All Activity

Spain is apparently willing to give Ukraine some Patriot missiles, not the launchers & systems, alongside other stuff like Leopard 2, IFVs, machine guns etc… one of their Patriot systems is currently located in Turkey on the border to Syria to defend against threats from there…Spain does have an ongoing conflict with Morocco about Ceuta, Melilla and some islands off the Moroccan coast, unlike Greece these territories are not covered by NATO Treaty, so they can’t call in Article 5 in case of an attack. The risk of Morocco launching airstrikes against them is rather minimal though IMHO, especially since people are dying in Ukraine… Greece seems to be under a lot pressure by western leaders since they both have S-300 and Patriot systems, so far they haven’t budged. Poland is another interesting case: they have 2 Patriot batteries located at the Ukrainian border to protect the border regions and logistical hubs from (accidental) attacks inside Poland (has happened before, resulting in the death of 2 polish citizens). Ukraine had asked if they can have one of those 2 systems and place it on their side of the border so it would cover both Poland and Ukraine. The Polish government has declined so far. Turkey has some S-400 systems placed in storage due to the US pressure, maybe they can be convinced to hand them over to Ukraine in exchange for Patriots or something else that Erdogan desires…

So I just finished the first day of the next ten days of grading around 200 research papers and final exams of criminally unprepared undergrads. It’s that time of year where I actually have to work for a living. Why am I mentioning this here? Because of my unmitigated appreciation for my trans students. They aren’t many, but over the last four semesters since Spring 2023, they have been reliably in at least the 90th percentile on all facets of the course. Spent twelve hours today going through shitty paper submission after shitty paper submission on speedgrader and then was like “oh cool!” when I hit one of my trans students cuz I knew I wasn’t gonna have to fail them for using AI. This thread started with Ormond emphasizing the research is inconclusive and thus we should allow doctors, parents, and the trans children themselves decide the best course of action. It then (d)evolved to kar having to elucidate the fact trans women are not threatening women’s sports. I would just like to express my appreciation for my trans students that are markedly more engaged, diligent, and insightful. It’s a small sample of course, but if we’re being this loose on what is “scientific,” seems fair to me.

I always considered Elden Ring and Souls like games to be JRPGs

You can be done all you want, you're still wrong. No-one said JRPGs aren't associated primarily with Japan. We said that not all RPGs made in Japan are necessarily JRPGs. There's a reason no-one credible calls Elden Ring a JRPG even though it's a(n action) role-playing game made in Japan. But also indie games like Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes are clearly JRPGs even though they're made in Quebec and Germany respectively. Because, like I say, despite originating from being RPGs made in Japan, there are genre markers that we associate with that term and both those games fit them to a t.

Oh I enjoy it. I have tons of problems with the ways AI is being deployed. Its concentrating power at an unacceptable rate and in ways that are going to have hellish societal consequences. But that's the fault of the people doing the shit they're doing. The underlying technology is interesting, though, and I can see good things it can be used for. I just don't have much confidence right now that the good will outweigh the bad. On sentience? No. But understanding the black box of LLMs? Some progress. I'd particularly keep an eye on blog posts from Anthropic, they do some cool studies and publish them, trying to figure out wtf is going on inside LLMs, and also ways in which they can fuck up massively.

Not looking good for the Suns. Getting the benefit of a lot of home calls but getting buried under the Wolves threes. Thought they'd put up more of a fight.

Okay…it’s the same as anime. Made for and created primarily by the Japanese, it like anime is consumed globally and one can argue there can be anime made by western studios like Avatar but the vast majority of its content is still associated with Japan. Done on this topic now

Yep, still totally wrong but please continue, this is gonna be fun

Haha I’m just saying from a marketing perspective, clearly a lot of non Japanese people play them too.

My God in heaven, what has Don Lemon done to his face!?! He looks simultaneously decades older and younger. The cheeks of a boy below the eyes of a fifty year old. It's like a deepfake, only not...

It's remarkable, you managed to get almost all of that wrong

I’d expect supplies that can be stored, to be transported by sea, most likely from Pentos. So, salted meat, pickled fruits, honey, wine, and spirits. The GC doesn’t have any kind of bureaucracy to handle supplies, so they would depend purely upon foraging. Fresh items (ale, vegetables, bread, fodder for draught animals and cavalry horses), would have to be sourced locally. That will be a burden on the locals, but presumably, she will be arriving with a substantial military treasury. Paying for supplies would sweeten the pill, somewhat. IMHO, logistical constraints make a successful invasion of Westeros impossible, without the backing of local allies.

