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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 37m

I was actually thinking the opposite. Lincoln may have been an outlier, but there's a reason why the vast bulk of rangy people aren't that strong and it's the same reason why most people bulk up once they start resistance training.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 40m

You run of the mill 130 pound ex-farmboy soldier can probably walk a lot and carry a decent amount in his pack, but would also probably struggle with a lot of more complex fitness tasks.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 42m

Though it's also worth noting that a lot of people who were lean back then, and even decently athletic, wouldn't really be considered "in shape" by our standards.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 4h

A lot of this is also the combination of (1) the death of syndication and (2) HD tv making it way to expensive to produce genre media. Syndicated TV was, for a long time, the foundation of middlebrow genre.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 5h

Crimea, by contrast, was just terminal Obama natsec brain combined with a decent amount of Merkel disease because the whole play was sacrificing it for Russian commitment to an Iran deal and we ended up getting nothing for it.

Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 5h

IMO the big mistake with the red line was declaring it in the first place because there was zero chance of meaningful US involvement in Syria after both (1) a decade in Iraq and (2) Libya going tits up pretty much immediately post-Ghaddafi.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 6h

Exactly. The numbers just aren't there and private industry generally does not trust D.C. subsidies to be consistent enough to warrant major capital expenditures on otherwise unprofitable ventures (see, e.g., the struggles to get defense manufacturing back up to speed with shells).

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 8h

Well that and finding a sponsor, because lord knows the walled garden isn't lowering the height of their walls (arguably the D.D.C. is worse about this).

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 22h

Elite media institutions and conservatives are like if crewmen in Alien were supergluing facehuggers to their face to make absolutely sure that they ended up birthing xenomorphs.

mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 23h

Thiessen having a good chuckle about his fired liberal colleagues - some of whom he worked with for 15 years - is a good reminder that token conservatives at mainstream news outlets are/were there to destroy them, not to contribute to them.

Philip Bump @pbump.com · 1d

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 23h

Not even for annoying him. For not being a perfect little set dressing for his livestreams.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 23h

Which does reinforce why people like Bari Weiss are able to seize so much power. The Ezra Klein types think that people like Kirk are just part of the game they are playing, while Kirk and Bari were seeking actual power.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

(Side note, the half-dead cicada you might be joining on as a crewman has been contemplated as a smuggling ship so Choctaw Bingo might be coming to the Wildsea).

Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

That was a great show, though probably the single biggest flop of an opening act I've ever encountered.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

It is genuinely weird to think about how Obsidian has gone from the overly ambitious jank factory to probably one of the most disciplined companies out there scope wise.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

TBF, it turned out that "writing an okay ending" was also an impossible task for them.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

A lot of this is the increasing costs of game development, though. It was way cheaper to bake in colossal amounts of reactivity in the era when level design was playing with a tileset and you creating a fully voiced Jagged Alliance mercenary meant putting Janet the secretary before a microphone.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

Human Revolution did a nice subtle call back to this as well.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, but that's one of the things that makes Benny interesting.

"Slimeball who just will not give up" is a significantly underused combo.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

Invite him to the ceremony and then make a big showing that he's not getting it and here's why he's not getting it.

He's going to come after them regardless, they should at least get a few hits in first.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

The reason why I like it is that Benny, under all the images he tries to keep up, happens to be a really really really driven weasel and trying to come back to off the PC by surprise with the idea of maybe grabbing yes man back is perfectly in line with said (1) drive and (2) weaselness.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

Oh - I totally get the degree to which there's not a lot of calories floating around in an area. My main thinking was along the lines that a group of soldiers is probably last in line to starve if there's still bread around.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

To Kissinger's ever slightest credit, he did try to return the prize in 1975 after the accords he negotiated in 1973 completely fell apart.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

The fundamental problem with modern US politics is that voters do not believe that the GOP will do the things to them that they promise to in their campaign platforms. The only solution is to let people get what they voted for.

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

Is that a situation of being in a region where their primary potential employer is also the guardian of the region to a degree where they can't engage in the usual five finger - one sword discount?

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Sasho Todorov @sashotodorov.bsky.social · 1d

All of his trips to Albania were actually about educating himself as to the future stars of the NBA.

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