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I never thought I'd DNF a book at over 90%, but I did with Melanie Rawn's first Exiles book. I'm not sure why I even read that far, probably hoping something interesting would finally happen.

Getting put in the Black Cells and subsequently riding all the way from Kings Landing chained in a wagon is hardly a reliable or efficient method of joining the Nights Watch. If secret agent guy can't come up with a convincing story of running from a vengeful lord intent on his execution or something like that, or arrange to get arrested in White Harbor for rape, robbery, theft, what have you, then I have to question his effectiveness as a secret agent. Being able to tell a good story is practically the first requirement for being one. I suspect that whatever happened before he met Arya has no relevance for the story and we therefore won't find out why he was in the Black Cells.

I do wish they innovated more though- it feels more like Hades 1.5 than a true sequel. Yes I know they’re an indie studio but Hades sold extremely well and this feels like the same production values…look at the leap in quality that Larian achieved from DOS2 to BG3. And they were an indie studio on the verge of bankruptcy who were saved by kickstarter and used the profits from DOS2 to truly make a leapfrog product. Supergiant should’ve just tried that a bit. Would’ve liked to see a more cinematic game, with more non linear elements. Or just higher production values in general if they can’t introduce new mechanics.This looks very good but it’s just more of the same that we’ve already seen before. And this studio has usually innovated a lot with each new game.

That isn't all that surprising. Chelsea's underlying numbers are much better than United's. According to Understat, United's expected points is 42 (which would be 15th place). Ten Hag genuinely has us playing relegation level football. We will end up finishing 8th-10th which would be a fairer reflection of our standard of play this season. I doubt we pick up any more points this season.

Jaqen is one of the most mysterious characters in the whole story. He has been discussed in a number of posts, most recently, I think, one of my own: My best guess is that he is acting as a spy, not an assassin; he came to Westeros to gather intelligence. He got himself imprisoned in King's Landing so that he would be sent to the Wall, where he could learn about the Others and the Long Night. He couldn't just walk up there and volunteer; that would have aroused suspicions about his true motive. After his journey North was interrupted and he ended up at Harrenhal, he went back to Braavos. He was reassigned to go to the Citadel, to steal their copy of The Death of Dragons, and to gather more information about dragons, and about magic in general.

I didn't say that you did, as you well know.

IGN's 9 out of 10 review makes it seem like it's 90% done:

Sigh, okay I’ll take your bait- I’m talking about playing half a game and waiting for the rest to come out, I know EA helps in game development and don’t mean that EA is causing the delay as you well know.

I have read some dubious reports that Italy has sent Storm Shadow(alongside SAMPT AA systems) to Ukraine, is that true? I couldn't find any reliable confirmation...

Hating something that makes them able to complete the game faster is some contradictory flow.

Feels like they lost their composure after a couple of possessions didn't go their way. They have a long break to try and fix things, but that's two home games gone. Not looking good for them. Also, was going to make a joke about Gobert's three point shooting getting a boost after the birth of his child, but he doesn't even take them. He's attempted just three for the year, and seventeen for his career.

Go Wolves!!! Poor Ty is apparently missing this due to having sex with someone he cares strongly for. What a loser.

