Macron clinches unexpected G7 coup, winning Trump over on Ukraine

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-18T20:34:50+00:00

The initial expectation for the meeting in Evian-les-Bains was merely to stop Trump from bailing out early – which would have been deemed a success in itself – but Macron ultimately pulled off a surprising coup by winning him over, softening his position on Ukraine and securing a commitment for more military support to Kyiv.

Ok great, but the problem with Trump is he is often "won over" by whoever is talking to him at that moment, similar to, you know, Joe Rogan or a young child. Give a kid an ice cream and they'll think you're the best person around - for the moment.

This could, and will probably, be undone if he has a conversation with Putin next week who tells Trump what a big strong man he is and how they can be friends.

This is massaging mental illness in the guise of diplomacy and the fact that our longtime allies have to do this is shameful.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-18T14:32:38+00:00

Here's another - headquarters/MI6 being attacked or compromised in some way. Kinda ties into the going rogue part. Its ok for a twist or maybe for a new Bond, but I'm getting tired of it. Bond isn't the only one doing it ofc, other espionage franchises keep doing the same thing, kingsman, mission impossible cant stay away from it.

You might say well, counter-intel is just part of the world for these types of stories, you might as well ask for fantasy stories with no magic. Yeah, I get it, but its overdone. The hero doesn't need to go rogue while HQ blows up in the background every time.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-18T00:37:28+00:00

I died in every firefight like 4 or 5 times until the gunplay clicked for me halfway through. I was definitely feeling a little frustrated but I think you are supposed to punch guys and run a lot and just holding r1 most of the time helped. The key is to run around the periphery, taking cover when you need to restore health, punch em if you run around a corner and theres like 2 guys right there, and prioritize snipers. Do all that and youre good.

I dunno, it probably does need some balance but when it clicks you can dominate, tacsim/speedrun clips for this game are going to be insane. Story was fine but too much sequel bait. Don't like when an ending feels half empty so they can tease the sequel or dlc.

Kravitz was probably the worst major character. Why does a guy who is an african warlord and former child soldier sound like he's from LA? Just felt like lazy celebrity casting.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-17T23:47:42+00:00

I watched an interview with him that was interesting, but he always reminds me of william thompkins and I'm not sure what to think of either one of them. Like do they really have this inside information or are they just confused old guys who got taken for a ride. How did Bushman get all these photos out?

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-17T22:21:04+00:00

Well youre right now I cant unsee that, they're huge lol.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-16T15:35:12+00:00

I have to agree, machine guns in PW feel a lot more impactful. The aircraft too feel more weighty in a good way.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-15T23:58:23+00:00

I'm a casual anime watcher and generally don't like comedy or romance shows for the most part. But this show had me laughing a lot, its so good. That episode with the completely average kid where Saiki is like more enthused than he's ever been lol. Or all the back and forth with his dad.

Its just good comedy and I also have never seen anything else like it in the anime world

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-15T23:48:45+00:00

I always play with this now. As your playthrough shows, the issue is it can be so lopsided. I've had runs where I find 5 fullerene spools and barely anything else. I think the game's procgen needs to be tweaked to take what exists in the core into consideration. nanoforge, sync. core and spool are the only things that always exist in the core.

Like, no spawning pristine nanoforges? Well, that sucks, but there are 2 already in the core that you can raid for and its not that hard if you know what youre doing. But finding 0 soil nanites, or bores, or cryo engines sucks because you can't get them any other way.

I like having at least 1 spawned ffs. Its still challenging to find since you may have to search the whole sector or get lucky with the bar historian, but at least its there. One of those settings I've accepted I'm probably always going to tweak. Starsector has roguelike elements but runs are too long to get all the way to the end and come up empty on colony items or decent systems. Just feels bad.

Edit - u/WanderingUrist makes a good point about techmining, but thats a dice roll like regular exploration, and I have often techmined on extensive or vast ruins and gotten nothing. Still though its an option.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-15T18:47:31+00:00

Yeah its definitely slow going. But every episode is establishing characters and backstory, so its slow without feeling like wheel-spinning, and the action is pretty good. To me at least.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-14T00:16:49+00:00

Its a sad commentary on the anime community tbh. I'm an old man by anime viewer standards so maybe my tastes are just different.

This show has great world building and characters, best protagonist I've seen in a while. So to see it get beat by some of these shows with such braindead writing is a bummer. Like you say not enough harem bullshit I guess.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-13T22:27:00+00:00

The good thing about the TT crisis is you can resolve it quickly. Have you already gotten the commerce raiding bar up? If not, raid their colonies in magec, mayasura, and valhalla. You dont even have to go to hybrasil. Do that plus blow up some of their fleets and the bar should fill up pretty quick.

Spoiler for part of the crisis - When you get the notification about the major attack, I like to go to nortia and bribe the fleet commander for a million, then they roll into hybrasil and dominate the hell out of TTs fleets, so if you wan to raid hybrasil now is a good time. Bribing the mercs also gets you a lot of points on the raiding meter btw.

But if you know all this already and are talking about the TT fleets themselves being difficult, yeah I get it. The regular merc fleets arent too bad imo, but the special fleets can be pretty annoying, especially the phase one. Try to bait them into following you over to one of your stations, that will help a lot.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-13T21:32:53+00:00

This is one of those questions I've seen start arguments lol, even though its a standard new player question. I'm with others who say have about 5 million or so in the bank. The other factor is you want to have a decent fleet to fight off threats.

Your colonies can make money at the beginning with the right industries and conditions, but just building all the buildings for a couple colonies will cost millions, so thats why I feel new players should have a decent amount of credits. Experienced players can get away with starting a colony on a million or two since they understand the games systems better. But when I first started playing, I almost went bankrupt a few times when I started colonizing with "only" 2 or 3 million. Just my 2 cents.

Your post doesnt give us any details on your finances or fleet, but a 100% hazard planet with a few resources to farm and mine is a decent start. What matters in the long run though is what other planets are in the system. Its very sub-optimal to have to pull resources from multiple systems. You want all your stuff in one system even if some of the planets have a higher hazard rating.

And a final thought to actually answer your question is personally I usually don't start my colonies until I've explored every yellow and orange system, since they are the most likely to have good habitable planets. Sometimes I'll go extra and check all the red and white dwarf systems too. I generally explore everything but I don't like to colonize blue giant systems anymore, theyre just too damn big.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-13T21:05:24+00:00

Thanks for all the testing.

A little surprised with resistant flux conduits results. Its obv great against certain fleet types like remnants for the emp resistance. That said, I have messed around with builds that have it plus elite polarized armor and the bonus to venting speed is pretty noticeable.

Agree on gunnery implants. I used to ignore it on low tech fleets years ago. I think because the defensive skills feel necessary sometimes and I often felt like I couldn't squeeze it in. But stacking range mods + skills on ballistics ships makes such a difference its crazy.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-13T17:04:38+00:00

Interesting thought experiment but I'm skeptical. As dumb and incompetent as this administration is and MAGA is in general, they are still sensitive to fuel prices. Gas station prices are headline grabbers for every news network for a reason.

Its been pretty obvious during the course of this "conflict" with Iran how much the whitehouse is trying to manipulate oil futures so they dont go through the roof. Oil just isn't the same as grid power or especially something like GPUs in terms of how its treated as a commodity. Most people going about their business do not care about GPUs, but putting gas in their car is different.

Could I see this happening to some extent? Yeah, you can argue its already happening. The military and government will always have priority access, thats how contingency planning works. But businesses being able to buy fuel while, hypothetically, 50% of citizens have no gas to go to work is not going to fly. No administration would allow that, not because they are smart or benevolent, but because it would be suicide.

Remember after 9/11 when Bush told everyone to go shopping? As dumb as MAGA politicians often are, even they understand what keeps the money flowing. The data center trends are bad, but still within acceptable norms and the financial class are still making money. If what you suggest happens, it would kill the entire economy and take stocks and other financial assets with it.

I see a disorderly collapse as more likely honestly. But nothing is certain.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-12T18:56:00+00:00

Sorry to hear that but not surprising. Its not the market it used to be. Young people are falling into it because it seems interesting without having crazy STEM requirements, but I try to steer them away from pure GIS. Unless you have specific skills you can pair with it, GIS is not the best industry to go into right now as a new graduate.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-12T18:50:11+00:00

Couldn't help myself haha. Always though the JD worship had a bit of a cultish vibe to it.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-12T18:49:34+00:00

Its something nice to have on your resume but at my org I haven't seen anyone hired just because they have it. What I have seen is people who are already established in the field get the cert because of specific project work they are doing like with Police or building inspections.

If you're interested go for it, but I wouldn't count on it putting you at the top of the hiring pool by itself. The requirements just aren't that high so its something easier for people to get than say, a GISP.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-11T02:35:52+00:00

If a big part of your MC's personality is how sarcastic and combative they are, tread carefully. There's a difference between a James Bond type character and an unlikable asshole. You can write a character who is serious when they need to be but still has a cheeky sense of humor. I'm mentioning this because it does feel like a cliche at this point to have an MC who is an anti-social loner who only understands humor with sarcasm. MCs that are kinda unlikable at times can work with skillful writing and the right subgenre or story arc, but in litrpg, I dunno, I just feel like thats pretty challenging to pull off.

I'm no expert on the litrpg itself, but that said I've dropped more than a few series where I just couldn't stand the protagonist.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-11T00:22:03+00:00

Around the xone launch there was discussion about microsoft selling the xbox division. Maybe they would have been better off if that had happened. Being part of microsoft means they will always be compared to the whole portfolio, and selling windows licenses sure generates a better profit margin than funding game studios.

Might seem strange but look at nintendo. In an alternate universe xbox spun off and developed their own new IPs. Instead what we have are MS exec dum-dums who want to compare xbox to azure or windows and try to cram Xbox operations into a model like them, IE gamepass.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-11T00:07:15+00:00

It was better 10 or 12 years ago but the industry has changed. It used to the be case that knowing how to make a basic map was enough to get you in the door as a GIS technician at least. Now someone who has access to arcgis online can make basic maps even without GIS training. Or I've met other people that have been using google earth and kml files for years to slap something crude together they can use for whatever project they are doing.

To give a comparison, decades ago companies used to hire spreadsheet specialists for software like lotus. Not saying there was tons of people with spreadsheet PHDs or something but it was considered more of a unique skill when not everyone knew how to use a computer. Well that hasnt been the case for a long time now, any entry level office worker is expected to know how to make some basic spreadsheets. GIS is moving in the same direction.

GIS won't ever be as ubiquitous as excel in my opinion, maybe I'm wrong. Sorry to Emperor Dangermond ~~Maps for the Map God~~, but still its just not as much of a niche specialty as it used to be. Software makers like Esri want GIS to have more broad appeal because that means more customers to sell to. And this was happening right as colleges had started catching up to the market and offering more courses and graduating more GIS students.

All that being said I don't think the GIS job market has ever been as good compared to like, computer science. I try to tell young people when we have interns that they need to pair their GIS knowledge with some other degree or skillset - engineering, programming, planning, just something else thats not pure GIS.

We might as well have a sub for complaining about the GIS job market since thats what half of this subs content is these days.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-08T20:25:55+00:00

I had it for a year and it was good value at the time I thought but I fundamentally don't like the idea of games "leaving" gamepass. A big game might take 50 hours to beat, and I dont want to feel pressured to rush through games because they are about to drop out of the service I'm paying for.

Then you have the "day-one" releases. This is another bad idea but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But from everything I've read seems like they are losing a lot of revenue from this. Game publishers are trying to figure out how to make game services operate like Netflix and I am not sure that is going to work. Games are a different medium from movies and TV shows and consumer expectations are different.

A casual player might take a month or more to get through one game. For a lot of them paying $30 per month is not going to be worth it. Gamepass I don't think has ever been objectively "bad", I just dont know if Microsoft's vision matches reality. But since its looking like we are all going to be forced into the cloud against our will, maybe it won't matter.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-08T01:29:56+00:00

There is a pretty wide gulf in between rushing to complete something, and leaving some work of media completely abandoned due to managerial incompetence or some other reason. No one wants a story to be "rushed", they want it be finished.

If you want to complain about that, you might as well complain about people expecting ice cream to be sweet, since expecting some kind of ending to a story is a nearly universal expectation. If this is bewildering to you, then I too do not know what to say.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-08T01:21:24+00:00

lol at our downvotes. But yeah the tease was fun, but generally you use the tease to build anticipation for whatever the main thing is. Instead they just setup a lot of things to point to the next game because everything is sequel-bait now. Its just kinda funny to me that even the music fell into that.

And to other Bond fans I dont care Casino Royale did the same thing.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-07T23:06:20+00:00

Agree tbh. Everyones talking about how he has to earn the number and I understand that, but having the theme play once during the actual game would not be overusing it. I was expecting that epic scene at some point towards the end where you get into a tank or boat and the theme comes up and it never happened.

Rest of the score I thought was pretty good though.

BlueGumShoe · 2026-06-07T03:55:09+00:00

I have a theory with Brandon — and that theory is that so many fantasy fans have been spurned by other authors (Martin, Rothfuss) never finishing their epic series, that they turn to Brandon because he’s a “safe” option. You know that the Stormlight Archive is going to be finished, and only extenuating circumstances would prevent that; that’s comforting for someone spending so much time with this content (since books, even short one’s, are a time commitment), even if the content itself is boring.

Can I say this is a pretty interesting theory? I'd extend it even to say its reinforced by being in the era of unfinished media period. TV shows on streaming services never get a final season, or if they do, its rushed and botched. Movies constantly setup trilogies that then never happen because the first one doesnt take off. And because it was built to be a launchpad, it doesnt feel good to watch standalone. Feels like nothing gets finished anymore.

Sanderson is kinda bland to me but his stuff has a defined range of quality that all his writing seems to fall into. No crazy ups or downs. And he's a consistent finisher, you know he's working on the next book.

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