Werthead

One of the destroyed shops being called "LIEFELD'S JUST FEET" did genuinely make me laugh.

Also, Blind Al is having a moment, as the actress was also killing it on Fallout recently. Nice job at 80.

Flooding in Kurgan has resulted in the inundation of the Dobrovnolnoye uranium mine, flooding the nearby Tobol river with uranium. Depending on the quantities this could have a significant impact on local health (note that any quantity is bad, but small is obviously better than "lots").

British intelligence (and, well, common sense) has identified the next main Russian target as Chasiv Yar, west of Bakhmut. The goal here is to retake the ground retaken by Ukraine last year between Chasiv and Bakhmut (it already has to the north, not quite to the south) and then attack the town itself. The town is already in Russian artillery range. Ukraine has had some time to build up defences there and the town has a formidable defence of occupying high ground which is very hard to assault.  But not impossible, and Russia has reportedly assigned 20,000 troops to the mission. That's actually less then they've used in assaults on Avdiivka and substantially less than the original battle for Bakhmut. If that's all they have and their start mounting their 800-1,000 casualties a day meat assaults, then clearly the maths do not work in Russia's favour.

Still, there's some uneasiness over Ukraine's strength in the region and how hard they'll fight for the city, and how fast supplies can arrive to reinforce. Russia is apparently seeking victory by 7 May, Putin's inauguration, which seems ambitious.

There is a diplomatic effort unfolding. Zelenskyy's peace plan will be presented to a conference of ~80 countries in Switzerland in mid-June, including Russian-friendly (ish) nations like South Africa and India (and probably Brazil). He has invited the Chinese to participate and they have made encouraging noises. Xi seems to be playing both ends against the middle, having recently met Lavrov and Scholz, will meet Blinken this week in China and Macron in Paris in early May. Putin will visit China in mid-May as the first major visit of his new term (which Russia is selling as a big honour to China, China probably sees it more as desperation). Xi I think is keeping his options open, but might be willing to consider a scenario in which China brokers a diplomatic end to the war (akin to its recent Iran-Saudi initiative, superficial as that was). I would not expend vast amounts of optimism over this scenario.

Speculation over Kadyrov's health mounting after his hospitalisation last year. He's filmed himself lifting stones - with difficulty - and jogging - resulting in a red face and trying not to keel over. Kadyrov was allegedly diagnosed with pancreas necrosis in 2019, which has a reasonable 70% survival rate with surgery and medical intervention. It's unclear to what extend Kadyrov complied with those instructions, but he's not looking to happy at the moment.

Ukraine has reached an agreement in principle to acquire four additional Patriot batteries from other countries, in addition to the one from Germany secured last week.

Transformers has had enough different timelines (it launched with two completely unrelated timelines proceeding in tandem, which remains weird), continuities, reboots, relaunches and retakes that doing an animated prequel comedy movie is perfectly valid. If it works or not it doesn't really matter because something else will be along soon to pick up after it.

Incidentally, May is I believe the 40th anniversary of the franchise, as that's when the toys launched in the US market (under the Diaclone and Micro Change banners, they'd already been out in Japan for 2-3 years by that point, of course) and the first issue of the Marvel Transformers comic was released.

According to Mark Warner, chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, there are a fair number of ATACMS in the first delivery tranche for Ukraine, they'll be in-theatre in under a week.

A Slovakia citizen launched a crowdfunding campaign to contribute to buying shells for Ukraine. Otto Simko is a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the 1944 Slovak national uprising against the Nazis, was a key organiser. In 48 hours the campaign raised over €2 million.

Some pretty apocalyptic lines coming out in Russia on Telegram and in some milblogger circles, including those cowed by Girkov's arrest. They believe the new funding deal, the loss of $350 billion in assets to Europe (even if only temporarily until the war ends, but seem resigned to it going to Ukraine) and more have made the long-term strategic outcome of the war for them much more doubtful.

