True fact, I always carry a Wand of Magic Missile in 5e when I can afford it. They’re so useful, no concentration check stands a chance!

Russia is not an altruistic actor here

Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn’t is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I’ll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.

How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China’s loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they’re “colonizing” anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.

As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren’t placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They’re the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR’s dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.

Had to rush my dog to an emergency vet yesterday, she was bleeding a LOT and it looks like the cost of sutures and follow on care is going to wipe out my savings. I’ll be able to rebuild it, and obviously I’m glad my girl is okay, but shit fucking sucks nonetheless.

2 years is still insanely short to me. I had a Nexus 6p from 2016-2020, and a Pixel 5 from 2020-present, and frankly the 6p was still pretty fast and satisfying to use when I traded it in so I can’t imagine wtf anyone needs to upgrade more frequently than that.

condemn any violation of international law

China says that the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.

That was mostly by accident. IMO America’s actions in and around WW2 are better understood as the result of two expanding empires bumping into one another (America and Japan)

I don’t remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I’ve had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it’s not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn’t mean that the bios “sees” it, which is pretty annoying.

Lately it’s been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn’t an issue until like a week ago, I’ve tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.

Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can’t handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I’ve had it. I guess I’ve had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn’t such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.

Yeah, comparing populations with IQ is specious BS, but you can track IQ over time and see what messes up people’s ability to take a test pretty easily. One that sticks out in my mind is kids in American schools who don’t get breakfast scoring something huge like twenty points lower even when you control for other factors, the constant deprivation of living in Gaza undoubtedly does huge damage.

Date, Fig, Peach, and Cherry are my picks.

The military is a snapshot of a certain younger portion of the US population. AFAIK support for Israel is down across the younger population as a whole, so that’s reflected in the military.

I don’t bother with a two piece rain suit, I just throw a bright yellow poncho on over my usual jacket and secure it around my waist. My pants are a lost cause though.

Perhaps the ethnic cleansing that started in 1948 had something to do with it.

That final boss fight song still gets me pumped up like nothing else. There’s a reason UT’s fanbase got so huge, and it’s not because the game is mid.

The creator of Missile Command allegedly had this very same revelation while creating it, and suffered nightmares about nuclear annihilation. I like how the game just gets harder and harder, meaning that no matter how good you are at it, once the bombs start dropping then eventually every city will be destroyed anyway.

The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.

Motorcycle. If I’m going to be forced to drive to and from work, I might as well enjoy it.

And they still couldn’t stop themselves from putting in some “this conflict has been going on for thousands of years” bullshit and other both sidesism.

Fractional BAB wins again. I like D&D 5 just fine but for stuff like multi-classing and creating really complex builds D&D 3.5 is the superior system.

I don’t think it’s possible without another Arab-Israeli war, or some kind of collapse of Israel’s military command. Unfortunately I think that strategically this latest attack is going to go down in history as a failure, because despite showing Hamas’ ability to win tactically unless something major changes I think the most significant political effect that this attack will have is galvanizing Israeli politics further against the Palestinians.

Now, that said, this could be just the first week of a new era of Palestinian resistance. If that’s the case then the situation in Gaza is going to become not unlike Stalingrad in WW2, with open warfare between a besieged population and their attackers, and if it goes on long enough Hamas will pull concessions out of Israel eventually, but it’s impossible to know whether that will be months or years down the line or whether it will be pro-Palestinian leadership that gets those concessions or some kind of collaborationist movement that arises and usurps Hamas.