Agiel

Associated Press, Reuters, the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Al Jazeera, BBC. I also have a subscription to Stratfor.

My apartment has become the designated cat shelter. In addition to one of my roommate's cat which I have to take care of while he's out East for the weekend, my parents left their cat with me to take care of while they remodel their house. On top of that, my landlady left a cat for me to take care of for a few days while we try and find a new owner for her; her previous owner had decided to move back to Iran, only for her to be placed under house arrest upon returning (her family suspects that this was an effort to shake her down for a significant bribe due to her extended stay in the US). Where's LadyCrimson when you need her?

I have three problems with dialogue wheel. 1, Needless obfuscation: written "yes", says "sure". 2, When the short written sentence doesn't match what my character says and/or does. 3, When the dialogue wheel is used to hide my lack of choice. Two or more written choices, but they all lead to my character saying/doing the same thing. #2 and #3 really are the worst. It's crazy how often it seems to be done, though. bring up #2 and #3 is why we got banned from bioware. complained 'bout how frequent #3 were happening in mass effect, so chris priestly locks thread-- insists that our complaints could lead to spoilers. no actual spoilers, but potential were too great. okie dokie. so then a dragon age dialogue wheel thread gets started by somebody other than Gromnir. no possibility o spoilers, yes? we get banned 'cause priestly told us we should "drop it," and we ignored his directive. *shrug* no big loss, but we bring up to show just how little the dialogue o' the dialogue wheel has changed. dialogue wheel has been broken from the start. minor improvements have not improved the dialogue wheel enough to make it worth the trouble. for a game with enormous amounts o' dialogue, the dialogue wheel is a developer time/resource saver, but somehow it gets sold as a boon to role-play. is pt barnum game design. HA! Good Fun! I would say that Eidos Montreal probably did the dialogue wheel the best for their take on the Deus Ex games. They do bother to give you at least a sentence long summation of whatever dialogue decision you make that's at least 95% in line with what you had in mind when you clicked that option.

I got some random compliments from ladies walking down the street or working cash registers when I grew my mane out (and we're talking about half-way down my back). Unfortunately I'm scrawny enough that whenever I wore slim pants I'd also occasionally get mistaken for a lady from behind

A blast from the past with soundtrack courtesy of Vangelis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz3ECzpu6CQ

I also seem to remember Warp Spiders wiping the floor with Terminator squads 1vs1 in the original Dawn of War. God knows I had my share of laughs when my favourite space elf ninja clowns soloed Grey Knights in Dark Crusade (which may be lore accurate given that a Shadowseer and a Death Jester were able to wreck the faces of the Adeptus Custodes in one 40K novel).

I'd rather that the crowd that wanted to "stick it" to the "experts and elitists" didn't stake human civilisation to make their point. Particularly so when the city I live in would probably have a warhead allocation that would almost break into the triple digits. Again, from the article above:

Keep in mind that he had no idea what a nuclear triad was, and had proposed this approach on how to handle arms reduction negotiations: The past eight years have done quite a lot to exhibit how utterly feeble the Executive branch is in effecting domestic policy, but the one area in which it holds terrifyingly unilateral power is employment of the strategic arsenal. If the Minuteman III and Ohio missile crews are turning keys, they do so under the assumption that PAVE PAWS, Cobra Dane, and Fylingdales is tracking ballistic missile contacts that just cleared the horizon, and not that Rosie O'Donnell is on a goodwill trip in Beijing.

While the merits of such a project are debatable, let it not be said that was perceived as such a wholly terrible prospect from the onset:

That's true. Another name for that is sell out. I sympathize with Sander's predicament, but he always said his movement is more than him. The Sanders supporters need to ask themselves, "Do we hate Trump so much that we're willing to back the candidate who embodies the political machinery we've stated we hate in politics today." Sure, most of them will. Perhaps a huge number, but I think Hillary will fall short of the 90% stated support she had before this whole thing broke out. It's hard for folks to deny the essential flaw in her character, namely corruption. Sanders is clearly settling for what concessions he can get on the front end in lieu of the chance for real long term organizational change. Real and lasting change also kind of starts at home. Want viable alternatives to the Democrats and the Republicans? Stop electing the incumbent State Representatives and Senators at a whopping 95% rate.

Well at least Sanders is being a trooper.

