Fez

Some of those messaging bills can be legit tough votes for Democrats. Some can even end up as law, like the DC criminal code recission. Biden didn't actually threaten a veto on the gas stove bill in his disapproval message.

It's what I was posting about yesterday, with the failed rule vote. They seem to be threatening to keep doing that. Which, if they succeed, is more than performative. It means that House Republican Leadership will not be able to hold any votes on anything else, without either caving to the HFC or cutting a deal with Democrats (which is very unlikely for many reasons, for anything short of ending a shutdown).

Decided to be part of the gaming zeitgiest for the first time in a while and picked this up too. I've gone through the prologue as both a rogue (melee) and sorcerer (ice) and I can't decide between them which I want to stick with.

Do you mean the HFC actions or the underlying bill around gas stoves? With gas stoves, there was another report a few months back finding that they're a significant source of indoor air pollution. And relatedly, New York passed a law banning stoves for new homes built starting in 2025; as part of their effort to shift the state more toward renewable energy. As a result, as with every change no matter how big or small, conservatives took this as a foundational attack on their way of life and it became yet another huge culture war fight. With the HFC, they're a bunch of whiny loudmouths who are pissed that McCarthy managed to bypass them on the debt ceiling and are acting out. But they aren't trying to remove him (yet, at least) because there is no one else who can win a Speaker vote right now. So instead they forced the first floor vote failure on a rule since 2002.

Things are getting spicy in the House. Republicans planned to pass a resolution barring the administration from implementing new regulations on gas stoves (just a meaningless messaging bill since the senate will probably never vote on it). But in the floor vote on the rule to allow debate, most of the HFC voted 'no' in protest of the debt limit bill. And since all Democrats voted 'no' since its a dumb bill (and the minority party almost always votes no rules no matter what), the vote is currently failing 207-219. The vote hasn't been closed yet (after 50 minutes), so maybe something gets worked out. But if this isn't a one-off, the House is now ungovernable without Democratic support.

I'm no expert. But my understanding we already have some decent theoretical models for warp drives, and if we don't wipe ourselves out maybe we get to test them out eventually. An alien species that was more peaceful than ours, and with a bit more advanced energy production, could probably test them at roughly our current level of technology. Maybe none of them actually work in practice, but to me it seems like the paradox is still fully in place.

That would make sense to me. Russia purposefully fucking over Crimea like this seems kinda counter-intuitive.

Happy to sheepishly be wrong and I have bought some new investments instead. And in the case of my Roth IRA, I literally just rebought some of my old positions that I had previously been happy with. All in all, since it had such minor tax implications, it actually was a decent opportunity to rebalance my portfolio anyway, and I think things really were dicey a couple weeks ago, I have no regrets.

Democrats did vote against the rule, but only 2 Republicans did instead of all 3 HFC members. So things proceed smoothly. Honestly not sure what would've happened if the rule was defeated.

It's not misleading, it was a big bill that Obama negotiated and wanted passed, and House Dems were against it. As for the BCA, 95 still means a majority of them opposed it. Unfortunately, House Report 112-190 which allowed for consideration of the BCA passed the rules committee in an unrecorded vote, so I've no idea if the House Dems in the rules committee voted against bringing it to the floor. But again, didn't matter since they had no power to block it anyway.

In a similar situation, with a Democratic president negotiating with a Republican house we got the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. In that floor vote, only 17 House Democrats voted for the bill, while 171 voted against it. McGovern is the only House Dem on the rules committee now who was in the House in the time and he was in the 171. Democratic votes weren't needed in committee since Republican leadership was still strong enough that they could ensure that only their allies filled the Republican seats on the committee. It is different this time, in that Democratic votes will actually be needed, both on the floor and in the committee. But there is precedent for the House Democrats to near fully reject a deal that their president negotiated with House Republicans. We don't know yet how House Dems are going to come down on this bill.

Right, and if those 3 voted against and the House Dems on the committee voted against it, that's be a 7-6 vote to block the bill from hitting the floor. House Dems weren't involved in these negotiations and one thing that isn't McCarthy's job is whipping Democratic votes. But if the House Dems feel that the White House has given up too much, things can get complicated fast.

It's a question of whether the bill can even get to the floor though. I believe there are enough HFC members on the rules committee to block it, unless the Dems there vote for it. And if their votes become necessary they may demand negotiations to make the bill more palatable to the House Dems. Which there isn't really time for.

