karaddin

That doesn't ring a bell lol, act 3 has mostly been well behaved for me although I didn't play during the patch that broke doors. The worst bug I had in my honor run was Mayrina walking through fire or acid I'd thrown on the ground after the hag fight finished and turning temporarily hostile. I ran away but she bugged out when I came back and wouldn't walk away to finish the quest. Still showed up later though. The previous run that I didn't finish hit a much worse bug with Halsin getting stuck in a doorway when he was meant to go to the lake lol. And thanks, when I load the board I've been getting depressed in general chat and watching stuff I haven't seen threads for so wasn't popping into entertainment for a month or two.

You didn't miss anything with her in EA, she was "in" it when I played but not as a party member - you just met her at the location you meet her in the full release and after that situation is resolved she says she'll catch you in Baldurs Gate and there was nothing more. @Werthead did you have a typo in your post from a month or two ago when you were planning your 'best outcome' or can you actually Haven't dropped back into this thread in quite a while, I was in act 3 on a 'good' Dark Urge play with the multiclass level cap increase mod when the Honour mode patch dropped, wound up ditching that one for a Wyll Origin play on honour difficulty. As with the other difficulties, by far the hardeest part of the game is the early game, I had to run away and flee combat several times in the first act - the paladin, Waukeens Rest (I tried to steal a good sword, messed it up and they all turned hostile lol), the ancient mephits and tree guys in the swamp for the shadow druid quest and I think 1 or 2 others. Once the builds got their feet under them at 5 it started coming together and nothing really stressed me after that. I even tried to keep it more challenging by not multiclassing on 3 of my main 4 - Wyll was straight 12 Warlock, Shadowheart 12 cleric and Lae'Zel 12 Fighter (eldritch knight), Astarion being the odd one out on thief rogue/swords bard with hand crossbows. I went full tadpole on Wyll and none on anyone else so was abusing the hell out of Hunger of Hradar + Blackhole once I hit act 3, its so strong. Closest I came to trouble was I keep playing so its clearly doing something right for me lol/

Ran - basically what DG said. The last decade has led me to swear off presupposing the outcome of any election. Until he's actually removed from office he's the leader of Israel and I'll continue to treat him as such.

It's a particularly neat trick to pull when the thing Ran is dismissing is the alternative approach to doing the thing he says is inevitable, which they don't want to do. Again I'm not going to claim inevitability on it actually happening, I'd love to be wrong and it won't even need international pressure to stop it, I'd be very glad to discover that Bibi has moral limits and doesn't even entertain doing it. But it's absolutely a possibility and a horrifying one.

To be fair to Tywin he raised that particular plan basically day 1 of this round of the conflict before the IDF had destroyed most of the infrastructure and displaced most of the population. I think it's reasonable for him to argue the morality of that proposal on the basis of the pre war position since he's really just been defending having suggested it then. I still disagree with it, I don't think a people that have been in the circumstances that have existed for a long time in Gaza can be to be truly volunteering for a land swap. It's the same principle that says you can't consent to sex under exploitative circumstances, or that we can't be subject to medical procedures without informed consent. Just because someone is forced to accept something under extreme duress doesn't mean it's truly voluntary. And (not at Tywin here but others in the thread) it should be really fucking clear that the Palestinians in Gaza cannot truly volunteer for that after all the bombing.

Oh come on now. Yes there is a big issue with the antisemitic trope of wealthy Jews controlling the world but that isn't what Fionwe was doing - the worst in that bit you quoted was a crime of punctuation. The "money, effort, and political will" that was poured into creating the infrastructure and associated institutions necessary to run a new state. It wasn't saying those things were suspicious or any of that conspiratorial bullshit, an awful lot of it came from major powers trying to absolve their guilt. It's also similar to rebuilding done in Germany (minus that guilt part). Getting anything major done requires investment, all Fionwe was saying is that this investment was made in Israel.

You don't need to dismiss that many Jews were displaced from the area over the last couple of millennia to see that there were a bunch of Palestinians displaced from their homes recently. It's an injustice that happened in living memory and what remains of the Palestinian community in Gaza needs liberty and opportunity and they have had neither. They haven't got it from Hamas, they didn't get it from those that preceded them, and they aren't getting it from Israel either. Now they're being killed at a high rate via bombs etc and a huge amount are displaced from their homes and suffering from deprivation as collateral damage in a war started by terrorists that appropriate their cause as justification and waged by a military that is ok with blowing up human shields to possibly get at a single target. I don't want Israel to end, I want Israel to stop blowing them up and work towards an actual solution for these people. I do want Hamas to end, and I'm happy for Israel to bring that about - just not with this level of collateral.

