Agiel

Visited the Museum of Death, which had an exhibit on serial killers. One of the displays had an interview form filled out by John Wayne Gacy, and some of the answers he gave caused the Twilight Zone theme to play in my head: Q: Who is your hero? A: Donald Trump. Q: What would you do if you were president for a day? A: I would make sure everybody had a job and a place to stay before helping out other countries. Keep in mind that Gacy was executed in 1994.

And this is coming out soon as well... about four and a half years after it had been announced: For those who haven't seen it yet:

Back on this point again, I've been of the opinion that the Libertarian Party could finally get off the ground in the Orange County area, a place in California which if one had told me in 2012 would turn Democrat I would have laughed in his face, unable to contain the spittle spraying onto him. However as the 2016 election has shown with Clinton beating out Trump in that area, in spite of it voting heavily in favour of Romney in 2012, and having turned completely blue in 2018, the only conclusion is that the current Republican party has left the educated, upper-middle class (people who are amenable to low taxes and fiscal probity, and at the best of times can take or leave the conservative commitment to the "Culture War" and at the worst hostile towards it) that has been the lynchpin of their strategy in suburbs behind, something that in spite of vehement claims demographics cannot fully account for (as Orange County's own Republican Party chairman has said "Significant numbers of Republicans we turned out, look to have voted Democrat.")

A while back I laid out the theory that we were going to see the KGB get involved as pay-off for the Jon and Nancy storyline in season 2. Looking at some IMDB credits I think we're going to see a Red Dawn-type story thread, with KGB operatives and VDV Spetsnaz dropping in to snatch up everything related to MKUltra, including Eight and Eleven.

Given how famously poor broadband is in Australia I have to wonder if Stadia is going to be a wash there. Hell, I can imagine bandwidth caps being a real damper on its viability in the US.

I can think of one potential upside of the whole Epic Games debacle: If it manages to succeed in taking a big bite out of Steam's market share (and it's an "if" that's the size of the Seawise Giant) then perhaps it might persuade Valve to finally get off their fannies and get on with making a killer app people actually want that might move the goalposts again, be it Half-Life 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. Granted this is easy speculation on my part; the games I'm looking forward to likely won't be made exclusive to the Epic Launcher (like Digital Combat Simulator or Slitherine's wargames) or are pretty much guaranteed to be available on another platform (Cyberpunk 2077 on GOG).

And some say the Swedes are soft...

I should like to point out since 1976 the American people was 6 for 7 in voting in the Presidential candidate that banked himself as the ultimate beltway "outsider".

Metro: Exodus. And having just wrapped up the Volga level, it's... really, really, really good. Probably the most narratively tight story FPS I've played in years (For instance, why do religious nuts call electricity evil? Well, humans being pattern-seeking mammals, what do they make of scary, unexplained balls of electricity floating about and randomly zapping everything in their paths? "Demons," of course). The Volga free-roam map certainly isn't quite as expansive as many "Zones" in STALKER, but it's close enough that it scratches that itch for me. Perhaps the only two things that bug me thus far are some navigation bugs when it comes to clambering over stuff and a few typos in the text.

Before Bezos Fight, Enquirer Publisher AMI Faced Steep Losses It'd be something if Bezos picked up that venture, and the words that would greet customers at the checkouts for supermarkets across America are "TRUMP: SIX MONTHS TO LIVE!" or "IVANKA BACK IN REHAB!"

Certainly I can imagine if at an earnings call for Activision or Take-Two Interactive that they announced that they were going to adopt CDPR's approach to piracy their shareholders would in short order move to vote out the leadership of those companies.

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.