kaliningrad. The US has had fairly little cost exacted upon it by abiding by INF because for the money it was willing to expend it has far better means of delivering cruise missiles by sea and by air. Without nuclear warheads for Tomahawks the amount of firepower it can put out is a pittance compared to these means (Aegis Ashore only has 24 VLS cells per facility, and any number dedicated for Tomahawks would correspondingly make it worse at its intended mission; this is compared to 16 JASSM-ER able to be carried by a B-2, 24 by a single B-1B, up to 96 Tomahawks for an Arleigh Burke destroyer, up to 122 for a Ticonderoga cruiser, and 154 standard for a converted Ohio guided missile submarine). If the concern is that at the absolute maximum a mere 48 missiles with 1000lbs conventional warheads have the potential to so cripple Russian warfighting capabilities, then that would beg the question of how their air defences, C4ISR redundancies, and force dispersals couldn't possibly have accounted for this. Vis-a-vis China INF withdrawal is also ill-conceived, since the primary theaters should the balloon go up is _air and sea_, and stationing the notional weapons system in allied countries is only going to be a re-run of the exact diplomatic debacle that helped pushed the US into signing INF in the first instance. The system is actually quite well known, given that it's based on a sea-launched weapon that might have fallen under the auspices of INF if launched from land-based platform (in fact the same launcher of the Iskander-M, which is mobile and from which much of the fear behind the SS-20, Pershing II, and GLCM was derived from). The impasse is largely derived from the fact that the Russians may have believed that it was compliant so long as it wasn't fueled to the INF range, which Article VII.4 has something to say on:

Suppose I was one of the "lucky" ones who had Metro: Exodus already pre-ordered on Steam. However, I'd like to think I wouldn't have hesitated to pick it up on the Epic store regardless since I adore the other games in the series. Having not played Fortnite I'm not exactly in a position to comment on Epic's service, but my experience with other digital distro platforms have largely ranged from "functional," such as Origin, to "actually fairly solid," such as Impulse back in the day and GOG, of which the latter is generally the best model in my mind (just an .exe to install, and no more fuss). About the sole exception to that however is GFWL, which was among the most incompetently-made products to have ever have graced a hard-drive.

"Touching the neck of the guitar is illegal in many countries, but is socially acceptable in France."

Kind of figured that Kingmaker had a lot going against it with the RPGCodex crowd (RTwP instead of turn-based, romances out the wazoo, straightforward quest design, and a fairly by-the-numbers, though nonetheless well-written, main plot).

Highly informative and entertaining review of a game I never worked up the constitution to endure, yet whose remake I'm looking forward to playing:

I don't know about that. Today we might have a chuckle at the idea that a collection of polygons in their underwear dry-humping each other is a realistic take on intimacy, but damned if I could say that FMV rape scene in the first Phantasmagoria, which I only experienced through a Giant Bomb let's play (paywall), is an improvement.