Sevastopol harbour has taken a big hit, one Russian vessel ablaze. Unconfirmed reports that it's the Kommuna, Russia's largest salvage ship which has been in constant service with the Russian Navy since 1912.

US satellite photos now show that the radar control system for Isfahan's S-300/400 defence complex has been levelled. The Israeli attack did succeed in destroying the target as claimed.

8 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I read Heretics and Chapter House over 30 years ago.  (yikes!)  Planning on rereading them soon.  Did KJA just make up the bit about AI, or was that actually what the Honored Matres were fleeing from in canon when they came back to the formerly imperial space?

That would make a whole lot of sense narratively, but I feel like reading the KJA books was like watching season 6 or 7 on HBO or watching the Two Towers movie.

No, they made all that shit up.

Frank Herbert was probably building up to the reveal of a Tleilaxu empire in deep space that was the real "great enemy," based on some of the stuff in the books. A robot comeback was not really on the cards.

Just now, DMC said:

Good luck on that one!

Even the next-most unhinged members of the MAGA-Repubs seem to think she's completely lost the plot, in a "do we need to call an ambulance here and keep sharp objects out of her hands?" kind of way. So maybe there is some hope that they can do something about her.

Equipment shortages on the Robotyne front had gotten so bad for the Russians that their last attack involved troops advancing over a fairly extensive amount of flat ground towards fortified positions, accompanied by a lone IFV, which was taken out by an ATGM in short order. This was after their previous "armoured assaults" involved troops riding unarmoured trucks and jumping clear when they were destroyed to advance without cover.

Both the Ukrainian defenders and Russian attackers seem utterly disbelieving that they were doing this. Russian soldiers are pushing for a halt to offensive operations on this front and just holding the line, before they run so low on men and material that the Ukrainians could just roll back over their positions (mines notwithstanding).

Ukraine disabled another S-300/S-400 complex by eliminating its radars with a HIMARS strike. This appears to be a shorter-range setup than the one they had in Crimea, but it's unclear why it was located relatively close to the front lines.

Blinken is visiting China next week. China has started to show increasing signs of scepticism over the course of the war in recent weeks, although still very moderate. Blinken might use this as an opportunity to encourage China to benefit from (very mildly) thawing US-Chinese relations to the benefit of the stalling Chinese economy and to discourage further support for Russia. Sceptical that will do much, but I guess never hurts to try.

Medvedev taking the news well.

Ukrainian soldiers were watching the vote live from trenches along the front. Lots of cheering, some guys bursting into tears. Probably the most emotional US Congress vote of all time, for these guys.

Apparently the US military and Ukraine have been working behind the deal on what weapons and ammunition would be covered by the initial deal and this will be in Ukraine within days, not even weeks.

Interesting.

Janny Wurts was apparently urged by her published to split the final volume of her Wars of Light & Shadow mega-series into two volumes. She refused, and when the published started arguing about it, Wurts noted that the book is 298,000 words in length (almost exactly the same as A Game of Thrones). She then listed the sheer number of epic fantasy novels published in one volume of comparable length or even much greater length, and her publisher backed down.

Wurts also noted that the first book in the series did have to be split in two (Ships of Merior and Warhost of Vastmark) way back in the 1990s, but that book was vastly bigger than this one.

On 4/19/2024 at 1:44 PM, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Holy fuck, The Beach is a book?!?!?!?!? I've always argued that's one of Leo's five best films. 

Written by Alex Garland, probably better known now as a film writer and director: he was behind current semi-controversial film Civil War, and Men, Annihilation and Ex Machina. He also wrote 28 Days Later and Sunshine for Danny Boyle. He also wrote Dredd.

6 minutes ago, 3CityApache said:

What's missing from that list for me: Six Feet Under, The Shield and Justified at least. Perhaps a few more around A-Tier, like The Boys, Fargo or - hell - Fawlty Towers or even first four seasons of House.

