majestic

Went to vote, watched the news, feel like barfing. Sweet Jesus, deliver me. So where's that Illuminati plan to reduce mankind to half a billion people? Get on with it.

Coming soon to CBS All Ass:

It also has David S. Goyer als screenwriter, who has awesome material like Batman v Superman, Jumper, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and Man of Steel to his name. Not to mention Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I don't go to Wacken because I hate people.

And Amazon is a US op.

Out of curiosity, on which platform are you playing? I've been playing on the Switch and I noticed some highly annoying lags - both in terms of frame rate and input, especially during extended plays. On the other hand I might just be terribad, currently kind of stuck on the Chapter 5 C-Side.

Kurz is the leader of a different party (ÖVP), they formed a coalition government with the FPÖ. The video is about the party leader of the FPÖ, Strache and his floor leader. Kurz is just facing a vote of no confidence right now because he attempted a (failed) power grab which included continuing his cooperation with the FPÖ on the condition that he can install his own people in the Ministry of the Interior.

Interestingly enough I can come up with some TV shows that would have ended well - maybe even great - if they ended earlier. With existing episodes no less. Stargate SG1, Lost City or Moebius: Both would have worked as series ending, but Moebius' final shot of everyone going fishing with Jack was as perfect a final scene of a TV show as it can get. Instead we got more seaons and the show was cancelled before wrapping up the new storylines - which resulted in two distincly average direct to video films, whose poor performance is direclty at fault for us not geting a proper ending to SG Atlantis at all. X-Files, Two Fathers / One Son: The Syndicate wiped out, the Black Oil explained and the alien threat neutralized. It wouldn't have been ideal but move this from the middle of season 6 to the end and build the alien rebels up a bit longer and walla (*snicker*) we'd have a nice ending to a great show. But no, FOX needed to milk their top franchise some more. Understandable but unfortunate. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, The End: Aptly named I'm guessing even the show runners expected it to be over with this eipside before having two more seasons dumped in them. Perfect ending for a fun show with a somewhat uneven, sometimes outright bad, first season. Coulson standing at a beach in (CGI'ed) Tahiti saying "Gotta say, it's pretty magical" was just so full of win. An odd example considering the show is still running, but I'm pretty certain the actual ending - whatever it may be - isn't going to be nearly as poignant and bittersweet. Another show that ended really well was Braunschlag, but I'm not entirely certain that anyone else on this board watched it (not even other German natives like Lexx) but the level of absurdity in the series rivals that of the Coen brothers. It's about a small, rural village located just shy of the border to the Czech Republic where the mayor, under pressure from a crushing debt to the Russian mafia, fakes a Marian apparition using a local conspiracy and UFO nut which leads to an influx of pligrims and money, a streak of bad luck thought to be a curse from an angered God and the revelation of illegally dumped radioactive waste. All of which eventually culimantes in an actual UFO landing in the final shot. Was actually adapted into an unaired ABC sitcom pilot titled Hail Mary.

Do mini-series count? Because Jean Claude van Johnson was awesome. Voyager and The Next Generation had good final episodes (not liking time travel or Borg villain decay nonwithstanding).

Party financing here is only illegal when it comes from outside (i.e. foreign) sources and is above a certain amount of money (2500€ per year and person) - but that never happened. Parties can receive any amount of donations so as long as they report them to the Court of Auditors. Associations and non-profit constructs can be donated to, and these can, in turn, quite legally employ people and pay for certain services. It would only be illegal if money laundering happened. Failing to report donations to the Court of Auditors carries a fine, but to put that into perspective, not only were the fines in the past 7 years a total of 21.000€ the Court of Auditors is only allowed to select the auditors they send to check a party's finances from a party approved list of candidates. Or in other words, our parties get to choose their own auditors. It's ridiculous. Fun fact, there's an upper limit for the amount of money parties are allowed to spend on election campaigns. In theory that's 7 million per campaign. Last parliamentary election the ÖVP spent 13 millions and the FPÖ almost 11. That too carries a fine. Of, uhm, up to 20%. And yeah, it is up to. Blah. Oi. We're looking at a vote of no confidence against our corporate sock puppet of a chancellor. He insisted on the dismissal of our - now former - Minister of the Interior, the response to which was that all FPÖ members of our government resigned and announced that they would support a vote of no confidence (but not actively propose one). Assuming the entire opposition votes in favor Herr Kurz might get the dubious honor of being the first Austrian government member to be removed by a vote of no confidence. That would be hilarious, but possibly a bad move. Fun times.

