You’re conflating some quite different things here. Most uses of cluster munitions are war crimes, yes, because most of the time they’re used in exactly the same way Russia is using them - by an invading army who is at best eking out a military advantage and heedless of the long-term damage done to the civilian population, and at worst as part of active terror tactics to try and kill civilians and force a surrender. That’s a war crime, no two ways about it, and the fact that they’re so widely used that way is an excellent reason to have treaties in place banning their use. But this is a very different statement to use of cluster munitions being against international law or a war crime in and of itself. They’re not chemical weapons or nukes. The problem with them isn’t that they’re inherently worse or more evil or inhumane than any other weapon in their effect on enemy troops, but that it’s very easy to use them in evil ways against civilians and that the damage they do extends long past the end of the war. In this very specific situation it would be insane for Ukraine to use them in evil ways, most of the long-term damage has already been done, and that small part of it that hasn’t should be Ukraine’s own decision.

You yourself admitted in another post that it’s very unusual for cluster munitions to be used by a defending army. Given that, I don’t think “most uses of cluster munitions are war crimes” is a good argument, and it’s still coming down to this idea that we should stop the Ukraine government from having cluster munitions in order to protect Ukrainian civilians. The same Ukrainian civilians who are now half-soldiers themselves by necessity and who desperately want those cluster munitions to stop the Russians from killing them, throwing them into re-education camps, and stealing their children to send to Russian “orphanages” whether their parents are alive or not. Do you understand why I think that’s so fucked?

If Ukrainian use of cluster munitions would inherently constitute a war crime or violate international law, then I can see a coherent argument for not sending them - as awful as the situation is, further weakening international law has the potential for even worse consequences down the line in future conflicts between other powers. But if that’s true, I’d like to see some actual evidence in the form of e.g. a statement from a respected bipartisan legal organisation saying so. So far I haven’t seen anything of the kind in the media, or even from bipartisan organisations calling for America not to provide them - for example, while Amnesty International is against the US supplying cluster munitions, they certainly don’t say it would violate international law or be a war crime. The argument I’ve seen from organisations like this is that using cluster munitions here is a retrograde step away from one day making these treaties global and banning cluster munitions worldwide - this is true as far as it goes, but nowhere near enough for me to ignore the clear and present harm that using them here would help to avoid.

If instead there’s no war crimes or violation of international law, then to convince me sending the munitions is wrong you’d need to prove that giving Ukraine the weapons they’re asking for to defend themselves is going to do significantly more harm to them than a Russian victory, and that’s a very high bar to clear.

This is absolutely a real and important effect, but we should bear in mind that this poll isn’t the thing proving it so it’s kind of a bad headline. In particular, the headline suggests that this is a new and tentative finding rather than something that’s been known for ages, and that it’s possible to disprove the effect by knocking down this survey. Intergroup contact theory actually goes back to the 50s and AFAICT is incredibly well-established.

To prove the effect exists with a survey like this, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “don’t know any trans people” because they don’t know any trans people from the people who “don’t know any trans people” because all the trans people in their life are terrified of coming out to them. Conversely, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to the world from the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to only a very few people who they already had good reason to believe would be supportive. There are ways of doing this for people who are better at statistics and experiment design than me, and as I understand it there are studies which do it carefully and do prove the effect, but this isn’t one of them and doesn’t try to be. (And why should it try to be, when the effect’s existence has already been established and studied separately, and when the raw data on a large current sample is useful without reinventing the wheel?)

As far as I can tell from a quick skim, that article is about firing cluster munitions into populated areas. I think we can both agree that this is a war crime and the people responsible should be in prison. I don’t think it would have been any less of a war crime if either Ukraine or Russia had been firing conventional munitions into populated areas, though. I also don’t think it has much bearing on Ukraine’s likely actions in this war, since it’s a conventional war rather than an insurgency with most fighting taking place inside major cities - even ignoring basic decency, there is simply no reason for them to brutalise their own population that way. I was more interested in evidence of a defensive use of cluster munitions which hadn’t been properly cleaned up, which was the direction of the conversation to that point.

I don’t think anything I said implied that Ukraine was morally unimpeachable on the military side. If we were talking about whether or not Ukraine should be able to torture Russian POWs or impersonate medics or firebomb Russian apartment complexes then this would be a very different conversation and I would be saying very different things. I also don’t think anyone is saying that use of cluster munitions is a good thing, only that it’s the lesser of all available evils.

I do think that under all circumstances it’s very unhelpful and even paternalistic for us to tell Ukraine what they can and can’t do for their own good. Ukraine is not fighting the Iraq war or Vietnam here. They’re not lunatics, they’re not children, and they’re not fighting because they’ve been lied or manipulated or bullied into it by their leadership. They’re fighting a defensive war of annihiliation in which they either win or die, much of the civilian population included. Given that, they are the only ones who should be allowed a say on what risks they are prepared to take and what costs they consider acceptable, and our role in this should be to shut up and help them unless they are genuinely violating international law. There might one day come a time where the Ukrainian people start disagreeing with the Ukrainian leadership on how far to go, and if that ever happens then I’m happy to weigh in on the side of the people, but we’re not there yet - last I heard Zelenskiy was still incredibly popular.