I read about half of the first page, and several of those posts belong to the OP and are very long. I was ready to reply after the first one, but I saw that the OP is complaining that people aren't reading the evidence she's providing or giving it enough thought, so I read quite a bit more. There is a lot more I could read, but I think after reading four or five of your long posts I've given you enough of my attention to entitle me to a response that, whether you agree with it or not, you don't have a right to invalidate. First, I love the attention to detail you're giving to the story. It's true that practically every time a character's last name changes, a branch in the origin family's family tree gets dismembered. Undoubtedly, there are elements of the story where that dismemberment is doing some work to conceal information that readers want to know. In order to find it, we'll have to do the leg work of chasing down those family ties and understanding them in contexts ranging everything from love to war to politics. What you're describing is a kind of analysis. You're arguing for the value of it. Whatever other people might think about the value of this kind of analysis, I'm not those people, and probably neither are some of the other users here, so I don't appreciate being shoehorned into the role of your oppressor from the get go. This is a minor complaint about tone, so don't take it too harshly, but maybe this feedback will be useful to you. The main issue is about content. You present a good kind of analysis and make fine points for its validity, but you haven't shown a proof of its validity. That is to say, you don't appear to have put the idea into practice enough to discover something that readers want to know but don't know. Tytos Blackwood's name may have some hidden relationship to Tytos Lannister. That hidden relationship may be marked by the fact that they have the same first name. And that hidden relationship may be an in-story relationship (as in the parents of the younger Tytos were inspired by the older Tytos) or an out-story relationship (as in GRRM is dropping a clue for the reader, of which the characters need not be conscious or involved in). But those are all speculations, or what a scientist would call hypotheses. If this kind of analysis is indeed useful for helping readers learn things they don't know and want to know, you need to advance a hypothesis to a proof by showing that it actually does predict things in the existing published story that readers don't know and want to know. You're relegating the proof to future books. While it's certainly possible that every meaningful prediction that a kind of analysis implies can be in the sixth and seventh books, it's an unconvincing point when we already have five fat books to work with. Even if we only had one book it would still amount to a confession of failure to prove the efficacy of a kind of analysis. Specific events and revelations in a story are certainly forthcoming in future books, but analysis of a kind should be expected to perform in each book in the series, because the safest assumption is that the author is not reinventing the story's fundamental mechanics or philosophies every time he writes a new installment of the series. With hundreds of families intermarrying for hundreds of years, it's incredibly unlikely that all the dramatic meanings hidden by dismembered family trees are inaccessibly stored up to be revealed all at once in a later book. You should be able to pick a major house at random and find at least one dramatic meaning hidden this way that we don't know. Do it with a few houses and you've got what a scientist would call a theory — a body of knowledge that has withstood an amount of rigorous testing sufficient to greatly eliminate the possibility of fluke in the method. In my own studies, I recently came across this mechanic in House Butterwell. I read that Lord Butterwell's daughters each married into a different family, and I had to follow those daughters into their husbands' family trees to see their children, who could be called Butterwell grandchildren just as fairly as Risley, Costayne and Heddle children. Similarly, the Stark kids are all Tully kids, but we call them Stark because they're also Stark, and because they're foremost Stark, by the laws and customs of their society (and by the laws and customs of our society, it bears noting). Anyway, I only mean to give constructive feedback and I hope I haven't been discouraging. Dismembered family trees are definitely a hurdle that ASOIAF requires us to leap, whether GRRM intended that or not.

My brother still does this btw. And he’s at least trained as a chef.

Given Biden is a neolib and captive of orthodox macro-economic mythology the best that can be said is lesser of two evils, IMO. Perhaps people can pick specific ways they differ but my impression is that this pretty much applies to the USA just as much as to Australia (and most of us) and it doesn't matter too much if it's a R or D in the oval office (or LNC / ALP in Canberra for Australia).

Denver is in trouble here. Gobert didn’t even play tonight and they throttled them.

Lesser evil. Though, I will say, Biden has been better than I expected on some issues, he's still too fucking old and the Israel/Gaza conflict has been a weird hill for him to choose to die on. That said, Trump is also too old and corrupt and a crazy authoritarian... and his brain is pudding being pushed through a strainer. So not much of a choice here. I'll take too old and shitty on specific issues than whatever mutated form of awful Trump has currently evolved into. RFK JR is also old and crazy and not going to win.

And when you wanted to get flashdance fancy ramen: make the ramen but don’t add the flavour powder. Dice up some Bell peppers and celery. Crack two eggs into a pan, add some milk. Whip the powder into that. Throw in the ramen, peppers and celery, fry that sheesh up. Put some shredded cheese on top, let it melt, then serve with some salsa and sour cream. Absolutely delish.

Driveway Shoveling Simulator. It goes well with Lawn Care Simulator for spring and summer.

Yes, this was the late 1990's food source for college students. I believe it was 5 packs for a dollar at the time. Take one Maruchan + a slice of American cheese (see: oil) and Tabasco sauce, and that was life. Keep in mind, this was not subsistence living, this is just how we chose to live in between classes, parties, and various herbal remedies.

I had picked Denver to win this series, but the way the T-wolves are playing suffocating defense along with their length, I don't know now.

The first, because the other guy has already failed any competence/lucidity test the office would require, and somehow is still considered an option by a large chunk of our populace.

There are plenty of models with more specific criteria and are more accurate for party share vote per election. Both.

As an outsider I wanna ask if you guys are voting for Biden simply because he is the lesser evil or do you think he’s competent and lucid enough for a second term ?

IIRC in 2016 Lichtman said he couldn't make a prediction, so far he is being pretty coy this year. I predict he's not going to make a firm prediction this year, which to me leans towards a Trump win. The incumbent wins more often than not, so to not be able to predict an incumbent win is not a good sign for the incumbent. Lichtman's keys do appear to be reliably correlative, there probably needs to be a lot more elections before any causative or predictive value can be asserted. But as far as forming the basis for an educated guess it seems to be more reliable than other attempts at formulating predictive criteria. There's no way his keys can be 100% predictive for elections where he has made, or will make a definitive prediction. So his predictive model actually needs a few failures, to be able to really assess what sort of predictive value the keys have. Of course population shifts towards certain undemocratic preferences, fascism and authoritarianism, can also ruin what predictive value the keys may have objectively had in the past.