I've only seen the first season of Justified I fell off it hard in Season 2. I should try again. The Shield never clicked for me, but I was very young when I saw it so I'd probably appreciate it now. I did really like Six Feet Under to start with but fell off in the second or third season (I think a bunch of these shows suffered from the "Season 1 on regular TV but then it moves to expensive satellite TV from Season 3 and everyone in Britain stopped watching it," syndrome of the late 1990s to early 2010s).

The Boys is great fun but it's not that good. Fargo is S-tier (Season 1 anyway, 2 and 3 are not quite as tight). Fawlty Towers I've liked but not been super-fanatical about: it's mainly a string of absolute classic jokes and comic setpieces held together by some very unfunny jokes and meandering mehness inbetween.

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

@Werthead

Any speculation on the political and military impact assuming all goes well and the $60 Billion military aid package is passed by the US House today?

The Russians are really pissed off about it, they think it's the difference between victory this or next year, and possibly the war being extended past their ability to fight it.

The key factor will be delivery time. Once the funding goes through, if more ammo and weapons can be deployed in weeks, Ukraine may have dodged a bullet. If it takes months and months to arrive, Ukraine could still suffer a lot in the interim.

The key point is the combination of this funding bill plus all the stuff Europe has done whilst America had its finger up its arse may actually give Ukraine enough material to mount a counter-offensive this summer, either in its own right or a spoiling counter-offensive designed to disrupt Russian plans for their own offensives.

For me it goes something like (nowhere near exhaustive):

S-TIER

• The Wire
• a gap, then the rest are not far off par with one another
• Deadwood
• The Sopranos (from what I've seen, this is finally high on my list for a full watch)
• Band of Brothers
• Rome
• Halt & Catch Fire
• Edge of Darkness
• State of Play
• Andor (provisional, depends on Season 2)
• Better Call Saul
• Chernobyl

A-TIER

• Shogun (provisional)
• Manhunt (provisional)
• Game of Thrones (Seasons 1-4)
• True Detective (Season 1)
• Battlestar Galactica (Seasons 1-2, first few eps of Season 3)
• Breaking Bad
• Ultraviolet

There's a lot of shows that are personal favourites but are also highly variable in quality so I'd be dubious about putting them that high up in any kind of an attempt at an objective list despite their best episodes approaching A-tier or S-tier quality (i.e. Babylon 5, Doctor Who, most sitcoms, most Star Trek shows, though Deep Space Nine does flirt with the A-tier).

I haven't seen Twin Peaks since it first aired, so I'd need to rewatch to determine where to put it.

Ukraine hit Kardymovo in Smolensk Oblast overnight, setting fire to two oil depots. Both depots are still on fire as of this morning. Ukraine also destroyed the Novo Bryanskaya electrical substation yesterday.

Ukraine also hit and damaged Russia's only 29B6 Container over-the-horizon radar system outside Kovylkino. This system can monitor long-range ballistic and cruise missile attacks from several hundred kilometres away. The facility seems to be operational, but one of the two primary antennas appears to have been damaged. This facility has been monitoring airborne activity over Ukraine but it has a major blindspot between the antennas where vehicles could approach and destroy it. The main reason it's survived so far is its distance from the front, but it is now in range of Ukraine's new long-range attack drones.

Bizarre factoid of the day: after the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Donbas, under Russian pressure, the US apparently agreed to a stricture that its weapons transferred to Ukraine cannot be used by the Azov battalion due to its alleged Nazism. For some reason this stricture is apparently still in place. Ukraine has been getting around it in some ways but to not annoy the US, they're following it in the main. There's now a growing (and hugely late) movement to have that stipulation repealed, given that Azov's alleged Nazism is a thing of the past.

The Russian losses at Novomykhailivka are officially deranged:

1 minute ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Remember when this war was supposed to be over in a week? With some of the first Russian troops in Ukraine around Kyiv packing their parade gear? 