I also didn’t say there was “no downside” to using cluster munitions more. I would instead say that most of the downside is already there thanks to Russia’s extensive use of them. Obviously the more bombs are present the more likely it is that someone is killed, but AFAICT the deaths are not the worst part of unexploded munitions because they are typically rare. The problem is that the reason deaths are rare is that the instant the immediate threat is over, the government has to designate huge swathes of the country as de facto minefields, unsafe for everyone including the people who used to live there until they can be painstakingly cleared. Even afterwards, the risk is never entirely gone and the population has to live with that - people don’t feel safe walking in the countryside they grew up in for decades after the fact. That, to me, would be the worst part, and past a certain point increasing the number of munitions used in a given engagement makes very little difference to it.

I think Ukraine, specifically, has a huge incentive to show as much restraint in their use as possible here. If you have evidence that defending militaries using cluster munitions typically fail to do so, then I’d be interested to see that.

Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.

Well this article’s a pro-Putin load of shit. The reason cluster munitions are banned under so many treaties is that they tend to fail to detonate and then kill civilians after the war, requiring a long and horrible cleanup process. But Russia has already been using cluster munitions in huge quantities, so that cleanup process already needs to happen, and this article is handwringing over Ukraine being able to use them on Ukrainian territory in response. And if Ukraine loses this war, Russia has already made it perfectly clear through their actions in occupied territory that the result will be genocide - something the article curiously decides to omit, while quite happily pushing a false equivalence between Russia’s use (pre-emptive, offensive, and murdering civilians of the country they’re invading) and Ukraine’s use (in response, defensive, and accepting some deaths to stop Russia from killing more).

Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.

(Given Sven’s advice here I’m probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)

By being the brains behind the Republican party, he has done more to endanger the entire world via climate change than almost any other living person. That’s leaving aside the destruction of democracy in America and all the many, many, many individual ruined lives. He is quite literally multiple orders of magnitude more evil than the worst serial killer in history, and when he dies I will hold a massive party in which the house toilet is decorated to resemble his grave.

The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.

I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.

Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.

People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.

I mean, let’s not forget the whole sex predator thing. Their image is going to be faeces smeared on a bathroom wall until Guillemot goes.

Gay people in Malaysia are imprisoned for up to 20 years. This is not a law that deserves respect, and anyone who believes otherwise is a monster.

A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.

Quite a boring answer from me:

• Steam deck, which gives access to a large subset of PC games and also just about every console up to the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era plus the Wii via emulation (no jailbreaking required).
• Switch, which gives access to a lot of the best WiiU games as expanded ports plus some spruced up versions of Nintendo’s back catalogue.
• PS5, which gives access to most of the best PS3 and PS4 games via PS+.
• Xbox Series S/X, which has backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for some (most?) games.

There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.

Have you tried Shelter 2? It’s not quite the same thing, but you play a lynx with five adorable cubs trying to survive in a wilderness setting. (Warning: your playthrough will likely involve some or all of your adorable cubs dying.)

Putin’s now fled Moscow to Tver. He’s made himself look weak and scared, which is incredibly personally dangerous for any strongman dictator and IMO completely rules out a trick. He might well have sanctioned Prigozhin’s earlier outbursts - he certainly kept to the rule of pretending that Putin himself was infallible, and only being given bad advice by Shoigu - but the only way this ends now is with either Putin or Prigozhin dead.

Russia has already instituted conscription and civilian terror tactics and done everything they really could do to win the war - there’s no further escalation available to them except into the realm of chemical weapons or similar, which would trigger further escalation from the west. And in the long run, NATO can outspend them - Russia’s only real source of aid is China, who will be demanding greater and greater concessions in return. On a strategic and geopolitical level, Russia lost a long time ago, and the only reason they haven’t withdrawn already is that it wouldn’t be survivable for Putin personally - he’d get couped the moment he showed weakness.

Don’t get me wrong, Prigozhin is an irredeemable monster who’s been at the head of some of the worst atrocities in Ukraine and who has based a lot of his appeal on his pyrrhic victory at Bakhmut (while also attacking Shoigu’s failures). But if the coup succeeds, he’s a monster with the political wiggle room to withdraw Russia’s dick from the Ukrainian beehive by blaming all failures on Shoigu and Putin destroying the great and powerful Russian military through their corruption and incompetence and blah blah blah stab in the back blah blah western decadence blah blah blah. And he will have significant political incentive to do so, since it will clear the way for the oligarchs to start making money again as sanctions lift.

If anyone in the comments doesn’t know about Civvie11 on Youtube, he’s the best source of long-form boomer shooter reviews and well-edited playthroughs on the platform. MtPain11 (a.k.a. Dean of Doom) is also amazing for Doom WADs specifically, that whole community got revitalised with the release of DOOM 2016 and just keeps going from strength to strength.