Werthead

Macron is deploying a significant French military force to Romania. He has said there is "no need" for this force to enter Ukraine but he will not rule out doing so in response to "Russian escalation." The current scuttlebutt is that if deployed onto Ukrainian soil, this force would effectively take over military operations around Odesa, freeing up several large Ukrainian formations to reinforce the front line. However, French advisors, trainers and engineers are likely to enter Ukraine first, to train and assist Ukrainian forces on the ground, rather than engage in direct combat operations. Apparently the phrase "deliberate tripwire" has been doing the rounds, referencing deploying French forces and if these are attacked, this will result in the deployment of combat troops. Ergo, Russia will be encouraged not to attack them. An alternative reading is that this force will only take action if Russian forces initiate military action in Moldova, as that will be a sign of the conflict spreading to another country, in which case France (and possibly Romania) will respond by reinforcing Moldova. France is not spelling out exactly what its plans are as part of its doctrine of strategic ambiguity. "There are no red lines for France." Fucking hell. Simultaneously, reports of gridlock as Russian civilians flee the settlements between the border and Grayvoron towards Belgorod, as Russian partisan forces vow to liberate the area and destroy large Russian forces. General consensus is that this is a psyops designed to distract from the elections rather than a committed push towards Belgorod. Although these partisan forces seem significantly larger than last year's, it's still unlikely they have the strength to retain territory long enough to reinforce. ETA: Some reports now that the partisans are using helicopters for rapid deployment, which seems pretty ridiculous inside Russian territory. That might support reports that Russia redeployed air defences from "secure" border areas to replace the S-300 and 400 complexes destroyed in Crimea.

In BSG: Deadlock I reached the second additional story DLC, Resurrection. Quite impressed by this one. It definitely rolls back the XCOM meta layer, which was starting to get a bit wearisome after the main game and the first two DLC (which can add up to around a 60-hour playthrough between them). Resurrection switches the strategic map away from the entire Cyrannus star system to just the area around Galactica, and now the map is located in Galactica's CIC (as in the same as the TV show) and you can walk right around it! That's pretty cool. You still have side-missions but now it's all much more tightly focused, and there's a rhythm of main mission-side mission with the option to throw in a few more side missions if you want. Some of the storytelling remains weird but entertaining.

I wonder if it's a budget consideration: doing stuff in the planes is very expensive, doing stuff on one set in the camp for three episodes (and I suspect reuse of some of the airbase sets, redressed) is a lot cheaper. Clearly the show isn't cheap, but I'm not getting the sense it had anything like the money spent on The Pacific or even, in its day, Band of Brothers.

Ryazan Refinery, the third-largest in Russia, took a pounding in the early hours. It's been hit so bad it's apparently lost 70% of its processing capacity. How long for remains to be seen, but the damage appears substantial. Novoshakhtinskiy Refinery near Rostov also took some hits, though not as bad. It will be shut down for two days whilst repair inspections take place. The Russian Volunteer Corps has said it plans to halt attacks on Kharkiv and Sumy Oblasts in Ukraine by targeting military bases inside cities in Belgorod and Kursk Oblasts, and has advised civilians evacuate certain areas.

Yup, pretty large-scale offensive by the Russian paramilitary forces in Belgorod and Kursk regions, accompanied by large drone attacks. Some border villages taken, others contested. Likely trying to be an embarrassment during the elections, so expect more of this over the week. An IL-76 and Su-27 reportedly shot down, although the 76 sounds like it might have been a genuine accident (some footage of an engine literally falling off). Lukoil oil depot in Kstovo, a fuel depot in Oryol destroyed. An oil facility near Moscow attacked but the drone was reportedly shot down. Another TOS-1A thermobaric missile system destroyed. I think we're coming up on 60% of Russia's entire pre-war reserves of that platform having been eliminated (although "several" new ones have been commissioned since 2022). Kursk is a 3-hour drive from Kharkiv (under normal circumstances, might take longer now), so not really. Kursk Oblast directly borders Ukraine's Kharkiv region.

Yes, but which one is a really big question. FF15 and 16 are the newest, but they're also more action games lacking some of the classic FF gameplay. But you might find 1-9 a bit too old-fashioned. 10 and 12 are in the middle and sort of bridge the classic gameplay with the modern, but they're not the best games in the series from a story or character POV. FF7 Remake is solid enough. I was literally talking to someone about Anachronox. One of the most overlooked games of all time, fantastic story and characters, really funny, and I remain convinced to this day that BioWare "borrowed" a lot of Anachronoxs ideas for Knights of the Old Republic. The similarity in feel, setting and sometimes plot is a bit eyebrow-raising.

