I haven't played Elden Ring, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think there's anything other than maybe showing a few bosses. It's mostly a humorous video poking fun at a certain segment of the Souls games' fanbase
I've heard good things about Dread Delusion, but haven't gotten around to playing it yet
"I haven't seen graphics this brown since Xbox 360" 
https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1805450204541284734
I've pointed out on many occasions that the Russians have the capability to launch a strategic offensive in Ukraine basically any time they want to.
But what I have not addressed is conditions. What would they want it to look like? How would they know when to "roll tanks?"⬇️
Critical to this analysis is just how successful the Russian decision to adopt a "ground and pound" approach to destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been. Despite the full and enthusiastic backing of NATO and a Ukrainian numerical advantage for much of the war, the Russians have maintained a lopsidedly positive loss-exchange ratio against their enemies throughout. Ukraine is going into demographic collapse while Russian society at large has barely noticed the war.
@MNormanDavies pointed out some time ago that the Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to "change the game" and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The "game" heavily favors the Russians and they're not in a rush to change it!
The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center - at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I'm sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher's bill of North Vietnam's war-ending 1975 operation - and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.
So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses "in depth," and then all hell is going to break loose. That could actually be quite soon - for instance, the recent Russian maneuver in Kharkov was likely intended to accelerate this timeline - but regardless, the State Department will be warming up their helicopters shortly afterwards.
As an addendum, it's just occurred to me that the Ukrainian Hundred Days Offensive of summer 2023 could be likened to Lam Son 719 as a poorly conceived and executed offensive maneuver by an army that had no real idea what it was actually getting itself into... perhaps a topic for examination later.
Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan
The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.
more
In addition to Israel, the Biden administration has sent an enormous quantity of materiel to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is gearing up to rush an influx of arms to Taiwan in hopes of deterring a possible Chinese attack on the island, which Beijing considers a rogue province. The U.S. Defense Department already struggled to maintain robust munitions levels in the decades before the recent wars in the Middle East and Europe. But the shipment of arms to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan has placed intense pressure on the Pentagon’s inventory, forcing it to make challenging risk management assessments as it tries to move the defense industry from peacetime production to a wartime footing.
...
The shortages are in part symptoms of a chronic issue, said a senior defense official, granted anonymity to discuss the closely held process. The Pentagon has long used munitions as a “bill payer,” neglecting their purchase in favor of platforms like ships or planes in the annual budgets, the official added. Over time, the low orders led to some companies exiting the market, which in turn reduces the number of businesses that will build those munitions and the speed at which they come off the line.
see, this is why you're supposed to have a state-owned arms industry, since when you leave things to the whims of the free market, obviously a ton of companies are going to go out of business during peacetime, like what do you expect to happen 
... the U.S. could use Javelin anti-tank missiles or Tomahawk cruise missiles against at least four major competitors: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But the military doesn’t necessarily expect to fight all four adversaries at once and may calculate requirements based on fighting two enemies at a time.
well damn, I sure hope we don't end up facing a couple crises at once! now, that'd be a real bad situation for us
... The U.S. often serves as a “backstop” for European allies, Clark noted, pointing to NATO’s heavy reliance on American munitions in its 2011 Libya campaign. “It’s not so much, are we going to have enough weapons to sustain our own capacity for a ground war, because we probably do,” Clark said. “It’s, do we have enough to sustain our own capacity to fight and also support our European allies who may need augmentation because clearly they don’t maintain the magazines to sustain themselves.” Others interviewed about the munitions requirements process also noted it lags behind real-world events and is closely tied to the Pentagon’s war plans, which usually project short conflicts instead of the reality of longer, protracted wars.
well, good thing protracted wars never happen!
But the U.S. could still quickly run through certain munitions even in a short conflict with a major adversary like China. A wargame conducted by the Center for a New American Security think tank and the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party last year found the U.S. would run out of long-range, precision-guided munitions in less than a week in a fight with China over Taiwan. Outgoing committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., subsequently told Defense News that America’s inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles stood at 250 last spring, noting a conflict with China would require at least 1,000.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, the U.S. has also used weapons that could be relevant to an Indo-Pacific battle, like the Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawks, to respond to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes off Yemen’s coast. “Is it a sustainable, long-term strategy to use million-dollar munitions to shoot down drones and loitering munitions that are $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a piece?” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., asked Gen. Michael Kurilla, the U.S. Central Command leader overseeing forces in the Middle East, during a House hearing in March.