Odd, as the Russians are not known for their sunny optimism.

Even more of a fun fact: in 2009 Alonso was eight years into his Formula One career.

Listening to the Rest is Politics podcast and Rory Stewart, who has contacts in various parts of the world since his days working in the UK foreign office, cited the Chinese government as being privately "alarmed" at some of the decisions North Korea has been/is taking, which is, y'know, reassuring.

Tim's videos on all aspects of Fallout are pretty good, from the original idea to them working on it for three years (an insane amount of time to spend on a video game in the mid-1990s) to how they settled on the retrofuturistic setting and absolutely horrifying Steve Jackson when he came in to play it with the level of adult content, to the point he refused to give them a GURPS licence and they had to completely rework the rules system eight months from launch. He even has a good bit about how they came up with the box art (Leonard Boyarsky created it on a whim one day and never got paid for it, as they folded it into his regular duties).

There's also some interesting stuff about internal Black Isle/Interplay politics, and how he left partway through Fallout 2 after Fallout outsold initial projections several times over and he didn't get his bonus, and several other developers resigned in solidarity with him.

He also has great stuff on the running of Troika and the absolute brain-numbing requirements of being the company boss, which is why they terminated the company even though they could have kept going despite the various problems Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Temple of Elemental Evil and Arcanum had.

33 minutes ago, Relic said:

Gonna push back a bit to say that The Wire was the greatest show ever made by the end of season 4, and remains so. No other television show comes close to portraying meaningful important issues with such wit, humor, and empathy. I'll go as far as to say that the Wire is the greatest work of American fiction ever out in screen.

I'm glad you're enjoying more than ever, but it was always special.

The two statements are not incompatible

I thought The Wire was the best TV show ever made (traditional, very minor Season 5 caveats aside) after first watching it, but you could say other shows were close behind it. I think now that's not so much the case. Other shows in that bracket I found were weaker on a rewatch (Breaking Bad's flaws are a lot more apparent on a rewatch, and pushed it out of my Top 5, maybe outside the Top 10).

Finished up with The Bear. Decent, a little bit overrated but when it was on fire it was really good. Other times it was a bunch of adults screaming about cheese.

Another couple of episodes of Manhunt down and damn this is good. Feels like it should be getting as much talk as Shogun. Tobias Menzies is outstanding.

Checked out Ford vs. Ferrari and very solid, great performances from Christian Bale and Matt Damon. Unlike some other recent-ish racing movies (like the otherwise solid Rush), the blending of real racing and CGI is faultless.

Kicked off a rewatch of The Wire and I'm pretty certain this show is only getting better and better with age.

Some analysis now that Israel was targeting the early warning detection radar in Isfahan which is tasked with picking up incoming missiles aimed at the Natanz nuclear facility. Unofficial US analysis is that the radar system was completely destroyed through three direct hits from air-launched cruise missiles. Iran's AA systems failed to engage until the missiles were practically on top of the target.

I've seen some speculation that the missiles were launched from inside Iran's radar detection net by an F-35, which would confirm the long-circulating rumour that Iran's Russia-bought S-300 and S-400s cannot see or lock onto F-35s in flight. But that's very speculative. It would make more sense to launch them from well outside Iran's radar.

That's a lot of messaging to the Iranian regime in one strike, and of course the worry that Israel deliberately took out the radar to deliberately take out Natanz itself in a follow-up strike. That would be extremely dangerous, with an unknown capacity for nuclear contamination of the surrounding area (with Isfahan just to the south and Tehran not far to the north).

The attack was so limited that Iran seemed embarrassed by the idea of retaliating against it, which is amusing.

However, the attacking drones/missiles (nobody is clear on what they were) sailed passed Iran's antique AA systems (#buyrussian) and were only intercepted apparently quite close to their potential targets (Isfahan airbase or the nearby nuclear sites), possibly because Israel had them loitering rather than proceeding directly to the target.

