213374U

Oof. Imagine a bank wanting to disassociate itself from you because you are hurting their image in the post-2008 world.

A bit of a digression but... that's actually not how American "democracy" (but muh republic) works. Everyone's vote isn't worth the same (and indeed, in some states depending on what you vote, your vote may be worth **** all), due to the Electoral College and winner-takes-all setup they have going over there. I know this isn't exactly where you were going with that, but I'm not sure that a different way of assigning non-uniform and/or non-universal suffrage value would produce better results. An inherent risk of democracy is that it may collapse because those tasked with maintaining it either stop caring or make the wrong decisions. Would you like to know more? Fair enough. As with everything else, it's just a tool. But I get a feeling that it tends to be abused by people who know a fair bit more about psychological manipulation than the subjects they are supposed to be writing about. I figure it's time I stopped beating on this particular dead horse anyway.

No, I mean, really. Statistical inference is great and all, but is there any actual evidence that Trump's rallies have (indirectly) killed 700 people? There isn't, and the paper's authors are the first to admit it. This is all purely mathematical modeling. Of course, it may be possible to argue that the Trump Administration has to accept part of the blame for the failure to conduct effective contact tracing programs. But that's a more complex story, not to mention nowhere near as attention-grabbing as "TRUMP KILLED ELEVENTY BILLION!!1". Nuance is for chumps, and you can't very well farm likes on twatter with that boring crap.

any contact tracing

Heh. You can't possibly expect a poorly educated illegal immigrant teenager from a Muslim country to know that freedom of religion actually leads to less people dying than the alternative by many orders of magnitude, but that's exactly how it is. Euros don't live in secular states because of a whim. It is the practical application of the lessons learned during the unimaginably bloody Wars of Religion and Thirty Years' War, next to which the ISIS thing looks like a ****ing Sunday picnic. They literally do not know what they are pushing for. Remove the secular safeguards that prevent religious nutjobs from dictating social norms and controlling the national agenda? No one, especially not Muslim minorities, would like the result of that. Callous as it may sound, a few deaths every year due to religious extremism is a very, very small price to pay for the stability brought by religious tolerance and freedom of expression.

"Invitation"? "Advice"? "Urge to give up"? Perhaps you can clarify. Are those actual bans on activities? Is there any penalty for not observing restrictions? I get that government trust levels in Sweden are rather high and so maybe simply "invitations" and polite requests are enough to make people change their behavior, but the way that's worded is really weird to me if those are actual rules people don't get to use their own discretion about.

Yeah, I was thinking icepick. That works too and I don't have to go to the hardware store. Thanks!

Going through my thankfully small backlog, I've been thinking of trying to get into DA Inquisition, for the story. But every video and review I watch keeps reminding me of the impression that I got and led me to uninstall after two hours -- that it feels like a single player MMO. I have neither the time nor the energy for that, as I'm already busy with one MMO. Help?

You expect something worse than a teacher being beheaded in broad daylight by a teenager to happen in the next few days? Heh, I hope not. It is 2020, though.

Special powers allow the government to largely bypass the straitjacket of, uh, the rule of law. Contrary to the version the media are peddling, the government is not bound to respect the stated intention and self-imposed limits to the powers granted by the state of alarm declaration. They claimed it's only to be applied to certain regions, and only to impose certain restrictions, but legally that's hogwash. There are no such limitations. The last state of alarm saw the government abuse its special powers to push through decrees and rules that had little or nothing to do with 'rona — which was deliberate because otherwise they would have been torn to pieces by Parliament. And seeing as how pushback against this overreach was marginal at best and the population largely supports kicking limits on executive power to the curb, I can guarantee that we'll see even more of that. After the state of alarm ceased last time, they pledged to make legislative efforts to avoid resorting to exceptional constitutional measures. Instead, they went on vacation and did **** all. Four months later, new state of alarm. TL;DR: what politician would say no to more power?

