brucoe

Let's not forget the Palpatine regime.

Still one of the greatest lines in cinema history.

This is such a sad thing to see this whole thing play out in real time.

After my first year at West Point, one of my roommates took his summer break to fight a revolution in Africa (his home country). My summer was quite uneventful in comparison to his. He was literally a lieutenant colonel in his country's military and had to come back to the Academy as a third class cadet.

They have four tanks and two planes. They just get around A LOT.

I'm starting to think that too many people have a video game mentality when it comes to actual war, and I don't just mean here. I mean the media as well. I'm watching and reading all sorts of "the Russians are failing because the war isn't going as well as they planned" TWO DAYS INTO THE BATTLE. Battles take time, and there are ebbs and flows that are quite often so unpredictable, but the reality of the situation is the results you achieve at the end of the battle. There are so many factors that have not yet come into play that will make a serious difference in how this plays out, yet we're not even touching on the Plans B, C, and D that have been drawn up long before the first bullet was fired. I'd love to see the Ukrainians wipe out the Russians during this conflict, but the Russians went in with the knowledge that their military suffers in serious areas that their generals have obviously thought long and hard about. Things like command and control, supply chains, morale, and even deterioration of their advanced weaponry has all been realized as struggles they would have to correct once in the field. If you look at history, even the US had some serious complications when we first fielded units into battle (both World War II where we jumped into battle with low tech and built up our tech as the war escalated AND the Gulf War where we jumped into battle with equipment that had no armor, practically building it onto our Humvee's during battle, using stuff we found in the field until actual supply lines could bolster our equipment with what it really needed).

They brought large snow cone making machines! How cool is that?

Yeah, I was reading through this when he first started posting his journey. It was pretty fascinating and quite sad at the same time. To make it even worse, the numbers of people who kept criticizing him as making it up by arguing that he would have been conscripted, too, without realizing he was an American journalist, just made it that much harder to read through the whole thing.

I was at work today and some young kid from IT came in and just seemed to really want to talk politics to me today about the whole Ukrainian thing. I teach communications at the college, but most people on the boards here know I also hold a doctorate in political science and have an extensive background in the military. Well, I spent about two hours listen to this guy TELL me exactly how this whole scenario was going to end up based on his "extensive" knowledge of politics and history, and not once did I interject with "no, the world doesn't work that way". Not once. One of my colleagues was on the other side of the room cracking up, because she knew what was definitely on my mind, but I didn't let up once. This is the thing I fear. We have a LOT of complete morons in our society today who are convinced that having watched two episodes of Band of Brothers that they are somehow experts in strategic and tactical warfare (not to mention foreign policy and advanced psychology). That conversation ended after he got into a whole diatribe about how I am obviously young enough to get drafted and because he's got a degree in IT, he'll be in a much better position than me should we both get called up at the same time. I figured it wasn't the time to get into the whole concept of conscription and the process of how the military reactivates field grade officers.

I was really hoping for a YES vote from Russia.

I suspect that this is one of those escalation spots that will turn the war into a full blown conflict involving multiple nations. There are a couple of instances I can see that might just do that, including Russian usage of chemical warfare, tactical nuclear weapons and attacking the infrastructure of outside actors. With the way things are going right now, I honestly couldn't predict exactly which ones might actually be enough of a pressure point. One comment I do want to make because this has been driving me nuts. People do not understand the difference between strategic and tactical nuclear/atomic weapons, but every time I have brought up tactical nukes, people start treating it as some kind of mutual assured destruction scenario, totally oblivious to what a tactical nuke actually is.

Translation: Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Hanna Malyar informs: ❗️ Defensive battles are being fought in the south of Kherson. Mechanized units of the Armed Forces recaptured the road bridge and established themselves on the left bank of the Dnieper.

I'm assuming this is not related, but some guy in a derby hat just informed me that due to my military service, me, my wife and son have been authorized space in the local Vault Tec bomb shelter. Should I be concerned?

I don't know if anyone else has noticed but the New York Times has been running ads all last week (four or five of them per issue) that all seemed to be client attaboys to Peloton for such great products and service they've been providing, almost as if the company could do no wrong.

As an educator in Texas, the thing that really drives me nuts is this continuous approach to draft all of us as some kind of secret police force to enforce these stupid decisions made by religious nutjobs. I became an educator to educate, to teach, to pass on knowledge, not to wear the Nightwatch's super secret armband that identifies us as vassals of the state, ready to pounce on any infraction that someone doesn't seem to like. God, I fucking hate this shit.

When I first read this article in another place, I just assumed it was an Onion article.