It sure got to be the only episode of the series that had me checking news on my phone while it was running. The entire season felt like a recent Zack Snyder movie. Visually bleak and undersaturated while both far too long and missing too many important scenes and events to make sense. That was Batman v Superman level of impressive. In all the wrong ways. I'd give it half a Mass Effect.

213374U might chuckle a bit:

Stumbling into the Firewine Ruins too early was a much more fun experience than the Nashkell mines. Those were reasonable, at least the Kobolds didn't respawn upon resting.

I'm pretty sure his wife at home with his newborn son will be rather happy about him attempting to impress rich Russian women while on vacation. You're right though, the video most likely doesn't contain anything that could lead to him being charged, let alone convicted. Even if the discussed donations to his party actually happened they'll be dealt with outside the judiciary system. At the very worst the party is looking at a negligible fine, and it's technically not even illegal to funnel funds through a non-profit association. Morally contemptible? Sure. Revealing of a terrible character? You bet. Illegal? Nah... politicians have no interest in making it too difficult to collect donations. Regardless of party affiliation. There are some fun things though. Harald Vilimsky, the face of their EU parilament election campaign not that long ago stated that it should be illegal for billionaires to buy their way into politics. Strache himself opened his statement by saying that there have long been rumors about foreign interference in the upcoming elections and that this dirty smear campaign is a new low. It takes a certain warped view of reality and balls to state that after having been caught on video trying to gain Russian funds with the expressed goal of interfering with elections. And finally no, the timing isn't a coincidence*. It's a week to the elections and we're most likely going into parliamentary re-elections this year considering that there's an upcoming press conference by both our head of government and the president. Usually that means the former is going to ask the president to dissolve the national assembly and the latter agreeing to do so. There's only one downside to this. Strache's former friend, mentor and all around lovable nazi piece of trash Gottfried Küssel who has recently been released from jail already insinuated that he has some, well, dirt on his former protegé that he might release when and if appropriate. They had a bit of a falling out. I suppose we'll never see what he's got. It's not really worth anything any more. *I do doubt that it was the Russians who prepared the trap or released the video. Not because the Russian government is saying that the woman in question is from one of the Baltic states but because this very much hurts the FPÖ's plans of uniting the European far-right into a coherent force. A force with membrs that are, more often than not, actually well and truly backed by Russia(ns), like Le Pen. This has been a major project on the FPÖ's part and it very much stands to fall apart right before taking off. Which isn't a bad thing, mind, but it's the one thing that piece of filth was right about. It was a set up and it was deliberately released to derail them, and it not being used in out parliamentary elections really suggests foreign interests (if it was domestic that wold have come out immediately). But as with affairs, it takes two to tango. There wouldn't have been a video if he had any common sense, some decency or weren't a corrupt, fascist piece of horse droppings. It also might actually lead to the end of Nord Stream 2. Something I am a bit ambivalent about. It's not like we (the EU) have much of a choice. We can buy cheap gas from the Russians or we can buy overpriced LNG from the US. It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Just watched a hilarious two year old video of our (now) vice chancellor and his party's floor leader sitting in a Russian owned villa on Ibiza discussing the acquisition of our largest newspaper, installing journalists that favor them and telling them freely of company and non-profit association constructs that would allow them to funnel funds into their party without them noticed - for bonus hilarity mentioning large companies and investors that already do (most prominent among them Glock apparently) - and promising overpriced construction contracts assuming the discussed funds and activities would land them an election victory resulting in them heading or being part of the government. I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't released prior to our 2017 parliament elections instead of now a week before the EU ones but whatever gets these two grubby, greedy buttholes out of our government and ideally behind bars is all right with me. I always knew these guys weren't the sharpest tools in the shed but discussing how to best use dirty money for six hours while being utterly embarassing in the process is more than a little sad. In German we have a really nice word for what I'm feeling right now: Fremdschämen. Meaning - literally - to be ashamed for/instead of someone else because these people obviously have no shame at all. Or any decency. Hey Visegrád countries, you sure you want to be associated with these fumbducks? Here be an English article in the Financial Times.

Thanks, let's agree to disagree on endings then. If Lost was bad, then Mass Effect 3's ending was 13.57 MegaLost.

Out of curiousity, and if you have played Mass Effect, how much Lost would the ending of ME3 have then?

I know I'm repeating myself but that last season of Lost (the ending just explained what was going on throughout the season) wasn't bad in the sense that they abandoned or messed up everything that made the show good up until that point or that the quality of the episodes were bad while seriously upping the production values to gloss over like what we're getting now with Game of Thrones. The ending of Lost just never answered any of the interesting mysteries that were left in a satifactory manner as everything was simply magic in the same way that "God did it" was the explanation of everything that happened in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Lost suffered from the Chris Carter Effect(tm) paired with a serious helping of Jar Jar Abram's usual modus operandi of setting interesting mysteries up with no idea how to resolve them in a satisfying manner. By the end it was impossible to attempt it anyway. Not going to put this into spoiler tags, just skip the paragraph if you ever want to watch Lost. The show was centered around certain religious ideas like the concept of the Buddhist Dharma and featured a depiction of the dharmachakra that was literally used to steer the island (it makes sense in context - kind of) while the logo of the DHARMA Research Initiative that had built research stations across the Island (which turned out to be the Well of Souls and the origin of all life, borrowing heavily from a lot of religions) was pretty much a Chinese Bagua. The final season spent roughly half of the screen time with the main characters in what looked like an alternate reality which was eventually revealed to be a form of purgatorial afterlife where they all met again due to the events of the show having forged a deep connection between them waiting until they're read to pass on to nirvana or rebirth or heaven, take your pick. That's what people got upset about for some reason. Somewhere I once read a complaint that the ending is completely impossible to understand unless one has studied "2000 years worth of gnostic mythology". Complete hyperbole, but not being ignorant about religions beyond Christianity (and knowing that them Mooslims are evul) does help. Le sigh. There might be an overlap between people who disliked the ending of Lost and people who disliked the ending of King's The Dark Tower series. Heh.

Only if you're a console peasant. There was a time when computer games went for a like a third of a Nintendo cartridge instead of roughly the same, and that included games with insane budgets (for the time) like Wing Commander IV. The prices of computer games went up well beyond what inflation could account for. Looking at the credits of games it's not hard to see why. Nowadays they have more people attached to them than some movie projects and ever since gaming went mainstream CEOs want a new car per month, not just one per year.

Ah, screw it. I'm getting my summer bonus next month, might as well tap out the credit card.

^ Disagree on that last point. Her plot armor was always like that. How else would you survive a knife in the gut and a subsequent swim in the dirty sea?

To be honest I had that moment at the end of Sacrifice of Angels. With the exception of a few standout episodes like In The Pale Moonlight is was all downhill from there. The ending was just icing on the cake. DS9 had its best episodes during seasons 4 and 5. Caveat: I'm a huge Robert Hewitt Wolfe fanboy and as such probably not the most objective. The worst Trek ending was Enterprise's, but I'm sure Discovery will eventually surpass it.

In all honesty I'm hoping it is true and hoping it is false at the same time. I want to get a proper ending to the series and would appreciate if the books were released soon, on the other hand, f*ck evreyone involved with that decision. It feels a bit like all those crowdfunded projects going Epic exclusive right before the finish line. On a rational level I completely understand their reasons and while I don't share a love for Steam with the complaints crowd or hate the Epic store it's still a crappy move towards anyone who invested to get the project going in the first place.

To talk about something more amusing, what do you guys think of the rumor that George has finished the books already but had a deal with HBO to not release them prior to the show's end?

The underlying technology is really interesting and has a lot of potentially useful applications. That the public face of it are wildly fluctuating crypto currencies with a host of hacking issues, chain splits, fraud and insane power drain is unfortunate to say the least.