If deliberate, that's a genuinely subtle use of military power by Israel, a sentence I did not think I'd be typing.

3 hours ago, Bironic said:

Ukraine claims to have shot down a Tu22M Bomber with an S-200 SAM near Krasnodar, while Russia claims it crashed due to a technical malfunction...

Maybe both simultaneously?

With an S-200 does suggest the aircraft was in serious trouble anyway, that's a very old system. Ukraine has said they are using an "unknown weapon," possibly the up-ranged Patriot blamed for previous Russian losses.

This is a critical moment, if Russian Tu-22 pilots start refusing to fly combat missions within range of Ukrainian AA (as it's believed many Su-34/35 pilots have after heavy losses), then their ability to send cruise missiles far beyond Ukrainian front lines will be lost and attacks like today's on Dnipro will become impossible.

There is also continued US speculation that all of this is creating "elbow room" for F-16s to operate closer to the front than originally hoped, from where they can engage Russian AA systems and aircraft engaged in the glide bomb campaign.

The crash footage makes it look like either a hit or the engine exploded.

Ukraine has scored a big scalp, the commander of the 59th Guards Signal Brigade was killed in a Storm Shadow strike on his unit's headquarters in Luhansk.

One Russian analyst, Shlepchenko, has said that he does not expect a Russian major breakthrough, and at best a very slow pushback of Ukrainian forces modest distances in some areas. His analysis chimes with a few opinions I've seen recently that both Ukraine and Russia are experiencing deficiencies in recruitment, ammunition, war fatigue, morale issues and equipment issues almost simultaneously with one another, and western political/journalistic analyses have not accounted for Russian problems in these areas whilst Ukraine is also suffering from them. He estimates that the war will continue into 2027 at this rate.

Russian partisan units continuing to shell Belgorod, which surprised me, I thought that'd withdrawn. Heavier rockets were used to hit Russian military and police sites in and another the city, and Russia was force to use some pretty big AA rockets to shoot them down, which is quite expensive.

A Buryatian soldier has returned home to to find that robbers broke into his house and stole everything, even unbolting and scarpering off with the toilet. His income from fighting in Ukraine for two years is basically going to go entirely on replacing his property.

12 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Why have 22 episode television seasons died out  really enjoying this show !

The 22 episode model worked when audiences were willing to accept low-budget shows airing year round with ridiculous gaps for repeats. 22 episodes were needed so they could get to syndication within 4 seasons, and selling advert slots in the shows paid for them.

That's not really the case any more. The streaming argument is that more than 8 episodes doesn't make sense economically, and with 8 episodes with movie-quality CGI it just takes a huge amount of time and effort and money to make them. Some recent network genre experiments failing (like the new Quantum Leap) seem to have reinforced their arguments.

The new regs are causing issues. By eliminating downforce (to reduce dirty air), the cars don't stick to the track as easily and without a huge power increase from the engine (which will stay the same as now, only generating more from the battery) that means the cars will either 1) go slower or 2) take off. I think the idea is that the cars will be at least somewhat lighter (due to more power coming from a battery rather than actual engine parts), which actually exacerbates the problem of the car being blasted into the air.

I've seen some ideas about they maybe going in a different direction with aero and slimming the cars down to the 2010-2016 level (which look almost comically narrow by today's standards), which should reduce aero backwash from a smaller crossframe and also improve the racing at narrower circuits. Not sure how seriously that is being considered for 2026, because the design needs to lock imminently (also the dirty air problem was definitely still present before 2017, if not as bad).

The active aero seems to be part of the solution, but it's also hideously complicated to get it working on both wings simultaneously, so there's some angsting about that.

Sainz, meanwhile, seems to be down to deciding between Mercedes, Red Bull and Audi, with Mercedes seen more as a long shot. Audi have apparently made a money offer that Red Bull cannot match, but Red Bull's form is powerfully persuasive.