The TL/DR is this: The allegation that David Pugliese is a Russian asset has floated around Ottawa for about a decade — often with various degrees of evidence behind it. It was in recent years that these documents, which appear to be real and which were furnished by Kyiv, were sent to Canadian intelligence agencies and were seriously investigated. While Pugliese has proved himself to be a willing customer for Russian disinformation, and while I believe he hasn’t appropriately disclosed his relationship with the Russian embassy, the idea that he is a paid agent of the Russian government is probably false.

But recent Kremlin influence operations have blurred the lines between asset and useful idiot. They invite us to, as I said repeatedly during my statement at committee, get serious.

Yesterday I saw the CNN version of Have I Got News For You.

It's... not bad? Closer to getting it right than many previous American attempts at panel shows. The main weird American thing they do is that the panelists seem inexplicably eager to give correct answers, as if they're quite proud of themselves for having watched the news this week in advance of going on TV to talk about it.

As opposed to Bill C-63, which pushes [age verification bullshit] far into the future and behind closed doors through an opaque regulatory process, our new Conservative legislation will directly legislate [age verification bullshit] that online operators must adhere to.

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension

That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them.

#firefox

phase 1: Don't care about diet. phase 2: Try to lose weight. phase 3: Don't care at all about diet. phase 4: Ascetic diet of mostly rice and peanuts. phase 5: Vitamin A deficiency. phase 6 (current): Carefully fine-tuned diet designed with nutrition calculator.

I can't explain it, that's just how it went.

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

First time since March 2023!

Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that.

*Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time.

*Armor Rating Overhaul - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better.

*Yet Another Difficulty Mod - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good.

*Extra Encounters Reborn - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world.

*High Level Enemies - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible.

*NPC Regen Nerfed - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier.

*Simple No Health Regen - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen.

*Smart NPC Potions - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you.

*Maxsu Combat Escape - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain.

*Simply Better Movement Speeds - My current choice of movement speed mod.

*Encounter Zones Unlocked - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.