...
The Pentagon hopes the foreign aid legislation will allow it to continue large-scale arms transfers to friendly countries. And as the department replenishes systems to those three partners, it hopes the additional munitions demand will pump resources into lagging munitions production lines. A significant chunk of that will go toward increasing domestic munitions capacity in the U.S. ... But even with the foreign aid legislation, expanding industrial base capacity is no simple task. ... Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress in October that some contractors have required employees to work additional shifts to keep up munitions production rates, highlighting labor shortages in the industrial base.
...
A former senior Pentagon official who now works in the defense industry, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to talk to the press, told Defense News the Pentagon is generally willing to take more risks on munitions inventory levels than in other areas, expecting that Congress will quickly fund replenishment efforts. “The mentality in the Pentagon is if I do get in a fight, Congress is going to be real responsive to give me as much money as I need,” the former senior defense official said. “Right now, we’re having a problem replenishing artillery for a war in Europe that we’re not even in.”
https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1780850610864267756
The US Army cancelled the XM1299 Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system last month. ... The only way I can describe it at this point is total organizational failure. We're now on our third failed program to replace the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and as usual for the US Army the interim solution - the M109A7, basically dropping the existing M109A6 Paladin turret onto a Bradley chassis - is going to end up as the permanent fix.
Let's walk through the history of this generational procurement failure. The M109 has been the US Army's 155mm self-propelled howitzer since before Vietnam, with the original short-barreled version (rather resembling a Russian 2S3) upgraded to sport what was then a very modern 39-caliber* cannon shortly after that war with the M109A1. Further upgrades followed, culminating in the M109A6, a modern weapon of the late Cold War era that was in some way groundbreaking but in some other ways quite dated. It had a lot of new electronics... and a manually-loaded cannon from the 1970s. When the Paladin entered service in the early 1990s the then-Soviet Union had already introduced the 2S19 in 1989 (featuring an autoloading 47-caliber 152mm cannon), and the Germans were hard at work on the PzH 2000 (with a semi-autoloading 52-caliber 155mm cannon). Both of these competing systems could fire three times the rounds of the Paladin at considerably longer ranges.
It wouldn't be an issue because the Army was working on a replacement already - the XM2001 Crusader, a thoroughly modern self-propelled gun with a 52-caliber 155mm cannon and an automatic transloader vehicle. It was the ultimate cannon to defend the Fulda Gap against the Red Tide... which was problematic at the time because that threat didn't exist any more and doubly so after 9/11. So like many Cold War legacy programs it was cancelled by Donald Rumsfeld during his apocalyptic tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.
Not to worry, the Army had a backup plan! Enter Future Combat Systems, a program that happened because the Army brass saw the Air Force make the F-35 too big to fail and thought that was a good procurement model. The XM1203 Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), developed as one of the FCS "family" of tracked combat vehicles, sporting a lightweight 39-caliber 155mm cannon with a high-speed autoloader and minimal crew requirements. It would have been the ideal cannon for the lightweight expeditionary Army of the post-Cold War era... and then Iraq happened. The bad part of Iraq where we were losing a hundred guys killed every month with no end in sight. After the Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections and Rumsfeld shown the door his successor, Robert Gates, axed the entire program as yet another Rumsfeld-era boondoggle with no value to win the War on Terror.
This left the Army's fleet of increasingly-worn out M109A6s soldiering on into the 2010s, and replacement vehicles were needed. Enter the M109A7 - basically a program to drop the existing M109A6 turret onto a suitably adapted Bradley chassis to ease maintenance and recapitalize the fleet. The M109A7 didn't offer any actual new capability, but it would keep the Field Artillery in business until a new cannon could be brought into service, because it was now the late 2010s and most serious armies on the planet had moved on to autoloading long-barrel systems.
Enter ERCA, the US Army's plan to leapfrog the competition with a fantastically long 58-caliber 155mm cannon... mounted on the same Bradley-derived chassis of the M109A7. If you take a short survey of modern tracked, armored, long-barrel SPGs - 2S19, 2S35, K9, PzH 2000, etc. - you'll notice that they're all quite heavy, with most of them built on a tank chassis or a specialized heavy artillery chassis. That capability isn't free. The Army was trying to stuff an even longer autoloading cannon onto an IFV chassis, and ran into easily-predictable issues with weight and then - once they cut capability to fix it - into equally predictable issues with bore wear given the extreme ranges they were trying to drive this cannon to (70+ kilometers for a gun about 10% longer than cannons maxxing out at half that). So that program got cancelled last month for what were basically technical feasibility issues.
