Werthead

I can't find out old dedicated wargaming thread, so I thought this might be of interest here. Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 co-creator Rick Priestly (who was in charge of the lore, the writing and most of the rules) on the creation and early history of Warhammer 40,000 and Games Workshop (he has another two videos on the history of fantasy Warhammer on the same channel).

Without Verstappen, you could see it was a more interesting race. Leclerc, Piastri, Perez and Norris all briefly looked in contention for the lead, at least potentially until Perez damaged his floor (or rather apparently got something stuck on the floor, which destroyed the airflow). Leclerc probably had the best shot, the McLarens tripped over one another a little and once the Ferraris pulled ahead they probably dialled down their engine, which is a shame but understandable. Norris did at least keep them in sight for quite a while though. Sainz did do what he needed to do but he did seem to drop pace towards the end; some suggestion both Ferraris were also told to dial down the engine and cruise them home once clear of the McLarens, and not fight for the lead. Hamilton does have a slight tendency to go into cruise control if the car is not to his liking. It's not unusual but it is a little disappointing. Still, the Ferrari looks to be on a much better trajectory than the Mercedes, which is a dog's dinner of a car. Surprisingly strong race pace from the Haas, again, and Tsunoda running rings around Ricciardo. Tsunoda not being eyed for Red Bull is very silly indeed, with the new rumour being that Ricciardo could be out midseason, Lawson in and if Lawson does well, he could be in the Red Bull in 2025. But on current form (and Red Bull seem to genuinely agree that Perez's issues today were technical) Perez might be breathing easier than he was before. At the moment I believe Tsunoda could win the next race in reverse gear and Horner would still not consider him for the Red Bull drive. The long run simulations do seem to agree that the Ferrari was much, much closer to the Red Bull than at any point since the start of 2022. Melbourne is more representative of a bunch of other tracks than Singapore, where Ferrari won last year, so interesting to see if Ferrari can get into a position to take on Red Bull in a straight fight.

Two more big landing ships in Sevastopol apparently damaged. More information now claiming one aircraft destroyed and two damaged in that big attack on the Russian airbase a few days ago. Ukrainian artillery has been hitting Russian targets in Avdiivka, apparently targeting artillery that Russia has brought forwards to take cover in the ruins.

Russia hitting Ukraine with missiles, mostly intercepted. But Ukraine has been hitting back, destroying the Black Sea Fleet communications hub in Sevastopol. Three Storm Shadows hit the building within the space of about five seconds, not leaving much of it standing. They also hit a major fuel depot in Hvardiis'ke, Crimea, which burned for hours. Russian air defences seemed slow in responding, with return fire only beginning after the first couple of impacts. The Kuibyshev refinery near Samara was also hit yesterday.

Pffft, easily doable. I mean, Herbert Jnr. and Anderson straight-up admitted in an unguarded interview that they made up 99% of the shit in their drivel. The only thing that Herbert's one A4 page of notes had was "Maybe bring back Paul, Chani etc as gholas?"

You don't need to make comparisons with China, that's a bit extreme, and the Chinese are discovering that their approach is total dogshit which could seriously damage their economy ("We'll loan money to all these poor countries the nasty west won't support!" "Great idea! By the way, all these poor countries the west won't support can't afford to pay us back. They say sorry about that, kthxbye,"), both in terms of internal development and external development. But it's true that Britain does seem less nimble an economy even compared to EU countries, which are not exactly not in love with bureaucracy and red tape. Some of that is down to the size of the country versus its population: we're a small country with a massive population and that severely complicates where we can build things*. The likes of Norway and Sweden are fucking massive countries with comparatively tiny populations, which gives them a huge amount of flexibility. Even France, with a comparable population, has twice as much land to work with; Germany and Italy do have more limitations comparable to ours. *From my days in the Department of Transport, a daily occurrence was someone grumbling, "Why can't we build railways that work like in France and Germany?" and us coming up with some variation of, "Well, we could deploy ten thousand B-17s and Lancasters to renovate the UK transport network from scratch, but that might be controversial."

