David Selig

The Wolves were a tough matchup for Denver in the playoffs even last year when they were without McDaniels and Reid in the playoffs and Ant was not quite the superstar he is now. They gave Denver a serious fight even though they had to play Jaylen Nowell (who is out of the league now) and the corpse of Austin Rivers for significant stretches. So I expected them to have a good chance to win this year, especially clearly struggling physically against the Lakers. But I did not expect them to dominate to such an extent, especially without Rudy last night. Their coordination on defense is just incredible. And the more leeway the league allows for physical contact this season is clearly in their favour, that second quarter run couldn't have happened last year because they would have been whistled for 5 fouls in the first 2 minutes.

This was an amazing series between the Knicks and the Sixers. So much drama, so many big shots, so many ref controversies... Kudos to the Knicks for not losing intentionally in the last regular season game to avoid the Sixers even after they reached OT, the other games were over and they could have done it without risking anything. Embiid is a great player and he deserves praise for playing huge minutes and having massive positive impact while clearly nowhere near 100% but he needs to work on his stamina, every year he just has no legs in the last quarter of most playoff games.

Has any team in recent years won a title with one of its top 3 players hurt? I can't think of any examples. It's just really, really hard to win a title shorthanded in a league as competitive as the NBA. I don't see this as a valid argument against superteams. Also, the Heatles still won a title in 2013 with Wade clearly hobbled for a large portion of the playoffs.

This year he has been pretty mediocre, to be honest. He had two great finishes to win games but overall he has shot quite poorly (his TS% for the series is 46.8) and too much at times and his playmaking hasn't been all that great either. He shouldn't be taking significantly more shots than Jokic, the most efficient scorer in the league.

Durant's Nets were pretty damn good when healthy while Harden was still there. They were the best offense in the league in the regular season in 2021 despite all of their top 3 missing a lot of games and they mostly likely would have won the title that year if not for injuries to both Kyrie and Harden in the Bucks series which they still would have won if Durant had stepped 3 inches further back on his last shot in regulation of Game 7. They were certainly better constructed than Durant's Suns because Harden is way better playmaker than any of the Suns' big 3 and they had Claxton who was a really good rim protector and just a much better fit for an offensively stacked team than the way past his prime Nurkic (who was never that good in the first place and has an all-time worse playoff win/loss record (3-17) of all players who have played at least 20 playoff games).

This is putting it very mildly, the sexism in these books is really blatant. And I haven't even read the third which is apparently the worst in this aspect. There is a significant subplot in the second book where One of the main characters in Book 1 was married but we never even learned the name of his wife even though he spent significant time at home while she was there. As for the scientific plausibility of this book, it's always been funny to me when people claimed it's hard science fiction when the whole plot is based on blatantly violating the laws of nature. But that didn't bother me much. What bothered me was the really absurd premise of the plot of the first book where many scientists started committed suicide due to thier physics experiments showing weird and inconsitent results which disproved many of the established theories in the field of physics.

Because most of the time he wasn't and he was shown to be pretty generous with money on quite a few occassions throughout the series. But the show pretty often ignored established characterisation for the sake of making a joke so there was a handful of scenes where he was cheap to get a laugh from the audience.

I had mostly given up on the show but gave Season 4 a chance, partly because I was curious to see how much of my country's capital would be recognisible there (I had heard that the scenes which are supposed to be in Moscow were shot in Sofia). And it's very obvious, in Margo's first scenes this season they showed some of the most recognizable location of Sofia which was pretty funny to me. They also used the infamous Ikarus 260 bus when she tried to get to the Star City, which was a staple of public transport in Bulgaria (and the rest of the Soviet bloc) for decades and you could still see some on the roads of Bulgarian cities until several years ago. I guess even with cheap energy the Soviets were still unwilling to modernise public transport too much. Margo walking around at a Sofia location known as the Largo in Episode 1 was also funny to me. I don't know if this was an intentional joke by the showrunners. Anyway, I agree that the show is a bit better than in the previous seasons, but not that great overall. Miles' plotline is especially irritating to me, there is no way in hell this reckless dumbass would have been so successful at such a business. And the fact that the 72 year old Ed was still one of the top pilots at the start of the season and was given the most important jobs was just destroying my suspension of disbelief, good thing this seems to be over for now.

I found Tactician mode easier than I expected on my second playthrough when I knew what I was doing and which spells and skills are the best. IMO healing is pretty weak in this game, it's almost always better to focus on dealing maximum damage and crowd control the enemy than on healing. Once I started focusing on the most powerful disabling spells (like "Hold Person") and on dealing damage instead of trying to heal my team the combat became much easier. Parties without any healers in them are completely viable unlike many other RPGs.

Spirit Guardians works great on Tactician too in that battle.

Hold Person and Hold Monster are extremely strong. With a properly built caster and decent equipment they have almost 100% chance of paralyzing almost any enemy and most enemies can't get out of this condition until the end of the battle. And paralyzed enemeies take autocrits from melee attacks and attacks against them can't miss, so they die very quickly. Spirit Guardians is incredible against mobs, especially undead, and strong against almost everyone else. Counterspell is a must have, completely turns around so many fights, especially in Act 3.

Pretty low, the showrunner stated when asked about this that he's "more interested in polyamory than polygamy". Though this was a long time ago, when season 1 was still in the planning stage, so maybe the plans have changed. Anyway, after rewatching the Avenger Assemble portion of the last episode where the EF5+Elayne gathered together, I realized there is not a single time in the books where this happen - the 6 of them being together "onscreen". Perrin and Elayne don't appear in a scene together until Book 13. Hopefully things will be different in the show and we'll see all of them together more often.

Sanderson didn't write a single word of the books the show is currently adapted. He is not a screenwriter either. So his opinion doesn't carry any more weight than that of any other fan of the series to me. And it's not like he's some sort of expert on the lore, his WoT books are full of continuity errors despite him having two assistants whose main job was to prevent this, as well as Harriet for his editor. Someone on Reddit said yesterday that after Harriet Sanderson knows best what Jordan would have wanted in a TV adaptation which was a downright absurd claim to me. Sanderson never met or talked to Jordan.

An obvious historical analogy is World War II, where Britain and USA allied with Stalin's USSR (only several years after the Great Purge in which Stalin had about 700,000 person executed and less than a decade after the Holodomor) to stop Hitler. Churchill in particular was a staunch opponent of the Bolshevik regime since its creation but he had to be practical.

As bad as they are, the Seanchan are better than the Shadow and Rand and company were fighting for the fate of the world, so couldn't afford to refuse any possible allies.