You really don't need to be so ridiculous in your snark about "living memory", it's actually got quite a clear and purposeful meaning: people that lived through it and remember it are still alive to remember it. The Holocaust is in living memory. The Siege of Masada (I think that's what it's generally called, but if it's also referred to along the names of "massacre" instead of siege I'm happy to go with that - it would certainly be accurate) is not in living memory because anyone alive at the time has been dead for approximately 1900 years. Yes it's still remembered, and it's relevant but no one still left lived through it. I think there's generally a second level of temporal proximity that people use which is whether people still alive knew family members that lived through it before they died. So for example there are people alive in the US who got to know their grandparents whom had been slaves. All of which is separate from the actual point other people were making.

I thought TrueMetis was suggesting that we take the Israeli settlers that say they want to use Gaza for beach front property as indicative of significant factions within Israel despite the lack of an IDF statement that that is their intent, much like we accept that Hamas are genocidal fucks despite their official position suggesting that they'd recognize the 1967 borders. My interpretation is "we should listen to the behaviour of both sides rather than listening to their press releases", your interpretation is "we should trust the press release of both sides" which doesn't fit well with TM making it clear that Hamas shouldn't be trusted on that front imo.

I desperately hope I'm wrong and you're right on this, and I'll happily come back and admit I was wrong if that's what happens. If the Palestinians wind up getting pushed across the border and not let back in will you admit you were wrong? Or will it simply be an exercise in moving the goal posts and explaining how it's justified actually?

Please tell me the Israeli PM account on Twitter is a parody. If those "Christmas" messages are real can anyone tell me with a straight face they think this war is going to end with any Palestinians still living in Gaza?

I could understand calling them "ostensibly liberator", or "supposedly", "theoretically" or any of a number of qualifiers that make it clear you're talking about the idea that's meant to be behind them rather than it being the idea that they actually serve. It is what they are meant to be, and I think it's important to remember that when discussing any support they receive from regular civilians. But it's not who or that they are, and they've had ample time as the government of Gaza (in as much as the Gazan government has been allowed to act as an actual government which is very limited) to demonstrate it's not who they are, that their priority is not the well being of the Palestinian people who are alive right now. The absolute best case interpretation is that they're sacrificing all the current living Palestinians for the "better future" they think they will have after an inexplicable total victory. And that best case is still fucking reprehensible. So I can understand wanting baseline support for Hamas to be interpreted as "support for the idea of liberation", but I can't understand thinking it's actually what they are. I can definitely understand why framing them like that is offensive to some and seems counter productive to others.

Hoping they prevail over Hamas and hoping they stop killing civilians isn't mutually exclusive, unless you've decided all the civilians in Gaza should be treated as Hamas.

Nothing should stop them? Regardless of whether we think the current actions already meet the threshold, I would have liked to think we would all agree "oh wait, we're doing a genocide" should be a red line that would make the IDF stop once they crossed it - I thought we were just arguing about where that line is. Civilians don't stop being civilians just because Hamas is using them as human shields. Entire residential blocks don't cease to be a sensitive area just because terrorist scum are hiding in them. When this war began there was a discussion of just how many Gazans civilians people would be ok with being killed in this conflict and it really seems like for some people there is no upper limit. We're in the ball park of having killed 10x as many as Hamas killed in the Oct 7 attack so even if you're on board with the war crime of collective punishment where is the line for proportionality? If it requires 100k civilian deaths to "wipe out Hamas" is that ok? What about 1m? I guess there is an upper limit at around 2m since that's all of them. And that doesn't get into the blatant destruction of Gazan infrastructure that's completely unjustified from a military perspective - if your troops are in control to be able to do controlled demolition of schools and hospitals they clearly aren't currently being occupied by Hamas are they*. *Edited to add: This point wasn't meant to be saying they never were, just that they've clearly been pushed out at the point a controlled demolition can be done as that requires the IDF to be in control of the building. Destroying the building at that point is denying the civilian population that infrastructure in the future.

Yeah I think the Terminus stuff felt so... interminable (ba dum tish) because of the week to week waits. I doubt I'd have loved it in a binge but it wouldn't have felt so much of fresh a drag. After a couple of months since the end of season 2 it's Demerzal that's really stuck with me which really just makes it two separate plot lines from the Empire side that are really landing. Agreed on the budget side of things lol, I was only thinking in terms of the writing that makes it a more straight forward adaptation than say a faithful Foundation (just going off what people said of the books here). You'd need to trim it down as well, but just normal adaptation things.

