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The Eataly in NYC has far more stuff than the others outside of the city. The prices are also terrible lol.

5/15 the Russian advance has slowed as Ukrainian infantry battalions from their reserves and the Donbass have saturated the area. 2. The town of Lipsty, north of Kharkiv is now being contested and is likely to fall. The city of Vovchansk looks to be a focal point as it is being contested. The Ukrainians claim that there are 4 Russian infantry battalions attacking with tanks in support. If the battle for this city takes a long time, it will be turned into ruins. 3. Ukraine seems to maintain that the attack is 'limited in scope' & 'for a buffer zone' but do not provide evidence that it will be. Overall it appears that the Russians only committed a few thousand troops or so of 31,000 in total for this direction. 4. They are now approx. 4 KM away from the first line of Ukrainian defense. The front line towns were easily taken, using infiltration tactics of individual infantry squads scattered across the front like the German Ardennes Offensive of 1944. Given the ease of taking this towns it appears that the Russians have been planning & training for this operation for a long time. The units that executed the attack are largely reservist-staffed infantry formations. 5. A possibility is that the Russians will expand the zone of control, just in front of the first line of Ukrainian trench systems and forts in their western effort. Their eastern effort could move slowly towards outflanking the Kupiansk front. 6. Putin announced that the 'new direction' is to increase military spending to 8.7% by the end of 2024, while maintaining social spending at the same level. Meanwhile the new economist-Minister of Defense will be tasked to increase efficiency of the defense expenditures. They also refuse to do a 2nd round of partial mobilization, intending to fight the war with an expeditionary force rather than a large army. 7. Putin then brought his new 'Albert Speer' to meet Emperor Xi Jinping.

@Jade Bahr Have you seen the Witcher show? I think they completely screwed it up, it is my favorite mainstream fantasy franchise with imho the most interesting masculine hero in fiction with a very good romance. I am almost done reading the books twice and know the game continuation by CDPR very well. I like it a lot more than Lord of the Rings and I think it's overall a lot better.

IIRC (I am not a Star wars reader either) Anakin's main character flaws was that he was extraordinarily arrogant and self-entitled, and also placed an infinite value on Padme, which meant that he was immensely possessive. He would rather kill 1000 innocent strangers than to lose her. He also believe that he deserved high position despite being very young and was massively angered when he was denied such an honor due to the Jedi recognizing that he was immature. The Sith Lord Palapatine knew Anakin well and manipulated his weaknesses to push him into the dark side. If Anakin was a traditional hero and did not have such serious personal issues he would have been immune to such external manipulation. A lot of this has to do with how Anakin was raised and repeatedly told by his teachers that he was the 'chosen one' , 'ultra-special', etc. This plus his very real gifts just reinforced it. So naturally he would grow up to have a distorted view of reality.

Indian food is kind of a mess to me.

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I think you hit the nail on the head with Vickers and all these other examples. They intentionally cast attractive men who also have a certain strangeness in their appearance and presence- which removes them from being a traditional hero. Basically the usual 'bad boy' thing . Anakin was initially good but his makeup, appearance etc changed progressively as he turned 'bad'- which by the end of revenge of the sith included the evil eyes and dark circles undernealth his eyes.

Halbrand did and said all sorts of stuff that is inconsistent with a traditional hero 😛 His whole relationship with Galadriel was kind of weird, like a friend but not a friend. I was about to say that Sauron (who is a shapeshifter- was like a hidden agent among the elves) is now obviously a feature of the S2 trailer. He is now an elf instead of a human. I think the LOTR game got it right, he was supposed to look like this. Sephiroth from FFVII also reminds me of Sauron visually:

Hah, that's funny I saw that too. For a while afterwards the media was all about how "Shogun" would be the last one and then it took a sharp turn because the show was way too successful...

I think it is obvious that her masters wanted to destroy the old S.I and saw it as a liability in 'current times' (socialist ideology gone mainstream & decline of print media etc)- despite it being an iconic magazine with decades of history. She merely has implemented what they wanted.

Penny is the best and has the best breasts. The photography is bad. So it looks like Haily didn't do much at all for this issue?

I made Raison bread with the bread machine- my most successful loaf!

I've been making bread machine bread (4th time already recently). It never comes out completely satisfactory- the bread texture is always a little flawed with some wetness inside. Had these chinese take out items recently:

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