The army and the foreign support did a lot of heavy lifting there. Discounting them is like saying that the American Civil War was won by a bunch of escaped cotton pickers. Sure, those escaped cotton pickers fought alongside the armed forces of some twenty-ish American states but they participated so we can attribute victory to them.

To bring the logic to the extreme, WWII was singlehandedly won by a French tennis player. Sure, his contribution consisted of finding American soldiers to rescue prisoners from the SS during the Battle of Castle Itter but he fought against the Third Reich and we'll just look past everyone else who did. (If that isn't absurd enough for you, I also could've nominated an SS officer as the war's winner, also from the same battle. It was a very weird battle.)

Yeah. While you could argue that it's no shame be surprised by a madman who keeps advancing with no concern for supply routes, it is a shame to be unprepared for mobile warfare in general. An army with more awareness of the possibilities tanks of the era offered could've countered him. Of course such an army also wouldn't have relied on the Maginot Line.

The French fought valiantly but no amount of valor can offset catastrophically bad leadership.

Well, the rice farmers were supporting a dedicated military force with the backing of two major countries and a robust covert logistics network. That kinda changes things a little bit.

It's a shit take but so is "the French surrender immediately".

The French soldiers had a pretty impressive track record and fought well in WWII. French military planning used outdated strategies, though, and let the Germans encircle them to the point where evacuating the Allied soldiers to England was the last reasonable choice. And the French still managed to hold off the Germans for long enough to evacuate 300,000 men. The rest went quickly because it's hard to fight a war when you just had to evacuate most of your soldiers. Without their equipment.

Likewise, the USA had a decent military track record and well-equipped professional soldiers. But that didn't mean shit when they were (from the NV perspective) the bad guys in an anticolonial war of liberation with broad support from the civilian population. Vietnam was a guerilla war, to which there was no good doctrinal answer back then. And even today those are hard to deal with.

So yeah, "the French surrender when they see the enemy" is on the same level as "the US Army can't stand against the military might of a bunch of rice farmers".

That's not necessarily why you take drugs.

Uppers like cocaine (which he was very fond of at the time) are often consumed to be more productive or to "enhance" an otherwise already positive time. From what I've heard, he was introduced to coke at a party, which makes perfect sense. Cocaine abuse starts with making a party exhilarating, then it continues with giving you so much energy while working, finally you simply take the stuff because your brain doesn't know how to work with natural levels or serotonin/dopamine/noradrenaline anymore.

To name another class of drugs, taking psychedelics (which I haven't heard of King having much business with) to hide from your inner demons would be a profoundly bad move since those tend to forcibly confront you with yourself. Great if you have the feeling that deep down there's something you need to address but you don't know what. Terrible if you know there's something but you can't handle dealing with it.

Downers like cannabis (which King apparently did at least occasionally use) can be used to silence the bad thoughts. Putting up a smokescreen between your conscious and your subconscious isn't exactly the best way of handling things but at least you're not pouring fuel onto the fire.

Drugs of all kinds can still take your mind in directions you normally would've shied away from, that's true. And a sustained drug habit of any kind is often indicative of an underlying problem; happy people don't mess with their brain chemistry as often. The specific underlying problem can vary wildly – unassisted psychological distress, physiological issues like chronic pain, performance anxiety, peer pressure... the list goes on and on.

Of course, given that King also had a sustained alcohol problem and apparently at one point abused everything he could get his hands on, he definitely seems like someone who couldn't handle what was going on inside of his head. Thankfully he had the support he needed to overcome his drug problem.

Good to hear, although the mere presence of a bullshit lawsuit can do a lot of damage to a smaller company.

The problem remains, however, that the patents in question were granted in the first place, as were the retroactive addenda (which is a terrible "feature" of Japanese patent law).

Game mechanics are patentable both in principle and in practice. And that's a problem.

Counterpoint: Summoning characters by throwing an item and having the character appear at the position of the item has been patented by Nintendo, as has using a summoned character as a hang glider.

Japanese patent law is pretty terrible.

And it's not even a rare occurrence. It's so common that being cheaper is one of the most common arguments in favor of schemes like UBI or universal single-payer healthcare.

Of course the most common (but unspoken) counterargument is that distressingly many people would prefer to make everyone worse off to make sure people who "don't deserve it" don't get paid.

Steam in Germany is a bit of a special case. Basically, they got criticized for years for offering adult-only games to minors on account of not having any kind of legally accepted age check.

Steam finally reacted to this but not by implementing PostIdent or some other age verification scheme. No, they just blocked German users from even seeing the store pages of anything that doesn't have an age rating in Germany. That mostly means porn games.

Hence my comment that "sexual content" and "unavailable in Germany" are pretty much the same thing as far as Steam is concerned.

Nothing new; they just renamed "unavailable in Germany" to "sexual content".

Add conditioner for me because I have super hard water. And my soap is body wash. But yeah, same principle.

The second move is for target acquisition and often precedes a pounce. The wide pupils let in more light, enabling a more precise pounce.

Why the cat's body is preparing to pounce is entirely situational. Maybe it's a hunt, maybe it's play, maybe it's just because the cat is being a little overenergetic derp. When you spend time living with a cat you usually learn to identify them pretty reliably. Especially the last one.