Agiel

With you on this. The voice actress for V is great and those moments immediately after she gets a bullet in the head after the heist gone wrong and up to when she leaves the apartment are probably the first instances in which I've heard something resembling genuine despair from a video game protagonist.

Before the pitchforks come out, it's an RTX _3070_. Had I known on September 17th that signing up for EVGA's auto-notify wasn't going to be an exercise in futility I would probably be sitting pretty on a 3080 right now. Though given that it's an EVGA card I do have the option of stepping up to a 3080 and receiving it when stock presumably stabilises next year, or to a 3080 ti if it gets announced in the next ~90 days for a sane price.

Glad to see one of my favourite models from the tabletop (and the pride of my Wood Elf army) getting represented in the game:

I still have some fondness for the Duke, so I consider Obama's take pretty spot-on: Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy

Fox News host Tucker Carlson says Biden and Harris want Americans 'drinking Starbucks every day from now until forever' in a baseless monologue about uniformity My dad was a Reagan conservative and even in his years of retirement it wasn't a day until he got his triple-shot espresso from the Starbucks a block away from his house.

Probably my favourite election celebration flag:

From what I’ve heard about Trump’s speech earlier my biggest fear isn’t far-right militias trying to live out their Turner Diary fantasies, but rather the fact that unless the 25th Amendment is invoked Trump will still have the Biscuit for two and a half months. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/01/no-one-can-stop-president-trump-from-using-nuclear-weapons-thats-by-design/

Thoughts: -With Arizona (a state targeted, arguably misguidedly, by the Clinton campaign in 2016) going to Biden if I were in the Trump camp I'd be pouring three fingers of whisky. Near as I can tell Biden/Harris did not spend nearly as much converting the state as they did bringing PA/MI/WI back into the fold, states Trump won in 2016 by razor-thin margins as they were (to say nothing of Georgia now, which bodes ill for Republican aspirations for Texas in 15-20 years if the GOP insists on continuing on its current track). -As GOP-strategist-turned-Never-Trumper Rick Wilson noted, Florida and Ohio were solid red states masquerading as toss-ups that required generational candidates like Kennedy, Carter, and Obama to turn Blue (i.e. you needed +10 Democrat to even consider them in the conventional sense "lean Democrat"). -That the EC vote remains tight as it is now is still cause for alarm for progressives. For those of us whose single-issue concern for the Presidency was "Who is least likely to order the men and women at Malmstrom and Minot to turn their keys" all a Biden presidency does is buy the world four more years of time for Donald Trump to die from heart disease or has a health event that renders him a drooling invalid (and in my view the latter situation still gives him a ghost of a chance). For as horrible as the past four years have been, progressives should count themselves lucky that a nincompoop such as Trump was the best the GOP could offer in 2016. On that last point it's a terrible shame. If on November 4th the US had a solid repudiation of Trump I was looking forward to posting this as my reaction to the election results:

Lithuanian, you mean.

Inside the Democrats’ battle to take back Texas And I'm here wondering if we'll be seeing Trump doing for Texas what Pete Wilson did for California with Prop 187. Given how the measure had passed with an apparently overwhelming mandate on top of California having sent a Senator and Governor to the White House it would seem even more improbable to folks back then that the state would turn into a Democrat stronghold. But I could certainly see Trump's rhetoric poisoning the Republican brand to entire generations of Asian-American voters who otherwise were highly receptive to the fiscal conservatism the GOP had espoused, not to mention activating an atavistic sense of being undefended in the Latino population of the state in the same fashion Prop 187 had done in California.

I suppose that's more than can be said about Bashar al-Assad: Anonymous Hacks Syrian President's Email. The Password: 12345

Stacraft: Ghost?

As the opening hours of Barbarossa can attest to the acreage of the Eastern half of Poland was absolutely no obstacle for the Luftwaffe in annihilating the Soviet Air Force. Not to mention in totally abandoning the Stalin Line in order to fortify the Molotov Line, with forces there under orders to not make any defensive preparations to boot, Stalin had effectively offered large formations to the Germans on a silver-platter and if anything gave them a clearer shot at Kiev and Minsk. Had the Soviet positions in Poland been recognised to be at best a tripwire against a German invasion and that there remained a need to have a defense in depth, and once the Molotov Line collapsed had the forces the Soviets hastily mustered not been ordered to conduct piecemeal and poorly organised counter-attacks with under-equipped units into the waiting jaws of ambushes the Soviets would likely have enjoyed far better exchange ratios with the Germans and the tragedy on the Eastern Front may not have been so terrible as it is in our timeline. But of course Stalin had to believe that Hitler was someone he could work with, providing him with all the materiel he needed to prop up the German economy up until the last minute and prioritising making the Red Army look good on paper while filling its officer corps with incompetent yes-men like Budyonny and Kulik. And by the same token you could ponder how those who are still with us would have fared were it not for food shipments to the Soviet Union considering the necessary mass mobilisation for both fighting and war production meant less hands working the fields, not to mention the fact that the most productive agricultural centers were no longer in Soviet hands come Case Blue, especially when undernourishment and starvation remained a perennial problem even in Soviet-controller territory.

Taking into account that in the interim months the Soviets launched an invasion in which they had been humbled by the Finnish (arguably giving Hitler as good a reason as any to believe Barbarossa would be a walkover) and Stalin continued to hollow out the officer corps of the Red Army, and made little to no progress untangling the logistical problems that had plagued the Red Army's mechanised forces (the overwhelming majority of T-34s and KV-1 were lost before firing a single shell, not because they were knocked out before they could, but because they were never working to begin with and were stuck in mothballs when the Germans overran the depots), I guess for all those dead Soviets between Lviv and Moscow that was time well spent. Hell, considering that the Germans fighting the British and French up until the last minute before Barbarossa were fed with bread made from Soviet wheat, driving tanks and U-boats constructed with steel made with Soviet coal, and flying planes sustained by Soviet oil, I believe it positively _magnanimous_ that the British so readily agreed to ship aid to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. People were furloughed or outright lost their jobs, thereby losing their health insurance, loved ones have perished from this disease as Trump makes light of it, kids haven't seen their grandparents living under virtual house arrest since February, and yet Trump tries to turn BLM and cancel culture into the issue that ought to be on everyone's mind. On the morning after whatever day the results become certain you and I would like to hear the pundits asking: "How on Earth could anyone believe this election would turn out any other way?"

And some companion tools: Nukemap and Missilemap by Alex Wellerstein.

Vaccine Makers Plan Public Stance to Counter Pressure on FDA How many people had the "Drug Makers push FDA for more caution & regulation" headline on their 2020 bingo card?

To cheer things up (well, at least it brought a great big smile to my face):

Re-visiting Hemingway and some might call me crazy but I think his anti-semitism is even grosser than Louis-Ferdinand Céline's. As despicable as <<Bagatelles pour un massacre>> is you actually get the sense that these are the ravings of someone who's had life beat him down far too many times, whereas the way Hemingway goes out of his way to make Cohn so unlikable in <<The Sun Also Rises>> suggests something far more dyed in the wool.

How long into it do you think we'll hear a "Not great, not terrible" gag?

The Homeworld series: The Void/Turgor:

Layoffs have hit the company. I managed to survive this round but I'm not certain such would be the case when the second wave of COVID-19 takes another swing at the economy in the Fall/Winter. My immediate supe had to take a big pay cut with this round.