Shadrach

We have good National Flag Day indeed - Moscow strike, S-400 hit, Mi-8 story, now Prig's jet downed by Russians %)

⚡️⚡️Evgeny Prigozhin was among the passengers on the plane that crashed in the Tver region, - Russian Aviation Authorities
 
https://t.me/pilotblog/6206

The Russo-Ukraine War shows precisely why this point of view, while ostensibly based on deep,universal insights, springs from a very specific set of circumstances. Namely, one where one's country and nation is free of any actual danger.
Apologies for saying the obvious, but it seems necessary. A country is a territorial pollitical organisation within which lives a group of people, called a nation. If you do not care about your country, you do not care about whether that group of people - including you-  is self governed, or subjected to other country, therefore another nation. Alternatively, you do not care whether your nation gets to use a particular territory, or is deprived of it by another nation - thus impacting e.g. the natural resources, trade routes, etc. avaliable to the group, which includes you. 
Not caring for your country does not therefore make much rational sense, because things which affect your country affect you, your family, your descendants, etc. It seems to me, that in fact, people say "I couldn't care less about my country" because either they consider the risk of having to defend their country as practically non-existent and therefore they do not seriously think about it, or at the back of their minds there lies is an unspoken assumption, that it does not matter whether you are German, French, or Dutch. I am not sure, but I am not going to dispute that about those 3 countries. However, it is absolutely clear to me that it is crucially important whether you are Ukrainian or Russian, as this war abundantly proves.
And as regards the random lines on the map called Ukraine, they decide e.g. whether the nation called Ukrainians will have access to ports of the Azov sea and able to export their grain through them. Or whether the Crimean Penninsula will be within those random lines, or on the other side of random lines and therefore under the control of whoever at the time is the tyrant of Russia, threatening the nation of Ukrainians with naval invasion. By defending those lines on map they are defending their future well-being. The position "I support your right to decide for yourselves but Ido not support your fight for the borders" is self-contradictory and thus obviously wrong, because the right to decide for themselves obviously includes the right to decide how to develop Ukrainian land. 
 

Small size cover arc.

Follow up…ok, I think I have got the only solution that makes any sense: Putin and Prig are in love but cannot admit it to each other or themselves.  Only a rom-com scenario makes any sense in what we have seen - hear me out (and yes I am sober as I type this) 
Prig and Putin have known each other for years - him a working class ex-con trying to go straight, Putin a golden haired princess who is so lonely at the top.  They have been sharing stolen glances and smiles for years but neither has the courage…their worlds are too far apart.  Prig is desperate to get Putin to really see him, instead of a boom box outside in the rain he rolls up to Moscow with T90s and MLRS.  It was a romantic gesture of the highest order.  A demonstration of power and masculinity while being vulnerable at the same time.
Putin, like a sexy fox, flees to St Petersburg to hold up with a couple girlfriends…he can’t cope with all this - it is too much too fast.  He is into Prig but the man is both intoxicating and terrifying.  Putin throws out threats but he really does not mean them, inside his heart is pounding - should he?  He mustn’t.  He is so confused right now.  Should he call in airstrikes or run out on the M4 into his man’s arms?
Prig is wailing into the night with an electric guitar (and AD systems), he is in love so hard it hurts.  He bashes out With or Without You by U2…Russia holds it breath, the two star crossed lovers both in love and hate at the same time.  They resent each other for making that love into something that threatens to consume them both.  Finally Lushenko, a girlfriend to both from way back I the day talks them both off the ledge - “you are both love struck fools, stop now before you say something you cannot take back!”
Prig realizes it first.  Putin is a fox to be lured and must feel in control.  Prig has come on too strong.  He dials it back, goes back to the dorm and tells all the guys “he totally scored” but inside he is tortured by the waiting game.  
Putin has fooled himself that he is back in charge but deep inside knows it is too late.  He says strong words but everyone at work knows the truth - FFS would they just do it already.  Their love is self-destructive and wholly doomed but neither can look away - it is a storm that must happen….to be continued.

Am I a bad person if I think "finally Russians are doing to each other what they did to us (people of Central and Eastern Europe) for generations"?

No Kontakt

Olaf Scholz, explaining to some idiots how it is.

The Russians on the receiving end will care.  💥

Regardless if terror bombing works (nuclear does😉)..
I dont think any target, even if purely military, makes it worth to risk goodwill and clear perceived moral high ground in the supporting nations. 
With debris and such, its just bad luck until a drone wreck crashes into a family car/.. there are hardly targets worth risking that image damage.
Im sure those drones could have hit another oil depot somewhere in Russia and done more

Oh believe me...there's nothing like a urine soaked hydraulic shoebox in the summer. Urine, machinery heat and sunlight through tempered glass gives you the full sulfuric terrarium experience.

Ok you can poo poo all you like but you have to admit these look pretty slick when stacked up against the urine-soaked hobo corpse ridden parking options we see here in the finest North American offerings.
I mean seriously:

More good news:

@danfrodo I hope I am not too late with this info but here goes. All the advice in this thread has been about graphics cards but nobody said anything about CPU. CM shines on CPU with a high single thread performance rating. When I bought my new computer three years ago, I used the following website to compare off the shelf pre-built computers and selected the one with the best cpu and graphics card I could afford. My cpu has a score of around 3000, smashing my old score of 950. 
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
 

Sadly, in many places. For years now. Here are a very few of the afaik endless list:
https://www.newsweek.com/nazi-flag-school-wake-county-north-carolina-1563635
https://richmondstandard.com/richmond/2022/03/22/swastika-laden-flag-removed-from-el-sobrante-home-amid-controversy/
https://www.columbian.com/news/2023/apr/19/la-center-residents-concerned-over-home-with-swastikas/
https://www.newsweek.com/swastika-flag-seen-display-california-state-building-1468330
https://www.businessinsider.com/nazi-flags-displayed-outside-tpusa-summit-where-trump-star-speaker-2022-7?op=1 
https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/05/10/florida-holocaust-museum-slams-swastika-flag-display-outside-disney-world/
https://abc11.com/swastika-nazi-flag-wake-county-tree/9877322/
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/swastika-displayed-in-front-of-elementary-school/
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2019/12/10/nazi-swastika-flag-near-des-moines-morris-elementary-sickens-school-district-confederate-painting/4389444002/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-woman-shot-back-while-trying-steal-man-s-nazi-n1232573

I've never bought the permissive environment argument. It's always felt like peace time thinking, where the cost of the platform,  the training and the pilot loss is prioritized. Thus is fine, in peace. 
In war, if that target must be hit, and if you lose one of two A10s to get it, the fact remains -  the target must be destroyed. If it's only an A10 can do it,  then in go the warthogs. You help the survivability odds with supporting ops,  but the idea of needing a permissive environment before doing anything is a fallacy. The target must be hit. Get those planes up. You can create a temporary permissive environment through using your platforms.  You won't create squat if you hold back. 
Losses are inevitable in war  and if a commander is scared of losses to the point of only allowing a platform to operate in optimal conditions then 1) those won't occur and 2) that commander should be reassigned. 
CMBS taught me to be far more aggressive Tactically and to always push, somewhere, and if you need the target destroyed,  use the platform that can do it, even if you only have one. Get it done. 
The A10 feels uniquely appropriate to the Ukrainian mindset. It's a flying hammer and holy moly would they smite with alacrity. 

It is uncertainty, which is toxic to humans.  We mostly do one of two things with uncertainty, we push out and explore to remove it, or we pretend it does not exist.  
We were never apex predators in nature, middle of the food chain in reality.  However we had a big enough brain to be aware of where we sat in the food chain which created fear.  We then leveraged that to survive and evolve.  The fuel for a lot of our fear is uncertainty, the unknowns because in nature those unknowns could easily kill us for food.
So we will work very hard to remove uncertainty, it is a primary impulse.  To over simplify and dumb thins down, particularly when faced with highly complex unknowns is a very old human strategy.  One of the first things we did was to try and use substances to cope - alcohol, narcotics etc.  Than when we constructed faith and religion.  And now we have whatever the hell this era has produced with echo chambers and ideologies that embrace obtuse and willful ignorance as dogma.  Better to embrace safe lies and face unknowable truths.  And to be fair there is also a caloric strategy at play here as well. Brain chews up a lot of calories so in one embraces dogma one can stop burning calories on worrying about unknowns.
Certainty and uncertainty are also central to warfare.  I describe all warfare as a violent collision of human certainties.  It creates enormous uncertainty as social structures are fractured.  Uncertainty is a weapon in itself and can be projected onto an opponent.  We have been wrestling with uncertainty since 23 Feb 22.  We have all created mental frameworks that aid us in reasserting certainty - I know I definitely have.  This is not a bad thing so long as those frameworks remain on speaking terms with reality and the facts on the ground.  If the space between my mental certainty framework and reality becomes too wide, I am in an unreality space and that is when decisions get really shaky.
Now for any 8th graders out there.  We are afraid of the dark because we can imagine all the bad within it.  So we can either build flashlights or cover our heads and pretend it is daytime until the sun does come up.

Summary of Bakhmut and around from UKR TGs
Russians have recovered from sudden UKR strikes and moved additional reservers - both army and Wagner to recapture lost ground. They fiercely counter-attacking, especially on southern flank, but even despite this UKR troops managed to advance some further toward Klishchiivka and in Ivanivskyi forest. Reportedly for now UKR troops advanced on 1,7 km in forest and attached to it treeplant. Units of 5th assault brigade entered to battle (but maybe they were involved recently) on this flank.
Northern flank: UKR troops attacking toward Berkhivka between eastern part of resevoir and railroad in narrow space, trying to capture tree-plants at the "bottle neck" entrance and along railroad. Also Russian strongpoint was captured on other section on northern flank, survived Russian soldiers surrendered. 
Bakhmut city. Situation still hard, Wagners continue assault actions and could achieve some gains in area near crossroads of Levanevskoho and Donbas Liberators streets. 
UKR artillery and sometime HIMARS reportedly caused some strikes on enemy arty.
45th arty brigade strikes at firing positions of D-30 near Bakhmut, destroying field ammo dumps
 

An old pro here, *cough*16 years *cough* since I had my uniform on.  Time flies.  We were always taught grenade or grenades, then straight in, over battlesights, single shots, one left, one right, sweep arcs, third man down the middle.  All dependant of size and what your assaulting obviously.  Good example is the video of the grenadier guards 💂‍♂️  in Helmand. 
However we did know of an excellent way of clearing bunkers that were tight, confined with little airflow.  Smoke grenades.  Bang one of them in and I can honestly say from experience that you can not breath, instant oxygen deprivation.  You will either come running out with your lungs screaming or stay inside and be incapacitated to some degree. 
Very effective.

Not your average video I agree. 
 

If anyone made them heroes it was the state,they targeted them for a crime they didn't commit and persecuted them for their beliefs and for being immigrants, in gross violation of the values of a free country.  

whoa hold on there.  my tinfoil hat has stopped alien messages from infecting my brain.  prove it hasn't!  😎  👽

OK for folks that have not seen this latest video of a UK volunteer back from Ukraine.
 
Key points that I found useful...
Sausage can be used as a reward... (payoff at end of video)😉 The difference between the Ranks and Officers - really interesting insight at start of video and I am not sure how it plays out in combat effectiveness? - Might have been repeated in WW2 as once you get a lot of new people in the Officer distinction might / gets blurred? Ukraine soldiers still makes mistakes - clumping  - training really needs to be upped Base camp life and stealing of kit There are still idiots who support Russia and have tried to infiltrate the land based forces... - See Sausage story.. Really explains the background to Ukraine and Russian military / original training and impact. Rules of engagement / restraint being followed by Ukraine on keeping civilian causalities low. How some folk in the units can do things / attack without the backing of command. - Shooting of boats to stop men trying to get across the river at the Russians. Russian living quarters - "like a bunch of junky student squatters had been living there" - Also some good points about food rations and where Russians had advantage (ammo and types of it) - does explain looting to some extent by Russians - no excuse but explains it... So IMO worth listening to in background as you work on the PC.
BTW the interviewer is a TableTop Gamer and does WW2 gaming and I have met him - very nice chap and down to earth - a funnier JonS - but JonS knows more about the pointy end than Lindybeige and is a bit more pithy...
😉
 
 

For anyone encountering this, the solution (at least on Win10+11) is to override DPI scaling in the executable properties, setting it to "Application". I need to do this for all CM games. There is no need to turn off DPI scaling to run the game. See attached screenshot.
For instance, running CM on a 2560x1440 display, the UI is too small for my eyes, so I want to run it at 1920x1080, so I set this in "display size.txt":
1920 1080 60
But with 150% DPI scaling set in Windows, the game does not handle this at all, thinking I'm running at 1080/1.5 = 720.
If the game engine had supported DPI scaling this would of course not be necessary, as any program that support it will automatically scale accordingly. But for games it's often necessary to override scaling.
It might be possible for Battlefront to fix this by compiling the executable with a manifest telling the OS the application does not support scaling, it will then fall back to using Application scaling:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/setting-the-default-dpi-awareness-for-a-process