archer

I don't think Batman could pick up Mjolnir....

When the Ukrainians screw up, there's not a bunch of Russian civilians around to post videos about it.

The Washington Post says the paper will no longer include staff names on stories produced by reporters in Russia, to protect them from being imprisoned. ==== Russian forces have fired into two different humanitarian corridors in southern Ukraine, killing at least six civilians. ==== Putin said western sanctions on Russia were akin to a declaration of war, reports Reuters. The US State Department has warned American citizens living or travelling in Russia to “depart immediately”.

No. Even if I were young or healthy, I have too many people here who depend on me to take care of them day-to-day. The Ukrainian embassy in Canada has been fielding a lot of requests though. I don't know how many of those are Canadians of Ukrainian descent vs other outraged Canadians. There's more people of Ukrainian descent in Canada than in any other non-European country, many of them in the western parts of Canada which has a similar climate to Ukraine.

I rather liked The Postman. It wasn't great but it was watchable and made me care about the main characters (which is something that horrible post-apocalyptic fiction never manages to do). I'd be dissatisfied paying money to see it but not seeing it for free.

I don't like dealing with the paperwork so I don't usually deal with armor encumbrance. If you've got the strength and training to be a warrior, you know how to deal with wearing armor without it substantially bothering you. If I were better at keeping track of niggling details, I'd be more of a purist about it. I like the visual of a shirtless guy being able to swordfight on equal terms with an armored warrior. But RPG's aren't a particularly visual game. I do casually keep track of armor weight when tracking how much a person is carrying. Most people need to shuck their pack and drop what goods they're carrying in order to fight effectively.

In the books to the best of my memory, Conan would invoke the name of Bel, god of thieves, to help him in his endeavors (though I've read non-Howard books about Conan and a ton of Conan comic books so I could be mistaken.) When was in Zamora, he was explicitly a thief. When he was in the south around Amazon, he explicitly became a pirate.

Tolkien had basically two types of elves, those who went to the lands of the gods and learned metallurgy and sciences & those who stayed behind in the dark then never advanced as much as the others. Then the ones who came back to Middle Earth after the sun was created mostly reverted. D&D seems to deal with elves as if they're granola-crunching individualists who never create cities or infrastructure for a technological civilization. ==== I thought it'd be interesting to deal with elves as those granola-crunching individualists who never create cities or infrastructure for a technological civilization...who happened to live next to (essentially) African animist tribes (or Australian aborigines) who shared a lot of the elves distain for technology and cities. So the elves of today are mostly intermarried with black tribes. In the vast savannahs, they often pursue a nomadic lifestyle. In areas with more rainfall, they do subsistence farming and are elaborate storytellers and gift the world with a large number of bards. In coastal regions, many of them take to the seas. Some of them have used magic to revert to a form suited for living underwater. Others fish. Many live close to large ports and are coveted by captains for their seamanship. But in any case, most "elves" which you meet are at least part-human. And all are black.

Bloomberg News, BBC, and Canadian Broadcasting Corp have stopped news-gathering operations inside Russia due to a new law which makes such activity about the ongoing war into a crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail. "The bill, which was adopted by lawmakers earlier on Friday, sets out jail terms of varying lengths and fines against people who publish “knowingly false information” about the military, with harsher penalties to hit when dissemination is deemed to have serious consequences." - Agence France-Presse CNN announced it is stopping broadcasts inside Russia. The BBC news website is still available inside Russia over the dark web via Tor. ==== Russia is not cooperating on the humanitarian corridors in southern Ukraine which they agreed to yesterday, particularly around Kherson. (Yesterday it was reported there that Russians weren't allowing civilians to evacuate, weren't allowing food or medicine into the city, and were bombarding the city with artillery.) - Washington Post The Ukrainian city of Mariupol has no water, heat or electricity and is running out of food after coming under attack by Russian forces for the past five days, its mayor said in a televised appeal. He called for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from the south-eastern port city. (A humanitarian corridor which should already exist according to yesterday's agreement.) ==== Facebook and Twitter are blocked inside by Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor. YouTube appears to be unavailable though I'm not sure there's been any official announcement about it being blocked.

Trump and Putin are invading Ukraine together in order to stop bioweapons from being constructed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. - latest QAnon conspiracy drivel ==== Former Vice President Mike Pence will tell Republican donors Friday that there "is no room in this party for apologists for Putin," according to speech excerpts shared with NBC News. The remarks from Pence, who is scheduled to address a Republican National Committee retreat in New Orleans ==== Russian President Vladimir Putin said he discussed Belarus’ interest in having access to the Baltic Sea in a phone call with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. “Just today we talked with the President of Belarus on this matter. Our Belarusian friends are interested in being present in the Baltic, interested in developing their own port facilities. You know that I also support it,” Putin said during a ceremony for a new Russian ferry, which he attended virtually. - CNN The only way to give landlocked Belarus access to the Baltic Sea is to cut a 400-500 mile long path through a NATO country, either Poland, Lithuania, or Latvia. Maybe not the best time to double down on announcing your territorial ambitions. ==== Russian forces have seized control of that nuclear power plant and are allowing the Ukrainian workers continue to operate it at the moment. We'll see what happens after the blizzard hits in a couple of days. The live feed of the plant which was running yesterday is no longer functional. Some sources claim a number of the workers have been killed but no major media outlets seem to have confirmed that as of yet. ==== From a partial second-hand translation: "As a result, thanks to "friendly fire", 9 tanks and 4 armored personnel carriers were destroyed. Accordingly, it saved us 13 Јavelin." Some grimly amusing comments about the incident: Good to see Russians fighting the real enemy. Probably figured if they were (fellow) Russians, they'd be out of gas or stuck in convoy/mud. "They're moving, shoot it!". Any time I get shot at I consider it unfriendly fire. Just throwing out an idea. Put up a toll booth. Then they will have to go back and get a crapload of rubles. ==== Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have in the last two days submitted formal applications to join the European Union. https://www.commonspace.eu/news/amid-fog-war-ukraine-georgia-and-moldova-submit-formal-application-eu-membership?PageSpeed=noscript I'd heard this of Ukraine and Georgia but this is the first I remember hearing it of Moldova. ==== US official states Ukraine still has "significant majority" of its aircraft - Reuters 92% of assembled Russian forces are now inside Ukraine. I'm not a military expert, but the general rule of thumb is that you retain at least 10% of your forces to be a reserve so you can respond to large enemy counterattacks and such. If Russia's digging into that margin while there's no large-scale enemy counterattack, that's either bad planning or things are going much worse on the ground for Russia than we're being told (even as being told by Ukrainian forces). ==== Canada promises another 4500 M72 anti-tank weapons and up to 7500 hand grenades out of their existing military stock. ====

Say what you want about Hitler... but at least the guy killed Hitler.

Russian stock market closed for 5th day in a row. MSCI and FTSE plan to remove Russian stocks from their indexes and reclassify them "at a price that is effectively zero." (Those are basically the international versions of the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P...which have also removed Russian stocks from their indexes.) All Russian stocks are suspended from trading on the London stock exchange because the values are still dropping so rapidly or have already reached effectively zero. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/russia-war-markets-stocks-central-bank-sanctions-ukraine-invasion-ruble-2022-3?op=1 edit: The Moscow stock market will remain shut at least until Tuesday, Russian state news agencies reported on Friday.

Frankly, I was kinda hoping you were a song writer.

Another Vanilla Ice song? What was the first song you created for Vanilla Ice?

You could name him: Star Blazar and give him a theme song.

The BBC and Deutsche Welle websites are both now blocked in Russia. Guess it's a good thing the BBC set up their shortwave broadcast into Russia yesterday. ==== Russia has drawn up plans for public executions in Ukraine as and when cities are captured by Russian troops, Bloomberg reports. Cites a European intelligence official as saying that Moscow has drafted strategies to break morale in order to discourage Ukrainians from fighting back as cities fall under the Kremlin’s control. The official said Moscow plans to crack down on protest, detain opponents and potentially carry out public executions. ==== City of Mariupol, Mayor Vadym Boichenko states Russian troops are creating a “humanitarian catastrophe” by actively attacking rail links and bridges, as well as cutting off water and power supply, in a bid to prevent civilians from escaping shelling. Russians are “hindering food supplies, blocking us like in Leningrad”. ==== EU officials in Brussels have said they believe the Ukrainian figures in relation to the deaths of Russian soldiers are accurate. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Thursday morning that 9,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. - The Guardian ==== Germany is planning to deliver a further 2,700 anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. These are Soviet-era shoulder-fired “Strela” surface-to-air rockets which Germany inherited from the East German military. Infrared targeting, useful again low altitude targets. Looks like a bazooka, can be reloaded up to 5 times. ==== Anonymous Offers Russian Soldiers Over $50K Worth of Bitcoin for Each Surrendered Tank ==== Zelensky has survived three assassination attempts so far https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/zelensky-survives-three-assassination-attempts-in-days-xnstdfdfc ==== Russian energy giant Lukoil calls for immediate end of Ukraine war https://www.timesofisrael.com/russian-energy-giant-lukoil-calls-for-immediate-end-of-ukraine-war/ I believe that's the company which I posted was down over 97% on London's Stock Exchange yesterday. ==== Pentagon says 90% of the assembled Russian forces are now in Ukraine. 111 of the 117 battalion groups.

News roundup === About 3,800 troops based at Fort Stewart in southeast Georgia have been ordered to deploy quickly and bolster U.S. forces in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. - AP ==== The U.S. military yesterday established channels to communicate directly with the Russian military as a way to deconflict tactical movements around Ukraine, a senior defense official said Thursday. - NBC Officially it's to keep both sides aware of aircraft movement of the other side to avoid accidents. In practice, it could be used to pass along intelligence or to coordinate activities if NATO gets into the war. ==== Sabre Corp. on Thursday said it terminated a global distribution agreement with Russia’s Aeroflot, crippling the country’s largest airline’s ability to sell seats. The Texas-based airline software giant provides airline ticket distribution and reservation services for airlines around the world. Sabre’s decision to end the distribution agreement means Aeroflot’s flights won’t show up on online travel agencies or other third party sites. I don't know how Aeroflot is set up, but many airlines just use Sabre for their internal booking services. So potentially being kicked off Sabre would prevent Aeroflot from selling tickets in advance at all because they wouldn't be able to keep track of what seats they've sold. And not being able to see Sabre would prevent them from knowing what tickets they've already sold and who the tickets were sold to. ==== Over 82% of forces Russia had gathered are committed to the invasion - MSNBC 20 hours ago ==== The International Cat Federation has banned Russian cats from international competitions, condemning the invasion of Ukraine as an "unprecedented act of aggression." Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe), a group which considers itself "the United Nations of Cat Federations" with members from over 40 counties, said in a statement on its website that "it cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing." ==== Russian forces are firing at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Enerhodar, a city on the Dnipro River that accounts for about one-quarter of Ukraine’s power generation. The city’s Mayor Dmytro Orlov said the nuclear plant is now on fire and the plant’s live feed shows smoke coming off the building. Live feed in case you want to watch a potential meltdown in the coming hours: ==== Economists say Russian invasion could lead to largest wheat shortage in history. The invasion will cause a massive supply shock and nothing can be done in the short term to prevent it, according to Scott Irwin, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois. Russia and Ukraine account for a quarter of wheat and one-fifth of corn production worldwide. - Bloomberg Russia won't be able to export due to sanctions. Ukraine might not plant a crop and even if they manage to, Russia might control all the ports which usually ship out the grain. ==== 2nd round of Russia-Ukraine negotiations focus on establishing "humanitarian corridors" to allow civilians to evacuate and to allow food and medicine to come in. Honestly, I don't see what Russia thinks it would get out of such an agreement. Starving the civilians and making it difficult for them to evacuate is exactly the buttons to push to put pressure on Ukraine's government and that seems right in Putin's sense of ethics. Of course, Russia not sending senior enough people to the negotiations to actually make a deal signals that Russia isn't seriously trying.... ==== IMF and the World Bank pledge $3 billion support package for Ukraine. ==== Russia’s central bank has imposed a 30% commission on foreign currency purchases by individuals on currency exchanges, brokers told Reuters, citing a letter from the regulator.

I have several mental disorders. I highly doubt their AI could accurately diagnose what's wrong with me.

Ever wonder if you're really crazy or not? AI model detects mental disorders based on web posts https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-ai-mental-disorders-based-web.html

About RT: Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok made RT's and Sputnik's social media content unavailable to users in the European Union on 28 February. Microsoft removed RT and Sputnik from MSN, the Microsoft Store, and the Microsoft Advertising network on the same day. YouTube, on 1 March, banned access to all RT and Sputnik channels on its platform in Europe (including Britain). Apple followed by removing RT and Sputnik from its App Store in all countries except Russia. Roku dropped the RT app from its channel store DirecTV pulled RT America from its channel lineup. New Zealand satellite television provider Sky also removed RT, citing complains from customers and consultation with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. There's been a wave of resignations from RT, including some on-air talent, because the channel wouldn't characterize what's happening in Ukraine as an "invasion" and allow unbiased coverage. Today, there's scattered reports that RT America (the branch responsible for US content) is shutting down. When RT was registered in the US as an agent of the Russian government in 2017, many hoped they'd open their books and reveal how much of their funding comes from the Russian government (much like Canadian Broadcasting and the BBC do). But RT kept their funding hidden even then. If it's true that they're shutting down US operations, I guess that answers the question about how much of their funding comes from the Russian government. edit: 15 minutes ago CNN confirmed RT America has permanently laid off most of its employees which will mean it effectively has ceased operations. That's 22 minutes after I made the original post. Remember to come here for all your breaking news before it breaks. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/media/rt-america-layoffs/index.html

Click this link here https://www.dcuniverseinfinite.com/ Login or create a DC Universe Infinite account for free Local the 'Annual Plan' for DC Universe Infinite and select it Under the 'Promo Code' section, apply FLASHSALE31 to receive your promotional discount for this annual plan Final price should be $37.49 you will be charged $37.49 (+tax) after your 7-Day DC Universe Infinite trial period ends

I nominate Free Guy for the best movie of the year.

