majestic

Sure, except that Ben Shapiro only imagines that Trump said anything about not wanting to go for a third term in that video. Trump is not asked about a third term and he is not talking about not running for a third term - he's just rambling about who his successor might be after being asked exactly that.

This is going to be good, an 80 hour experimental movie with no plot that consists of the protagonist wantonly killing thousands of creatures because the Gloam-Eyed Queen told them to.

No, he's not. He is saying exactly what he means, i.e. he wants to be dictator perpetuo. Except, well, I don't see the senate taking care of that problem in this day and age.

There's also the problem that people are somewhat unable to deal with more abstract concepts, especially large numbers. We had the case of former FPÖ party leader Strache who was filmed while talking about making deals with the niece of a Russian oligarch. Except, well, there was no niece and no oligarch, and it was just a trap. While that ultimately forced him out of the government at the time (at the behest of the coalition party), the wider public opinion of him only started to shift once reports came in that he was using taxpayer money to pay for Clash of Clans. Offer a random, supposedly Russian, woman with deep pockets billions in public contracts in exchange for her buying his party favorable media coverage? Well, why not, they're all bad, that is just part of the game. Misappropriating party funds to pay for his 3000€ / month Clash of Clans bill? Bring out the pitchforks, he's not one of us, he's spending more on a mobile game than most of us make a month. Saw plenty of something similar during the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns when politicians started to talk about how 50% of all hospitalized patients were vaccinated, claiming that the vaccines don't work. I mean, sure, when half of the patients in the hospital (and close to all of them in intensive care) come from the much smaller part of the population that is unvaccinated... but people gobbled it up nonetheless, after all, with an even split in patients? Edit: Trump being able to scam his cultists (and people with too much money when paying for an invite to a party with bad food and barely any presence by Trump) with his meme coin without backlash but causing some - even if very, very mild- criticism and bewilderment amongst his own base when accepting an obvious bribe in the form of a plane is like that too. A plane as a bribe, that's something tangible, something people can understand more readily. It should not be, but such is the world we live in.

No, Trump's always funny, just not in the ha ha sense.

And somehow Palpatine SPECTRE/Meltdown returned. https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/branch-privilege-injection/ Already fixed by a microcode update though, but for some reason people are talking about an unfixable exploit. Not that it matters all that much, really, as it was back when the original exploits came out, this is - at best - only a problem for cloud computing services with shared CPUs where attackers could gather data from whatever else is running on the same CPU (from other users), for anyone else to be affected an attacker would need direct access to your system, and at that point you're already cooked beyond what these exploits could possibly do to you. Still, the concept is pretty interesting, they're basically tricking speculative execution into, uhm, expecting that it will run an exploit with priviledge violation and then caching the results through branch prediction race conditions, bringing back a way to exploit Meltdown.

A long, long time ago in a... uhm, just a long time ago I bought a game in early access called Between the Stars because it looked like it could scratch an itch that I had for a while. The game was kinda really, like, really really unfinished and I shelved it until release. The clock ticked, the Earth turned, and turned, and turned, and weeks turned to years, and back in 2022 I checked to see if any more work was done on the game - and lo! - nope. Read a bit on forums here and there and most posters seemed to agree that the game's been abandoned. I was just going through my library and noticed that it actually had a proper release last year. Well color me orange and call me Sunkist, looks like I'll be playing the game now. Reviews say that it's still plenty janky, but as long as it actually works it's going to be fine, I guess.

No, there just weren't enough, at least not in the state the game launched in. With the combat bugs mostly fixed I can't see myself replaying the game. Looking for ways to break the combat more and more was fun. Playing those encounters in the way they were intended?

Setup and reveal mostly taken from the Outer Limits Remake episode Tempests, so of course it was good. Anything Outer Limits is good.

Done with the Diablo 4 season. As far as I am concerned Blizzard's on probation now. Another season like that and I'll quit playing. Playing the lair bosses in Torment IV was decidedly unfun, even with a full meta build's worth of damage. Making all the mechanics more or less one-shot you in a boss fight is not a great idea when the boss mechanics were never designed to be completely unavoidable, are hard to see and can layer on top of each other. Switched to the sorcerer meta build to top the season off because with a sorcerer at least you get teleport and a four second invulnerability negating the most troublesome of mechanics. I don't know, perhaps these problems existed in the past season too and were just avoided by being able to pop bosses in half a second. I don't really mind the difficulty spike, but the bosses should be redesigned with better mechanics. At least Blizzard's finally fixed the Varashan builds.