Everyone at Ferrari and all the Tifosi: "Wheeeellllp." Major case of sellers' remorse going on there, I think. Perez might have gotten away with that though. What could have been a nail in the coffin of his career was offset by apparent damage to the underfloor of the car, which explains why he went from beasting half the field to suddenly being 3 tenths off the pace within a few laps despite new hard tyres. A day, and maybe a season, for Mercedes to forget.

I'm not even sure if you have to appeal to the MMT as a means to an end (by which I assume is the "if you have your own currency you can summon money out of thin air as long as you also avoid inflation" approach, which is both correct and also not without risks). If a government invests in services and people, it usually gets a return which dramatically improves upon the initial investment. The problem in the current situation is starting on a bad foot (unlike 1997 when Blair inherited a significantly improving economy and nothing like the current national debt, which meant opening the floodgate of spending was much easier to sell to the public) which makes that look almost irresponsible in the short term despite being almost inevitably successful in the long term, and frankly it is necessary at this moment. The damage heaped onto the British economy since 2010 (following on from the systemic shock of 2008) by austerity is unsustainable without doing fundamental damage to how the entire country is financed and operates. One of the big problems we have in the country is that in 2010 the coalition successfully sold the idea that national finances are just like household finances and need to be treated the exact same way (tighten your belt and then tighten some more, cut up your credit cards, don't take on more debt), when this was, never has been and never will be remotely true. The problem is that that was a very simple message and getting into the weeds of how national finances work is complex, long-winded and requires some degree of specialist knowledge, messaging which is almost impossible to get across in the current media environment. I suspect current Labour planning revolves around this and knows that long-term repairs to the economy require at least two terms, but if they go in all guns blazing in the first term, the Tories will be able to claim Labour irresponsibility and try to win back into power in the second term, undoing whatever good work is done in the meantime (assuming they can achieve that, of course, which is not a given, although the fruit is hanging very low).

Putin is repeating the line that the attackers were trying to escape towards Ukraine, but he does not blame Kyiv directly. He might still do that, but he hasn't pressed that button yet. The UN has also pinned the blame on ISIS, and noted that various major countries have taken their eye off the ball on the threat from that area whilst they jockey for position.

Oh yeah, that's a good point. Regarding the Arbiter: The Halo series is weird in being mostly basic space opera guff to excuse lots of shooty shooty bang bang, with far less narrative than say Mass Effect, in which you can at least Talk To The Aliens. But the lore is surprisingly developed. The tie-in novels are above average (mostly) and even Proper SF Author Greg Bear came on board to flesh out a lot of the lore and write a trilogy of novels about the backstory. As a result, the changes are not going down too well with the fans, even moderate ones who expected fairly significant changes because you can't adapt a first-person shooter faithfully to the screen, there's not much narrative to tell there. The main complaints are too much focus on brand new, fanfic-style characters, with a common argument is that if you can't remain focused on Master Chief constantly, then you can focus on the Keyes, Halsey, Johnson, Cortana, the Reach characters etc, without going down the whole new character route quite so heavily. There's also too much uninteresting bullshit: Soren's family being kidnapped is "Perrin's wife being kidnapped" levels of tedium, though fortunately resolved a tad faster. Pacing I think is also a complaint. It took one-and-a-half seasons to reach the events of Reach and then undersold them, then another half-season to reach the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, but they've mixed things up by not doing as much as they could with the Forerunners (I don't think the name has even been mentioned) but introducing the Flood too early. The familiar "eight episodes isn't enough" refrain is also there, although I disagree. These are pretty short games and I think you can adapt them in that timeframe, much more easily than a lot of these other shows which are struggling.