One of my managers was let go today, the reason given being "redundancy" (his position was merged with that of another department supervisor). I can't say I particularly liked dealing with him as compared to my other supes, but as I get what it's like being laid-off I can't say I would have wished that fate on him either, even when our manager-worker relationship was at its most strained. The supe who took on his former responsibilities went to some lengths to convince us that our jobs wouldn't be affected for the foreseeable future, but I wasn't totally convinced. It was also a source of some distress since the last rec meeting gave us the impression that things couldn't be going better for the company. So I resolved to make sure I wasn't doing anything that could even remotely be construed as malingering (forgoing the occasional stream watching on my computer, coming back from lunch promptly on time, and cutting the socialising with co-workers outside of breaks). I even went on Indeed to get a gauge on what my job prospects were like in case things were to suddenly and catastrophically go south, and luckily in the case of that eventuality there wasn't really a dearth of employment opportunities in my field.

Only thing Melania's speech was missing was: "Make sure to buy a copy of my husband's book 'Dreams from My Father.'"

The biggest mark against her in my book is the email scandal, however almost anything is better than handing the keys to 1500 offensive strategic warheads on 5 minute alert to a man who doesn't know what a nuclear triad is, let alone someone who had this to say on how to handle arms reduction negotiations:

I'm going to speculate some maladjusted loser who would latch on to any cause to justify his social grudges and destructive tendencies. After all, I've batted almost a thousand with that bet.

Given that among the anti-EU movement's biggest champions include luminaries like Vladimir Putin, the Le Pens, Front national, Rupert Murdoch, Nigel Farage (a man who had at one point said "let's go eating at the ch*nks"), Alexander Lukashenko, the FPÖ, German Nazis, the AfD, and Donald Trump (though he had to to be told what Brexit was), I think most can be forgiven for thinking the EU isn't all bad. Seriously, I'd take the faceless bureaucrat in Brussels over this face any day of the week:

Might I direct you all to what Tom Nichols coined as "the Lost Boys"? (Article was originally written in response to the Orlando shooting, but given that the Nice perpetrator was reportedly a French citizen, do not colour me surprised if it turns out that the following fits his profile to a T): For Lost Boys Like Micah Johnson, Any Ideology Is An Excuse To Kill Maybe Micah Johnson, like Charleston murderer Dylann Roof and Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen, was a screwed-up weirdo who went looking for a cause to support his desire to kill. Let’s take the Dallas shooter at his word: he hated white people. But is that all there is? Lots of blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans hate each other. They don’t all open fire on each other with powerful weapons. Maybe there’s something else at work here. The current narrative is that Micah Johnson, as a young African-American man, was enraged by police brutality against African-Americans. An Army veteran and a “quiet” young person—these shooters are never described as “loud”—he was finally pushed over the edge either by the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana (if you’re sympathetic to the most militant black nationalist line) or the irresponsible rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter (if you’re an adherent of the view that BLM is essentially a terrorist organization). There’s another possibility, one largely ignored because it doesn’t fit either narrative: maybe Johnson, like Charleston murderer Dylann Roof and Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen, was a screwed-up weirdo with a ton of anger who went looking for a cause to support his desire to kill. Always Something of a Misfit Superficially, it looks like Johnson turned to violence after returning from Afghanistan, a fact that seamlessly plays into a perfect narrative of racial injustice: black veteran returns to Texas from a war zone—“he managed to bring his war back home,” as the New York Times put it—where he finds black men are in more danger in America than in Afghanistan, so picks up a rifle in defense of his community. Except that’s not quite what happened. Johnson never saw combat, and he didn’t “return” so much as he was “sent home.” For stealing panties. As the Daily Beast reported, Johnson was shipped back to his reserve unit just ahead of a restraining order and a less-than-honorable discharge from the Army. Somehow, Johnson escaped punishment: he got an honorable discharge, which surprised even his lawyer. “Someone really screwed up,” Glendening said. “But to my client’s benefit.” Johnson, as it turns out, was always something of a misfit, much like his would-be White Power and ISIS counterparts Roof and Mateen. Like other “loners”—a word that popped up within a day of the shootings—he was fascinated by military hardware and macho endeavors, including enrolling at the “Academy of Combat Warrior Arts” near Dallas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s perfectly normal for a young man with “anger issues” to enroll in an academy that trains young men in combat tactics, rather than wasting his time with boring things like jobs or girlfriends. (When he wasn’t honing his urban guerilla skills, he shot hoops literally for eight hours a day.) A Victim Avenger None of this is to deny that when Johnson finally opened fire on Dallas law enforcement officers, his head was full of racist poison. The outsider who was obsessed by military weapons as early as high school, whose stepmother was white, whose time in the Army came to an end with a handful of stolen panties, found an ideology that made him the victim of a race war and placed him in the role of a powerful avenger. This is what Roof and Mateen did as well, like so many other “lost boy” killers. Roof, for his part, said he was sick of black men raping white women. Like Johnson, his friends said he made the occasional racist remark, but no one thought he was serious about violence. Mateen, likely a closeted gay man, lashed out at the gay community after a history as a difficult boy stretching back to third grade and more recent events in which his temper scared those who knew him. In every case, we must study the professed motives of the shooters and hold those responsible who made the propaganda who inspired them: white nationalists, black nationalists, Islamic extremists. At the same time, we should not assume these young men are avatars of the ideologies they espouse. Rather, they are part of a new strain of violent losers, men driven by a combination of narcissism and insecurity and who latch on to heroic narratives in which they are the central figures in a morality play of justice and retribution. Defending the white race, defending the black race, avenging Islam: all of them are the same story played out by the same type of man. In other cases (John Salvi attacking abortion clinics, Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building) the targets or the ideas may be different, but the actors and narrative are the same. The hero, spurned in his own community, takes matters into his own hands, and kills—usually in the most cowardly way possible. Crazy Loners Shouldn’t Control Us In every case, we zero in on the message, because normal human beings link actions with words. We also do this because the alternative is even more frightening than terrorism: we cannot seriously believe that an aimless life of too much weed, or a burning shame and anger about getting caught as a panty thief, can eventually produce the slaughter in Charleston and Dallas. It’s too random, too uncontrollable, and too close to home. Terrorism, in a way, is actually the more comforting explanation. It’s true, of course, that hateful propaganda always targets the weakest and most insecure among us. It’s not meant to turn men and women of virtue into killing machines; it’s meant to sift through the lost and disturbed, and to instruct them in how to focus their vaporous fears and formless rage into a weapon. It’s also true that groups of people with the same ideology create cells of terror and violence. These groups make plans and sustain networks, and must be pursued and broken up wherever they’re found. But to conflate radicalized losers with actual terrorist organizations is to risk spreading law enforcement and intelligence too thin: the battle against terrorism and the firefight with a disturbed loser who was part of nothing and who spoke to no one are not part of the same war. Johnson’s ramblings are no more and no less important than Roof’s racial theories or Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS. These men, in retrospect, seemed likely to kill at some point. White supremacy, black nationalism, and Islamic extremism lit the fuse, but in the twenty-first century, there is no way to empty the trough of toxic Internet sludge on which these damaged boy-men feed. They wanted a reason to commit murder. They found one. The next killer will just as surely find his own. The more pressing question is whether we will allow ourselves to be dragged into social warfare by these pathetic failures. Racism and terrorism are real problems, but are we going to let panty thieves and chronic stoners set the terms of the debate? Rather, if we’re going to have another dreaded “much-needed national conversation,” it should not be about guns or racism, but about the human time bombs our culture is creating and nurturing among us. Unfortunately, that’s not only a discussion for another day, but one so uncomfortable to think about that we’re likely never to have it at all.

Unfortunately for Americans, the Netherlands is known as a land of soft drugs and confectioneries:

Pretty much on the money. An important note is that the Adder doesn't really see much use in its native air force (its most prolific operator is in fact the Indian Air Force). As the earlier version barely stacks up against AIM-120A and B variants of the AMRAAM and doesn't compare favourably to newer C and D AMRAAMs, it's likely the Russian Air Force didn't think the improvement in performance over the Cold War-era AA-10 Alamos was worth the (much) higher cost, and are hoping improvements on the original design are a much better bet for the future, hence why we saw those Flankers in Syria operating with a mixed loadout of AA-10s and AA-12s. AIM-120D also has a nasty party trick in the form of co-operative engagement capability, meaning it can be inertially guided into a suitable homing basket by off-board sensors (E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, JLENS, certain Aegis-equipped vessels, other CEC-capable fighters). Meaning an AIM-120D-equipped fighter can launch its six missiles and immediately RTB without committing further into the engagement and stencil six more kill markers on the fuselage.

Not one to repost something from Kanye, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag40XYIj4hE 2:20, man.

A friend of mine directed me to this in the Hearts of Iron IV Steam Workshop: