If the Russians were even half as petty and image obsessed as the Ukrainians are, they'd fire a missile into that trident.

Remind me again why were Russians forced to adopt a system were business elites could use their capital to exert political power.

That wasn't public money.

Liberals are only people who could write a post like this and lack the self awareness to realize how blatantly hypocritical it is.

US mainstream media isn't even trustworthy for predicting the US economy.

They downplayed if not outright denied the potential causes of the Great Recession until well after it had already occurred. They then portrayed the Great Recession "from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business" manipulating the empathy of their audience in order to serve the interests of their true masters.

Liberals are neither intellectual nor do they actually want dialogue.

They're so hostile to differing opinions that they have sullied the very word for propagating ideas. The connotation that such an action is inherently negative and something that entails deception was added by them. The redefinition of the word propaganda is ironically the result of liberal propaganda.

That pretty much is a tacit admission to its failure.

They are so obsessed with saving face that they would only ever admit to starting an offensive if they had reasonable gains.

/pol/ and its consequences

First they removed the /.compact old mobile view, I did not speak out since I had already moved on to using RiF.

3 months later...

Once the heat dies down, they'll be coming for RES and the old. desktop view.

Overextend, turn your enemy into insurgents, attempt to kill every one over ten of the "military aged males", cause a global financial crisis, as a million people die due to your shit pandemic handling pull-out

The US is worse than Ukraine. They send their vassals to death without a second thought but with an inevitable betrayal. Yet if they ever fought a war in their own land for once, they'd quickly lose the will and ability to fight.

The only Nintendo console I ever had was a Famiclone so I don't really have much nostalgia for their games.

It's just Nintendo ROMs that are disappearing. It's still easier than ever to find even the most obscure classic PC games on abandonware sites and GOG compilation torrents. It's also only the SEO abusing ROM sites that are vulnerable to Nintendo's attacks. Complete ROMsets for their consoles can still be obtained through torrents, Vimm.net, and the r/ROMs megathread especially for the older cartridge consoles.

Emulating a current gen Nintendo console has never been as good as it is for Switch emulators. Any new PC can emulate Switch Triple As at full speed. Android is getting builds of the Yuzu emulator and mobile SOCs have enough power to run less demanding titles. When a lot people who don't even own a Switch can play Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo is understandably trying to crack down. The portable aspect of the Switch is no longer a unique advantage. It used to be just GPD making those handheld PCs now every brand is trying to compete in that form factor.

Honestly I think the state of emulation in general is experiencing a golden age.

Retroid, Anbernic and AYN are making hardware that is a better solution for most people than trying to jailbreak and refurbish old original portable consoles. The screens, the analogs and the buttons they use are as good if not better than the first party hardware. Unlike bulky handheld PC, their Linux or Android based emulation handhelds are still in the same size and weight class as the PSP.

A couple years ago the Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators were basically just experimental demos. They weren't stable enough to actually finish any game on and most CPUs weren't fast enough to run them at full speed. They're still hit and miss but the list of playable titles will only ever grow.

It has come to the point that the PC can play everything. All previous gen consoles aside from the OG Xbox have emulators at a playable state. There are almost no current gen console exclusives anymore as the PC is getting ports of PS4/PS5 exclusives, the XBone/Series never had any to begin with, and of coarse the aforementioned Switch emulation.

Starfield demonstrates a complete lack of any cohesive vision in story, themes, and gameplay.

The artstyle has that generic "hard" space sci-fi look. I could just as well be looking at Star Citizen, Interstellar, or The Expanse. The locations might sound interesting in theory but are executed in the most bland way possible. It's kind of hilarious to think that these tiny settlements are supposed to be interplanetary capital cities. I do understand that unrestricted player movement means that they can't really place a massive city in the background like in the Mass Effect Trilogy but explicitly calling the places you visit capitals is absurd.

Bethesda tries hard to ape Serenity-esque space westerns with Akila. An interplanetary capital without paved roads in its main thoroughfare. It really clashes with the rest of the game's attempts at being seen as a believable "hard" sci-fi. A vision of a car free future brought to you by the limitations of the Creation Engine. The game engine is no excuse for not having a space horse though. Traversing procedurally generated terrain on foot is a waste of time.

The vaguely utopian corporate solarpunk of New Atlantis is soulless and not in the satirical good way. Which is ironic because it seems to be inspired by Starship Troopers.

Neon, the cyberpunk offworld oilrig tries and fails to be a hip seedy dystopia. It looks more like the Outer World's Groundbreaker Promenade than Mass Effect 2's Omega. It doesn't illicit feelings of despair from the callous disregard of humanity as a consequence of greed without limits. It's just a shopping mall with boring corporate suits who try to sound edgy.

The same goes for the music. It doesn't convey any emotion and isn't uniquely identifiable. Inon Zur's work for the Bethesda Fallouts weren't this forgettable so it's probably down to Bethesda's lack of direction. The music doesn't build into the atmosphere of any location or any story moment. I don't think Jeremy Soule would've made a difference, and it's good that Bethesda doesn't associate with an accused rapist. That said I'd still say his work with Oblivion was one the best soundtracks of any game.

Ship combat has controls like Freelancer except it plays terrible. The ships feel heavy and are unresponsive to control so it doesn't really work as an arcade space combat game. The mouse first controls with no flight stick support, fast travel, and the inability to actually dock/land manually make it an automatic fail as a spaceflight sim. The ability to fast travel instantly to any previously visited location is good though. With its quest design, it would be painful to play Starfield if they went the sim route.

The gun play is identical to Fallout 4 but plays worse due to procedurally placed enemies and levels. It has to rely on the AI, weapons and enemy design. None of those elements are able to make the fights interesting. It's still a lot better than any of the other spaceflight games with ground combat though.

The bar is being dropped so hard that Mass Effect Andromeda is retroactively becoming a great game. In the universe that Starfield is an 87, Andromeda is at least a 97.

I'll still play Starfield over Elite Dangerous, or No Man Sky since it has actual content. It isn't all procedurally generated and has an actual story with characters. I'll finish the main quest at least, the game isn't aggressively bad in anyway. It's just all around sterile and uninspiring. I still have the hope that somewhere out there I might find a branching side quest that is remotely as good as those in Oblivion, or New Vegas.

It's conventional warfare, not guerilla warfare, nor a suicide bombing campaign. The worst case scenario would resemble the Iran-Iraq war and the initial conditions resembled Northern Cyprus more than Afghanistan.

The Ukrainians don't really even have an equivalent to the Viet Cong. Insurgencies need the support of the local populace to eat and operate without being ratted out. Only Kherson is even close to divided enough for that to have a remote chance of occurring.

The terrain and culture of Ukraine aren't like Afghanistan. Afghans are more loyal to their tribes than Kabul. The underdeveloped subsistence farming economy of Afghanistan means any insurgent knows how to live off the land and survive living in deprivation for long and sustained periods. The terrain of Afghanistan allows insurgents to easily isolate whatever forces the government sends in an attempt to control the countryside. The Taliban won without any state really backing them. The overall population of Ukraine and Afghanistan might be similar but what matters most is the demographic in the age range for military service.

Syria didn't turn into an Afghanistan. The Donbass republics fended for themselves for 8 years while the DRA only lasted 3 years alone. Even then the DRA still outlasted the Soviet Union so had material support continued they might've continued on as a rump state. It wasn't like the US puppet, Ghani's regime, which just collapsed immediately after the US pullout.

Ukrainians are more Northern Alliance than Taliban. Their ideology isn't anywhere near as unified as the Taliban's. The moderate liberals and extremist fascists would turn on each other if living conditions deteriorated sharply.

There can be no defeat either. Pulling out would be political suicide for anyone in the Kremlin. Abandoning Russians in Russian territory would be different from abandoning the DRA. Nukes would fall before Crimea falls.

Anyway, you can't really predict the future by looking at the past. The similarities are only down to hindsight and brute force exhaustion of every possible historical parallel.

Only 1/10 of the price of peripheral needed to play Iron Lung VR.

Russia is simultaneously reduced to using old obsolete equipment on the front lines while somehow only ever loses the latest and greatest.

Although I'd say these channels are more accurately described as apolitical analysis based on facts.

• Cabbage did a 3 video deep dive on the QBZ-191.

• Red Effect covers tanks.

• Eurasia Naval Insight covers warships and planes in the pacific.

• Kalibrated with Scott covers Ukraine.

Russia's officially stated original goal was basically the Minsk accords, but instead of autonomy it was changed to independence for Donbass.

Ukraine officially stated goal is Crimea and Donbass.

I got the original picture from what is apparently a Forbes ad campaign by Goodby Silverstein.

It wasn't even welded. The sub is so ridiculous that it doesn't even use steel or titanium alloy like most serious submarines. Contrary to its name it was made out of carbon fiber.

https://fortune.com/...

Lochridge warned that the constant pressure on the Titan as it traveled deeper underwater would weaken any existing structural flaws, resulting in large tears to its carbon components. It was crucial, he said, to conduct non-destructive testing so that a solid and safe product could be provided for both passengers and crew.

Diving the submersible “without any non-destructive testing to prove its integrity” would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible,” Lochridge said in legal documents.

However, OceanGate allegedly told Lochridge that instead of carrying out the testing, it would install an acoustic monitoring system in the submersible to detect the start of any potential hull breakdown.

Lochridge expressed concern that such an acoustic system would not be able to detect existing flaws. It would simply flag components that were about to fail, he warned—which often happened “milliseconds before an implosion.”

The Philippines was a full on US colony before WW2 so outside of the Hukbalahap, it often became a choice between collaborating with the Japanese or collaborating with the Americans.

Honestly I respect Artemio Ricarte more than I do Emilio Aguinaldo, or Manuel Quezon.

Chicajo he mostly did System Shock remixes and C&C inspired music. Sadly, he stopped making music after his stroke in 2016 and his website has been down for years.

Chicajo - Drone

Playlist of Chicajo's System Shock Remixes

Chicajo - Bog 2004, ignore the anime picture this is actually a remake of the C&C Red Alert 1 track by Frank Klepacki of the same name.

Bizarrely, the channel that exclusively uses completely unrelated anime pictures has the most complete collection of his original tracks on youtube.