Finland isn't a big country in population terms, but it's still over five million people. Looking at a population pyramid it looks like there are about 300,000-400,000 children in the stated age range in the country. I'm pretty sure you could find six people to support damn near anything if you get to choose from 300,000

Also, though, they all already spoke Russian. That doesn't mean they're somehow genetically predisposed to imperialism or some shit, but it does suggest that they're more likely than most to have some pre-existing cultural connection to Russia

He didn't win the overall final, only the men's one. He lost to the women's winner, who moved to the UK from the US last year

I live in Scotland so, uhh... guess we've got the hills and a general attitude towards the bigger country we're a part of? Not a lot else in common, but still

Earlier this week I had curry on nacho chips because I made some really good curry and did not have the energy to make the actual nacho accoutrements that I had planned on doing

It was great

Considering how the world's biggest uranium producer by far is Kazakhstan and Russia seems to be actively determined to tank Russian-Kazakh relations, I'm pretty sure they could acquire some

Dr Strange being a professional surgeon and barely making it past the neutral mark on the qualification axis seems, well, a bit strange

Seven hundred million dollars

Ahh, I forgot about that. I think they should have just committed to having Kylo Ren kill her. He pulled the trigger, after all, the intent was there.

I liked Holdo as a character. I believe she was meant to come across as overbearing and arrogant because part of her role was to teach Poe that his recklessness was doing as much harm as good. He had to learn to work with other people, and Holdo was the one to show him that. She had to be (initially) unlikeable so that Poe would chafe against her command

If I had the chance to make edits to the script, I'd have done the following:

• Replace the animals in the racing with podracers
• Have the hacker guy drop the dreadnought's shields for a moment to permit the Holdo manoeuvre

The podracer stuff is basically just fanservice, but it's very minor and not adding any more distractions than were already there, so I think that's fine

The hacker does have a motivation to ensure the empire doesn't get a clean win. He profits from the war. He wants both sides to struggle. Doing this just as he leaves gives him an actual role beyond betraying Finn and Rose, makes sense for his motivations, and also explains why hyperspeed ramming doesn't usually work in Star Wars

Thanks! I was always more keen on 40k so my awareness of goings on in the fantasy side are more tangential

Ehhh it's literally a magic curse, I'm okay with ignoring the details of how real life mimicry works. Going by old lore they also couldn't come up with any new ideas of their own either, but this makes them kind of impossible to actually use as characters, so I'm content to ignore that as newer stuff seems to

The 40k orks do have a couple of Warhammar fantasy counterparts, at least. I'm not sure how similar in personality they are (a brief search suggests the Old World ones were more like 40k's orks than Age of Sigmar's orruks are) but they at least look similar on a surface level

Kenku! Little crow folk who can only speak in mimicry. I made it all the way through the D&D 5E adventure Wilds Beyond the Witchlight as a kenku bard, taking enormous amounts of notes of the things I heard so I could go back to find things to imitate.

I mean at the core of it I actually just love crows, but kenku are a really fun challenge to RP and their current abilities in 5E are very conducive to creative usage

The pervitin-to-paperwork ratio was just way off

The aeticle should have said, but it's OPHI's Multidimensional Poverty Index. It checks the following:

• Nutrition
• Child mortality
• Years of schooling
• School attendance
• Cooking fuel
• Sanitation
• Drinking water
• Electricity
• Housing
• Assets

These are grouped into three categories (health, education, and standard of living) and each category is a third of the total score. Each indicator is an equal portion of the score for its category. If a household lacks access to at least a one third of the total after that weighting, it is deemed to be in poverty

So, as an example, if Household A has the health aspects covered (nutrition and child mortality), has access to education but their children don't actually attend, and does okay on the standard of living indicators (the last six) except for a lack of electricity, they would not count as being in poverty. If, however, their neighbours in Household B also lacked reliable access to cooking fuel and sanitation, Household B would count.

Huh. Really liked these games when I was growing up, but had never looked into anything that came before Armageddon. That art style on the original and Director's Cut makes me deeply uncomfortable

Still, cool way to celebrate the series

Each column represents the total military spend of the world's countries in that year. Each column is further broken into what separate parts spent that year, the categories for those parts being America, Russia/USSR, China, NATO except America, and the rest of the world.

So to pick some examples out, we can see Soviet expenditure (the bright red section of each column) crash enormously when the country fell apart in 1991. Post-Soviet Russia hardly spent anything by comparison, so the red section of each column got really small all of a sudden. This combined with the reduction in American expenditure (the pale blue section) in the 90s resulted in a low total spend for the world (the total height of each stack), even though the spending of every other country outside of those two stayed fairly constant (the pink for China, dark blue for non-USA NATO, and grey for everyone else).

That January 3rd release date had me panicking, I was very much looking forward to watching this with the family at Christmas. Turns out it is out on Christmas on the BBC in the UK, just not on Netflix. My condolences to the rest of the world

To be clear, the accusation from the North is that the drones were there to drop propaganda, not bombs. The South denies it, but let's assume it's true for a moment. Why is that a bigger provocation than the balloons full of actual human shit that the North has been floating over the border?

They clearly meant it's a worse name for a board game, not that it references a worse thing