Agiel

So far as I can remember the two major scenes retained between the <<Redux>> and Coppola's <<Final Cut>> was Willard stealing Kilgore's surfboard (which helps with continuity and provides a good transition between the air cav assault and PBR Street Gang proceeding up the river) and the plantation. As beautifully shot and in my opinion thematically necessary the plantation segment was it did have the unfortunate effect of majorly messing with the film's pacing, and I imagine if this was someone's first time watching <<Apocalypse Now>> in any form they will have mentally checked out of the movie half-way through their time in Kurtz's compound.

Hitman47101 delivering the good once again: Could kill to see Lucas "The Rifleman" McCain firing animations for lever-actions:

I believe in the <<Gameplay>> tab in the options you can disable ranged units defaulting to "Skirmish" mode. I turn it off even playing as factions that rely heavily on dedicated ranged units (i.e. Wood Elves) as often I find that results in the AI causing them to retreat at less-than-ideal times and in un-optimal direction.

I suppose in that instance Thomas Friedman's "McPeace" theory of international relations holds true.

With Elon Musk being South African and a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” I’m curious if he’s familiar with Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. Projection of a swastika on the South African embassy in London during Apartheid. Projection was taken down two hours later for being a “public nuisance.”

In the words of the late, great Norm MacDonald, "Say what you will about Elon Musk. But with his new plan to bring people to Mars, nobody is a more creative serial killer."

In solidarity with the metal siblinghood of Ukraine some gems from our Kvlt brothers and sisters there: This last one an incredible one-woman act who released an album last month:

I guess the Norwegians got the last laugh when the Russian MFA threw shade at them for the loss of that Fridtjof Nansen frigate a while back.

Images aren't showing. And the ones you posted earlier are broken now too. *EDIT* Never mind. See them now. <<Giants ahead>>.

On level design there is a catacomb dungeon under the capital a friend and I were crawling around in that does gaslight the player, as there is an identical corridor to one the player went through earlier with another flame-spewing trap at the end, and a room with a layout and textures identical to the boss rooms of other dungeons of the type is found in between those corridors but merely holds two normal enemies. Makes me shudder to think what a tabletop RPG campaign being DMed by Miyazaki for his friends must be like.

A German pal sent this to me. A piece on the one General who has as much to do with the Ukrainian armed forces' success as Zelenskyy. Machine translation as follows, with emphases mine:

On the other side I was thankfully forewarned to refuse a quest from Lann as a female character, as otherwise it was very easy to inadvertently stumble into his romance path.

I'm routinely astounded the US Men's Team keeps qualifying considering how its reputation for mediocrity has reached memetic levels.

While I'm heartened beyond belief that Ukrainians have done sterling work in humbling a certain fascistic Patek Philippe wearer in the Kremlin and made all the pessimists and naysayers eat crow a thousand times over, these feelings have been overridden by plenty of other reasons to be downcast, chief of which is the fact that I'm hardly optimistic that the voting public of western democracies' enthusiasm for supplying the much needed arms and supplies to the Ukrainian defenders will carry over into the much harder and more expensive task of rebuilding the homes and livelihoods of Ukrainians once the shooting stops. I've held that as soon as he started asking for it that if Zelenskyy is even half as smart as he appears to be then he knows perfectly well that a NATO no-fly zone is a non-starter, but the implicit message of the ask is "Okay, so instead of that what else is the west going to help Ukraine out in terms of arms and material? And more importantly what kind of reconstruction aid and security guarantees can Ukraine look forward to once the war is over?" It's fantastic to read stories of Britons, Germans, Poles, Romanians, and even Moldovans going out of their way to help out Ukrainian refugees, but I dearly hope this generosity carries over into allowing Ukraine into the EU (I'm sure there will be loads of German, Dutch, and French farmers who won't appreciate a sudden flood of cheap agricultural goods in the common market), providing Marshall Plan-levels of financial aid, and rebuilding their economy to pre-war levels. I'd go further and say that to do less would be the greatest geopolitical betrayal this side of the Yalta agreement. Ukraine isn't post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan by a long shot, nor do I think that Mr Hilter and his dicky old chums Heimlich Bimmler and Ron Ribbentrop will arise in Kyiv, but the character of the Russian Armed Forces' attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure is that of making sure that rebuilding the country will be as expensive and difficult as possible, perhaps beyond what the west will be willing to pony up for (reminder that the last American administration argued convincingly to voters that billions in foreign aid would be better spent domestically). And if resentment that their tax dollars are spent in Ukraine festers then the Kremlin might well use the opening to rebuild their foreign influence operations in the west.