I worked out the recorder cannot handle 4K, so I set it to "half resolution" and then it recorded fine.

Given the prominence of Ncuti Gatwa in the trailers and the title sequence, it's bananas he shows up in a small role in the penultimate episode of the series. It's remained pretty strong although it started to suffer from Pacific vibes in splitting up to follow different characters in different areas. It hasn't got the single Band of Brothers group going on. Obviously the history doesn't allow them to do that, and they do try to keep focus on the crew from the first episode by moving between the airbase (with Croz, who no longer flies) and the PoW camp, but it has dissipated the pacing a bit. Still, technically impressive and some of the character work is pretty good. Way more of showing life in wartime Germany and occupied territories than I thought they'd go for. Frog-marching the US prisoners through a city just bombed by their comrades to show the impact on the ground was also an interesting move.

Jon Glover.

Well, to be fair the Russians knew the French could not hold Moscow for more than a few weeks in the approach of winter. And the Nazis did not besiege Moscow, they barely managed to get a foot in the door and made a last mad dash to get troops in the city before winter killed their advance, but there's no way they could have taken it in that moment (Stalin knew that their momentum was running out and there were substantial reinforcements approaching from the east, which is why he stayed, not because he had balls of steel and all the rest of it).

Looking at the stats, it's interesting that from 1950 to 1999 there was only one driver who won more than two World Championships in successive years: Juan Manuel Fangio, who won four on the trot from 1954 to 1957, in addition to his win in 1951, making him one of only two drivers to win four or more championships in the 20th Century (the other being Prost, who won in 1985-86, 1989 and 1993). The second we get to the 21st Century, there's a very abrupt shift to long periods of ultra-dominance, with drivers winning numerous championships on the bounce: Schumacher (five in a row, 2000-04), Vettel (four, 2010-13), Hamilton (two and then four, 2014-15, 2017-20) and now Verstappen (three, 2021-23, and probably four with 2024). Apart from that brief false dawn of varied winners from 2005-09 (and even Alonso nailed two on the bounce in that period), and Rosberg's near-fluky win in 2016, we've just had this staggering period of ultra dominance by a very small number of drivers. Another way to put it is that in the first 25 years of the championship, we had 13 different champions; in the second 25 years we had 14 different champions; and in the third 25 years we've had (probably) 7. I think this is unhealthy for the sport and it'll be interesting to see how far the viewing figures drop this year, after that small but noticeable drop last year.

Hit some difficulty spikes in the DLC missions, mainly due to the enemy spawning a lot of Revenants and Arachnae that make the old standby tactics not as effective, so I've resorted to the "if nothing else works, cheese," approach. Namely running away from the main enemy force, so they get strung out in a line behind you, and simply use your fighters to annihilate everything whilst your capitals stay safely out of engagement range (and as your fighters expose enemy ships on the radar, your caps can lob missiles at them). It's cheap, but it works.

I'd always slot in Patrick Tilley's Amtrak Wars by dint of it being very much forgotten, batshit insane, a lot of fun (despite some 1980s-isms) and a very original genre-mashup of epic fantasy, 1980s Americana, post-apocalyptic science fiction and, just for giggles, Shogun. I was always fond of Tilley depicting North America free of from modern civilisation basically as a fantasy landscape on a par with Middle-earth. Quite striking.

So it sounds like Ukraine needs ~2 million shells for 2024 to match 2023: strong defensive actions with a major counter-offensive action inbetween. With the Czech supplies and other armaments coming in, they might get to around 1.2-1.5 million for year, which means having to either take some hard risks with chancy attacks that might not pay off, or spend the entire year on the defensive, which might further demoralise support amongst allied nations. What is interesting is that several Nordic nations are now producing shells 24/7 and it sounds like other supplies are coming on-stream, but whether they can get up to the 2 million for the year to allow Ukraine to do both options, or the 3 million+ to give them likely fire superiority, is a huge ask. A Swedish Archer artillery piece went on a bit of a hero run from Kreminna and destroyed at least two Russian artillery positions, and possibly a third (unconfirmed from drone footage so far). It does look like the latest push around Kreminna has stalled and run out of steam with no ground taken.

The only thing that can save this season from being a total write-off is Red Bull imploding and Max walking, and even then that might just be a 3 or 4-race adjustment period for whomever Max's replacement is before they win everything (or Perez, who seems to be more consistent than last year).

ACoK, but yes. The first three books took nine years to execute and write (various asterisks there). But clearly even splitting that into three years per book still gives a production time per book far in excess of the time of TWoW.

