Agiel

This is apparently going out as a $17 print. A copy editor working in Trump's media team likely won't go hungry from what we've seen.

I'm still not wholly convinced that the encounter design was a substantial improvement over what was in Planescape, as a good number of the "crises" took place in a big wide open arena against the same type of enemy. I may be looking forward to the next combat encounter vs. Planescape, though that may be because the transition to turn-based means you can't have nearly as many as you would in Planescape.

The other day while waiting in line to checkout at the supermarket I saw something I thought I would never see in my entire life... a man buying O'Douls in full view of the public.

I tried to recreate one of my favourite Justin Sweet portraits, as frustratingly there are few hi-res versions of his work on the web. Unfortunately, there's only so much you can extrapolate from an image whose dimensions were ~400x600 pixels, it still looks substantially more, shall we say, impressionistic than other offerings in the base game, but I hope that sometime with a little more elbow grease I can make it more in line with the other portraits:

"[L]ighter tone, perhaps comedic..." seems to describe two of the potential party members thus far, which includes the one named Tybir. The other one I get vibes of having something much more tragic and sinister behind the veil that we discover down the line. Plus, Tybir bears more than a passing resemblance to Billy Dee Williams:

Which party member do you reckon Avellone wrote? I'm guessing Tybir since it seems the others seemed to have been locked in before he was actually brought on board and the first time we knew about his presence was from the first beta.

Conway gets called out by the House Oversight Committee, leaks show that Trump was totally ignorant of New START, Flynn was revealed to have been lying about his calls with Russia before Trump being sworn in (which potentially means he'll be "resigning" from the NSA post before Spicer gets the boot), Trump is now walking back on his Taiwan call, and now the appellate court rules against the immigration ban, and that was just this Thursday. If I was a betting man I would now put my money on "Trump keels over from high blood pressure" over "impeachment" and "resignation" for how this administration ends.

A German pal sent this to me: Translation- 1. Soldier 2. Special Forces Commando 3. Sergeant on the way back from the NCO mess 4. Lieutenant with compass.

Other stories: Trump Begins to Chip Away at Banking Regulations If that doesn't sound like the kind of crony-capitalism Trump built his campaign on railing against, then goddammit, I don't know what does. But in happier news in Europe... Amid protests, Romania scraps proposed corruption bill In light of this, I recommend reading Robert D Kaplan's In Europe's Shadow.

My first bash at recreating a 1990s/early 2000s 1st SFOD-D operator: "Now Delta or no Delta, that's a hot weapon. You know better than that. Your safety should be on at all times." *Presents index finger and bends it as if pulling a trigger* "This is my safety."

POTUS doesn't have to undergo certification, does he? Which means he can't be decertified... One wishes they gave Trump an outdated biscuit and gave the real things to Pence and Mattis.

Was listening to the radio on my way home from work today to hear someone express concern that there was "a six-year old with the 'biscuit' in his pocket in the White House." I'm afraid many might miss the reference to "the biscuit." Speaking of which, the following is what the DOD considered key personality features necessary to be judged as reliable enough to handle US nuclear weapons (circa April 2016): Make of it what you will.

In other news: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/cyber_gl1.pdf "Flim-flam, razzle dazzle." As Gromnir put it, I suppose. I really hope those Trump hotels in Moscow are going to be "terrific, really fantastic."

The "boast[ing] about the magnitude of his electoral college win" should come as no surprise given how someone who came out from under a rock on November 9th can get an adequate sense of Trump's character. And senior government sources in Australia have actually said that the WaPo article was "substantially accurate." I feel for the Ozzies a 1000% on this one, particularly in regards to this: Throw steadfast allies like Germany and Australia under the bus and offer others like Poland and Romania who paid for American security guarantees in Iraq and Afghanistan when they didn't have to onto an altar. Gee, that doesn't sound like something that will bite the US in the ass at all down the line

I bet Cheney looked at Bannon, kicked himself, and exclaimed: "You mean I didn't _have_ to run as Vice President to run the country?!"

Correct. Trump could also have optionally had said "Because of me the sun will rise tomorrow morning." Following was from an Aviation Week article (which too is behind a paywall, but I'll just post a small excerpt): From that you can get a reasonable idea of what words were exchanged between Trump and the Lockheed Martin rep a week or so back: "My voters can't be bothered to work out that more experience with the manufacturing process to reduce scrap and waste and economies of scale will bring down costs as sure as it will rain in London, but just let me have this and I'll never twitter-shame you again and I'll make sure the defence budget will go up, which will be great for your bottom line." Unfortunately at the moment I can't be arsed to translate that into Trump's typical word-salad.

"Lost boys," people. "Lost boys." The sooner everyone recognises that the likes of Alexandre Bissonnette and those losers who shoot up gay night clubs and rock shows in the name of Dae'esh are cut from the same cloth, the better able we are to actually solving the problem.

I'm coming around to Gromnir's "Razzle-Dazzle" theory, and that this disastrous refugee EO serves to distract from a development that will prove far more sinister down the line, Trump pushing the JCS and DNI out of the NSC and replacing them with Flynn and Bannon. For god's sake, I thought the criticism of the "PC-gone-crazy" college campuses was that the humanities professors were depicting to students the world as they would like it to be rather than how it is. The reason _why_ we have the highest-ranking military officer and highest-ranking intelligence officer on the NSC is to relay to the Executive the hard truths out there to outfit them with the tools they need to make the world "as they would like it to be." Perhaps given that Bannon seems to be on to ensure ideological purity there was more to his claim of being a "Leninist" that goes beyond commie industrial policies. "Comrades! Former Marshal Dunford has been removed on grounds of insufficient enthusiasm for our glorious revolution! He has since been airbrushed out of all Politburo photos and the bill for the bullet has been sent to his widow!"

Put by John Schindler: and...

"What?" Should be the collective and simultaneous refrain of the American people.