Oh, look, we won the ESC. Huh. Well, now I can't complain about the jury votes any more (like when they messed up the winners for 2023 and 2024 ). Video may or may not be region locked for you.

You know, if you're playing roguelike mode then you'll be looking for the final floor for a, uhm, long time.

'S always interesting to see hot dogs in other places, because what is sold as hot dog here in Austria is similar, yet different. If you buy a hot dog at a traditional Würstelstand, you'll get a french baguette style bread with one of the ends cut off, then a hole is punched down the middle, which is then filled with condiments (various mustards, hot sauce, ketchup) and a sausage of your choice - frankfurter for kids, adults usually get grilled käsekrainer or bratwurst. No pickles or any other ingredient added. Wouldn't fit in the hole in the baguette anyway. There are dishes more similar to traditional American hot dogs, but they're not called hot dogs. One of them is the Bosna, which is made with bratwurst, onions and a curry powder & mustard mixture. Still, everything's inferior to deep fried debrecener sausages in lángos dough, painted with garlic oil. Might as well go for something that burns your mouth and clog your arteries while eating.

Not sure Trump and Peter Navarro deserve all the credit here, this was Stephen Miran's idea, incompetently implemented. The two certainly deserve all the credit for botching it, but it was someone else's dream of changing the entire world's financial and trading system by targeted tarrifs and subtle policy changes in four years. That, and the insane idea that Trump understands the words subtle and targeted.

I necro 10 year old threads with AI-generated texts. It's the popular thing right now.

I switched to a Necromancer build. I'm not doing extended Diablo IV boss fights on an Earthquake Barb, they have the same problem as Darkness Necromancers at launch. The earthquakes just layer over every damage zone indicator on the ground. Even at full health with all restistances and armor maxed, with full fortification and barrier, most of the mechanics on Torment IV all but one-shot you. EQ Barb worked wonderfully in season 7 when every boss just died in four seconds making the mechanics irrelevant, but this is so... Blizzard. Also, like, Bone Spear Necro might actually be a bit OP. I reached Torment III without a single ancestral item equipped. Almost made it to Torment IV, but the lack of defensive stats on my gear made it impossible* to finish the Torment IV unlocking pit in time. *Maybe not impossible per se, if you get lucky with the elite pack spawns it might even work, but I just got swarms of teleporter lightning mobs. They don't get along with 0 lightning resistance.

The concerns around Kaspersky Anti-Virus stem largely from geopolitical tensions and allegations rather than publicly proven technical backdoors. While there's no conclusive public evidence that Kaspersky is malicious, the risk is geopolitical and strategic - primarily due to its Russian origin and deep access to systems. For high-security or government use, it's generally advised to avoid Kaspersky; for average users, it's a risk trade-off. For most users, Windows Defender (now called Microsoft Defender Antivirus) is actually a very solid, low-risk choice.

I'm impressed. That is a worthy entry.

Well, Laura Loomer doesn't like him too much, so... guess he's at least all right.

It's silly - on the one hand, we have film studios doing remasters with excessive noise recuction to remove film grain, and on the other hand we have game developers with nothing better to do than to add film grain and motion blur options to their games. The games have the advantage here though. I just turn both options off.

India launches missiles at Pakistan Nice. Here's a 2019 paper about the consequences of a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025.

Bosses on Torment IV sure have a lot of health. Which means having to deal with their mechanics, which in turn means playing an earthquake based barbarian is slightly annoying. The earthquakes your character spawns every few steps makes it very hard to see what is going on. Well, I have a couple of pieces of gear left that could be better and more paragon levels to grind out (and an item to get that randomly doubles earthquake damage), hopefully that'll be enough of a boost in damage to cut down on the boss fight lengths.

Nice, haven't really read the article on Wikipedia, just linked to it. Guess I'll go check TN1's version out at some point.

Once upon a time when the first Star Wars DVD boxed sets were released, there was one that included a laserdisc transfer of the original, non-special edition, films on DVD. I still have those here. The biggest problem nowadays is that they are simple transfers of the laserdic version. Meaning they're a non-anamorphic 4 by 3 nightmare which was fine enough way back when they came out, but on modern TVs the watching experience is not, well, that good. If you're not too queasy about stepping into a legally grey area that probably blurs the lines of fair use, there's always Harmy's Despecialized Edition. A fan project that proves Lucas' assertion that the originals cannot be transferred to modern media because the reels no longer exist in good enough condition a lie.