I think Part 3 opens with the holy war in full swing, Paul tries to reconcile with Chani, she maybe takes part in the conspiracy against him but recants and they reconcile, she falls pregnant and after a handy timeskip, she has his children, dies. I don't rule out them combining Messiah and Children in some fashion, although that's possibly a tall order.

Pushing people into lava is way less common in D&D tabletop than you'd expect from BG3. She debuted in Murder in Baldur's Gate, which came out in 2013, seven years after The Blade Itself came out, so eminently possible. BG3 also uses the phrase "back to the mud" at least once.

I think a pilot is almost always a helmsman. They may be multi-skilled though, as on real ships they knew there was an excellent chance of not surviving the journey so people would double-up on skills so one person being swept overboard wouldn't kill the entire crew.

I could be wrong but I think the board might have had some, "wow, George is taking a long time with these books, huh?" discussions before. Possibly thousands of times since around 2002.

It's an odd comparison, and a slightly risky one. One could point out authors like Erikson in the 2000s, Dan Abnett through almost his whole career and Adrian Tchaikovsky, who have all been more productive than Sanderson (Erikson used to write a Stormlight Archive-sized novel in nine months, not four years, and usually superior in quality, if we quickly elide over Dust of Dreams) and arguably all superior in quality over a longer period of time.

I think they're similar in that most endings are horrendous tragedies to one degree or another. The difference is that you can get one optimal "happiest outcome" ending for BG3 which requires an almost absurd degree of threading the needle to get into that position.

It makes sense: Basestars are carriers and carriers only. They launch a ton of Raiders and then fire off missile barrages, but that's all they're good for. After that they are just big targets. It's the job of the Basestar escorts to finish you off with their big guns. EA have released the C&C Ultimate Collection on Steam, which now means people can properly play Red Alert 2, Command & Conquer: Generals, Zero Hour and C&C3 and its expansion on modern systems, which are probably the three best C&C games. Mods aren't working at the moment though, including the widescreen and HD mods, so it might be wise to hold fire until they come back online. Hopefully not more than a few days.

What We Do in the Shadows is very solid with some outstanding comedic moments (Jackie Daytona, the chicken-siren). However, it does milk jokes way past their sell-by date (doll-Nadja was like a one-episode gag extended across what, four seasons?) and it does that thing of having calamitous mega-finales which they ignore/elide past in the opening seconds of the next season and quickly reset to status quo. It is very funny though, and Season 5 was a return to form after Season 4 showed them losing the plot a bit. Nandor goes to space might be the funniest thing they've ever done. The original movie made its point more succinctly and was a very fine piece of work in its own right, of course. And Wellington Paranormal is incredibly funny as well, not far off WWDitS despite not having the same budget (the kaiju storyline was...ambitious for that reason). I'd really like to see a bit of a crossover in the final season between the movie, the WWDitS TV show and Wellington Paranormal, since they all take place in the same universe. In terms of the best vampire TV show of all time, that's 1998 UK mini-series Ultraviolet, interestingly also featuring True Blood's Stephen Moyer as a vampire. Idris Elba scores the two best vampire kills in screen history, and the episode with him trapped in the warehouse with the cryo-pods full of vampires with timers counting down to sunset is one of the tensest things I've ever seen (and his solution is phenomenal). Written and directed by Joe Ahearne, who is the also the guy credited with saving the first season of Nu-Doctor Who after the OG director almost completely fucked it up. Incidentally, I watched this show in 1998 and called it that Idris Elba would be fucking huge one day, leading to more than one later moment of Braugher-screaming "VINDICAAAAATION!"

Ukraine did achieve an unexpected tactical success in crossing the Dnipro and establishing bridgeheads in what should have been impregnable Russian territory. Ukraine required only a modest amount of firepower to break through the lines there and cut Crimea off from the land bridge. This would also put Ukrainian forces in a huge flanking position to roll up the entire line south of the Dnipro, which had not been fortified in depth. The problem is that Ukraine was unwilling to take that risk - and make no mistake it was a huge risk - whilst it was also fighting on the Bakhmut, Tokmak and Avdiivka fronts simultaneously. A Ukrainian defeat in that sector would have been calamitous and may have threatened them with losing Kherson again. But by carrying out the limited attack on Krynky and not reinforcing the breakthrough (limited though it was), Ukraine tipped their hand and allowed Russia to reinforce that sector. On the glide bomb front, it's notable that the delivery of glide bombs along the southern front precipitously dropped to zero for several days last week after the interception of Russian Su-34s over the Sea of Azov. Ukraine seems to be on the ball with denying Russia the use of glide bombs, but their capacity to do that across the entire front needs to be increased.