I hadn't thought of it in a while, but its really quite surprising no one has jumped on those rights yet, and that one at least should be able to do a fairly straight adaptation if I'm remembering right (which to be fair..its been a long time since I read it).

Yeah this ones getting me as well, I know its a thing that happens when you start getting old but jfc it feels like a lot the last few years.

Maybe its just my perspective living in a country that's fucked a bunch of its surface soil via salinity from over-irrigation and my early adult years having a years long extreme drought but its the potential eco-destruction of the tunnel flooding that really horrifies me. The people that are directly killed by flooding the tunnels might be horrendous, but its still 'countable' in the sense that its going to be a concrete number of people, but the impact if this fucks the acquifer cannot be measured and is extremely long term. I cannot imagine doing that to an area that neighbours my own water sources even if I didn't give a fuck about the people that live there. Is there seriously no overlap between the acquifer below Gaza and those below Israel? Editing to answer my own question: If https://water.fanack.com/palestine/water-resources-in-palestine/ is a trustworthy source (I've never seen it before, but the brief skim looking for the map doesn't look like its a particularly political source) then there's a distinct coastal acquifer below Gaza, coastal Israel and the areas of Israel directly inland from Gaza, but the main acquifers are completely distinct around the rivers which I guess does make sense. Still I'd never fuck with the water.

It legitimately scares me what damage this is going to do long term, although I'm sure you don't need me to preach to you on that front. The right wing fucks in the West that support this shit are not actually their friends, they'll love all this stuff anticipating how they're going to use it in the future for their own propaganda.

If Israel was conducting it's war on Hamas with absolutely no civilian casualties then I wouldn't be saying there needs to be a cease fire and I'm pretty sure everyone else, at least here, would feel the same. The cease fire we want is for Israel to stop bombing the shit out of civilians, not stop pursuing Hamas. Now 'absolutely zero' civilians might be a fantasy, but the line for 'reasonable response' is a lot closer to that than what we're seeing from the IDF. That's obviously imo not an objective claim. I'd also love if he IDF could stop doing shit that my initial response to is "well that's some blood libel bullshit right there" and having it actually turn out to be true. That used to be a nice easy line to see, but "leaving babies to die in hospital" is a pretty fucking staggering atrocity. It would also be nice if they'd stop gleefully destroying Gazan property seemingly for fun, or looting. But failing that I'd recommend they stop letting their fucking troops document their own crimes and post it on social media like it's actually good propaganda.

I just want to add to this - even if we could argue it out to some kind of objective decision it's still pretty pointless. If Hamas treated the hostages like honored guests would that somehow magically diminish the heinous act of taking hundreds of people hostage in the first place? Absolve them for murdering over a thousand people in the same attack that they seized the hostages? Of course not. And the same applies in the other direction, you don't need to pile further atrocities on top to judge those involved as evil - there's plenty of undisputed facts making that clear. I hope those that are responsible for this face some form of justice, that those who were taken hostage and are still alive are released or recovered alive in some way, and that they are able to heal from the massive trauma inflicted on them by living months in captivity always a potential 1 minute away from being executed even if their other conditions were treating them like a king.

Security is "supposed" to be the whole raison d'etre for right wing hardliners. If they ignore warnings and let terrible attacks happen then they're not much fucking use are they. And hopefully replacing them means replacing their catastrophically unsuccessful methods as well, rather than just changing faces and hoping someone else will just do it better.

Yeah, this entire tragedy has just been the worst people on both sides giving each other exactly what they, and only they, want while ruining everything for everyone else.

You can start a new story and I think that might be getting to the problem. Most of what they've done feels stuck in-between telling a new, self contained story and keeping the connectivity to the wider MCU. There's too much obvious connectivity being jammed into them for them to land emotionally as complete stand-alone stories, everything feels like its merely set up for something else. But at the same time that something else has taken too long to materialize. The little building towards Kang dynasty hasn't been compelling, or exciting and even what there is has been restricted to 1 movie and 1 tv show, so the rest is just stringing together a bunch of set up with no pay off. Avengers had the spinning money shot as the first hit of pay off for the first 5 years of the MCU but there's nothing comparable now, and probably too many characters involved for a checkpoint pay off to even work.

No argument with you that its going to take time and work before this is likely to even be a possibility.