"We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

I haven't responded to these topics at length for a couple of reasons, chief of which is that it's hard to write coherently when you're watching a human nightmare unfold in close to real time and it feels like you need a close to daily Johnny Walker nightcap to help sleep at night, as I have friends and acquaintances from Ukraine who have thankfully managed to flee to Poland or Moldova (for those interested, here's where I go for my doomscrolling). -To start I can't help but observe just how astoundingly prescient former Russian GenStab member Mikhail Khodarenok was at the beginning of February on outcome of the "Special Operation". Translation provided by the excellent <<Russian Defense Policy>> blog and excerpts provided for emphasis: "To assert that no one in Ukraine will defend the regime signifies practically a complete lack of knowledge about the military-political situation and moods of the broad masses in the neighboring state. And the degree of hatred (which, as is well-known, is the most effective fuel for armed conflict) in the neighboring republic toward Moscow is plainly underestimated. No one in Ukraine will meet the Russian army with bread, salt and flowers. It seems events in south-east Ukraine in 2014 didn’t teach anyone anything. Then they also figured that the entire left-bank Ukraine in one fell swoop and ticked-off seconds would turn into Novorossiya. They already drew the maps, thought out the personnel contingent for the future city and regional administrations, worked out state flags. But even the Russian-speaking population of this part of Ukraine (including also cities like Kharkov, Zaporozhe, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol) didn’t support similar thoughts by a huge majority. The “Novorossiya” project somehow imperceptibly deflated and quietly died. In a word, a liberation crusade in 2022 in the form and likeness of 1939 won’t work in any way. In this instance the words of Soviet literature classic Arkadiy Gaydar are true as never before: “It’s obvious that now we won’t have an easy battle, but a hard campaign.” ... To this it’s certainly necessary to add that supplies of prospective and highly-accurate weapons in the VS RF don’t bear any kind of unlimited character. “Tsirkon” hypersonic missiles still aren’t in the armory. And the quantity of “Kalibrs” (sea-based cruise missiles), “Kinzhals,” Kh-101 (air-launched cruise missiles) and missiles for “Iskanders” in the very best case number in the hundreds (dozens in the case of “Kinzhals”). This arsenal is completely insufficient to wipe a state on the scale of France with a population of more than 40 million from the face of the earth. And Ukraine is characterized by exactly these parameters." -Ever since the lines seemingly ossified in at the end of 2014 I had deep suspicions that the Russian armed forces were going to have a substantially harder time moving beyond the Donbass due to the potential morale problems we are seeing now; the Russian armed forces would be invading a fellow Slavic country with a shared cultural and religious background and most Ukrainians are able to speak Russian, fluently in fact. In spite of a painful history between Ukraine and Russia a conflict was as unthinkable for most westerners as the state of Iowa invading Minnesota (I'm reminded of this poignant exchange between Simon Ostrovsky and Ukrainian Naval Infantry from back in 2014). What's more I had believed the addition of the FGM-148 Javelin to the Ukrainian arsenal (which in retrospect should have happened in the direct aftermath of the MH-17 shootdown, not in 2018 when Ukraine had long since ramped up production of domestic ATGMs, which made up for their lack of sophistication in comparison to the Javelin with sheer numbers) was going to be something that would give Russian armour pause due to how devious the thermal imaging mode of the CLU and its launch-and-leave features were going to be on top of the fact that current hard-kill APS measure cannot account for top attack projectiles. -The seemingly derelict Russian Air Force can in part be attributed to the fact that the Russian armed forces tend to treat air power more as "extended range artillery" which drops ordinance no more than 100-150km behind enemy lines, and not as a means of conducting deep battlefield interdiction as western Allied air forces pioneered in Europe in 1943-1945 and the US codified into doctrine with AirLand Battle in the 1980s. For this the Russian Armed Forces would have left the task to breakthrough exploitation force (not happening now, for obvious reasons) or to their missile artillery and cruise missile bombers (both only effective against stationary targets). What has not helped is the severe lack of PGMs and advanced imaging infrared targeting pods in the Russian inventory (the most advanced targeting system in use is the Su-34's targeting system which only has an LLTV mode, which doesn't compare favourably to western IIR-capable offerings like Sniper XR or the ATFLIR) which has limited their ability to engage pop-up targets from a safe enough altitude (most Russian aircraft losses were from MANPADS, as they had to fly low in order to hit targets with any meaningful accuracy, which was fine in Syria, where the MANPADS inventory of rebels quickly dwindled to nothing). -All these factors lead to what is seemingly the only viable strategy left in the minds of the Kremlin, which is to follow the formula they used in Syria, which is to savage Eastern Ukraine and bomb all the civilian infrastructure that makes it possible for the remaining population to make the call that they're better off sitting tight. After all no population left = no partisans or potential troublemakers for the now evidently woefully-inadequate invasion force to deal with (some folks who like living inside their tanks insist that the Russians are making real progress in terms of territory, to which I say: "So, what? They haven't even gotten to what was supposed to be the actual _hard part_ yet, which is installing their Quisling and rebuilding a country while everyone is shooting at them). The message is this: "You want liberal democracy? A small/Mittelstand business climate that isn't (as) racked by corruption and cronyism? Go move to the EU for that, because here it's 'Putin or we burn the country.'" Will add more tomorrow night.

Well as aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia so eloquently put it: "(I)s Vladimir Putin the best F-35 salesman ever, or what?"

Genuinely astonished that "Ukraine is game to you?!" hasn't quite been as widespread as I anticipated:

Few could resist making the crack that the Russian desantniki tried to go a bridge too far with Antonov airfield

In light of Putin's claim of "de-Nazifying Ukraine" my mind was brought back to this vintage photo of a Soviet T-10 during the Prague Spring:

@DarkpriestMaybe you want to ask Europeans or the Kenyans what they think: And last I checked freaking Bernie Sanders wasn't exactly Scoop Jackson-esque in his views on interventionism: Slice of life story: In anticipation of the upcoming release of the Eldar codex I was on my daily sojourn onto Reddit to see the new rules leaks, and the last image on post alone got an upvote from me.

The Kislev one (specifically Katarin's) seems canonical as it is the most detailed and the implication is that TWW3... One of the top threads on the Reddit is how to mod the race for the four souls. You would think that with the feedback on the DLCs the playerbase liked the most that CA learned that players _do not_ appreciate time pressures in their campaigns, but alas.

That last one is a real hoot coming from Putin:

Could put up with a certain backer quest in the Kingmaker cRPG, because prior to hitting level 20 who willingly passes up a decent chunk of EXP?