Agiel

As for the combat side I'm having fun with the Flame Dancer archtype that really came into its own in an encounter against the The class basically allows you to laugh at enemy alchemists chucking fire bombs at you, and with its ability to cast fire-based spells later on and on top of me building up her AC (she stacks up reasonably well compared to Valerie's AC) she can throw a fireball at her feet and do a pretty good impersonation of Adam Jensen with his Typhoon augmentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEDVuQ6rh68 And of course Octavia is generally free to throw her own Fireballs with reckless abandon.

I suppose it wouldn't be a game from Russia (or other former SSR) if it wasn't big in both ambition and jankiness on release. On the other hand I have to commend many of the quality of life improvements Owlcat has made on the cRPG formula without compromising on, well, what others might consider the "uncompromising" elements of the genre like encumbrance or not having arrows pointing to where you need to go to advance a quest.

The argument that INF tied the United States' hand vis a vis China (curiously the reasoning Putin tried to use when he attempted to take Russia out of it before) makes absolutely zero sense; the treaty only forbids _ground-launched_ cruise missiles, and its arsenal of both air and sea-launched missiles (be it from Mk. 41 destroyers and cruisers or submarines, though this would require refitting nuclear warheads onto Tomahawks, as the nuclear-armed missiles were taken out of service in the early 2000s) are more than sufficient for the deterrence role. Most likely scenario is that no new platform that would have violated INF will be deployed by the US in Europe (as the DoD previously didn't see the need) where Russia's programs will go into overdrive. Words by James Acton: https://twitter.com/james_acton32/status/1053793374090731520

There's a guy who'll take them off of you for way more than the standard merchant once you establish your barony, if you're talking about the crap that has in its description something like "an antiquities expert will pay well for it."

Obsidian still has that Tim Cain/Leonard Boyarsky project they're doing with 2K, don't they? Wouldn't an acquisition by Microsoft kind of be stepping on their toes?

Soon you can live the "Dance of the Vampires" for yourself:

You speak of the Technic League random encounter? I could generally take out the mages pretty quickly, but I'm finding that in this game when playing on normal received damage the enemy Fighters ain't no joke, and that any hit the manage to land can take out a third of Amiri's health.

Well to roughly quote Barbossa I suppose it's more a "guideline" rather than "rule". Certainly for classes that have to spread out points across multiple ability scores like a Cleric to get the most out of I've had to settle for a Dex score at 12. About the only thing I would say there ought to be zero compromise is to have at character creation enough Int to get all the skills you want for the length of the game.

Well the rule of thumb is that at character creation one should if at all possible strive for at least 14 in Dexterity so as to get the AC bonus from that.

As divisive a movie Mandy is, it has at least given the world this image:

A shame you can't be a cleric of Lamashtu. Though I suppose a crab claw hand or extra sets of breasts are beyond the breadth of the character creator.

Would be something to see a WeGo-type system like what is implemented for the Combat Mission games used for a cRPG. Seems like a decent compromise between turn-based and real-time with pause.

Paul Manafort has ‘cooperation agreement With his days as a freewheeling lobbyist over and given the fate of the Skripals I'd have to imagine Manafort will have to spend the rest of his days in witness protection: "And that's the hardest part. Today everything is different; there's no action... have to wait around like everyone else. Can't even get decent food - right after I got here, I ordered some caviar with smetana, and I got salmon roe with Daisy sour cream. I'm an average nobody... get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

huh. swedish elections is a bit different than we expected. kinda disappointing. HA! Good Fun! I actually consider this a supreme form of election, atleast we would know that the people that are up for election really want to be there, and not just for the easy money. It would also motivate politicians to keep investing in healthcare and social security. Kind of hard to work when your arm has been cut off. sounds crazy, but wouldn't be any worse than most current systems. perhaps have candidates face a 50/50 chance o' either hand-to-hand combat or chess, with death being the result for the loser in either case. would almost necessarily get smart, dangerous and complete committed candidates. HA! Good Fun! How about Chess Boxing? And to top it all off in the comic...