Oath Keeper is 1st to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy for Jan. 6 attack Joshua James, 34, of Alabama pleaded guilty before the court to one count of seditious conspiracy and one count of obstructing an official proceeding. The agreement requires him to cooperate with federal authorities, testify before a grand jury, sit for interviews, and turn over an accounting of his financial assets. And his eventual sentencing will be based on how well he cooperates. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/oath-keeper-pleads-guilty-seditious-conspiracy-jan-attack/story?id=83212947&cid=social_twitter_abcn The seditious conspiracy charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. Obstructing an official proceeding is up to a 5 year sentence. However, if there was terrorism acts involved in that obstruction, up to an additional 8 years can be tacked on. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1505

Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities: No need to declare captured Russian tanks, equipment as income. The National Agency for the Protection against Corruption has stated that captured Russian tanks and equipment do not need to be declared to tax authorities. This is because the value of this “crap” does not exceed 100 living wages, the agency joked. On a serious note, it said that war trophies are untaxable. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3416691-deklaruvati-zahopleni-rosijski-tanki-ta-insu-tehniku-ne-treba-nazk.html ==== The BBC has launched a new shortwave radio service in Ukraine to ensure the resilience of its news operations in Ukraine and Russia, the corporation has announced. The new broadcasts will make four hours of World Service English news available every day and will reach audiences in Ukraine and parts of Russia. (The weekly audience for the BBC's Russian language news website more than tripled following the invasion compared to its weekly average from earlier this year. But access to that can easily be blocked by the Russian government if it wants while shortwave cannot.) https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60582327?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=621fa92bec502b53cd4806be%26BBC launches new shortwave radio service in Ukraine%262022-03-02T21%3A47%3A39.123Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:ed36bf50-ad9f-4830-a6bc-905ebf19cd71&pinned_post_asset_id=621fa92bec502b53cd4806be&pinned_post_type=share ==== Four Russian fighter jets violated Swedish airspace over Baltic Sea. A Russian aircraft violated Japanese airspace. ==== EU It shall be prohibited to sell, supply, transfer or export euro denominated banknotes to Russia or to any natural or legal person, entity or body in Russia, including the government and the Central Bank of Russia, or for use in Russia. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022D0346&from=EN ==== Exxon Mobil has also said it will exit Russia oil and gas operations that it has valued at more than $4b and halt new investment as a result of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The decision will see Exxon pull out of managing large oil and gas production facilities on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East, and puts the fate of a proposed multi-billion dollar liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility there in doubt, Reuters reports. ==== Primary school children were reportedly arrested by police in Moscow for laying flowers at the Ukrainian embassy and holding signs saying “no to war”. Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin posted photos purporting to show three children holding placards and flowers in the back of a police van, with others pictured behind metal bars and in what appeared to be a police station. Later, a video emerged of a mother of one young girl attempting to soothe her daughter who was crying inside a cell, explaining why the group had been arrested, The Moscow Times reported. https://inews.co.uk/news/russian-school-children-arrested-for-laying-flowers-at-ukraine-embassy-and-holding-no-to-war-signs-1494704 ==== Georgia to Apply for EU Membership Immediately - asking for emergency consideration. Their previously-stated goal was to ask to be considered for membership sometime in 2024. https://civil.ge/archives/477032 ==== Russian natural-gas giant Gazprom, oil-producer Lukoil and leading bank Sberbank are all penny stocks based on their trading on the London Stock Exchange, as the local market was shut for a third day. Sberbank SBER, -78.43%, which had assets of over $500 billion at the end of 2021, was trading for 3 cents a share in afternoon action. Lukoil LKOD, -93.23%, Gazprom OGZD, -23.50%, and Rosneft Oil ROSN, -77.71% continued to collapse as the dollar-denominated secondary listings in London remained the one venue where Russia’s top companies could be valued. The collapse of the energy giants came even as Western sanctions specifically exempted the Russian energy sector. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gazprom-lukoil-and-sberbank-are-now-penny-stocks-as-russian-companies-collapse-in-london-11646227312 ===== Apologies for yet another news roundup today. Bad health day and haven't been able to do anything more productive than sit at my computer...and wish I could sleep some more.

A Guide to Ukraine’s Swear Words So You Can Follow the Viral Videos https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-guide-to-ukraines-curse-words-so-you-can-follow-the-viral-videos?ref=home