In any event the US Army's current plan seems to be to go to war with the M109A7 and, if the performance of similar 39-caliber systems in Ukraine is any indication, lose the counter-battery fight and get a lot of artillerymen killed manning obsolescent guns.
Xi Jinping held a ceremony to welcome the President of the Federated States of Micronesia to visit China.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1779037694783627336
People often say that China is not very good in soft power but this is an example of something that they unarguably do much better that the West: treating all countries, no matter how small (we're talking Micronesia here, about 100k inhabitants), the same when their leaders visit China, with all the State's honors and personal reception by the President.
I don't think Micronesia - or any similarly small country - got the same type of welcome in Washington. In fact I checked and the President of Micronesia visited Washington in 2023 and was received by... the White House’s Indo Pacific coordinator.
This sends a clear message of respect, and of abiding by the principle inscribed in the UN Charter that all nations are the same.
As often with China, their messaging isn't so much in grand declarations but rather symbols that shows their commitment to certain principles. As such we often don't get the messaging ourselves because interpretating symbols is not soo much in our culture. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact. If you're Micronesian for instance in this case, you understand the messaging extremely well.
https://twitter.com/S_Mahendrarajah/status/1778804475618107467
‘Iran will bomb Israel tonight!’
Nah. That was an attention grabber. Daily headlines that an Iranian strike is ‘imminent’ or ‘in 48 hours’ prompt me to explain military and intelligence purposes that lead Iran to feed data to U.S. intel sources. This in turn generates news headlines. These purposses include PSYOPS, concealment (by Iran of their plans), and deceit (of Israel). The Russian terms Maskirovka (concealment; маскировка) & Dezinformatsiya (deception; дезинформация) are popular—among an older generation of intel analysts—given KGB’s superlative use of Dezinformatsiya to advance Maskirovka. Iranians are no slouches in this respect if IRGC’s operations in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria are yardsticks. But this will be IRGC’s biggest op yet.
Psychological Operations (PSYOPS)
Israelis are bullies unaccustomed to being punched in the mouth. They are wearing adult diapers and begging Washington for help. ‘Please daddy, don’t let the mullahs hit me.’ Fear of the punch is damaging Israelis’ mental health. U.S. has been begging Iran not to hit their ‘baby,’ but refusing to chastise the bully for violating the Vienna Convention. It behooves Iran to maintain a high level of psychological pressure on Israelis. When the blow falls, Israelis may be relieved! Meanwhile, they are swallowing Immodium, Valium, and Ambien like M&M’s.
Concealment and Deceit
The goal is for Iran to conceal its activities while deceiving Israel and USA. Disinformation is used as an ‘active measure’ to advance deception.
Preparations for war generate electronic communications (‘chatter’) and physical movements of people and equipment. ‘Chatter’ are the electronic signals and communications captured by SIGINT (signals intelligence) services (NSA, GCHQ, etc.). Even if an intercepted signal (e.g. email) is encrypted and the ciphertext cannot be decrypted, its existence suggests ongoing activity. To illustrate, if an officer at a missile depot in Camp X rarely receives a call from Tehran, but now receives calls daily, pattern analysis indicates that something is going on. Thus, it benefits IRGC to generate activities—electronic chatter and physical movements—that are harvested by enemy electronic intelligence systems. The best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles. IRGC will generate needless activities to feed the enemy. Hence headlines like ‘Khatm al-Anbiya base is on high alert’; and ‘Iran is deploying air defenses around Tehran’ (this was done long ago, although more units may be added). Somewhere in the midst of these ‘needles’ is hidden the real ‘needle.’