"Mandrake, come over here, the Redcoats are coming!" Royal Marines DLC for Afghanistan '11 has dropped, cashing in Blackhawks and Huskies for Lynxes and Terriers, which makes me recall a certain passage from Rudyard Kipling's "The Young British Soldier": "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

On a lighter note some interesting tales from aviation history. The first the saga of No Kum-Sok (AKA Kenneth Roe) and Operation Moolah (recounted in much greater detail in the excellent book "The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot" by Blaine Harden) And a Soviet flyer who performed the same feat in a MiG-29 in the closing days of the Cold War:

Once again, the thing my mind comes back to whenever there's a Trump rally: https://streamable.com/czf9b

That cat actually kind of reminds me of Gaahl:

Got a crack out of this:

Or the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop thread. As of late been prepping my Harlequin army for my local Games Workshop's "Armies on Parade" Harlequin Troupe Master with Power Sword and Shuriken Pistol (weapons currently magnetised): The old 4th Edition Shadowseer (yet to be properly based): My kitbashed Solitaire (followed by one of my favourite extracts from the lore relevant to the model):

That's pretty well appreciated, for 'elective' wars which even with Mexican Telegrams and unrestricted submarine warfare WW1 was for the US. WW2 though wasn't, doesn't matter how isolationist your population is if you're actively attacked by Japan and have Germany declare war on you; that's the one thing that will usually get all isolationists on board for a war since isolationist doesn't mean pacifist. I suppose it just goes to show just how poorly appreciated it is. In part why those not in the loop with the Manhattan Project balked at simply continuing the conventional firebombing campaign of Japan and blockading her into submission was because absolutely nobody could give an exact time when Japan would accept the Allied terms of surrender (remember that Leningrad was besieged for two and a half years), and there was concern that the cost of the blockade and simply having the five million strong invasion force indefinitely mobilised would wear down on public support for the campaign. Even in Western Europe Hitler's Hail Mary play to save the Third Reich was based on the the Ardennes Offensive inflicting horrendous enough casualties on US forces and, failing that, succeeding where the Germans had failed at Dunkirk encircling British forces and potentially bargaining for an armistice with the Western Allies, then swinging those forces over to the East to stabilise the Soviet Front (the chances of success were uncertain of course, but it was pretty much this or Hitler curling into a ball and sucking on his thumb in his bunker).

What tends to be poorly appreciated is just how fragile the United States' commitment to foreign wars was. While American casualties were certainly light as compared to the European powers in WWI, it nonetheless left a scar on the American psyche that pushed the country into isolationism quite well into the 30s, a sense that was not helped by the fact that the troubles of the rest of the world seemed so distant to Americans given that they had the luxury of being an ocean away from them. This sentiment would coalesce into anti-war, isolationist movements such as the America First Committee (and you thought Trump and Bannon were being original), with one of its founding members being Charles Lindbergh, as much an American hero in his time as Eisenhower was in the direct aftermath of the Second World War (in fact the Philip Roth novel "The Plot Against America" from which the quote in my signature comes from posits on what would happen had Lindbergh ran for and won the Presidency). Even the long drawn-out slog of Korea would eventually push the US to settle for an armistice with North Korea (the unpopularity of the war would play a key factor in Truman having the lowest ever recorded approval rating ever since Gallup began collecting that data and the decisive defeat of the Democratic candidate by Eisenhower in the 1952 election).

As an aside some of these claims should be taken with a grain of salt given the political ramifications of the atomic bomb. As the nascent US Air Force had a monopoly on the atomic bomb in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War there was an incentive by Navy brass to downplay the impact of the bombs as it could possible result in the Navy getting sidelined by the Air Force when it came to funding, and to a large extent this fear was well-founded, as it was under Eisenhower that US military underwent its largest downsizing in conventional forces, with funding diverted to the Air Force in service of the doctrine of "Massive Retaliation," in which the US would respond in a disproportionate fashion with nuclear weapons to any offensive action taken by the Warsaw pact. The US Navy even attempted to demonstrate that the effect of atomic weapons against naval vessels was negligible in Operation Crossroads, to somewhat limited success (while physical damage was indeed light, the sheer amount of radiation the ships absorbed made it wholly impossible for them to be operated by human crew without a substantial decontamination effort). Ironically the US Navy would go on to become the most important leg of the American triad as Polaris and the "41 for Freedom" ballistic missile submarines came online (later to be succeeded by Trident, which today constitutes fully half of the US arsenal).

Worth pointing out that while today we consider it a no-brainer that the ultimate authority to launch nuclear weapons, at what targets, and, relevant to the Nagasaki bombing, when belongs solely to the top level civilian leadership this was not so obvious to military and political leaders at the time. This meant that the bombs were to be dropped at Lemay's discretion as weapons became available to him, so his primary consideration on the timing was actually favourable weather conditions rather than geo-politics (Japan in late summer was known to have particularly temperamental weather, so it was either use it now, or potentially wait another few weeks before the weather permitted). In fact the delegation of weapons release went so far that the aircrews of Enola Gay and Bockscar were given alternate targets in the event that weather conditions were prohibitive (as happened to Bockscar, of which the primary target was Kokura).