Yes, we don't know. And that's what the study ultimately admits -- more research is needed. Until then I'd suggest keeping your shirt on. Where the NYT hack says "78% present signs of heart damage", the study actually says: "A total of 78 patients who recovered from COVID-19 infection (78%) had cardiovascular involvement as detected by standardized CMR, irrespective of preexisting conditions, the severity and overall course of the COVID-19 presentation, the time from the original diagnosis, or the presence of cardiac symptoms. The most prevalent abnormality was myocardial inflammation (defined as abnormal native T1 and T2 measures), detected in 60 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 (60%)" Involvement, not damage. This is because perimyocarditis (the most commonly found side-effect) does not necessarily entail heart damage. It is no joke and in a worst-case scenario it can kill someone, but it is generally treated simply with inflammation meds and rest. Many viral and bacterial pathogens (such as Influenza A) can cause heart inflammation, as well as some vaccines. So, in essence, it's another trash piece written by, what's the term... a science-challenged yahoo? As an aside, I wouldn't trust a word that comes out of the Spanish premier's mouth. His "experts committee" which informed the government decisions until July turned out to be literally a figment of his imagination. The 3 million figure comes, conveniently, just two days before a new state of emergency proclamation. The general lockdown that the article guarantees "no one is proposing" is exactly what the illustrious premier is threatening if the situation doesn't magically improve, and what the state of emergency that's intended to last until May, would allow.

Well, yes, but... As KP said, Brooks is retired, from TV at least. Has been for like 20 years. Not sure if he does theater anymore. His Rutgers profile still lists him as a professor, but that's likely out of date. I don't see him going back to a role that he saw as well closed at the time. Fingers crossed, they can bastardize other characters like Fleet Grand Marshal Wesley or whatever.

It's surely shaping up to be a 2/10 game at least...

Aliens: Crucible. East vs West. Fallout Tactics 2.

Sorry for the Razer plug, didn't find a news item (heh). Finally coming to GOG, though I'm not sure anyone here even cares anymore. I might check it out after researching the mod scene a bit. The co-op is basically all I'm interested in.

I'm so glad I cut my losses early. I guess there's room for some pseudo-profound metaphorical commentary about the state of Trek writing and current times, and how ironic this is considering the writers' politics, but I'm perpetually tired so here's a silly gif instead: OT: I binge-watched Cobra Kai. Can't wait for S3.

I believe the logic goes: if they aren't freedom* lovers, that is necessary and sufficient to make them commies. People vigorously argued that Hitler was actually a socialist in these boards, and I'm sure they will again given the cyclical nature of these threads. * unless exercising freedom bothers me personally, in which case, please please state power crush them! (and they were commies abusing freedom anyway, so it's not really authoritarianism, it's just that the boys sometimes get a bit carried away upholding law and order) When it's the essjaydubyoo hordes defining the boundaries of what's acceptable it's thought policing, but when it's us drawing the line on how far freedom goes, it's just self-evident truth, man. I used to believe that people were just being dishonest and get angry at these hilarious double standards. Not anymore. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

Exitium. ****posting since ca. 2000. He's a bit of a joke over there IIRC. Gotta hand it to him though, the rest of us have to work for a living. His focus on US politics is self-explanatory -- no one gives two ****s about Malaysian politics outside of Malaysia and he's always been a colossal attention whore. Essentially an improbably successful troll. It's profoundly depressing that people still read the garbage he posts.

Haha, I don't think I ever found all secrets in any JK map. Hell, I remember being confused enough by the path you were supposed to take to finish some missions to even think about going for secrets. As for Velen, I think you may have missed an objective. IIRC you could go search for the daughter after asking the fisherman, but before finishing the Baron's quest so you'd have a more complete picture by the time you got back to him. But yes, it's not great design that you can't tell him what's what afterwards if you decide to tell him what you know before heading out -- which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. As for the rest of the sidequests, I believe the plot eventually takes you back to Velen, so you may want to wait to wrap up stuff there.