I believe ISIS-K members have even agitated for attacking China in revenge for their treatment of the Uygher (and they have access via the remote border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan), but even their leadership has hesitated over that so far. These are the guys who really do not give a fuck what they do or the consequences of their actions. The religious-political angle is very complex, but you have essentially a lot of Muslims from the Caucasus region who were very angry at the Chechen War, and even angrier at its conclusion when they believe - correctly - Kadyrov sold the Chechen people out to Putin in return for personal enrichment, gold toilets etc. Even after the end of the Second Chechen War and its prolonged aftermath (when fighting in the north Caucasus continued for many years after Kadyrov signed up to Team Putin, in one year almost killing a thousand Russian security personnel), you had Caucasus-based jihadist groups continuing to target the Russian government. When the conflict in Syria started, the Russian government offered these groups something of a bizarre amnesty, releasing some from prison and allowing others to leave Russian territory unharmed to fight as part of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (presumably hoping they'd target US and allied forces). Whether the Russians realised they themselves would be engaged in that conflict shortly thereafter is unclear. However those groups still retain a hardcore element who want to liberate Chechnya and the north Caucasus and create an Islamic Republic in those areas, and have carried out occasional attacks to this end. In some cases, yes, it's likely the attacks have been inspired by the stalemate in Syria and maybe anger at Ukraine and Gaza taking the eyes of the world off that conflict. ISIS-K are also very, very unpleasant, to the point that it's believed the US has provided the Taliban with intelligence on ISIS-K operations in Afghanistan because, as problematic as the Taliban are, they're easier to deal with then these fucking total lunatics. Some Russian sources are still blaming Ukraine outright. One Russian security report even says the attackers planned to cross the border into Ukraine to escape, with the help of the Ukrainian intelligence services, so I'd hold fire on that for now. There are some in Russia agitating to make this part of the Ukrainian conflict.

The first one did see the biggest shift to Labour in electoral history, exceeding the swing in 1997 that delivered Blair his landslide victory. As was noted at the time, getting an even bigger shift to win a majority outright was almost completely demographically impossible, so complaining about that feels a bit churlish. As it was, that success plunged the Tories into a full-on crisis lasting until the next election. However, he did completely screw the pooch afterwards. Some of the complaints are valid - it was interesting seeing the absolutely titanic assault on social media of US-style advertising basically claiming that Corbyn was going to sell the country to communists, or something - but ultimately Corbyn lost because the Tories threw everything into the election on the basis of Brexit-delivery and Corbyn could not deliver what he clearly personally wanted, Labour supporting Brexit fully, but could not bring himself to whole-heartedly oppose it, so his messaging became incredibly weak, confused and incoherent on that issue. Everything else his policies seemed to resonate as well as they did in 2017, but the Tories very successfully pivoted the argument away from those policies. He fought the battle on ground of the enemy's choosing and did not show up with a viable strategy.

Some reporting that the ISIS claim has come through a fake account, but the BBC and several US news networks are saying that their sources they have that are long-affiliated with ISIS, or affiliated with affiliations of ISIS (that's a thing, apparently), are all confirming that this was an ISIS strike. The US is also saying it had firm intelligence of ISIS planning attacks against Russian interests and did directly inform Russia several weeks ago under its legal obligation to do so.

OSINT sources saying the Russian police have put out an arrest warrant for five men from Ingushetia, although this does not appear confirmed yet. Interesting if this is the "North Caucasus" group rearing its head again. This was a jihadist organisation that fought alongside the Chechens during the Second Chechen War, then went solo in Ingushetia and Dagestan. They halted operations in Russia to redeploy their assets to Syria to fight Russian forces there. They've been a generally low-key group of limited importance, but there has been concern over the fact they contain Russian citizens and can speak Russian, so could operate in Russia itself relatively freely.

The US issued a warning two weeks ago that "extremists" were planning terrorist attacks inside Russia, including targeting concert halls. It went under the radar at the time but has come up again now. Russian news sources saying that up to 40 are believed dead. Ukraine has issued a denial that it was involved, and the US concurs there is no intelligence chatter supporting Ukrainian involvement. Even Russian news and government sources have hesitate to point the finger at Ukraine. This seems to have genuinely come out of nowhere to Russia (but possibly not US intelligence).