This is a very weird one. It looks nothing like the old game, as you said, and its not like the old game was some huge IP that will help boost sales by getting slapped on something new. Probably no one under age 35 has even heard of it, and even among those old enough it was not an enormous seller. All just feels very odd.

Yesterday I moved everything I had in the stock market to cash in preparation for a debt ceiling-related crash. Fortunately, the tax implications of that will be pretty minor for me. If I'm wrong, I'll sheepishly buy some new index funds in a couple weeks. And if I'm right, at least I'll be able to "buy the dip" while the economic chaos unfolds.

As I said many times last year, Democrats should've at least tried to fix this issue while they had the House. They could've put up a reconciliation bill in the lame duck to just raise/eliminate the debt ceiling and at least force Manchin/Sinema to vote against it on the floor. Instead, they did literally nothing and now here we are. It was literally the most predictable thing imaginable.

Is Bronny actually good enough to make an NBA roster without the promise of his dad coming over? (Legit question, I dunno). Because if not, I don't see why he'd be in such a rush to just play in his dad's shadow and then get cut as soon as his dad retires. As for the Lakers, its hard to imagine them getting much better than this any time soon. Even if they manage to get another big star, it'll mean trading all their depth away again. And Lebron+AD+3rd guy is not enough to win a title I don't think. I don't think Lebron goes to another team though, hanging out in LA and having easy access to USC's home games is too big an incentive to stay. Which means he's probably not getting another title, unless he's still playing 4+ years from now getting 10ish minutes off the bench while some next generation of LA superstars is leading the team.

RPS has some details: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/total-wars-next-stop-is-ancient-egypt-with-total-war-pharaoh Basically it's Bronze Age-era Egypt (with 4 factions, unclear on the differences between them yet), alongside the Canaanites (2 factions) and Hittites (2 factions also). And the map will extend up to Anatolia. Based on the faction names, and what might make sense in terms of having at least one recognizable name in the marketing, I suspect the game is set right after the death of Ramesses II' successor, Merneptah. And there was in fact a civil war then. So 1203 BC.

Seems like Ukraine came pretty close to becoming a nuclear power today

Yeah, from what I've read the problems run deep enough that you can't really brute force past them with a sufficiently over-powered machine.

To be clear, I'm talking about the end of Kingmaker. Owlcat seemed to have learned their lesson for Wrath and the final dungeon there isn't nearly as bad. Wrath's is still tough (turns out giving enemies the 'ascendent element' mythic ability and letting them cast 3 spells per turn can cause them to really carve you up), but isn't a slog. Whereas Kingmaker's is both tough and a slog, and (spoilers)

Yeah, I love the idea of the kingdom-building, but in practice it feels bolted-on and a distraction from the main appeal of the game. Wrath has a similar extra system, but it's at least a lot less time-intensive. And they made elements of it, the council meetings, much more engaging. On a separate note, I don't want to spoil anything for you, but I strongly encourage you to make sure all your characters have the 'blind fight' feat by the time you go to the final dungeon, if not sooner. In general, it's a good feat throughout the game (at least on martial characters) due to how many enemies have concealment effects. But the final dungeon (a slog no matter what) has a ton of enemies, literally hours and hours worth, that all have instant-death gaze attacks. Without 'blind fight' it can be literally impossible to beat the dungeon, unless you set the difficulty to the lowest setting to cutback on how much save-scumming is necessary to beat the gaze difficulty checks. It's some of the worst game design I've seen in years.

I agree with Arakasi. However, if you truly can't stand the crusade stuff you can just set it to 'auto' and ignore it. I believe that prevents you from going down the lich or swarm-that-walks mythic paths (since they require specific crusade projects to be finished), but every other mythic path should be fine. Although I'd suggest setting it to "easy", picking up the spellcaster generals, and just blowing through it. There's some fun narrative stuff in the events and rank-up conversations. Plus some pretty good loot.

Speaking of ARPGs, has anyone played Last Epoch? It's supposedly finally getting its 1.0 release sometime this year, after being in early access since 2019. It seems interesting. But the last time I got a lesser known ARPG it was Wolcen, which was not a good game, so I'm more cautious now.

TBH, the length difference of the base games (excluding DLC) isn't that big. Kingmaker is an enormous game too, probably only 10% or so shorter than Wrath. But it's worth playing first not only because it's hard to go back, systems-wise. But because its a much more low-stakes, traditional adventure. Whereas Wrath is an epic, fate-of-the-world adventure. Also, as a minor point, there is one character who is in both games, and their story is more satisfying having the context of Kingmaker.