So have you all read the letter yet? It's ... well it's something all right.

I haven't really been paying attention lately. Has Kim insulted Trump after they agreed to meet?

Looks like it's available for free on Kindle as well. I'll download it and give it a try. Haven't actually read a book in ages. :-)

Very much longing for vacation! Which is soon, thankfully.

Ah yes, our good friend and ally Turkey. Sometimes I wonder if they really should be our ally.

As far as I know there is no mechanism in place to remove a member of NATO. Even if there was, I'm not sure it would be a good idea to boot Turkey from the alliance. I bet Russia and Saudi Arabia would be eager to cosy up with them, not to mention how valuable a member they would be if NATO ever happens to be attacked by a major power.

I think the biggest advantage of kicking them out would be as a warning to other member nations. "Here is what happens if you turn autocratic." Looking at you Hungary and Poland.

So just make it impossible to reverse engineer..?

Are you worried about them selling the designs to non-allies?

That the USA is selling the most advanced fighter to foreign nations upsets me.

Well, selling them to allies makes sense. If there ever is a World War 3, you'd want your allies to be able to hold their own.

Haven't heard of them before. Good stuff! :-)

I assume "the FB shitfest" refers to the outrage surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. GDPR (which is the reason so many other web sites and applications have updated their ToS lately) is not really related to that scandal. The two just happened to coincide in both subject and time.

By the way, are there other ways of supporting the site, like Patreon, Flattr, Brave Payments?

Huh, I guess I'm a utilitarian.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I bought a used Nintendo Switch with a bunch of games, and now I'm playing Zelda. At first I wasn't very impressed - it's not particularly graphically impressive, the game world can feel barren at times, tutorials are easy to miss, and the difficulty is all over the place. It's growing on me though, and the more I play it (and get used to its quirks), the more I like it.

It all feels very derivative though. Not unusual for a game in a franchise of course, but Breath of the Wild doesn't just borrow from earlier Zelda games, it also borrows heavily from The Elder Scrolls, Portal, and to a lesser degree from Ubisoft's sandbox games.

Most of all it reminds me of Skyrim, and much of the time it feels like I'm playing The Elder Scrolls: Hyrule. The game feels less ambitious though, with fewer things for the player to do. But that again means the developers actually had the time to properly polish the game, and it's not riddled with the kind of bugs and half-hearted features that we expect from a Bethesda game.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing that they borrow heavily from other games. What matters most of all to us players is that a game is fun, and Breath of the Wild certainly is fun. I think I'll be playing this game for at least a few more weeks.