It was. Some nice video game callbacks. The twin Needlers gag I think is a solid reference to a lot of people in the games, and a nod to the fact that nobody in the Halo universe goes into battle with remotely enough ammo for whatever mission they are facing. ETA: Oh nice! It's Harry Lloyd playing

Today's missile attacks on Ukraine were expected - Russia has been hoarding weapons for months - but may have been a strategic mistake. The Ukrainian military was bracing for attacks on fortified positions and possibly munitions factories, airfields and so on. Russia bombing energy infrastructure right now, rather than at the start of winter, is unlikely to be as effective, and Ukraine has a lot of energy infrastructure spare parts stockpiled as they'd been anticipating this back in November. Still a hard hit, with a million people out of power for most of the day. This is reasonable.

The Germans knew about it, or at least they knew/reasoned that the US, Britain etc would all have their own nuclear programmes and that's why they were racing hard to try to get it first themselves. Not to mention that the security of the project was having it as its own self-contained town with very high security on a separate continent five thousand miles away with everyone speaking a different language at a time of war at a point with no Internet or mobile phones. The actual idea of the nuclear bomb wasn't a secret at all, HG Wells wrote a short story about it almost fifty years earlier and tons of people had published tons of scientific literature on it for decades previously.

The "later books are unfilmable" thing is a bit overwrought. Only God-Emperor really has that problem. Heretics and Chapterhouse have much more action, with massive space battles, ground wars and entire planets blowing up (mostly offscreen, but you can bring some of that onscreen a bit). Also, any and all subsequent films should have: Obviously anyone even thinking of trying to film any of the Herbert Jnr./Anderson excretions should be beheaded before they even outline it.

Here we go. Looks amazing, although it has the video rendering problem afflicting a lot of Gsync monitors, like Starfield (fortunately I twigged the problem immediately on the menu screen and fixed it, rather than spending 20 hours suffering through the game with it). Looks outstanding but also plays incredibly well, likely because Guerrilla Games were clever in how they made it so it could work on PS4. But the PC version blows the PS5 version out of the water at 4K.

My general take is that conspiracies only work if you have a tiny number of people involved in them. The more people you add, the chances of exposure exponentially grow until exposure becomes inevitable. Successful, actual conspiracies achieve their goals by either the people involved being very low in number, very highly trained in keeping secrets (so government spy agencies, for example), or the people who get wind of what they're up to being fucking incompetent and not stopping them. I think the cut-off I saw quoted once was less than 50 people. Even the 20-ish people involved in 9/11 pretty much exposed themselves and put them on the FBI and CIA radar, but because the agencies were in a pissing contest, they didn't put the pieces together to stop them. It's also why the "9/11 was inside job" theories are self-inherently bullshit as you'd need many hundreds and probably a couple of thousand people involved in the conspiracy and the chances of that staying secret is zero. Keeping Kate or Charles dying/being dead secret might be possible briefly whilst a small number of people knew about it, but more than, nope.

Russia's Baltic Sea Fleet has managed to sink a Russian fishing trawler by accident during a live fire exercise. At least three people on the trawler Captain Lobanov were killed. A heavy missile strike on Kyiv. The Ukrainians are claiming 100% interception rate but falling debris caused significant damage. Some sources claiming multiple Kinzhal hypersonics were intercepted and destroyed, others just one. Some indications that the Kovalchuk Brothers have fallen out with Igor Sechin, the Rosneft energy chief. These are some of Putin's closest advisors and members of the inner circle (or, if not, are at least knocking on the door of the inner circle). The three have apparently clashed over their nominations for the post-election reshuffle. Sechin's son Ivan died last month in weird circumstances (he spontaneously suffocated and fell unconscious, then his bodyguard gave the wrong address to the ambulance, which took two hours to reach him, by which time he was dead at 35). At least some Russian formations have diverted from reinforcing the front in Ukraine to instead reinforce Belgorod, but have not yet amassed enough forces to counter-attack the partisans, who continue to attack targets in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts. The partisans apparently engaged Russian forces in Kozinka and eliminated them, but discovered they'd just called for reinforcements, so they set a trap which successful engaged and destroyed the rescue team. Reportedly this was a GRU Spetsnaz Rescue Team (2nd Detached Special Forces Brigade), which if true would be quite a scalp. Even Ukraine is treating that claim with scepticism. The CDU believes that Scholz will fold on supplying Taurus to Ukraine, but couldn't guess on the timescale. The Institute for the Study of War is pretty conservative in its reporting, but it has expressed concerns over the plans to form new Russian army units in western and north-western Russia. It believes these units have zero reason to exist other than for offensive action against NATO member countries. It does not believe the threat is imminent but could become a major issue in three to four years, especially if Russia is successful in Ukraine. However, it notes significant demography problems in Russia that makes standing up new large militarised formations from scratch problematic.