Destiny 2 is that game that loves to hate me. I keep up to date on expansions, and I play it enough that I should know what's going on, but seriously, every time I play the game I'm completely lost. I really don't know what I'm supposed to be doing; I just like to pew pew as much as I'm capable. Lately, I've been running the Xur missions every time I sign on because it's a team-based mission that I at least understand (even if I don't understand why I'm actually doing it). They REALLY REALLY need some kind of tutorial to work with the game as you're playing it so you actually understand what you're supposed to be doing. Right now, I sign in and feel like I'm playing one eighth of what the game is designed to do.

My problem is finding games that are new enough to feel like I'm really pushing my system. Lately, I've been playing Destiny 2 and Lost Ark, but that's just because I need to find some really awesome games to start playing with the new system. It also doesn't help that work is just taking way too much time that should be used for playing games.

Personally, I liked Boba Fett for his mysteriousness when I knew nothing about him other than what was already in canon, AND when I had never seen what he looks like under the helmet. I guess since they decided they were going to show us what Mando looked like they were going to double down with Boba Fett. Boba Fett's story was finished in Return of the Jedi (at least to me). I'm MUCH more interested in cowboy Deadwood than in anything involving a geriatric bounty hunter. If they at least gave us a real character arc with Boba Fett, maybe the series would make sense, but what story is it they're trying to tell?

Yesterday, I got my Alienware delivered with a 3080, 64 gigs of RAM a I9-ridiculously fast processor and a physical gaming girl who arrives to press the power button every morning. It was massively expensive, but I finally decided to just treat myself instead of try to find a card to upgrade my older system. My one problem now is I have no idea what to install to take advantage of this monstrosity.

I've been watching it weekly, and I really like the turn they've done with the last two episodes. And while I'm a huge Star Wars fan, I'm even more of a fan of watching reaction videos of people who are certified (or should be certified) fans who go nuts whenever an obscure character shows up in the show, like when the bug eyed bounty hunter shows up. I figured he was important, but had no idea how much until the two guys I was watching had a practical nerdgasm when he appeared. That whole last episode was nonstop that.

I have all sorts of mixed thoughts on textbooks and education based on my own growing up experiences that I don't think I'll ever get beyond. When I was going through elementary school and then middle school, there was a HUGE fight in our school district concerning our history textbook because the "new" textbook had seven chapters that were added to the curriculum. There were school board arguments that went on for years over this issue until one side managed to win, and the "new" textbook was put into the mandatory curriculum. That's all great and good, except when it came to being in that class that was teaching the subject of history. Our history teacher actually assigned all chapters BUT the seven chapters that were added to the curriculum. For years, that became how they taught it. And for spoiler warning (which I only discovered because once my mom found out what had happened, she made me read the unassigned chapters), the stricken chapters were all about the Native American experience. Basically, the argument in our school district (in Southern California, so it wasn't like this was in some Missouri district no one had ever heard about) was that they didn't want this "outside" information being taught to our young students. If you didn't seek out the information yourself, you were pretty much taught that John Wayne and a bunch of cowboys had civilized the heathens to make America what it is today. Yeah, it's anecdotal, but add up those anecdotal incidents, and you get a lot of what makes up our crappy education in this country.

Loved the show. I also need to see the third season.

One of the things I loved about working for Maxis (and then EA) was I was often assigned to games that were about to move out of pre-alpha, so they would want me to find how to best totally screw up the game from within. Quite often, I would find a completely different goal to achieve than what the original design of the game was meant to be. And I was often assigned this task to games from other studios (they'd hire us to do this based on our history of massively breaking others' games in this process), and it was so much fun. Once you figured out what the original engine for the game was designed to do, the amount of fun you could have within the game itself was fascinating. I remember running anti-star destroyer missions within Tie Fighter because one of the unspoken rules of the game was that without the initial star destroyer present, the whole game couldn't move forward (so we'd figure out ways to destroy the central star destroyer and see what anarchy happened after). They even "fixed" the game so that destroying that star destroyer was impossible, yet one of our senior testers, a pilot named Bill who passed away just a month ago, spent a month nonstop running strafing runs on the star destroyer before he managed to blow it up. They had to actually add a readme file to the game because of him that stated something to the effect: "If you destroy the star destroyer, the game may not be able to be completed."

My problem with Icewind Dale isn't the gameplay itself (it's actually a lot of fun), but that it's designed to be handled by people who are exploring tactics. In that guise, it's a bit fun, but as always, I begin to focus on a strategic level of handling combat, and in a very short time, I'm way overpowered and basically smashing through practically everything.