JRPGs= RPGS made by Japanese studios primarily marketed towards Japanese people. Let’s keep it simple rather than getting into mechanics

Alright then, I'm ready.

Turing and Voight Kampf tests

The Vale.

I'm not so sure about how successful that was, as a reader who was there, in so many ways, and who has always been friendly with Bill. He's really good at where he's not actually involved in so many ways. He likes that position - distance, big overview from afar that is about how we look now. But I was here, and have been ever since, and his writing didn't work for me with that. What those two events, Kennedys assassination and 9/11 had in common was the endless loops of what people didn't know -- just the image of what happened. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but I really and truly swear that endless 9/11 loop was superficial only, and not what it was for us. Then, well -- hey the response by Bush? to put up enormous billboards on the sides of high rises here downtown, where I lived, less than a mile above the Towers, which I knew well, had even worked in them, which told us to get credit cards and go shopping as the best way to counter and defeat the enemy? God I hated him and Cheney -- and still do.

I think its mostly a fait accompli now though. Not sure if you are from the US or not, but drivers licenses/IDs need to be 'RealID' compliant by next year which allows for facial biometric identification. In time it wont really matter if you have been staying off the grid, your face will be your ID (as mine apparently is now using Global Entry and by giving up my rights to privacy from the government by being a Fed). You don't really even need to link up a birth certificate or social security number, etc with it, if you've gotten on the wrong side of the law, there's nothing preventing the state from prosecuting John/Jane Doe with facial ID # xyz. Add to the fact that virtually everyone already keeps a personal tracking device on them nearly all the time (no insidious tracker chips needed) and I'd guess the age of anonymity is at an end. Given the way we've seen the youngest generation act towards social media, my guess is that in a hundred years, no one will blink an eye about it.

Right, a professional army which is dwindling by the day with a supply line that's had its pillar and stones cut out in more ways than one. It's also a supply line that Daenerys would be loath to reopen. Prepared ahead of time? Daenerys hasn't gotten a foot in the Dothraki let alone the Free Cities and they don't really get a foot in Westeros either. Size of the landmass? Most of that is the Dothraki Sea and the Red Waste, and we already know how much trouble Daenerys had with finding sustenance for a small group.

He has already become a cannibal through his direwolf. The next stage through the tree. He will feed on the blood of the sacrificial victims.

Queen Daenerys Targaryen will arrive in Westeros with a professional army and a large fleet of ships. They will be prepared ahead of time. The supply chain is easy because the Narrow Sea is short in distance. It won't be her army that will be starving for food. It will be the Westerosi who will be boiling their leather boots for soup. And the North will be eating each other before Daenerys arrives. The North will have resored to cannibalism by then. Food will be easier to procure from Essos because of the size of the landmass.

I think that William Gibson did a good job looking at the psychological fallout of 9/11 in Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. The event caused a kind of psychic dislocation in the American worldview that matches the Kennedy assassination in terms of modern critical historical faultlines.

So pissed at the Niners right now….two OTs they were linked to were both there when the Ravens picked immediately ahead of them. Ravens pick one of them. K, just take the other one. But NOPE! Instead let’s trade down a pick, let the Chiefs - the fucking Chiefs! - pick the OT, and draft a corner that could’ve been gotten at the end of the third round.

People tried and made a real mess of it. Particularly since it got started way too soon. Immediately in sf/f genre, for instance, many proposed the Fall of the Towers as the impetus for a plot in which somebody takes advantage to disappear and begin a new life ... w/o taking into account that even in ye olden days of 9/11 digital records were so extensive disappearing and creating a new identity was so difficult one needed deeply expensive and deep connections to do so -- and the government had them. So making it just personal romantic journey was ridiculous. Not to mention disparaging of the people who lost their lives and what their families went through. BTW, of such proposals for fiction I ever saw, not one was proposed by anyone who lives here and went through it. The weird politics of 9/11, though almost as forgotten as Katrina, are still playing out right this moment too, in so many ways. See -- for a single instance, Giuliani.

3. Assuming the Dothraki will want to come.