While I do not believe that the purported violation is as serious as Bolton and his ilk are suggesting (if anything I believe the whole debacle arose due to poor oversight of Russia's defence industry that got a missile with the _range capability_ rubber-stamped by the MoD rather than any actual deliberate intent on the Kremlin's part to violate the treaty) and I think Obama dropped the ball when his administration was frustratingly vague on what was the offending missile at the start (if it is true, as some are suggesting, that it had come from a deeply embedded intelligence source and they were vague so as to protect it then I'd rather he never brought if up at all) the Russian counterclaim is far flimsier. Breaking the claims down... 1. Nuclear missiles can be launched from the Mk. 41 cells. It makes close to zero strategic sense to put them in a _fixed_ launcher. One of the main reasons why the GLCM, Pershing II, and SS-20 were so scary was because a handful of mobile launchers could have been anywhere in enemy territory and it would take dozens, if not hundreds of tactical nukes to account for all of them, let alone with conventional weapons. Compare that to an Aegis Ashore facility that you can be sure will always be there and can be overwhelmed by no more than a baker's dozen warheads (even less if some of the 24 cells at each facility hosts the notional nuclear missile). 2. The ABM interceptors can be outfitted with nuclear warheads and turned on ground targets. The Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle that serves as the "warhead" for the SM-3 missile weighs 140 pounds versus the 290 lbs of a W80 variable yield warhead. If one had the will, time, and resources could that warhead be eventually mated to that missile (see point 4)? Well, why not? But at those dimensions good luck getting it to range as far as Moscow. 3. Nuclear-tipped Tomahawks have existed, and they can be launched from the Mk. 41 cells. The TLAM-N has been removed from service since 2011 with both the missiles and the W80-0 warheads having since been dismantled (in fact it was the US Navy itself that considered it redundant capability early in the Bush administration). Even if production for both the missiles and warheads could be restarted it would be close to thirty years behind modern Flights of Tomahawks in guidance methods, signature reduction, and networking capability, which brings us to a common misconception... 4. A nuclear warhead can be swapped with the conventional warhead of a modern Tomahawk. This vastly underestimates the amount of engineering nuclear weapons systems require on both the launch platform and weapons side. Nuclear weapons have a degree of complexity that goes quite well beyond an ordinary cruise missile with a unitary high-explosive warhead; on the weapons side it includes additional electronics to power additional systems such as the permissive action links, safety features, arming mechanisms, and so forth. These in turn must be powered up and be able to talk to additional equipment from the launching platform (it was for this reason that for the Indian Air Force's MMRCA the Dassault Rafale was selected, as it already had the necessary equipment for employing nuclear weapons, and because these systems have been removed why the B-1B Lancer is no longer considered a nuclear delivery platform for purposes of arms control agreements). Could the US cheat on the above? Well, I find it highly unlikely they would be able to get away with it, as journalists have consistently been able to to get a reasonable idea of the budgets of supposedly highly secretive special operations outfits like JSOC (mostly by looking out for budget items with painfully mundane and highly vague titles like "Army Compartmented Elements" and "Development Group"). Then there's the fact that the GRU could simply look up GAO reports related to Tomahawk development (to quote Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Open government. Freedom of information. We should always tell the press freely and frankly anything that they could easily find out some other way"). Finding these wouldn't exactly be a smoking VLS cell but at that point their counterclaim would carry as much weight as the current administration's claim that the SSC-8 is an INF violation. I would have settled for "even a broken clock is right twice a day," but the concept is _axiomatic_: An un-monitored obstacle is virtually useless. As Raithe's quoted post also pointed out in the case of Trump's wall it would be even worse than useless, as it would impede the ability of border patrol to keep track of the movements of anyone attempting to get over, under, or even through it. Most everything that Schumer and Pelosi offered in lieu of the wall (more border patrol agents, UAVs, additional helicopters and vehicles, FLIR cameras, etc.) would prove far more effective, especially for cost, than the wall. There were even things they proposed such as more asylum claims judges that is the stuff some immigration activists truly slide their fingers down their shirt collars and tug at them nervously over.

"Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man." -George S. Patton

There are other ways in which one's idiocy can affect others. For instance, should one suffer grievous injuries as a result of not wearing a seatbelt or helmet I don't see many people advocating paramedics administering the "Emperor's Peace" on them to save on medical costs instead of nursing them back to health.

Neverwinter Nights 2 coverage starts at 1:41:17.

They do carry that look into their promotional material:

None So Vile, the album from which the Cryptopsy track comes from, came out in '96 and is widely considered a landmark brutal tech death album, so probably would qualify as "Classic Metal."

Doom composer is hiring voices for a ‘heavy metal choir’ I would like to recommend that he get in contact with Dave Hunt of Anaal Nathrakh... ...and Lord Worm, formerly of Cryptopsy:

IWD2 could benefit from proper widescreen support. Modders have already done an admirable job implementing it for other IE games even before the Enhanced Editions came out, whereas IWD2 has only an imperfect fix. A shame given how if I were asked at any given moment between IWD2 and BG2 what was the best IE game I'd have to give it a long think before I could give an answer. The big thing about NWN2 I would change is some optimisation, which probably warrants a patch rather than an actual new product. The graphics by no means hold up particularly well, but as with the IE games they look as good as a "retro" game from 10-20 years ago needs to.

Would be quite a sight if Bungie wound up getting contracted to make new Halo games.

I swear it's a bit like John Malkovich entering his own mind: "Nazi nazi nazi nazi nazi, nazi nazi nazi. Nazi nazi nazi!"