Fez

I wouldn't be at all surprised by a 7-2 narrow ruling mostly rejecting the petition, but finding that courts can't directly draw maps themselves if they overturn un-state constitutional gerrymanders. Which arguably they shouldn't be anyway, they're not experts either; better to issue instructions and hold people in contempt if they're ignored. And I don't think the really broad stuff, like letting state legislatures change the administration of elections on their own or appointing presidential electors in violation of state law, has any shot.

In exchange for Viktor Bout. As always, it's a tough moral calculus with these kinds of exchanges. But it's yet more proof of what a scumbag criminal state the Russian government is, that they'd use a trumped up marijuana charge to get the leverage to free someone like Bout.

Okay, so in the past hour or so: Congress voted 101-6 to remove him from office The Constitutional High Court denounced his moves as a coup attempt and appears to have unilaterally declared he was removed from office The armed forces and national police issued a statement rejecting him and affirming support for the constitution National police have reportedly arrested him This seems to be an even more poorly planned self-coup attempt than what Trump tried in the US.

Castillo in Peru appears to be attempting a self-coup Seems unlikely to work, though it's hard to get accurate info when events move so quickly. However, it appears that Congress just went into session and is voting to remove him from office immediately. There's a statement from at least one general saying the military supports Congress, but the big question is how accurate that is.

Hard to get all of them though, and the Bourbon pretenders do occasionally pop up in the news saying dumb things.

For sure. Barring an absolutely historic landslide, there's only 4 Republican-held senate seats that Democrats have realistic shots at winning right now (ME-Collins, but only when she retires; WI-Johnson; and the two NC seats). But there's a bunch of Democratic-held seats Republicans could win in even a normal-sized wave beyond the 11 you mention; plus there's Tester, Brown, and Manchin. HOWEVER, there's no telling what might happen in the future. In 2016, Johnny Isakson was winning re-election in Georgia with a 13% margin, and John McCain was doing similar in Arizona. It was far-fetched to suggested that Democrats would hold all 4 senate seats in those states just 4 years later, and keep the ones up 2 years after that. There are other states still very Republican that have been slowly trending Democratic for years, and if those trends continue it would not be similarly shocking if Democrats were holding some senate seats in them by 2030. To me the best bets look like Kansas, Alaska, and Utah; though all of them would probably still hinge on Republicans nominating awful candidates.

Wow, thanks! Loading times are still pretty bad, but I'm shocked at how much that improved the game performance.

Is there a straightforward guide to disabling the launcher? I've been playing a bit of Midnight Suns and I've really liked what I've seen so far, except for the technical mess. Darktide has the shader issue too. It's like every big dev has forgotten how to use their game engines properly.

For reference, here's the first trailer for that: It's hard to make an honest comparison, knowing how bad that movie turned out. But, to me, it's a pretty comparable trailer to this new one.

They appear to be entering hyperspace at 1:08. The crossover finally occurs!

I'm about 40 hours into P5R but haven't played in about 10 days and I'm not sure I'll be getting back to it. I had a lot of fun at first but the combat doesn't feel deep enough to last another 60+ hours, and I'm not enjoying the rest of the game enough to last through it. The characters aren't drawing me in the way P4G's did, most of the confidants aren't much fun, the writing feels very weak in a lot of places (although there are some great bits too), and I'm not interested in the central story (in fact, I'm not even sure what it is). Still, the game simply oozes style and I'm glad I saw it for a while. The core gameplay does feel great and I think they really nailed the 40k atmosphere. I am worried about the amount of grind needed for new weapons though, and the fact that there's only 4 classes and most of the perks look pretty lame makes me concerned that it'll get stale much faster than Vermintide 2. Also, the character creation is fun, but with there being 12 different personalities (and 21 separate voice options) there seems to be much less character banter than VT2 had with its 5 characters. There's still a bit, but most of the dialog appears to be undirected combat barks and quips. Which is a shame. And there doesn't appear to be a story after the prologue, just a setting. I've seen rumors that the story will unfold over seasons. But considering Fatshark's trouble sticking to deadlines, that idea concerns me; if it's even true at all.

Okay, so how do you explain Frank McCloskey getting seated over Rick McIntyre in 1984? That was pure power politics by Democrats.

It's really not. The House could've (and debated in committee) seating Rita Hart in 2020 despite Miller-Meeks being certified by Iowa as the winner. There was no question the House had the power to do so, Democrats just didn't want to overturn the election result even though there was grounds to do so. ETA: Another example would the 1984 IN-04 race, where Democrats actually did ignore Indiana's certification and seated the other candidate after conducting their own, independent recount.

It won't happen though; funny as the prospect is. The House has final say over its membership and it would seat Ciscomani as the winner anyway. But it won't come to even that, Arizona law doesn't actually allow the state to certify without all the county tallies (although Arizona law also doesn't allow a county to refuse to certify, but that just means a judge needs to compel them to do so).

I believe he and his family moved to Michigan earlier this year, so I suspect he's done with Indiana politics. Maybe a run for Michigan governor in 4 years instead.

I think the biggest tangible way a primary loser Trump hurts the GOP nominee is by going back to his usual playback and suing; trying to find courts that somehow would make him the nominee instead. None of them would. But depending on how lucky he gets with lower judges, he could possibly tangle up the nomination process for several weeks; delaying the nominee's ability to access general election funds the RNC has raised and stuff like that. Which in turn could lead to more inefficient campaign activities when the dust is settled, like having to pay more expensive TV ad rates.

