War returns to Europe

 I forget, who was it that said history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes?  That's what I'm thinking to myself, about 24 hours out from when I first heard that Russia had decided to go ahead and start its full-blown invasion of Ukraine.  Apparently, and unsurprisingly, Russia wasn't terribly deterred after the world's tepid response to their prior invasion of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula, and is willing to bet that any response to a full invasion will still be a net positive for them.

Now, as belligerent as this post will sound, I have no desire for war.  Civilization is a much better option in my book, and I would choose that path in almost every situation.  However, civilization only works if all the groups involved are committed to working within that framework.  To use an analogy, it's rather hard for everyone to enjoy a game of poker if one of the players gets up from the table to go around and punch one of the other players.  Well, Russia just started throwing punches at our collective poker table, so what's our response?

So far, outside of the less-than-worthless "thoughts and prayers" lines dribbling from the mouths of those who want to appear to care, but don't care enough to actually do anything else, it's been a mix of giving military hardware to Ukraine and applying limited economic sanctions to Russia.  Well, the hardware might help Ukraine somewhat (never mind that they're greatly outnumbered), but sanctions?  Seriously, you're trying to use a long-term pressure tactic to dissuade an immediate threat to another country's continued existence?

I'll set aside the all-too-apt comparisons to the lead-up to World War II that others are bringing up routinely, in favor of another, more recent conflict.  How about the first Persian Gulf War - no, not the one with the supposed weapons of mass destruction that had us invading Iraq, but the one where Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait, intending to take it over?  I don't recall us saying "oh, that's terrible, thoughts and prayers all around, and we'll apply harsh economic sanctions against Iraq."  Rather, we demonstrated that we object to forced takeovers of sovereign nations in the strongest possible terms, by using military force to eject the would-be occupiers.  The fact that we're not taking that path in the face of this invasion strongly implies that either that earlier response was driven by what we stood to gain from Kuwait, by how little risk we felt in putting our armed forces against those of the Iraqis, or both, and none of those answers reflect well on us.

But OK, I'll accept, for the sake of argument, that, this time, we don't want to put our people in harm's way for the well-being of our fellow humans.  How about some other, broader actions, rather than trying to target individuals and select companies within Russia?  Shut down their trade, restrict the ability of all their citizens to travel the civilized world, heck, shut down the Internet links to their country, since that seems to be a constant source of trouble as well.  Yes, any and all of those would cause us pain as well, but that's kind of the point.  The calculation the Russians seem to have made is that we won't do anything too bad to them, for fear of causing ourselves inconvenience and discomfort.  Right now, I'd have to say they seem to be right on the money.  Here's hoping I'm proven wrong in the coming days and weeks, for all I may not enjoy the side effects.

That's Mass Effect 1 down, on to the next

 I recently finished the Mass Effect 1 portion of the Legendary Edition trilogy remake.  While I'm glad I was able to go through the whole game once, thanks to the gunplay and companion AI improvements, the game itself was okay at best.  Some of that comes down to what they were able to attempt with the hardware available at the time, no doubt.  However, there were enough plot holes and failures of common sense scattered throughout, generally of the flavor of "we want to do this cool thing at this point, so let's ignore the problems with the setup needed for that cool thing to happen", that my suspension of disbelief was regularly broken.  Basically, if this was a sci-fi movie instead of a game, I would put this closer to Battle Beyond the Stars than Star Wars.

That said, I still have hopes for Mass Effect 2, now that I've started in on that volume of the trilogy.  Where the first game starts you off tied to both Earth's military and the ruling galactic council, with "I am the law" levels of personal power, the second makes a clean break with that by having a mysterious ship track down and destroy your stealth-enabled ship.  You manage to get some of the crew off safely, but you end up jettisoned into space with a suit leak.  Fast forward to you waking up, two years later, after a shadowy humanity-first organization named Cerberus (who you took out some unsavory projects from as side-quests in the last game) has given you the Six-Million Dollar Man treatment via their Project Lazarus - and even that is an early wake-up call, because someone decided to sabotage the facility's security bots, likely in a bid to kill you properly this time.  Surviving that, you find out about an ongoing issue that might be linked to the big-bad Reapers that you managed to stop last game, something the powers-that-be seem to treat as settled, while Cerberus is willing to give you an updated ship, some of your old crew, and contacts to gather more crew to investigate and deal with things as you see fit.  For now, your goals and those of Cerberus align... will that hold true throughout?

Simply put, the story of Mass Effect 2 looks to be more interesting than the story of Mass Effect 1, and there are mechanical changes between the two games as well, so the only reason to play the first game would be the story... and the second game includes an "interactive comic" that you can use to get yourself up-to-speed with the story from the first game.  All in all, I would say to give the first game a skip, and just start with ME2 at this point, if you haven't played either.

Now, it's just about time to show my face to the galactic Council.  It'll be fun to see how that turns out.