Engels Airbase in Russia, on the Volga, has come under drone attack. Unclear on the extent of the damage, but some of Russia's strategic bomber fleet is based there, including long-range bombers and aircraft used to launch cruise missiles and glide bombs at Ukrainian targets. Satellite photos showed quite a lot of planes on the tarmac just a few days ago. The lack of lots of social media and video from civilians (Saratov, a pretty big city, is right next door) suggests maybe it wasn't a huge strike, but there is one video from a nearby car park indicating at least one very large explosion. The scale of the repulsed attack on Berdychi is becoming clearer. The Russian 15th Separate Guards Brigade took an absolute pounding with several vehicles destroyed and at least dozens killed. The survivors reporting on the attack seemed to be genuinely shell-shocked. It looks like they expected an uncontested advance after Avdiivka. More trouble in Buryatia, where a woman was jailed for quoting from Pushkin at a memorial to the writer. This was perceived as being anti-government in some fashion. Belgorod has come under attack for the seventh day in a row. Kursk city has also seen some explosions in its vicinity, one of which hit a power substation and plunged the city into darkness for several hours.

The Volume is really good at doing a certain number of things, and The Mandalorian employed those things really well. The main problem since then is that everyone started using the Volume for every single thing whether it was a good idea or not. So the vast arctic alien landscape in S1 of The Mandalorian obviously makes sense to do in the Volume. Something they also did that was great was moving, dangerous environments, so all the stuff with the sandcrawler on Tatooine in the Mando vs. Jawa incident was excellent. Since then, we've seen quite a lot of "using the Volume to create a perfectly ordinary fucking forest, of which apparently they have none in California or Britain," which is where it falls over, as when the Volume is compared to a 100% real environment it falls apart almost instantly. When you're using it to do absolutely crazy environments that cannot exist in reality but they want the actor to react to it, it makes sense. Doing Dune on location 100% absolutely added to the effect, which sticking it in the Volume would not have done. I also had some issues where House of the Dragon recreated real locations or sets previously used on GoT in the Volume - or Warner Brothers' non-copyright-infringing-equivalent - and it looked fucking awful because we were used to the real thing (the long causeway steps on Dragonstone come to mind). Peter Jackson receiving a list of actresses from Weinstein not to use in the Lord of the Rings movies and him just following it without thinking about it until like 20 years later is a bit wild as well. I must admit I also found Jackson's fawning attitude to Weinstein after he fucked him over on LotR to be a bit odd.

Russian partisan forces have hit Razumnoye, a large Russian military base on the outskirts of Belgorod. The partisans are claiming - for the total campaign so far- 613 Russians killed, 829 injured, 27 captured. 7 tanks destroyed, 20 BMPs, 6 howitzers and 4 APCs. No independent confirmation (and even the Ukrainians are treating these numbers with one eyebrow raised). Kofman, who has been pretty pessimistic throughout the conflict, surprisingly measured in his latest analysis. He notes Ukraine has weaknesses and these could be exploited into a breakthrough, but generally Russia has proven unable to do so in the past. He notes their superiority in glide bombs, but that in other areas Ukraine has achieved parity or superiority. He seems to agree with the general consensus that 2024 will be the make or break year for the conflict, based on military supplies, churn of equipment and men (which he thinks will bite Russia hard in 2025) and the US Presidential Election. One reply quotes an estimate of internal European shell production to exceed 1 million in Jan-Dec 2024, which means with the Czech initiative, Ukraine will receive 2 million shells this year, which is what they need to mount a successful defence (though not the 2.5-3 million they need to undertake moderate counter-offensives as well).