What? I don't remember this. Granted, even my first playthrough was heavily modded, but I don't remember the game permanently locking me out of content that I couldn't do at the time natural progression would take me to another area. Are you speaking of Velen? And I don't remember actual checklists, but I have very bad memory for games. Is this a task list in your log, or in the interface? Can't you disable secondary quest tracking so that it's not in your face all the time? I definitely see your point that designers shouldn't be overly concerned about balance in single player games. But as for breaking the game, different strokes I guess. To me there's a difference between finding an effective build, and stacking every thinkable advantage in possibly unintended ways to trivialize the content. It's also different from grinding XP out in higher level, easier sidequests or mobs so I can heavily outlevel encounters that are meant to be challenging when faced "naturally" at an earlier point in the game. When that happens I usually lose motivation to continue. It's also a reason why I've become wary of all games now apparently needing RPG mechanics with levels tacked on to them. STALKER is the perfect example of a game that had tangible progression without having a character sheet or assigning arbitrary levels to areas and enemies. I think open world games in general would work better with a similar approach than simply using the typical contrivance of "area is 5 levels above you, rats here will one‑shot you". A satisfactory solution to this problem hasn't been found yet to my knowledge. Oblivion level scaling was widely derided, and DOS2 punished you heavily for going into an area even two levels higher which effectively railroaded progress. In New Vegas literally taking a wrong turn at the start would quickly lead the player to an area with deathclaws that were simply not meant to be dealt with that early in the game. Each of those approaches had a con for each pro. People want to have their cake and eat it too and there's no one‑size‑fits‑all fix.

I stopped ticking checkboxes in games and found I enjoy them a lot more if I play organically and avoid anything that feels remotely like a chore. I believe it also breaks the game less because I'm not going to be hitting the XP cap by the mid game or ridiculously outlevel bosses if there is no cap. This also ties with the merchants thing -- if you don't turn every stone for a copper and take every rusty sword back to the vendor, you won't have a huge bag of gold to throw in merchants' faces as you clean their inventories out. Not saying your complaints are invalid, of course. It's just that the min-max, 100% ALL THE THINGS, OCD playstyle hurts players but also negatively affects design because developers have to account for people obsessively going for absolute BiS gear in optimized builds who then go on message boards and post "lol gaem 2 ez" nonsense. Arbitrary limitations on quick travel, on a single player game, are hard to justify though. And I hate crafting with a passion. Regarding side content, I think some of them you could safely skip, but others tied to main characters, possibly affecting their epilogues and such. It's a huge game and even reading any such guide would probably take a good chunk of the fun out of it.

My understanding is that that's supposed to be handled by the reactions system. If you are in melee range, a wizard starts casting, and you've checked the attack of opportunity reaction from the list, you'll automatically attack and if they fail a concentration check as a result, the spell will be interrupted. Same for counterspells, defensive casting, etc. This is all from what I read before EA dropped so perhaps someone who has played it can explain how it actually works in the game currently.

I don't know man, how often do you get to enjoy a meal without a care in the world, literally? Cheeseburger. And some hooch to wash it down, because I guess I won't have to worry about a hangover and regrets...

I thought Atton was a darker spin on the archetype. He's already a sleazebag when you first meet him, and that turns out to be a pose to hide the fact that he's a literal sadist and murderer. Might be reading more into the character than was originally written into it though.

Perhaps it'll be fun, but at the pace they are progressing, it will almost certainly be seriously outdated by the time it finally "releases". Nothing strange about this either -- most MMOs are outdated at launch when compared to whatever is coming out at the same time in terms of single player games' tech. However, Squadron 42 is not a MMO. I'm in the same boat as you, btw. For me it's, on paper, the game I've always wanted. Every roadmap update is a new disappointment, though. I hope I'll be one to eat crow.