In sad news, we already our have first vacancy of the new House: Donald McEachin (D-VA) has died. It's a safe Democratic district, but it makes the Republican margin for error slightly larger until the election is held. And goes to show just how unstable the House might've been if Democrats had held an extra couple of seats.

Seems like none of them. I really thought Democrats would pick up CA-13 (this is different from the old, safe CA-13, aka Barbara Lee's district) but it looks like Gray has lost it by 560ish votes. Final House tally appears to be a 222-213 R majority. Which is slim, but not unprecedented; in fact it's the mirror image of the majority Democrats won in 2020.

From the people who made Searching, which is one of the more creative movies I've seen in the past several years:

That doesn't surprise me at all. I kinda suspect I've already messed up my chance of recruiting at least character I met. I'm going to try staying guideless though, and just see where it takes me. I've never played any Ogre games. I'd heard about them way back when, but never looked into them. And then kinda forgot they existed. It was only the announcement earlier this year of this remake that put it back on my radar.

I'm into Chapter 2 now of Tactics Ogre, and one more point I want to make is that I am shocked at how tanky everyone has become; both my units and the enemy. It takes an average of probably 7 hits now to take a unit down, and knights and beasts can take far more than that. Combine that with how large the battles are, I started at having 8 party members per battle and am up to 10 now, and how plentiful healing is, and it turns everything into a slugfest. Alpha strikes, which are the key strategy in so many other tactics games, are non-existent; everything has too much health. It's makes for a very interesting time, and has led me to actually status effect spells regularly. From what I've read, this is a big change at least from the PSP version, due to archers being significantly nerfed from what they had been. Apparently they had been death machines who would alpha strike regularly. Now they can do a decent hit against unarmored units (though no better than a melee attacker, just at range) and often will do literally 1 damage against knights and other high defense unit (for context, I'm at level 11, out of 50 I think, and a knight generally has about 650 health).

I've been playing the remaster/redesign of Tactics Ogre Reborn that came to Steam last week. I never played the original SNES game or the PSP remake, this is my first exposure to it, no nostalgia at all. And it's really good! Similar to FFT, in a lot of ways (which makes a ton of sense considering Yasumi Matsuno made both of them) and better than pretty much all of the indie FFT-like games on Steam that I've played over the years. Other than the voice acting (and I assume the character portraits), I don't know what's new (or from the PSP remake) compared to the original SNES game. But I would think the combat maps and the game script are basically the same (though I understand that combat itself has been reworked each iteration), and I'm shocked at just how good they both are for a game that old. I'm only 10 hours in, but the story might even be better than FFT (which might primarily be a function of having a well-done translation) and it appears to have a branching narrative. I don't know precisely how much things might change, but I appear to have made a couple pretty large choices and one enormous choice. The characters aren't quite as developed yet, and the game relies on a lot of shorthand, but it's fun. I also really appreciate that the two story characters who've joined my party have still had a few lines here and there even though they could perma-die in any battlle. In FFT almost every character stopped saying anything after joining. The combat system itself isn't as good as FFT, with a lot less character customization. No cross-class skills exist, each character only gets what their class has. And there is no class level, only character level, so if you switch classes you auto have everything unlocked up to your current level. So basically there's almost never a good reason to switch classes, just hire a new character instead. And each character appears to only be able to have 4 active skills equipped at a time, which is a big problem for magic users. But the fights themselves are good fun!

It's not about being conservative, most of the anti-Netanyahu parties are conservative (or centrist at the most) themselves. The actual liberal parties combined to get all of 4 seats it seems; Labor only just made the cut-off and Meretz missed it. Likud voters simply seem to think that Netanyahu is the only one who can maintain Israel's security. Meanwhile the religious parties just get all the voters of their denominations, same as always. And the "Religious Zionism" party got the outright racists and fascists, who are now allowed to proudly be part of the mainstream thanks to Netanyahu.

It looks like he'll easily put together a majority. It's not that he did substantially better than last election. But the way turnout shook out, it appears that a few of the smaller parties that aren't with him will just barely miss the 3.25% cut-off to enter the Knesset. Meaning rather than each of them getting 4 seats, they'll get 0 seats and those 4 get distributed among the larger parties. It's a complicated formula and nothing is certain yet, it's still possible I think (though unlikely) for those smaller parties to get in. But right now it seems like Netanyahu and his allies will have 65 seats; and 61 seats is needed for a majority. The worst part is that this majority will rely on the extreme far right (as in, "was once designated a terrorist organization even by Israel") which seems to have gotten 13 seats. Netanyahu controls Likud with an iron fist, so none of them will revolt; and the only other coalition partners are the religious parties, which will allow anything to happen so long as their schools get funding, their students get exempt from military service, and their rabbis get to control religious doctrine in the country. Whatever the extremists demand, they'll get.

Israel has its 5th election in 4 years today. Continued gridlock is the most likely result, but from the polls it does seem possible that Netanyahu will be able to put together an uncompromising far-right government. The big question seems to be which smaller parties don't make the cutoff to get Knesset seats and how those seats get distributed by the electoral formula, rather than any changes in voter trends. Reports are that turnout is actually very high, rather than there being the anticipated voter fatigue. But it remains to be seen whether that extends to Arab Israelis as well. There were stories last week that the Arab parties were concerned that they'd miss the cutoff because their voters were giving up on voting after not seeing any improvements for years.