Demut

Why does Prigozhin look so much like a ball sack?

Huh, interesting. That's fairly clear-cut* but I never heard that about the two of them. I wonder why. *Although I suppose it could be argued that they sought out that kind of thing because of their pre-existing issues rather than being exposed to that content causing them. A chicken and egg kinda thing, I guess.

100% agreed.

Played some CRSED today. Does anyone remember that April Fools' Day battle royal shooter? Cuisine Royal is what it was called, I think. A few years back it got overhauled and is now a bit less goofy. It's still F2P but they changed the name to, well, CRSED (and no, that's not a typo). It's still kinda fun, actually, and runs better than many of the big titles. Most unique are probably the so-called rituals in the game which are actions players can take that influence the entire round, such as reducing gravity, turning day into night, starting a zombie apocalypse or causing a map-wide flood. I'm not sure how I feel about the different playable characters' individual abilities though. Some of those are clearly more useful than others (such as turning into a swarm of tiny fucking bats and being able to then rematerialize at will), with the better ones seemingly all being locked behind the paywall.

Are they? Now, I'm no scholar and only know of school shooters' motivations what I remember from the respective coverage at the time but ... were school shooters like the guys at Columbine for example motivated by "far right wing rhetoric"? Seems to me like those cases are more aptly described as being committed by disillusioned, depressed nihilists, often on drugs like SSRIs (that have side effects like emotional blunting and increasing violent behavior), and frequently with traumatic pasts. If you read what the perpetrators left behind in writing (in the cases where they did so) you usually find them airing their grievances with the world in general rather than any particular partisan issue. So the access to guns is clearly a prerequisite for these shootings but given the aforementioned facts regarding their historic prevalence it cannot be a major, let alone primary, cause behind those incidents. Again, I see your point when it comes to spree killings in general, way more of those are clearly committed for overtly right-wing ideological reasons than the reverse (or those drawn to said ideologies are more likely to commit them, however you wanna look at it). But at least from what I've seen school shootings don't mirror that trend so obviously.

The irony! What's there to tolerate, you drama queen? Did I miss something? Are you the arbiter of who gets to post here or something? Did me not posting for a couple of years disqualify me from doing so again in the present?

So juvenile school shooters are predominantly motivated by "far right wing rhetoric" and use "assault weapons"? 'Cause that's the phenomenon I'm primarily talking about. Mass shootings in general have been far more prevalent in the past by comparison (although still much rarer overall than today) so there the unidimensional gun explanation at least makes somewhat more sense.

Nah, fam, I need you to stop policing my language, it's getting tiresome. What's next, coming at me for saying "Aussies", "Ruskies", "Frenchies" or "Paddies"? Go pick up a book on linguistics, clipping is a ubiquitous way to form hypocorisms. I'll keep calling Ukies Ukies and vatniks v#@!%&§s. So go pick something more worthwhile to do with your limited time here on Earth.

Not that I disagree since I've got no idea myself but how come? Again, with aircraft in particular I can see why there would be less photographic evidence. Say a R*ssian jet flew a sortie, turns around to return to its airfield and gets hit by some Ukie rocket on its way back. Depending on how catastrophic the damage is, it might only crash a few kilometers further on rather than immediately. Or maybe even still manage to land somewhat intact. Either way, you wouldn't expect OSINT to count these cases properly most of the time unless there was footage of the hit itself and/or satellite imagery of the aftermath. Only ones crashing in some field within areas of Ukrainian control would be likely to be photographed and listed as a loss. To some extent this might explain the MRLS and artillery figures as well since those are generally positioned further away from the front than, say, tanks or IFVs and such (and thus be less likely to be photographed by Ukies).

I think your embed went wrong. Okay, so you got me curious and I did. Using Oryx we get the following (left: UAF, right: Oryx): Tanks: 3267 / 1718 APV: 6474 / 3348(?) MRLS: 463 / 172 Aircraft: 295 / 71 Helicopters: 286 / 77 Lemme mention one issue right off the bat: I have no idea if both count losses the same way (is it the sum of destroyed, damaged, abandoned and captured in both cases or subsets of those?) and how they classify each piece of equipment. The UAF figures for example have just this one category called "APV" (Armored Personnel Vehicle, I'm guessing) whereas Oryx lists AFVs, IFVs, APCs, MRAPs and IMVs. I added up the latter under the assumption that this "APV" category includes all of those. Similar issues exist for some of the others. Anyhow, with that out of the way, we can immediately see that there's quite a difference. Of course, the OSINT data is only a lower bound since you can't expect every loss to be visually confirmed (particularly in the case of aircraft which might limp back to their own territory before crashing or not crashing). And it's not like we have direct access to the military's own after-action reports/strike effectiveness assessments. The question is, I suppose, whether it is reasonable to assume that there'd be, as in some of these categories, more than three times as many "actual" losses as visually confirmed ones. Is less than ~30% being visually confirmed by openly available data a lot or not? My lame take-away here would be that it's hard to arrive at a confident conclusion. Had the Ukie numbers been very close to the OSINT ones it would have been sensible to just accept them at face value. But with those discrepancies it might go either way. They could still be somewhat accurate and just reflect the natural gap between what's outright provable and what's hidden (at least to civilians) by the fog of war. Or they could be padded which wouldn't be surprising either.

Would it actually work with something this blatant? The examples I've seen talked about the past (usually in relationships) are much more plausibly deniable. I know there's been psychology experiments involving groups of (in-the-know) people saying shit as dumb as 2+2=5 and one subject eventually going along with it but from what I remember of those the outcome was more one of someone reluctantly going along with peer pressure and not ACTUALLY believing all of the sudden that 2+2=5.

Authoritarian regimes are famously incapable of proper self-assessment given their fraught relationship with truth and the usually present disincentives for officials at every level to report rosier data to their superiors in order to make themselves look better (or at least not rock the boat). R*ssia is another prime example of that in the present, their military apparatus in particular.

How do they compare to the visually confirmed losses compiled by open-source intelligence data? I mean the equipment losses anyway, it's not like there's equally comprehensive data on killed and wounded soldiers.

Make a thread in the off-topic forum and I might. This got derailed enough by him already.

Serious question: I keep seeing certain 'Murricans (read: mostly red state boomers) pointing out that when they were kids they regularly brought guns to school and it was no big deal. Specifically, rifles and shotguns in their cars during high school so that they could go hunting and shit after class. And yet there were virtually no spree killings by kids back then (maybe like one with a single death every few years). In other words, not really "now with guns". So what changed to cause this explosion of cases?

As if that had anything to do with your previous animosity. Also, can't be all that wrong if the very moderators of this site use it themselves without censure. Besides, it's not like I called anyone one (unlike others in those results). That's straight-phobic of you. Bad CitizenVectron.

You've been a hostile dick since day one for no reason that I can discern. Not sure what your deal is but you might wanna introspect some. Also, lol.

All lost during the transition, I'm afraid. Unless @Commissar SFLUFAN can restore my account after all. They were listed in a PM sent by ... I don't even remember the username anymore. And I never bothered saving them elsewhere. Why would I? It's not like I expected D1P to go anywhere. Have all of you gotten nastier since last I was here or have I just gotten more sensitive? And no, had that been a significant factor in my coming here, I wouldn't have went on this hiatus (if you wanna call it that) in the first place. It's not like I couldn't have gotten most of the games I was gifted elsewhere. Having them on Steam or whatever is nice to be sure but what little difference that makes isn't really enough by itself to hang around.

Heh, I'm starting to see why this place is so much smaller now. Also, is my memory just getting bad or have you really always been this annoying? For what it's worth, I don't recall you being such an ass back in the day.

According to the thesis of the video below (and the recent studies it relies on) the whole narrative around its meteoric rise was significantly exaggerated to begin with and much of it turned out to be straight-up fiction upon closer scrutinization:

Still chewing my way through Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (2nd attempt). Man, that game is such a bore as a completionist. Prime example of why fucking side quests should value quality of quantity. If I am asked to taxi one more stupid-ass NPC across the entire fucking map I'll not guarantee that they'll make it there with a pulse. I should probably just drop it (again) but at this point the sunk cost fallacy has its grip on me and I just wanna finish the stupid thing already.

Does anyone here still play PUBG these days?

No, I'm not a philistine. Although I mostly have subtitles on out of habit at this point. Back in the day I'd have them one so that whenever I heard a new/unknown word I could see how it was spelled and looked it up. That's almost never necessary anymore so nowadays this mostly only comes into play for proper names and made-up terms (particularly in fantasy games).