Agiel

I believe Petraeus was on his way to the White House this week for... something. Idle thought, but it'd be something if through the rest of Trump's cabinet being embroiled in scandals that lead to further "resignations" Mattis gets Gerald Forded into Oval Office.

Being actually my second favourite Infinity Engine game, I'd be a fairly happy camper if an Enhanced Edition for Icewind Dale II came out. The base game didn't even get a proper widescreen mod for crying out loud.

Then again Cadegund did get cut out of PoE to ostensibly be replaced by Durance, a character I get the impression quite a few people didn't take a liking to. And we had to wait a year before Zahua made it into the game.

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.

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."

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.

Put by John Schindler: and...

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

Thoughts from Philip Roth, for my money the finest American author still living today (though he has retired from writing), on the Trump presidency and its parallels with his novel, the Plot Against America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsb7CxwSiBA

Years from now we're going to be seeing books written about how quickly Trump's honeymoon with Mattis and the Pentagon fell apart over everything from procurement to NATO. This kind of clash of personalities, fundamental disconnect of priorities, and total cluelessness on foreign policy on the part of Trump for whatever reason gives me some vibes of John Diefenbaker's Ministry and his Cuban Missile Crisis and Bomarc debacles.

I'm also baffled by the implication that California should be considered any less "American" than all those heartland states. After all, as that movie "The Founder" shows, it's the birthplace of McDonalds which is as good a symbol as any of American innovation and ingenuity (such as it is, given Ray Kroc's depiction) and the footprint it leaves on the rest of the world. And, you know? Taco Bell, Carl's Jr, In-n-Out, and Del Taco were founded in Los Angeles. That makes the city the source of another American symbol: Chronic obesity.

Ideally you want to look up what the draft of a ship is in the identification book, set the depth setting to ~2 meters deeper than the draft, then set the fish to magnetic-influence detonation. This is so that the torpedo detonates directly underneath the ship's keel and "breaks the back" of the ship so to speak and can generally spell the death of all but the heaviest ships with just one torpedo. It could be that the automatic targeting sets the running depth to those settings, and assumes the player sets the torpedo to magnetic-influence themselves. Just keep at it and check in with the fine folks at Subsim (who can teach you far more than what I could tell you here). You haven't lived until you've conducted a surface torpedo attack on a convoy with decks awash under a cloudy night. "Aal Eins... los!": Fun trivia: Magnetic-influence detonators for the G7a torpedo in the initial stages of the Second Battle of the Atlantic were notoriously unreliable, forcing crews to rely on the contact detonators. This state of affairs was a damned sight better than that of COMSUBPAC, where _both_ the magnetic detonators (they were tested in Alaska, but did not account for the differing temperature and magnetic conditions of the South Pacific) and contact detonators (they were simply crushed upon hitting a vessel) of the Mk. 14 torpedoes were totally useless for the initial months of the war.