An added benefit is that IRGC intelligence and the Ministry of Intelligence will be able to identify leaks by individuals (human intel; HUMINT) and compromises to their electronic communications systems. If, for example, a headline appears that ‘100 drones and missiles will be launched,’ this will help intel officers identify the source(s) of the information.
https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1778682534123172215
The MV Dali collided with the Key Bridge in Baltimore three weeks ago and so little has been done for remediation that if this was happening in Russia or China we'd have people writing Ph.D dissertations on this website about poor state capacity and shaken trust in "regimes." ⬇️
Let's look at the current status of things three weeks in:
- M/V Dali remains aground and has not been freed from bridge debris, let alone unloaded, refloated, and evacuated to drydock
- Practically no progress has been made clearing debris, because:
- The handful of small floating cranes on site are obviously not up to the task, because:
- Apparently the Biden Administration decided this would be an ALL AMERICAN salvage effort and refused to bring in foreign crane ships with far greater capacity, thus:
- Workers are being endangered by being ordered to cut the bridge debris into small chunks manageable by the low-capacity cranes on site, complicated by the fact much of this work must be done underwater
- The Port of Baltimore remains closed to all heavy traffic and authorities expect it to remain closed through at least May, which is very optimistic
- Officials expect a replacement bridge might be inaugurated in a decade, which could itself be optimistic
Let's be real - if this had happened in China the port would have been open in days and construction on a replacement span would be underway as we speak. This incident is beginning to illustrate the decline in the real state capacity of the United States of America in the starkest possible terms.
god is with you captain bolsonaro
Y'know, somehow, I feel like the guy who's been hit by like a dozen consecutive plagues doesn't actually have God's favor? I dunno, just a vibe I'm getting.
A note on something I can see becoming a problem after the Ukrainian War is over: the "Ukrainian Vatnik" cope. It will become an article of faith in the West that the AFU's failures can all be laid on incompetence, and Real NATO Troops would do better. Is this true though?⬇️
Let's examine the case of the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade, an organization that was intended to be the showpiece unit of the new NATO-standard Ukrainian Army. This was an organization that was stood up in late 2022, filled with young, highly-motivated volunteers, many of them already with high-intensity combat experience. These troops were then sent through months of additional training, both in the West and in maneuver areas in Western Ukraine. This unit was lavishly equipped with the pick of donated Western equipment fully equal to anything fielded by any NATO army - Leopard 2A6s and M2A2 Bradleys, supported by 155mm howitzers and HIMARS. It had distributed high-speed tactical internet thanks to Starlink. And it had something that no NATO formation has - a fully integrated drone group, created from the ground up to incorporate the hard lessons of the war by people who learned them personally.
In short, the Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade was in all likelihood equal or superior in combat power to any heavy brigade in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when it attacked in Zaporozhe in the summer of 2023. The Russians proceeded to beat this unit so hard it became a meme. "Bradley Square," anyone? I quipped at the time it looked like the Battle of 73 Easting in reverse, with attacking NATO armor burning in failed breach after failed breach. But when this war is over - after the Russians break Ukraine and humiliate NATO - an awful lot of very senior Westerners are going to cope about how the Ukrainians were dumb brutes who just didn't get maneuver warfare. Couldn't be trained. Soviet dinosaurs. Wasted effort.
Anything to avoid admitting that could have been us.
I love all the "um, actually, real NATO troops wouldn't have attacked without air superiority!" responses... so, Western militaries are just never going to get around to actually attacking, because gaining complete air superiority in the modern day just ain't happening?
The Iraq War has thoroughly mind-broken westerners into thinking that they can solve all their problems with bombing, and they've completely ignored all the advances in air-defense, as well as the advances in long-range strike capabilities thanks to ballistic missiles and drones - where exactly are your planes going to fly from once the Russians hit your major airbases? Where are they going to get their fuel from once the Russians hit your logistics? Something that people forget about Iraq was that in both 1991 and 2003, Western forces had months to prepare, build up, and stockpile, during which the Iraqis couldn't really do much but sit and watch. An air campaign of that scale simply isn't sustainable normally - you'd just run out of fuel and munitions (and later in Libya, there were indeed ammunition issues, and bombing had to be paused for a bit). Westerners don't even understand why they actually won the victories that they did, and how in a different situation things might go differently, just complete 
the UK would have to have a child monarch
I want to see a modern regency council so bad, can you imagine 
and 
and whoever else (I don't know any anglo politicians 
) trying to do old-timey palace intrigues
Smallswords were an evolution of rapiers optimized for ease-of-carry, so kind of. They're definitely more associated with the aristocracy though, a regular guy at this point in time would probably be carrying something more like a hanger/cutlass: