If there is one person who has done more to discredit leftism than @Impassionata, it's probably some reddit moderator.

But between Impassionata's wide-eyed histrionic projections that Trump was finished, their vicious attacks on hardworking Americans like @TracingWoodgrains, and their ill-considered repetitive longposts about fascism that no one reads, the state of leftism on the Internet these days can only be described as 'in shambles.'

The simple truth is that Impassionata and the other leftists who hiss and screech about Trump never gave Trump a chance.

Politics isn't about being liked. Politics is about getting what you want. People who support Trump or Vance are getting what they want out of the arrangement, and that, I think, is what makes leftists so angry about the situation.

Let's look at what Trump accomplished:

• Got us out of Afghanistan, though Biden did his best to sabotage it,,probably on purpose.

• Met with North Korea's leader in a genuine peace overture.

• Put conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

• Connected with Putin at a time we need to be diplomatic and thoughtful towards the Russian people.

• Killed terrorists like Iran's minister of terrorism.

Let's look at what leftists talk about:

• Trump firing Comey for investigating him, even though Trump is the president.

• Trump's campaign connections with Russia, even though the Mueller Report indicated that they could not charge Trump with a crime

• Trump's call with Ukraine pressuring them into fabricating lies about his political opponent, even though the subsequent impeachment did not lead to his conviction.

• Trump crushing protests and touching a Bible. Sometimes state violence is called for. We must have order.

• Trump's bombastic rhetoric. The leftists can't understand the concept of 'kayfabe,' to them everything Trump says is a real threat.

• Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Though many people went to prison for the fake electors plot, Trump has been ruled to be immune to prosecution for it by the Supreme Court. This makes the left mad, but the law is the law: we must have order.

• On January 6th, Trump and his crowd enjoyed their freedom of assembly in a mostly peaceful protest.

But let's look at what Trump says:

• His sincere call for unity in the wake of the unjustified and egregious attempt on his life at the RNC touched many.

• His calls for a peaceful day on January 6th.

• When asked to condemn the various enthusiast groups who have some views that leftists find distasteful, Trump told them to 'stand back.'

The violence of leftists, however, always goes unacknowledged by these leftist types. We all know that leftists are little more than pack animals, striking at vulnerable targets, wielding social consensus against people in ways which harm people.

Leftists are and have always been the real authoritarians.

And Impassionata doesn't have the authority to make the rightoids listen to the leftist ideological confabulations, and that makes Impassionata, and the entire left, angry in their powerlessness.

When will these sad leftists understand that politicians are a means to an end? A means to good policy, implemented by clear-thinking, rational and considerate discussion?

Leftists will lose election after election until this lesson sinks in.

Christian fundamentalists and child exploiters Britney and JD Lott (instagram: @/americanfamilyroadtrip) are finally under investigation for endangering the health of their 8 kids after forcing them to live in JD's version of "Noah's Ark": a 217 sq ft old Air Force transport bus with one bathroom, 6 cramped, twin-sized bunk beds squished in the back of the bus and a drop-down queen-sized bed where their 3 most recent kids were conceived.)

Link to a tour of the bus (it hasn't changed since this was posted)

A short background:

Britney and JD met in 2008 on deployment in Iraq and got married in 2009. JD has a hard-on for getting rich quick, so they bought into a gym franchise in 2011 while they simultaneously started procreating (kid 1 - 2011; kid 2 - 2013; kid 3- 2015; kid 4 - 2016). During this time, they were living in their 5800 sq ft house, and Britney pulled their oldest out of Christian private school and started homeschooling their army as they didn't agree with the school's "secular approach"???

In 2017, JD got a vision from god, and god told him he needed to build an ark in the form of a bus. He told Britney and within a week, MotherBus and FatherBus were well on their way to living la vida loca. They had their 5th kid in August 2018 and started their bus bullshit in October 2018. The 3 youngest bus kids were conceived in 2020, 2022, and 2024. As of today, their kids' ages are 13, 11 (only girl), 9, 7, 6, 4, 2, and 3 months old. All kids share the 6 bunk beds together (the 13 year old shares a twin bed with the 2 year old), and all kids go to bed at 7:30 PM so that Britney and JD can have "date night" from 8-9 PM.

Abuse allegations

Britney and JD love swinging their newborns around for the internet. The earliest documented occurrence of this was in 2022 with a pic of Britney not supporting her newborn's (now 2 years old) neck.

Since they literally fund their life through posting daily videos of their kids doing choreographed dances while Britney eye fucks the camera, a lot of their neglect of the most recent kid is all over their instagram:

• Baby Boone was born in the bus bathtub unassisted

• MotherBus brings newborn to have a chiropractic adjustment

• FatherBus forcing Boone's leg straight to measure him as he screams in agony

• BusTards take Boone to a local UPS to weigh him

• Britney constantly leaves Boone on a piece of sheepskin rug on the floor all day while the 5 youngest kids constantly crowd him and walk all over the rug. Boone doesn't have a bed either; he sleeps on the sheepskin rug underneath the parent's drop-down queen bed.

• Britney continually brings Boone onto the beach and into the sun without a hat, shade, or sunscreen (She's mentioned before that she doesn't believe in sunscreen and she puts beef tallow on her kids for "natural SPF")

• Boone is literally jaundiced when he's not sunburnt

• They treat him like a ragdoll

• Boone is extremely lethargic, doesn't respond to voices, doesn't make eye contact, and won't unclench his hands. Any comments on developmental milestones or telling MotherBus to take Boone to the doctor are deleted and the user is blocked immediately.

This caught the attention of concerned family members who anonymously reported MotherBus to the Florida Department of Children and Families. The shitlords are convinced that the users of /r/FundieSnarkUncensored are anti-Christian "online trolls" who are weaponizing the government to attack and "defame" them. They are quoted online accusing FSU of geolocating their family from Instagram screenshots and calling the manager of the campground they were at to send CPS on a "nationwide manhunt" of the Lotts.

JD and Britney claim their kids were cleared at an undisclosed hospital where a doctor "took a look" at Boone and the other kids and determined the cops didn't need to take the kids at that time.

Speculation

Through some digging, FSU reddit discovered that the initial call took place in April 2024, when Boone was 14 days old. It's July 24th, and the BusTards are just now going public with the story. Two weeks ago, FatherBus was seen at an express passport office getting a passport for BabyBus. One week ago, they posted that they bought plane tickets for their entire family and they plan on leaving the country. Now yesterday, they post an absolutely IRATE video about the CPS call.

Are MotherBus and FatherBus planning to run from CPS, or is the investigation still ongoing and critical to the point that CPS told them they aren't allowed to leave the country?

They're addicted to the clout, so I'm sure they'll post an update within a day or so.

All in all, his appointment makes me take seriously the possibility that Trump's second term will focus seriously on setting a policy foundation for the future versus just being cult-of-personality stuff.

Why would you believe this?

How could you actually believe this?

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An entire generation of would-be intellectuals attempted to treat Trump as a politician with policies instead of as an incompetent authoritarian using overt fascist rhetoric, creating a cult of personality. The Republicans are still calling out 'civil war' and then realizing this makes them dramatically unpopular.

And TracingWoodgrains continues to think: could this ancient person who just today or yesterday claimed to be a 'young vibrant man' turn his focus towards setting a policy foundation?

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Remember (for those who haven't been paying attention), after all the fascism was invited into Scott Alexander's culture war threads in 2016-2020, they turned so violent that Trace created /r/theschism.

And this is one of a few places where the pseudo-intellectuals who couldn't perceive the fascism, but could believe that wokes were out to get them, retreated to in a world where one party was fascist, and the other party tended to insist on calling out that fascism.

It boggles my mind that Trace could be appalled by the violence, but never understand that the violence was the fascism. And now the 'dissident right' is nodding very seriously about Trump's policy positions, as if there is anything to the Republican Party but a bunch of authoritarian sycophants tripping over each other to praise Trump more while they state directly that they'll engage in civil war if they lose.

The Onion says it best: Trump vows to unite nation against common enemy of other Americans.

TracingWoodgrains is the sort of person who believes Trump when Trump calls for unity. TracingWoodgrains requires that we live in the reality where a few kind words erase years of violent rhetoric.

Why, TracingWoodgrains, are you so easily duped by Trump?

When will the greater SFBA Rationalist Cult wake up from the fugue of confusion brought about by Woke Derangement Syndrome?

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Scott Alexander semi-ironically tackles 'an orgy of vengeance.' He starts to unravel, hopefully, the failure of the ideological wasteland of his home ground, in his recent essay: Some Practical Considerations Before Devolving into an Orgy of Vengeance.

I was cancelled from the culture war threads. I didn't take it personally, at least in the sense that I didn't think: all rightoids are like Scott, or all rightoids are like the moderators, who were crippled by their necessarily authoritarian connection to the space: whatever Scott said was true.

Cancellation is just part of human nature. The most egregiously obnoxious position of the SFBA Rationalist Cult is that it is somehow above or better than cancellation.

Scott Alexander gets close:

Liberals invent a fictional entity called "The Right", which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against "The Right" because it's an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.

What a terrible paragraph.

Scott Alexander was part of the Woke Derangement Syndrome crowd.

But the NYT doesn't have to produce out-of-context quotes demonstrating Trumpism's authoritarian dialogue.

The problem is that Scott Alexander suffocated his worldview with racism. Never forget: he self-consciously invited fascists and racists (neoreactionaries) into his audience. This level of racism and fascism became normal for Scott--and for TracingWoodgrains.

You have an entire coup attempt planned by Trump in the wake of the 2020 election, starting with the fake elector plot and culminating in January 6th. And Scott Alexander's take is that the liberals (HE IS INVENTING A FICTIONAL ENTITY HERE) are inventing a fictional entity around it and hallucinating its racism and fascism. (To put it in idiot SFBA Rationalist Cult terms, his priors are 'trapped.')

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

And if you don't understand this, there is in fact a very basic political intelligence test which you have failed. It's ok. The fascism fools people.

The fascism fools young men especially. Young men who feel persecuted by a society that doesn't care much for them. (And to be clear: society does not care for young men. It treats them as disposable, and always has.)

Scott Alexander took these young men and said: it's ok, the evil SJWs are evil and bad and we can create our own little space where we don't cancel people for their beliefs. Then he pulled the people with the worst beliefs on the planet into his space, and leftists were driven away by their racism and violence. This is what happened.

What they never seemed to understand is that you can in fact treat an egregore as an entity with beliefs and conditions provided you are careful to make distinct the voices. A mob of rioters that burn down their police station is in fact different from a mob of rioters instructed by a president who attack our Capitol.

Thus a vast wasteland of pseudointellectuals. Right now the King Pseud is Elon Musk, who is bewildered that other people find Trump morally repugnant. "Shouldn't we treat politics as an exercise in getting what we want?" thinks Musk. "All of these intelligent people in my circles are supporting Trump hoping for policy implementations," reasons Trace.

None of these people possess reasonable social skills. They're perpetually confused by politics, but worse? They think that's the problem of the people who can understand politics.

Which is why I'm here, where they can't cancel me.

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**210 BC: The First Emperor of China dies

His plan was for a dynasty to last the millennia. His son was to be the next in line.

Instead, immediately after his death his preferred narrative is abandoned. His son was killed. Others ruled the throne through proxies.

1185 AD: Andronikos Komnenos

Andronikos oversaw a 'terror state' of reckless bloodshed against his political enemies in his paranoia. When he was finally killed,

At last he was led to the Hippodrome of Constantinople and hung by his feet between two pillars. Two Latin soldiers competed as to whose sword would penetrate his body more deeply, and he was, according to the representation of his death, torn apart; his remains were left unburied and were visible for several years afterwards.[18] He died on 12 September 1185.[19] At the news of the Emperor's death, his son and co-emperor, John, was murdered by his own troops in Thrace.

69 AD: The Year of Four Emperors

A bunch of delusional people swear loyalty to anyone who happens to be a leader. The temple of Jupiter burns.

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If there's one thing I would do to Scott Alexander in person, it's slap him so hard he falls to the ground and then put my knee on his back and force his face into the mud and whisper into his ear: your shithead following believes in effective emperors. They believe in a Caesar. They believe in Augustus.

Force is the only way to get through to these people through their woke derangement syndrome.

But the problem of succession is so fricking huge that the one genuine accomplishment of our American system is the peaceful transition of power. This is what Trump threatened on January 6th and if you don't understand that you're a fricking idiot who should never have written about politics.

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

And Scott Alexander continues to fluff Trump in his mock political debate writing. Scott Alexander is thus a pseudo-fascist: one who propagandizes Trump as an effective politician.

Honestly I have to admire the irony: Scott Alexander doesn't understand why the left freaks out about the things Trump does. Scott assumes that explanations of Trump forcing their reaction are true, so Trump must be effective as a politician, because he produces a desired result through his speech.

Scott does not put these things together, that because the desired result of Trump's violent rhetoric is violence, this is what makes Trump dangerous, this is what makes leftists broadly correct.

Trump is an "ontological threat against Democracy"

There is nothing more to a narrative of state than the people following the story of its leader. The competing narrative of Trump as to the legitimacy of the 2020 Election makes Trump a dangerous instability to be reckoned with forcefully. By any means necessary, including slicing up the worldviews of people like TracingWoodgrains, Scott Alexander, and Elon Musk.

TracingWoodgrains continues to tell the story, bizarrely, of a man who might turn to serious policy.

Scott Alexander continues to tell the story, bizarrely, of a left that is producing 'out-of-context' quotes.

Musk is in a pathetic search for legitimacy on Twitter, getting told by other rich people of his mistake.

Thankfully, Biden has promised to 'finish the job' and I think we'll soon be rid of this old person boomer confusion. (Just because he's incompetent as a leader doesn't mean the movement around him isn't fascism.)

But I haven't forgotten the weakness of the pseudointellectuals whose Woke Derangement Syndrome prevented them from perceiving the authoritarian fascist movement which began in 2016. They still have a chance to correct their answer, before the history books close on them as collaborators with the insurgent traitor Trump.

Soon Impassionata can retire.

Two nukes lead directly to this

Vtubing is a form of online streaming or videos made with an anime character as the speaker, for entertainment. Their predecessors include normal webcam letsplayers and streamers (

) and long form content creators that use one or more still images of their avatar talking as they talk (insert any random dork that has one of those 2 hour analyses of childrens' cartoons).

If this sounds incredibly neurodivergent, it is, but this is the very tip of the iceberg.

The typical vtuber is a biological woman(1) that uses a camera to rig a 2-d model or a 3-d model of an anime girl to follow their face and head movement, so that they appear fully animated.

They take on various forms of entertainment, from essentially being normal video game streamers but with an anime girl facecam, idol-type singers, "wacky" Japanese "humor" types, porn, to even news commentators. A lot of them make a big deal out of their model and character, with intricate backstories and keyfabe. Generally speaking, Japanese companies and vtubers are a little heavy on this and hype up the vtubers as idol singers, while Americans and Canadians are a little more inclined to know they're effectively regular streamers juiced up by weeaboos, but also keep up the keyfabe and idol stuff.

Vtubing is enabled by advances in camera tracking equipment, Youtube and Twitch allowing livestreams to receive money from viewers in "super chats" and memberships, and a proliferating online community that broke containment from Japan around 2019-2020. It appears that COVID led to a ton of weebs looking into alternative spaces to interact, including parasocial relationships with streamers. In turn, the community of artists, 3-d modelers, and riggers exploded, and now anyone can be a anime girl with their iPhone, paying for the model of their character, and a few software cowtools for streaming. In the last year or year and a half, it appears that some of that COVID-era parasocial engagement has fallen, but the cat is out of the bag, and I wouldn't be surprised if this type of media continues to grow. If you type in "vtuber" on youtube or twitch there are a ton of shitty setups with 1 or 2 viewers live all the time, it kind of reminds me of when every guy thought he could be a letsplayer. In terms of the rdrama userbase, users may be familiar with Kirsche, the /pol/tuber, or Pippa the variety streamer, who are both 4chan and KF adjacent. Overall, the largest company is Hololive, recently known for their most popular vtuber singing at a Dodgers game

.

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The Fans

But what happens when you take an already strange group (weeaboos) and combine them with the parasocial experience of wanting to frick an anime girl streamer? Unmitigated schizophrenia. Reddit is as normal as you can be for entertainment like this, twitter is usually weird over the top care for their favorite vtubers (like when someone cancels because they are sick, fans will write out detailed concerns and fifty heart emojis), but elsewhere is hilariously insane. 4chan rarely adds boards, but they added /vt/ for vtubing as a containment board, and it is now almost as fast as the fastest boards /vg/ and /pol/. It goes faster than fricking /a/ and /b/, and would completely swamp where it would be otherwise, /jp/. KF has a vtuber general with 8000 fricking pages. There's a KF splinter site dedicated entirely to vtubing. Oh, and a solid proportion of vtuber models look and act like children, so a lot of pedos are into it too.

There are a ton of boundaries that vtubers aren't supposed to cross because it is seen as dangerous ("yab"/"yabai" in moonrunes). Usually it's related to how idols are supposed to not smoke or drink or publicly talk about s*x. However, because essentially what these women do is talk or play video games 20+ hours a week, things inevitably slip in. Even the agencies that acknowledge they platform actual psychiatric patients or are kinda edgy generally try to keep their vtubers with some level of keyfabe, some level of idol stuff like songs, and no talking about relationships.

Remember how this is about mid Asian women playing video games and singing with a little bit of pretending to be a dorky anime girl? A lot of r-slurs think it's real.

• First, there is "gosling". AKA falling in love with the anime girl on your youtube. Think of Ryan Gosling's character from Blade Runner 2049

• You may come to the obvious conclusion that this is r-slurred, but think of the kind of community that this attracts

• Because vtubers make money from fans sending money on their streams or by buying their merchandise, they are incentivized to grow their fanbase to include lonely weirdos who will drop $500 on their streams

• However, these same weirdos end up cataloging every single snippet of personal information that you say because they are in love with the vtuber

• Then when the vtuber slights them somehow, they will dump all that info attempting to dox them

• This could range from political opinions, personal hypocrisy, not reading out the chat they sent, or just schizos building up tangential evidence that you have a boyfriend

Now that I think about it this reminds of something here... ... but somehow more neurodivergent, because once again, they're in love with an anime girl and don't even get to have s*x with it. And this isn't "oh I'm literally handing out my full name, phone number, job and location " but this:

. It's fricking insane.

In the funniest instance, accidentally revealing you have a boyfriend on stream directly :

https://streamable.com/lnjg6z

led to some schizo dropping a 60 page google doc of groomercord screenshots and accusations she led him on, leading her to retire her character and rebrand. He still shows up on /vt/ occasionally to sperg out AFAIK

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Vtubers

So the viewers are obsessive weirdos that will literally track weather and note that their vtuber said it was raining at exactly 10:19 AM EST to narrow down where they live, while compiling insane screeds because they want to frick their favorite clumsy nerd dragon anime girl in real life... what about the vtubers themselves?

• They often have considerable issues, but are usually just gross femcels

• The rabbit girl at the top of this post, Pippa Pipkin, is IRL trailer trash, had a drawer she would puke in, lived with mold on her stuff, did not brush her teeth, and is just generally really gross:

• Rushia is the name of a former vtuber who lost her job because of lolcow-tier crazy, revealing that she was married, cheating on her husband, then divorcing him while cheating on him and making a ton of accusations, and was threatening lawsuits to a ton of people over this information

• It explains a lot to learn that the average vtuber is neurodivergent. On this test, https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/#test, where 65 is minimum score considered for autism and 130 is the mean score of neurodivergent people, the company Phase Connect had many of their vtubers take it and most of them scored above 150.

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Why is this dramatic?

The slightest negative thing that a vtuber does gets amplified by schizos and a-logs, which often snowballs into drama. For example, Pippa is gross and weird, but there's a thread right now between her white knights and a-logs that is like 50 pages long in two or three days as if its a update

The juxtaposition of vtubers to normal media is still fricking hilarious, like tell me this isn't funny: https://rdrama.net/post/285799/apparently-there-are-rightoid-redpilled-vtubers

It's only going to get more neurodivergent and parasocial from here

• The Japanese Communist Party has a vtuber:

• If J.D. Vance, a rightoid twitter user who follows "Mid Castizos" and Steve Sailer can become vice president, we will eventually have a weeaboo vice president that'll get questioned why he followed Kirsche

Pissing off vtube fans is funny and unfortunately a proportion of them are pedos and/or gooners

• Do NOT look at any pictures from conventions. A lot of these guys look WORSE than your worst stereotypes. There are people in real life who buy anime body pillows.

Vtubing could be an innovative form of media. The motion tracking and animation is really interesting. The interactivity that some streamers have can be original and interesting, from the way they break the fourth wall to the way they can manipulate elements of their character model and background on the fly. Some vtubers are surprisingly talented but either too ugly or mentally ill to be regular streamers or did not make it as singers, and this offers a track for them to continue to be an entertainer and make bizarre content.

However, vtubing is ultimately more likely to be known on the internet for pedos jacking off to their favorite 4,000 year old shark girl and donating their Burger King paychecks to Youtube.

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Finally, pretty much every single thread on vtubing anywhere turns into this.

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(1) Yes, I was honestly surprised at first too. Technically it would be hard to tell if an independent streamer passes hard enough, but agencies have to verify their vtubers and are almost always looking for women only. If you've ever been to weeb convention or related event and you see 4/10 Asian or white women cosplaying or doing related things like /cgl/, there is a nonzero chance they've tried vtubing. Surprisingly, there are even attractive ones, though the correlation between attractiveness and being a vtuber is obviously negative.

I have long since known about the impracticality of Plastic Recycling, but i found a good video addressing this issue in a comparative short and summarized format. (15 minutes)

The point of this video and my own belief is not to be an anti-recycling advocate or propagate anti-green sentiment propaganda. I and the video creator still believe we should in fact recycle to the greatest extent possible, but that we should also become fully aware of the horrifying reality standing before us - and that is that plastic has never, even since its inception in the early 1920s been capable of being recycled in any economical or environmentally sustainable sense meaningfully.

There are a great multitude of barriers to complete practical plastic recycling - including economical, practical and physical science related impossible reasons.

For economical reasons, it is because most nation states upon the earth subsidize any plastic or fossil fuel industry they may have, since these are astronomically critical sectors of economy and society, these subsidies

tend to compete painfully against any industry which must consider even the feasibly recycled resin or raw virgin plastic, against fossil remains/oil products from which plastic originates, and often recycled plastic (which contains the cost of labor intensive manpower) loses out.

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Now there are industries in places like South Africa which have edged out a niche in recycling plastic which can meaningfully be recycled and done so in an economically viable manner. We even have a pretty decent organization advocating this issue- though obviously they sure as shit don't hold any real power or influence. But they do actually highlight and underline the most critical issues we face and actually attempt to offer pratical solutions.

This surprised me as Green hippie types are usually very prone to offer and champion noble but impractically insane idealized solutions.

https://www.plasticrecyclingsa.co.za/

They actually have a practical grasp upon our declining situations and even attempt understand the practical reality where we have lots of "trash pickers" people who hunt in junkyards for plastic, or pilfer through peoples trash bags before they can be picked up by trash lorries, so that they might fill their giant bags with plastic for recycling plants in the big cities.

https://www.news24.com/citypress/news/sas-itinerant-waste-pickers-feel-the-pinch-as-covid-19-lockdown-drags-on-20200423

It's very unglamorous, but many poor safricans make a living from this.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/how-waste-pickers-are-helping-win-war-plastic-pollution-2023-07-17/

Now I sure as heck won't be like this Reuters article and claim that our "waste-picker" economy is "winning the war against plastic waste" or anything, but it does actually help in the grand scale of things. Where the average plastic by tons on the global stage is recycled at the pitiable 5% on average, south africa has been recycling at between 7,5% - 15% of our plastic waste (still pitafle but above global average)

However, even this recycling economy, supported on the backs and efforts of "waste-pickers", is only really feasible BECAUSE south africa is so brokenshit poor, and has at least a 25% unemployment rate - meaning that because safricans are so poor and desperate, they are willing to do the most unenviable and difficult jobs of being waste-pickers, which is basically the lowest rung of even south african society.

whereas richer places like Burgerland in all its wealth would find it impossible to compete, trash-pickers or trash-sorters would have to be paid at least minimum wages or have safety regulations against them being exposed to biohazards from junkyards or landfills - in safrica we are so poor, the concept of even regulating trash-pickers here in nonexistent because they are borderline beggers.

Thus even with the economic incentive of not starving, safrica still only manages to collect a tenth of our plastic waste - the rest is dumped in landfills if even that.

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THE IMPRATICALITY OF RECYCLING PLASTIC: WHY IS IT HARD?

I go on this Safrican tangent to make you guys realize the sheer magnitude of problems involving ACTUAL recycling plastic, and the logistical barriers that would be involved at every step.

Like the video goes on to explain: Why is it so hard to recycle trash and plastic?

1. There are different types of plastic

https://www.plasticsforchange.org/blog/different-types-of-plastic

When plastic products are created, they are chemically created with different additives, to give them specific properties - like waterbottles being watertight and firm. Other plastics like plastic bags are intentionally made to be bending and malleable.

Mixing these different shit into one giant recycling cauldron and trying to melt them together into one magic giant bar of resin is worthless, because the combined product of plastics with different properties or chemical makeup just generates worthless plastic goop and gunk, worth only as burnable coal.

2nd hand plastic will just never have the same versatility as "virgin" resin plastic, or plastic generated directly from oil and other fossil fuel products.

Thus to meaningfully recycle any plastic shit, you need to sort them - which is a logistical task of great magnitude and WILL require human hands, no factory can in any meaningful sense sort plastic magically into the different types and even if those plastic is recyclable.

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2. Many plastics are chemically bonded with other material on the molecular level, making them unsuitable for recycling.

https://stories.undp.org/why-arent-we-recycling-more-plastic

Many plastic products also contain metal, carton, paper and polystyrene which are often impractically impossible to separate.

3. Recycling also degrades plastic with each recycling cycle

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4. Contamination with food remains and chemicals.

Plastic containers for food and poison or cleaning chemicals also cannot be used in recycling for most plants as there are often no meaningful manner in which to separate toxic chemicals from these plastics which will remain even after the furnace of the recycling plant's processing. So basically bottles holding ratpoison or floor cleaning liquid are for safety already almost never capable of being reused EVER.

https://nilu.com/2020/02/can-we-recycle-plastic-without-recycling-the-toxic-pollutants-as-well/

https://www.sulapac.com/blog/truth-about-plastic-recycling/

"When plastics are recycled, they can contain a toxic cocktail of chemicals that makes them unfit for food-grade and other consumer uses. Dangerous chemicals make their way into recycled plastic materials from a variety of sources. Greenpeace has identified the following three 'uncontrollable poisonous pathways':

Toxic chemicals in new virgin plastic materials: When plastics are made with toxic chemicals and then recycled, the toxic chemicals can transfer into the recycled plastics."

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END:

I don't know if I have any grand point to make in this post, and it's not my intention of just putting forth a pessimistic doompost with no viable solutions to our global frickup.

But I did want to talk to you darmatards regarding the mammoth nature of the task before us, if we as humanity even decides to ever make plastic recycling a priority.

I recall a funny story in my time at UCT (Univericity of Cape Town) where every year there were perpetual campaigns by hippes and other environmentalists with new and improved plans involving the University to improve our carbon footprint and lower our waste in the form of recycling.

On campus there would be these fancy multi-bins, divided into categories for waste disposal: plastic, paper, metal, food, ect. There would be Green propaganda campaigns, slogans and posters, encouraging peeps to responsibly think before they threw their trash into the bin, and help sorting our trash for recycling plants in the city.

The end of that year I saw a trash lorry come in and the garbage-men would just simply dump the fricking bins into the garbage-lorry, mixing the carefully sorted bins with apathetic abandon clearly undoing most of our efforts through the year regularly

https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2021-03-05-installation-of-new-bins-part-of-ucts-green-campus-transformation

Later UCT would correct this and make sure to employ palstic/metal recyling collectors to come and pick up the intended recycle shit, and give the food-waste and non-recyclables to the regular trash-lorries

Additionally safrican students tend to be r-slurred and the 4 bin project eventually got scraped for a two bin, for recyclables and non-recyclables cuz students kept throwing paper into the metal bins or vice versa, but even this STILL GOT FRICKED UP

---

Anyways regular soft drink bottles like coke bottles which are uniform type plastic and don't contain poison are still very practical to collect and recycle just like tin cans, this post is just to highlight the magnitude of the practicality of the recylcing problem.

Also posted on WatchPeopleDie

"Custom color" in the chart refers to a color that's not one of the preset color options. In other words, you have to enter a hex code to change your name to that color. The pie charts below only show individual colors with a frequency of 0.5% or higher. The rainbow slice represents the colors not shown in the pie chart, not the "Other" row in the table.

---

These are the 19 preset color options.

      #F04BEC - rDrama current theme color and default color

      #FF459A       #FF66AC - rDrama previous default colors (#805AD5 was also briefly the rDrama theme color)

      #805AD5       #62CA56       #38A169       #80FFFF       #2A96F3       #EB4963       #FF0000       #F39731       #30409F       #3E98A7       #E4432D       #7B9AE4       #EC72DE       #7F8FA6       #F8DB58       #8CDBE6

#F04BEC was newly added on July 11, 2024. The color #FF66AC was removed over a year ago (June 7, 2023) and added back the same day #F04BEC was added.

---

rDrama

Compare the stats from July 11, 2022

• Total users: 26,762

• Default color: #F04BEC (pink/magenta)

• Default color (pink) names: 22,089 (82.54%)

• Non-default color names: 4,673 (17.46%)

• Custom color names: 721 (15.43% of non-pink names, 2.69% of total users)

Our of our 26,762 users, 22,089 users, or 82.54%, have the current default name color #F04BEC (pink/magenta), which has been the default color since July 11, 2024.

This leaves 4,673 users (17.46%) who chose other colors. Purple comes out on top, just narrowly beating red. #805AD5 is the name color of @Aevann and the same shade of purple used by Ruqqus. The beautiful red (#FF0000), once in first place, is now in second place. The red menace may not be winning, but it is still strong. White and black (#FFFFFF and #000000) are the most common custom colors. #21262D (#21262D) is the color of the midnight theme, the default theme of WPD and the former default theme of rDrama. Users who chose it like @whyareyou were trying to be invisible! With one more user than last time (4 compared to 3), #696969 is still not popular, but still common enough to show up on the chart (there were also 4 users with that color on WPD).

All users who had the previous default pink color (#FF459A) had their names forcibly changed to #F04BEC. Only 7 users changed their names back to #FF459A, and the default pink even before that, #FF66AC, has only 2 users (not on the chart). The third least chosen of the preset options is light blue (#8CDBE6).

The lovely @TwoLargeSnakesMating (we still miss you, Snakes) made a previous post with rDrama's name color statistics on July 11, 2022. How do those statistics compare? The colors are ordered slightly differently, but there doesn't seem to be much difference. While red used to be more common than purple, purple is now very slightly more common than it. 77.2% of rDrama used to have the default name color, and now it's 82.54%. I don't have data for users active in the past week.

As a redname, I love my fellow rednames, but my name color is actually #f22;/* (#FF2222). I made it paler to try to make it more visible on the midnight theme. I don't know if it had the intended effect.

---

I'm probably the only one on rDrama with a name color that isn't a valid hex code (#f22;/*). I changed it before it was no longer allowed. The /* indicates the start of a CSS comment. The only effects are making my name unbolded on the desktop site and making my name change to the color of the previous speaker in chat. My name changes back to red when I refresh the chat page. Sometimes it shows up as the theme color (mine is green on rDrama).

Here are the links to the comments in the first screenshot

---

WatchPeopleDie

What about our sister site WatchPeopleDie.tv?

• Total users: 2,428,237

• Default color: #805AD5 (purple)

• Default color (purple) names: 2,393,153 (98.56%)

• Non-default color names: 35,084 (1.44%)

• Custom color names: 3,212 (9.16% of non-purple names, 0.13% of total users)

As all of you know already, the gore site is a lot more popular than our niche drama site. Among WPD's 2,428,237 users, the default color purple (#805AD5) is overwhelmingly the most common color, with 2,393,153 users (98.56%). Most of those 2.39 million users probably abandoned their accounts immediately.

This leaves only 35,084 users (1.44%) who selected a color besides purple, a significantly smaller percentage than rDrama. Red (#FF0000) is, of course, the most common color option for them. Very suitable for a site about death. Two different shades of pink (#FF459A and #EC72DE) come in at second and third. How cute! rDrama's former default color #FF66AC is well-appreciated, at 19th place with 73 users. Like on rDrama, the most common custom colors are black and white. Blue (#2A96F3), WPD's previous default color up to around August 24, 2022, comes in at 8th place. Various shades of light pink/peach and dark red take up places 21-28. @MAGAshill's name color #DC143C has some popularity, with 11 users using it. Ten users thought #B00B69 was a funny color (but none on rDrama did).

Teal (#3E98A7), pink (#FF66AC), and magenta pink (#F04BEC) are the least used preset options.

Like on rDrama, my own name color on WPD is #FF2222. I changed it from #FF0000 to #FF2222 on December 27 to match my rDrama name color. I kind of miss the vibrance of pure red now.

In May, I made charts of the name colors of users who voted on WPD's top post, Gary Plauché shoots his son's rapist by AFX. The results were fairly similar, but as you would expect, the percentage of purple names was much lower. I don't know if the data is correct or not.

---

https://watchpeopledie.tv/@Jandice/wall/comment/3920509#context

Thank you @Aevann for providing the data for this! And yes, that is a link to the unwholesome death site with a login wall.

rDrama - https://pastebin.com/raw/Y7xuWgpj

WPD - https://pastebin.com/raw/CzkNbYg2

Might have made some mistakes I lost track of things in some parts

• 0 minutes - 11 minutes, no timestamps, it's wall to wall content.

  • Stealing 40'000 a year from mother while also leeching a salary separate from this from mother's business, mother "forgets"

  • Mother has caught on before but has not done anything because she "forgets," then starts again

  • Bought a new outfit just for coming on this show, spent $100 at a restaurant for lunch

  • Took a 'loan' from her mother for an 2100 wedding ring she told her mom was 3000, mother has "forgotten" about this "loan"

  • Brother is also stealing from the family business something about Steam giftcards

Collections on some bills

• In collections on some bills

Car Loan (2016 Suburu Crosstrek) (15477 remaining) timestamp

• "Does not really care to make more than one payment on car a month"

  • Mom cosigned on the car

  • If not "I would still make the payments but they would be late"

  • Some bullshit about paycheck timing, spending the whole paycheck before receiving it on going out to eat, "going out to do things"

• $386 minimum payment

• 13.47% interest rate

• "How's the condition of your car?" timestamp

  • "Bumper's coming off" this r-slur rammed into a pole at a gas station last year "kinda bumped into it a little hard," blames ex for saying they were not going to run into it

  • AC has some kind of leak

  • "Husband says my brake pads might be shot"

• Split finances with husband, starting to combine, married a month

  • "He's a little bit better with spending than I am"

  • Husband does not have any debt

  • Husband encourages her theft? timestamp

    • Some weird details in here

• Thinks it's worth 10'000 timestamp

  • Original loan was for 19'000, 72 months, "my parents left midway through the paperwork and I didn't understand what I was signing" "I thought a 13% interest rate was good because like my credit card"

• R-SLUR does not know that the S&P 500 is timestamp

• Capital One Quicksilver ($400?) timestamp

  • Sob story about why opened, "wanted to spend money" is what it comes down to

  • 660 credit when this was opened

  • Maxed it out "really quick"

  • Just keeps making minimum payments, "kept going through hardships"

  • fights with mother, wouldn't steal money when these happened for fear of upsetting mother timestamp

  • "My mom actually paid it off" timestamp

    • "She paid it off to make my credit score higher"

  • Built the balance all the way back up timestamp

    • Blew lots of money on Temu, Caleb has refused sponsorships from them, "they are a terrible company"

  • "I had actually lost a bunch of weight, my clothes were all too big on me"

    • "I had no money so I used my credit card"

    • Bariatric surgery, stomach sleeve? "tried to diet but couldn't keep doing it"

    • Mother paid for the surgery, 16'000, ended up gaining all of the weight back because couldn't stop eating McDonald's

    • Mother then paid for her to get on weight-loss shots

    • Mother just paid again for "tummy tuck and liposuction"

      • Why Lipo? "My mom told me I probably wouldn't be able to get rid of it" Mother knows this r-slur has no self-control

      • Had to get woken up mid-surgery?

  • Didn't tell mother the balance is back up

• Claims to be doing better but spent $500 going out to eat timestamp

  • "Sometimes I go out to more expensive places"

• Misc bullshit alone is more than monthly income

• Student Loans timestamp

  • Switched degree a million times, "always in the field of psychology"

  • Got GED at 16, graduated early because bullied "really bad"

  • "Ball State University" - online

    • Fell behind, left at 18

  • "Chicago School of Professional Psychology"

    • Applied Behavior Analysis

    • Ended up falling behind, left this one too, weird aside mentioning "can't remember why"

  • Colorado Christian University

    • Grandmother passed while here, ended up leaving "couldn't mentally do it"

  • American Public University (not certain on the name for this one)

  • Southern New Hampshire University

    • "Already a third of the way through my degree"

    • Bachelor's in Psychology

  • Total timestamp

    • 7 or 8 thousand

  • Claims to be getting bullied in college by girl on snapchat timestamp

• Collections 1 - timestamp

  • The Colorado school

• Collections 2 - timestamp

  • $608

  • Treating cashapp as a collections

  • Can't make a bank account? US Bank held her account? What?

• Azca Donations tiemstamp

  • something for a mobile bingo game?

• This WHORE is paypigging to Pokemon Go timestamp

• Constant in-app purchases timestamp

  • Reads like DSP's bank statements

  • subscriptions for board games to get rid of adds too holy shit, this is beyond parody

• Trying to rehome dog because can't take care of her timestamp

  • "I don't have the time to"

  • Dog has super severe separation anxiety? Behavior issues? Dog is on doggy meds, "can't exist without other dogs"

• Doordashed something from 7'11, has no idea what it was

• Spends so much on food, it's unreal

• "Plays" counterstrike 2, buys tons of skins, tries to sell for steam profit to get games? "Usually makes a profit"

  • Claims most made was $75 profit on one

  • Lost money more than made?

• Final Fantasy in-app purchases

• minecraft in-app purchases on servers? What the frick? plays "prison servers" ???????????????

  • claims 5'000 over the course of two years

• $150 getting lashes done

• "steam levels" $100 timestamp

  • Wanted to make level higher than husbands??? What the frick????

Retirement

• 2'300 in retirement timestamp

  • this story is fricking insane. "I got into a fight with my dad, then it turned into a fight with my mom and I threw a taco at her and I hit her golf cart, umm, her brand new golf cart with my car umm and dented it a little so she fired me, she didn't talk to me for a while"

  • Pulled out her 401k, 6 or 7 thousand - claims spent this on rent and needful things only (lol sure)

• Plans to be a leech off husband in the future instead of mother? timestamp

Pie Chart time timestamp

• Spent three times more than made

• 48% is bullshit

• 1.5% is groceries

---

Calling the mother timestamp

• Mother just doesn't care. "It's chump change to me." "Something I'm very used to"

Do you know how much money that she's taken from you over the last 5 years?

I don't, I would be very interested to figure that out.

It's about 200'000 as far as we know

Oh my god, for real?

"I don't really know how I help her, I'm willing to cut her off"

"If I give my money to somebody I just assume it's gone"

"We're having a watch party"

TbhSkincare is an Australian company which delivers to Romania, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh (probably domestic shipment), India, Cambodia etc

But not to US and Canada

But they do supply to Mexico, so the we don't supply to the Americas as of yet doesn't make sense either.

Is it an anti-Israel kind of thing? Doesn't make sense since all EU countries and India are in the list.

Ukraine-Russia makes even less sense with China, India, Vietnam

Also, they merged with BoostLab (another foidshit company) to form YorkStBrands

https://yorkstbrands.com/

Now BoostLab however delivers to USA

So why don't TbhSkin provide delivery to us and the moosefrickers?

Short answer - I DONT KNOW

Long answer - WTF is going on

So right of the bat, I got some vague info about tbh Skincare's investors. They have an investor related FAQ which says frick all.

So 1. This is a crowdfunded company

2. What the heck is NextTribe Pty Ltd?

According to the extremely few search results I got:

https://www.australiacheck.com/nsw/nexttribe

https://creditorwatch.com.au/credit/profile/635960397

So NextTribe Pty Ltd has been inactive since 2019. What was its purpose? Raise equity? Private Equity?Act as custodian for private equity companies? Was it a shell company? Did it just fail? Did the owners just give up halfway through? We'll never know.

But if it has been cancelled as an effective business operation since 2019 with its licenses cancelled, how the heck were the investors of NextTribe able to purchase equity in Tbh Skincare 2 years later? Huh?

You can have a wiggle room of 3-6 months during which the investors (mostly lenders at an interest), of a bankrupt company get the opportunity to recuperate what they can. But the bankrupt or unlicensed company sure as heck don't make investing decisions for the investors. I'm already smelling fraud in the air. The frick is going on?

Also, TbhS did most of its crowdfunding via the company Equitise so I'm even more lost how NextTribe comes into play here

https://www.equitise.com/blog/tbh-skincare

Anyway, let's move past that for now.

The same line of tbhSkin reads

"please note that all investor updates are made via the Cake Equity platform"

What the frickerfrucker is Cake Equity now? I'm starting to believe this company is just one equity layering over another.

On to Cake Equity my friends!!

Oh no, another tag team VC bros. My gut feeling is worsening.

So what does Cake Equity do?

Cloud-based cap table management solutions for businesses. It features a solution for equity management, capital raising, startup ESOPs management, business valuation analysis, investor relationships, shareholder & employee portfolio management, and more. It also offers investor readiness strategy & documentation, corporate structuring, retail equity crowdfunding, and others.

https://tracxn.com/d/companies/cake/__HnqnCs4IfoTyVVvjkNp9D_QWa-lgAy2GG_LeEnpmMEY

My Brother in Christ, if you could do all that for just one company, you would be the next NVIDIA.

Simplified, all it does is prep the owners of gullible startups with no experience in finance with a cap table (who owns what percent of the company), and give some shiny VIBES to it to make it look like they did anything useful whatsoever.

Cake Equity's features (in their own words):

So, they made a software which shows you, an employee, your ESOP value. Literally that. I think @Aevann can code a real time chart in 12 hours which does the same.

Also, forgotten in a Google Drive? Huh?

So, Cake Equity is a bad startup with no real thought behind it, destined to fail, sure. What's new? That's like 99% of silicon valley.

THE POINT I'M TRYING TO MAKE !r-slurs is that why is tbhSkin pushing people who crowdfunded it towards opening an account in a SAAS forum catering to B2B markets and ESOP Cap Tables.

Crowdsourcing is just equity funding without a centralized IPO. WHY IS IT TREATED LIKE AN EMPLOYEE ESOP?

IS PWC THEIR ADVISOR? {Reference for r-slurs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC_tax_scandal }

The simplest theory is Cake Equity is fricked and tbhSkin is getting some special discount on pricing for pushing outside investors to inflate Cake's numbers to make it more attractive to investors.

So who are Cake's (pronounced kek's) current investors?

The biggest one is Jason Calacanis. A super angel investor who is considered a genius in early angel investing.

Okay fine. So at last we have reached the end of one thread. What about the others?

Not really, Jason turned his angel gaze towards Australia in 2018.

https://www.afr.com/technology/worlds-best-angel-investor-jason-calacanis-targets-aussie-startups-and-warns-against-trusting-big-tech-20180613-h11bxm

So, a Billionaire or multi-multi-millionaire moves to Oceania to make more money. How Peter Thiel. I mean, how original!

Anyway, the questions are:

Why won't tbhskincare deliver to N.America? What is NextTribe Pty Ltd?

The answer to the first question, after more cosmetic hunting than a trans women before xer first pride parade seems simple at first. The US Customs cucked them.

Sunscreen regulations, amount of liquid in a bottle etc etc silly things

Blah blah blah, the FDA and Customs have a shit ton of rules which a startup might not be able to cope with

BUT

The second question:

It had registered itself in Singapore since 2015 (still active as of today)

https://sgp.databasesets.com/entities-registered/uen/201506639D

But the data is collected by Hong Kong/Mainland China

https://user.databasesets.com/en/home

https://user.databasesets.com/en/about_us

But it is also listed in the official Singapore Business Directory as a "Holding Company"

https://www.sgpbusiness.com/company/Next-Tribe-Pte-Ltd

And considering Singapore is the #3 Tax Haven in the world my best guess is that the poor frickers of TbhS let a lot of shady investors who shuffled their money around (at the midst of it all Jason Calacanis, who saw Singaporean Tax laundering and Aussie startup as a match made in heaven) and now tbhS is desperately trying to distance themselves from their bad decisions by rebranding and entering the US market.

!r-slurs !trolls !burgers

Libertarians are a funny bunch. Half want to smoke weed and let corporations run everything and the other half secretly wants to roll back to 1946 America. How can person possibly tell which libertarian they are talking to? The age old litmus test of illegal immigration. It's always a hot topic among libertarians where half want to deport every illegal and the other half doesn't want the government to be strong enough to do that. It's their version of the omnipotence question.

Only instead of trying to give an honest and thoughtful answer, they just accuse each other of being sock puppets for (((sarc)))

The linked article is written by some foid that wants to have completely open borders. Typical libertarian talking point. Below is a summary of the comments

Chapter 1: 5.56 is a fed

Vernon Depner: Every time a criminal is punished, that tears apart a family.

5.56: I hope those ILLEGALS get theirs torn apart so good and hard. Time to watch some border footage, yum.

VULGAR MADMAN : Ok, Fed.

5.56: Ok, Fag

VULGAR MADMAN : Is 5.56 the length or the diameter of your penis?

5.56: A faggot would be interested in that kind of information.

VULGAR MADMAN: So you're tiny. I'm so sorry.

Don't look at me: .

A wild prfd1 appears!

prfd1 is angered by Don't look at me's comment consisting of a single, fucking, period.

prfd1: An international political (DEMOCRAT) organization issues arrest warrants for Jews……

	First nation saying – "WE WILL ARREST THOSE JEWS"

	.

	GERMANY – 2024.

	.

	WTF?

	DEAD SERIOUS.

	FUCKING LOOK IT UP.

	DON'T USE GOOGLE IF YOU ARE HONEST.

prfd1's version of gooning is injecting wild thoughts into unrelated conversations.

---

Chapter 2

Times's up on VULGAR MADMAN's and 5.56's refractory period. These lady boys are busting out the manly toys. First they swing at a woman. Her name is Fiona, she wrote the opinion piece on illegal immigration. Opinion pieces

are the only thing reason.com is has. They don't actually do investigative journalism. They constantly insult the main stream media's ability to do a job they aren't will to do themselves. Oh the illegal irony!

5.56: Fionas tears are almost as sweet as those of ILLEGALS. Im thinking about all the DOORS that are SHUT to the children of ILLEGAL LOSER parents. All those translator puppet children of ILLEGAL LOSER parents that speak no english and let their 10 year old ANCHOR BABY APPENDAGES do all the talking at walmart for them. How sad and hopeless they must feel. I really love it.

VULGAR MADMAN: You're really overdoing it sarc.

5.56: You are more retarded than you are old. Which is probably really hard.

VULGAR MADMAN: You only get hard when you go to links posted by palins buttplug.

5.56: Jesus Christ, this so has absolutely nothing to do with me. But you also failed to identify me correctly when I did my Fiona one trick pony parody account. You fucking idiot legit wouldnt stop accusing me of being OBL. Youre really not that bright, buddy.

---

Chapter 3: Drunken sockpuppets

GroundTruth has a solid question about how these policies will be enacted. He thinks racism is for practical matters though. He needs to be sent to the re-education camps first. FR FR.

GroundTruth pontificates with sweeping arms. "How does Trump propose to do this? Will we all be required to carry papers showing where we were born? As a practical matter, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?"

Sarcasmic turns his head to the side, his smugness already yanking back one side of his mouth.

	   "If you're unwilling to sacrifice liberty to round up 11,000,000 vermin, then you're not a libertarian. If you don't support expanded police powers and immunities to catch these vermin, then you're not a libertarian. 

	   If you oppose deploying the military to build concentration camps for these vermin, then you're not a libertarian.  No, if you oppose any of those things, you're a leftist. Duh."

5.56 looks in sarcasmic's direction and righteously yells "ICE ICE BABY".

"Getting your socks mixed up again?" says VULGAR MADMAN as he walks up the 5.56.

VULGAR lifts his pant legs to show both of his socks match.

5.56 rolls his eyes at VULGAR MADMAN while scratching his balls. He replies, "You are beyond retarded, bud. Hope you die soon,

telling from how inflexible your brain is it can't be much longer."

A bottle of scotch is crafted from artisanal air as its imagined contents glides into VULGAR's mouth.

"Your alcoholism will kill you first, sarcasmic." replies VULGAR

"You know that everybody here can see how much of a fucking dipshit you are when you call me sarc, right?" shouts 5.56.

"Keep coping drunky."

"I think youre coping with the fact that you are expired. Must hurt."

A commenter by the name 'Don't look at me!' clicks the littlest co-signing pen in the world.

"Poor sarc" he says while making a pouty face at 5.56.

5.56 didn't even turn his head while quipping,

"Another goddamn idiot, dont worry, won't look at you. Unless you really want me to lol".

The green ethereal form of Vernon Depner fills the room with a faded green smoke. Arising from the vapors is a skeletal hand draped in a tattered sleeve. A long yellowish boned finger points to 5.56. The spectre's drooping face wails "We can all see who the dipshit is."

DesigNate is not impressed by the Spirit halloween store theatrics and asks ,"Is that a 5.56 spoof or did him and Vulgar get some beef with each other?"

5.56 and MrMxyzptlk both have eager replies to DesigNate's query.

Disgust flinging from his mouth 5.56 lets us know what he really thinks aboug VULGAR.

"Vulgar is old and not very bright, so he is stuck on that sarc paranoia. He also seems to really like ILLEGALS for whatever reason. I mean, reason really doesn't have the brightest kind of commenters in general when you look at their little AI infatuations of late. But this here is as bad as it gets."

He continues.

"Its pretty obvious that Vulgar doesn't have the ability to process a whole lot of information, I mean I comment rarely, but not that rarely that the slow kid would have a reason to assume that I'm a sock."

MrMxyzptlk then offers his own theory to the query. "I think it's a reverse Spartacus gambit. Anyone they don't like they claim is 'Sarcasmic' a guy living rent free in their heads. They then dismiss this supposed sock of Sarcasmic as

being not worth discussing matters with. They're pussies."

From the top of the peanut gallery two new voices accuse MrMxyzptlk of being a sarc puppet

"Says the sarc puppet."

"Good one sarc!"

---

Chapter 4: AT is the worst AT-AT

A commenter by the name of AT thinks Fiona is cherry picking deflated numbers because she cited a report that came out in January of 2022. AT insists that Fiona could have used more relevant numbers and AT's barrage began with the glare of red rockets and bombs busting in air!

AT goes on a rant and I'm not copying all of it.

Sarcasmic from the top of the ropes invokes Godwin's law and lands with an elbow drop that causes his haters to spew cope.

"We're either a nation of laws, or we're not.

Germany in the late 1930s was a nation of laws. Everything that was done was done in accordance with laws and regulations from the government. Everything.

It doesn't matter if it would tear apart families, affect American workers, or require militaristic enforcement.

They said the same thing."

VULGAR scoffs "Sarc with his genius idea's again."

"He's now an ansarcist" says someone not worth remembering

"More like: analcyst." chortles VULGAR

AT replies with spit flying from his mouth.

"So what? You did the EXACT THING that I said punks like you do (and Godwin'd it while you did).

Look, this is simple:

If you DON'T want to be a nation of laws, THEN SAY THAT.

If you DON'T think the United States of America should be a thing, THEN SAY THAT.

Stop pussyfooting around where you really stand. The criminal illegal population in America is a SERIOUS problem.

If you want that problem to continue until the United States of America can no longer endure and then falls, THEN SAY THAT.

Or are you too much of a coward, and intellectual fraud, to do so – like Fiona clearly is."

Sarcasmic responds with vague talk about morals that vault him onto the high road.

"Authoritarians blindly follow laws because they blindly follow authority. People with a moral sense question unjust laws and see flouting them as a patriotic duty."

5.56 screeches

"Dude, the open borders camp is completely tonedeaf and out of touch with the reality of the kinds of individuals that illegal immigration brings into this country. Those upgraders are one of last groups that need sympathetic

political representation. Even the legal-ish ones know very well what theyre doing by instrumentalizing their children to become socioeconomic anchors. Making this shit legally easier isn't gonna help anyone."

AT is practically on his knees begging Sarcastic to declare that he hates America.

"You still can't even manage to say it out loud, can you. Can't sell it to anyone unless you obfuscate what you're peddling."

Chumby thinks making fun of Biden is going to make libertarians seethe

"Guess that makes Biden Hitler."

"Now THERE'S a winning ticket!" replies the ghostly form of Vernon Depner as he finally admits he's a nazi.

It's off to heaven now as his spirit finishes it's unsettled business.

Well that all the highlights everyone. I hope you guys enjoyed my first effort post. Jewish lives matter

NEGLIGENT SHOOTINGS AT THE GUN RANGE

It comes as no surprise to anyone when I mention that America is a country riddled with guns. Here are a few shocking stats regarding America's gun culture.

• The share of American households owning at least one firearm has remained relatively steady since 1972, hovering between 37 percent and 47 percent

• In the United States in 2022, 48 percent of Republicans reported that they owned at least one gun, and 66 percent said that they lived in a household with a gun

• 38% of White Americans own a gun, compared with smaller shares of Black (24%), Latinx (20%) and Asian (10%) Americans

• The survey stated that American civilians account for an estimated 393 million (about 46 percent) of the worldwide total of civilian-held firearms

• Of the 265 million privately owned firearms in the US, about half are owned by 3% of the US adult population.

• While about half of gun owners own one or two guns, 8% of gun owners own 10 or more – a figure that amounts to about 40% of the total US gun stock, according to the report.

With all these weapons flowing freely, it is no shock that accidents happen. Before we proceed, we should clearly define and mark the difference between ACCIDENTAL discharge and NEGLIGENT discharge. An accidental discharge takes place when the gun is fired, and it has nothing to do with the weapon wielder or their behavior. Instead, the source is a mechanical failure of the firearm. In contrast, an accidental discharge is the product of the weapon wielder violating one of the four basic gun safety rules. For those who need a refresher, they are:

1. Treat every gun as if it is loaded

2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you're not willing to destroy

3. Keep your finger off the trigger and outside the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot

4. Be sure of your target and what is in line with your target

Today we'll be looking at two instances of gun violence caused by negligent discharges. The notable thing about these three cases is that they all take place in gun ranges. Despite the numerous safety measures put in place, gun ranges are dangerous locations filled with novices handling deadly equipment. It goes without saying that if gun mishaps are going to happen, it's going to be at the gun range. Regardless, gun ranges have been innovating in an attempt to make the establishments safer. One of the precautions put in place involves the use of cables to hold the gun in place. This prevents the novice from pointing it anywhere but downrange.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/bh68e2/this_gun_range_in_australia_has_a_bar_and_cables/

I hope you enjoy today's piece.

Yours sincerely,
Sneedman.

---

1. The Nine-Year-Old With the Mini Uzi

It was a warm day on the 25th of August 2014 in Arizona. A family was on holiday in Las Vegas when they decided to travel to Arizona Last Stop gun range (also known as "Bullets and Burgers") in White Hills, Arizona. This gun range is notable because it allows anyone from age eight upwards to fire a gun. The little girl in the family was 9, making her old enough to handle a gun at the range. As a treat, she was allowed to play with the Fully Automatic Uzi which was owned by the gun range. It is legal for the range to have the weapon because it was manufactured and purchased before the passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act in 1986 and added to the National Firearms Act machine gun registry where all fully automatic civilian-owned firearms are registered.

The family was assisted by Charles Vacca, a 39-year-old instructor who had been working at the gun range for 18 months. The father, Alex Gen MacLachlan, had a go with the weapon first. Braaap braaap braaap went the fully automatic firearm capable of firing 600 to 650 bullets a minute! It was a feeling like no other. Next, it was the 9-year-old girl's turn. Vacca helped her hold the gun. Unfortunately, the gun was still too much for the girl and she lost control. Instead of aiming downrange, she swung and aimed at the instructor while firing, earning him a fatal bullet to the head. At first, the family tended to the girl thinking she was the only one who was hurt and it wasn't until a co-worker ran to Vacca's aid that they realised something was terribly wrong. The entire event was caught on camera by the girl's mother, Alison MacLachlan.

The incident caught the media's attention due to the age of the girl and the involvement of firearms which is a hot-button topic. No legal charges were placed against the girl and

her family. In fact, Vacca's family forgives the little girl's family and holds no ill will. They wrote a letter to family acknowledging their grief and encouraging them to move forward with their lives.

>"You should not let this define you," they wrote. "Someday we hope we can meet you, hug you, and tell you that it's OK."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/children-uzi-shooting-victim-charles-vacca-pen-letter/story?id=25435120

So where does the blame go? To the parents for letting their child fire a gun? Or to the instructor? Maybe it's the gun range owner's fault for allowing 9-year-olds to handle fully automatic firearms. You decide.

---

2. Father Kills Son at the Gun Range

Ah, shooting guns is a fine family activity! The smell of gunpowder and the ear-splitting bang of ammunition being spent makes for the best childhood memories! That's the philosophy William Clayton Brumby follows, as he decided to take some of his children to High Noon Gun Range in Florida. While firing a gun, a hot shell was ejected which fell into the back of his shirt. Gun in hand, the father quickly tried to fish out the hot shell and accidentally fired the gun. The bullet hit the roof and ricocheted, killing his 14-year-old son, Stephen Brumby.

Stephen Brumby was one of seven children, and he loved tennis, bass fishing, and playing worship piano at church, according to CNN. William takes full responsibility for the death of Stephen. He had the following to say:

"The gun didn't kill my boy. I did," he told CNN.

"Every round in the gun is your responsibility. When it fires you need to stand to account for it. That's what I've spent the last two days doing, accounting for my operating error."

No charges were filed against William. Do you think this is the right move? Has William suffered enough, or does he deserve jail time?

---

Conclusion

Americans need to sit down and have a serious conversation regarding guns and the future of the country. Guns are the leading cause of death for US children and teens, since surpassing car accidents in 2020. Will Americans continue down this path, or will they decide it is time for change? For now, guns seem to be synonymous with masculinity, safety, and patriotism, and while this is the case, the status quo will remain the same, and the gun range to morgue pipeline shall remain.

Tune in next time when I give a review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Francis Scott Key Bridge

This has been a long time coming. Today, I'm discussing the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. I know this bridge and it, too, knew me. Baltimore is quite a beautiful city and you should definitely go there, if for nothing, to visit the site of the bridge.

Hearing about this just about broke my heart at the time, but i've sorted through the trauma. Everyday seeing this bridge--it's sad that this happened close to home. Honestly, if it were up to me this would be a declaration of war; how does something like this happen? Why would a God allow this--travesty to occur? I can't understand it, folx.

So here's the deal, listen up:

This---this is the baby before those heathens harmed the bridge with their foul, uncouth gesture!

As you can see, she was a beaut! I know that she is a she, because she told me. This is a secret that i've been keeping for a long while, I can speak to bridges and their words empower me.

They Francis Scott Key Bridge was known as the Beltway Bridge , or the Key Bridge. It was open on March 23, 1977. 43 years ago. It's opening must have been quite the experience., probably euphoric. Sadly, they made this bridge a toll bridge, but I get it: You have to pay to take a ride on Francis, iykwim. ;)

Also--the name is an obvious misgendered name, but I understand it. Darn, why she look like that?

What happened.......we all know it. A cargo ship hit the bridge. How dare they hit it? How fricking dare they? They didn't even pay the fricking toll to hit it.

On the date of March 26th, 2024 at approximately 1:28 a.m. EDT (That's Eastern Daylight Time for you r-slurs who keep using EST), it happened. Dali, the container ship that struck the bridge was created by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea in 2015.

As they left the port the ship lost power and thus lost control of the ship. It was too late, however and they struck a pillar causing the bridge to partially collapse.

Conveniently, nobody aboard the Dali was injured. Obviously, the City of Baltimore wanted to get money and requested a jury trial against the owners of the ship, Grace Ocean Private Limited of Singapore and the managers of the ship. If you ask me this was an act of war.

The 20 men from India and Sri Lanka were apart of this conspiracy. The FBI did right to remove their phones--and they were lucky that they got off with that. Their exile aboard the ship meant that their visas expired. At this point, we should have arrested them and initiated trial by combat, or at the very least a blood sacrifice to appease the Gods of Bridges.

The negligence of those operating the ship and those who owned it deserve nothing but punishment--execution is too harsh. They must rebuild the bridge making it their lifes remaining work to atone for this.

The bridge being destroyed caused millions of dollars each day and affected the the world over. I cannot express my anger and loathing towards these types of people.

Pictured above are explosives being used to remove the broken portions of the bridge off of the cargo ship.

Seven people fell into the Patapsco River and six of them died. It's been quite a time--but we should ready the nukes and wipe these distasteful heathens off the face of the earth.

They plan to have repairs finished by 2028 and it will cost billions of dollars. Like I said:

Ready.

The.

Nukes.

@Patsy @DestoryerCaribine @houeIIebecq @Nr1CarpFanboy @Spiderman

Ready The Nukes

using google translate on the main text:

It started as an ordinary election rally, just like the many rallies photographer Evan Bucci has photographed for The Associated Press.

Photo Feature: Former President Trump wounded in gunfire during speech

Former President Trump stepped onto the podium in Butler, Pennsylvania, to greet his supporters and begin his speech.

The next moment, chaos ensued.

Bucci recalled the assassination attempt on the 13th, saying, "I heard a few pops over my left shoulder. I knew right away they were gunshots." "I was pointing my lens at the podium at the time. I saw the Secret Service rush in and cover him. I got into work mode and got to work."

As many of the rally attendees evacuated, Bucci and other photojourn*lists sprang into action.

Bucci is the chief photographer for The Associated Press' Washington bureau. "It was instinct at that time," he said. "All I could think was, 'I have to get this photo.' It's a photographer's occupational hazard. I couldn't go back and recreate it, so I had to get it right then and there."

Evan Vucci

Photography is a much more widely respected art in Japan.

When the shots rang out, Butch was in the buffer zone in front of the podium. His first thought was not his own safety, but recording the events in front of him. There would never be another chance to capture a historic moment through the lens of his camera.

"I was looking for the best angle to capture Trump," Butch recalled. "Then I started thinking in my mind, 'OK, how is Trump going to get out of here? Where are the security going to take him? What are they going to do?' Finally, I saw that Trump stood up and was being taken by the security to the back of the podium, so I hurried to the back."

Butch took a photo of Secret Service agents supporting Trump and taking him to a safe place.

"He stood up, looked at the crowd, and started pumping his fist," Bucci said. "I could see blood on his face through the viewfinder. I think that's the moment that a lot of people are sharing."

Doug Mills has been covering presidents for over 40 years. But even Mills, a photographer for The New York Times, had never experienced anything like what happened on the 13th.

"It happened so fast, it was chaotic, it was so scary," Mills said.

Before taking the photo, Mills walked around the podium to check out Trump from various angles. He then took a position just below the podium and looked up. That's when he heard the gunshots.

From this spot, Mills took one of the most famous photos of the shooting.

It took him a while to realize that he had captured a decisive moment.

Sometime after Trump was taken to a safe location, Mills looked through his photos and sent them back to his editor at The New York Times.

They knew they had captured the moment the bullet hit Trump. In the series of photos, it's easy to see that Trump is distorting his face and holding his hand to his right ear.

But then their editor, Jennifer Mosbrucker, told them there was something else in the photo.

"Jennifer called me five minutes later and said, 'You're not going to believe this,'" Mills recalled. "I thought we screwed up. That was the first thing I thought of. Then she said, 'I've got a shot in the back of your head.' I said, 'What?' She said, 'The shutter was so fast that there's a bullet in it.'"

Jennifer said that an FBI ballistics expert looked at the photo and described it as a "one in a million" shot.

Getty Images photographer Anna Moneymaker, who was with Butch and Mills, initially thought the gunshots were fireworks.

Thought it was a google translate hiccup but that's the actual name, or at least a psuedonym

https://www.annamoneymaker.com/

"But then the crowd started screaming and some of the revelers asked me to get down with looks of shock and confusion on their faces. It didn't seem real."

Moneymaker's breathing became heavy and his mind was starting to wander, but he kept pressing the shutter and took the memorable photo of the day.

"I moved to the right side of the podium and saw all the guards hovering over him. I could see his face through the guards' legs," said Moneymaker. "I didn't know how badly he'd been hit, so I took a photo to see how he was. I could see the blood running down his face."

Mills, Moneymaker and Butch all mentioned how important it was to stay focused on their work amid the chaos.

Butch had experience covering Iraq and Afghanistan in his early days and had been in combat situations. He said that experience helped him stay calm amid the chaos. Butch, like his colleagues, focused on the basics.

"I was looking through the viewfinder and thinking, 'OK, where's the light source? What's the composition?' I told myself, 'Slow, slow. Framing and composition.' All of those are things you tell yourself as a photographer," said Butch.

When Trump was shot, Moneymaker gasped and repeatedly said, "Oh my God." But he didn't stop moving.

"I just wanted to document history and take pictures," he said. "I was a little nervous. What was I going to achieve? So I just kept pressing the shutter. I was yelling curse words and muttering, 'Just keep taking pictures.'" (Moneymaker)

Mills was trying to remember what he'd learned from his former colleague at the Associated Press, Ron Edmonds, who photographed the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan.

"I always asked him about the situation when he took the photo of Reagan getting shot. He always said, don't flinch, don't look away, just focus on what's in front of you," Mills said.

The next day, Mills was working on just a few hours of sleep, and he took a moment to reflect on his experience at Butler.

"It was scary. Looking back, it's scary. It probably wasn't the wisest choice for my safety. But I did my job."

His fellow photographers shared the same sentiment.

"I'm just happy that everything was in focus and that I did my job," Bucci said.

---

yahoo.jp has a comment section!

if you route the whole page through google translate, it just redirects you to the main yahoo.jp page

I'm using deepl instead of google translate for this. (deepl is better, but will limit you on large texts)

I wonder what the 495 (and counting...) comments are about

Rei Shiba

28 minutes ago

Freelance journ*list (environment, human rights, war and peace)

As a member of the journ*lism community, I would like to express my discomfort with this photo. To put it simply, it is "the best and the worst picture". I take my hat off to Evan Bucci's ability and boldness as a photographer to be able to take such perfect photos under extremely shocking and dangerous circumstances. On the other hand, however, news photography is not just a question of how good or bad one is, but also of what one conveys and, more importantly, what kind of impact one can have on society. In this respect, I wonder if it is ethical for a news photographer to photograph extremely problematic people as if they were heroes. At the risk of sounding a bit harsh, I feel that Mr. Bucci's photographs are similar to those of Leni Riefenstahl, who was criticized for being complicit in Nazi Germany's propaganda while being highly praised for her artistry.

well that's quite the strong opinion as the top comment!

despite being displayed as the top comment, there are no replies

In fact, it looks more liked a pinned comment than a top comment

---

The normal comments:

While looking through the viewfinder, ask yourself, "What is the light source? What is the composition? I thought, "Slowly, slowly. Slowly, slowly. It's all about framing and composition.

I thought it was a "miracle shot" that I happened to be in the right place at the right time and succeeded in capturing it, but in that moment of upheaval and confusion, he calculated the composition and focus of the shot while swinging the camera and releasing the shutter.

It was a shot that made me think, "Professionals are different after all."

It will be one of the most representative photos of the 21st century!

The photographers must have been desperate not to miss this historic moment.

It's not every day that you get to be a witness to history, even if you were there by chance.

Unlike video, where you can see the whole story, a photograph captures the moment. A single photograph tells the whole story. In order to take such a picture, you are a veteran photographer who, without regard for your own >> safety, calmly predicted Mr. Trump's actions and searched for the best position to take the best shot!

You did a great job of capturing the best moments.

I know it's inappropriate, but I thought America likes scenes like Hail America.

Even in movies. Movies are fiction, but this is a miraculous piece of non-fiction that really happened.

It looks really really inappropriate but very cool. I think it's a wonderful piece of work.

This photo may be used in future elections.

I also believe that this photo will stay with us forever when discussing the American case.

It is a paternalistic, realistic picture that symbolizes a strong leader.

I feel that many Americans are inspired by this picture.

It is reassuring to see the courageous figure of the leader of one's own country.

Although the presidential election is still some way off, I think many people would like to have the person in this picture as their leader, to have this picture engraved in history, and to have him as their president.

He is also a dependable person in that he turned a pinch into an opportunity.

I am a photographer with a little name.

Photographer.

This photo will probably be a historic photo that will last for the next 1500 years.

That's how close to perfect the composition, Trump's spirit, the weather, the flag, the secret, everything.

It is a shame that there are quite a few Japanese who were hoping that Trump would fall to a bullet and not return.

Fortunately, there aren't any in this thread, but it really is a problem when self-proclaimed pacifists and liberalists unexpectedly resort to violence and advocate and support such violence.

---

I read something once that America wants to create a hero because it has no history. This time, a hero was created. The hero was born thanks to the seriousness of Mr. Trump and the professionalism of the cameraman, and the place was transformed from a place of fear into one with the call of "USA. This is the wonderful thing about America.

I think it's definitely dark to be in your 80s and 70s to come out as the top candidate in a country that size in the first place.

Trump has it for sure and I think it's almost a done deal this time, but there are a lot of hard things to be decided.

Americans are hysterical.

At a time like this, Biden is talking about Putin, the president of Ukraine...

Do the Democrats want to win?

Or let Biden lose,

"It's his fault" and call it quits.

and end the whole thing.

They're hysterical, or should I say stupid, for better or worse. Otherwise they wouldn't think about crossing the Atlantic and starting a new country in the New World. Japanese people often overthink things and don't move forward, so in that sense, being a little stupid helps things go well.

---

꧁꧁꧁꧁⋛⋋( ・Tomato・) ⋌⋚ ꧂꧂꧂꧂

2 hours ago

It was so well composed that some had a fake theory using AI, etc., but I saw that The Washington Post posted a video of this event yesterday.

After watching the video, there was no doubt that Trump was posing with his guts as shown in this photo with the Stars and Stripes in the background.

Some professional cameras can take 120 shots/second, so I think the combination of the photographer's experience and professional equipment produced this miraculous shot.

if this user's name is really "tomato", why is their pfp a strawberry?

These seem to be genuine and definite, but in this day and age, even videos can be easily faked.

From now on, there will be a mountain of untruthful information flying around. Japanese people should be careful anyway.

The icon looks like a strawberry...

ok it's not just me

I hate name ornaments.

Well, it shows what kind of personality you have.

---

When I saw this photo, I thought "this is Pulitzer Prize stuff" and was surprised to learn that the photographer, Evan Bucci, is already a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer.

Revisiting online accounts of the situation and videos from the time, he said that he had moved around the scene to film Trump immediately after the shooting had taken place against him, without regard for the danger of the shooting continuing.

If the shooting at Trump had not been an isolated incident, a second or third shooting could have taken place. I admire Evan Bucci's courage and energy to take action in such a dangerous situation to capture what was happening.

Evan Bucci is already a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I was impressed by the talent and courage of such a distinguished award-winning photographer, who is able to take the best possible photographs under any circumstances.

Evan from AP and Doug from NYtimes were SONY.

Manny Maker of Getty was Canon.

They were all mirrorless cameras.

I'm wondering if it's Canon or Nikon.

Japanese cameras are great!

No way, SONY camera.

The 1mm at Mitoma was also SONY, wasn't it?

---

I have to admit, I am one of those people who do not want Trump to be president. Again, I thought he was just a lucky man, but I think this picture made me feel that no matter who Trump is, his enthusiasm for the presidency is solid. And one more thing, if he ever becomes the president of the United States, I hope that the weight of leading the country of the United States, the greatest country in the world, his own life, which was once dead, and the world he sees after being reborn will change after seeing this picture.

I'm also anti-Trump.

Still, when I saw this scene, I had to admit that he has the strength and leadership to lead a great nation.

Photojourn*lists are amazing.

They can move people's emotions to this extent with just one photograph.

Even though Trump hates war, even though his motive is for business.

For some reason, pacifists like idealistic, idealistic belligerents.

On the surface, he seems like a rough guy, but in the underworld, it's like Trump is good and Biden is evil.

The powers behind the scenes apparently don't want Trump to be president. Biden is basically a puppet. He works for the backroom interests. Trump seems to overlap with the assassinated Kennedy. Kennedy was also trying >> to move the US in the right direction without listening to those behind the scenes. That is why Kennedy was assassinated. I think Trump's current situation is the same as Kennedy's.

---

This is truly a miraculous picture. The fact that such a photo was taken is so symbolic of the incident and the United States that it seems as if it might have been made. I wonder how many people saw this photo that traveled around the world immediately after the incident. This is a picture that will be introduced with the record of the incident for decades to come.

---

The attempted assassination of Mr. Trump had quite a significant impact on the course of the presidential election, and this photo of Mr. Trump with his right fist raised in the air makes a vivid impression of his extraordinary mental strength and boldness. It seems to me that he is already a legend and will surely be etched forever in the history of the United States.

Kim Jong-un has fallen in love with this boldness, so that even his sworn enemy, U.S.

He met with Mr. Trump (when he was president) in person.

This old man is not just an ordinary man.

You look like Raoh.

I'm sure I'll get a collage of "I have no regrets in my life" as it is.

Now we have gone from a tiger to a confirmed tiger.

---

"We are reporting with safety in mind."

This is a common phrase used in disaster reporting in Japan, and it is a typical Japanese expression of the excessive pursuit of safety.

This excessive pursuit of safety and risk aversion may ultimately lead to the atrophy of society and a decline in competitiveness.

Only by taking on challenges, even at the cost of a few, can the welfare and gain of society as a whole be improved.

I commend the spirit of this photographer and the challenging country of the United States.

If we enter a disaster site without ensuring safety, we would be slowing down rescue efforts, so we say, "We are reporting with safety in mind. What is excessive safety in that?　It's not excessive safety, it's just that your understanding of the situation is not excessive.

When things go wrong, they cry to the powers that be.

I've never seen such a slob in the American press, at least not in the award-winning class.

I've never seen such a slacker in the American press corps, at least not in the award-winning class.

They are willing to be martyrs for their jobs,

It's as if they are saying that since they enjoy the freedom (of the press), they are responsible for their own actions.

Is he complaining japanese journ*lists don't have balls?

You seem to be writing a lot of things, Mr. Bloodthirsty commenter, but are you ready to go to the front lines with weapons? Have you joined the Self-Defense Forces and are you trained to survive on the front lines? Are the various things you write just thoughts? Are you still eating a hot meal in a safe place? Are you just poking around on the internet?

---

I don't remember if I read something or someone told me, but this is the critical difference between amateurs and professionals. Normally, when something happens, people feel the urge to confirm it with the naked eye. Therefore, the images tend to be out of focus at the crucial moment and afterwards, even though they were taken right up to the moment the event was about to happen. However, professionals are able to continue to follow the event, and I guess this is the "instinct" of a photographer as he calls it.

---

In the old days, there was certainly a word "shutter chance" and there were pictures that captured a miraculous moment.

However, nowadays, we can capture a movie, select the best scene, cut it out, and finish it as a single photo (in fact, I suspected that this photo might be one of them).

I expect that the number of photos that capture the "shutter chance" in the true sense of the word will decrease, and the word itself will disappear.

camera speeds are too fast, those mirrorless cameras are degrading the art and culture of photography

With a mirrorless SLR, what you're doing isn't much different than video. I think the pros are SLRs.

---

>I see a few things that are a bit unnatural. First of all, the photographers are reacting super fast to the gunfire, which is suspicious. The photo of Mr. Mills "with a bullet in the back of his head" is also too well-timed. The Secret Service response is also very fast, and it's weird to see Trump pumping his fist in the air after he was shot. Furthermore, it's also unnatural that Mr. Mannymaker initially mistook the gunfire for fireworks. All of this together makes it seem like something was planned in advance.

---

I was a news photographer for a while, and I went to many crime scenes carrying a camera. I even went to the scene of a fire and took pictures of people at home, but I didn't feel good about it at all. But my body naturally moved. I wonder if it was the same for the cameraman at this scene. It's a natural movement.

I'm there to work, and if my body doesn't work, I'm simply incompetent.

---

I also saw the video of the moment of the shooting, but this photo left a more vivid and dramatic impression on me.

Even I, a Japanese, thought, "Is this the strong America?

I realized that a photograph that captures only that moment has a great impact, both good and bad.

---

I have been thinking about this assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. In the U.S., it seems that the attempt ended with the shooting of the suspect. In Japan, the suspect in the Abe assassination was captured, and later it came to light that the Unification Church was the reason for the Yamagami attempt, which is still a problem today. Will the suspect who tried to assassinate Trump become a lost cause without knowing why?

This seems to be the Japanese and American way of thinking.

Well, it is true that if Yamagami had been shot dead on the spot, the LDP would have gained nothing but benefits. There are a lot of yahoos who say assassins don't need trials, but that's not good enough as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea, but he might have had a serious grudge against Trump.

It's not the right way to go about it, but if there are compelling (in the perpetrator's own way) circumstances that led to it, it's better to make them clear.

There are cases where it's unavoidable, though, right?

---

It is amazing that he could raise his fist in that situation.

I wonder if Biden would have been able to do it.

He embodies the indomitable spirit of America.

I think it's obvious to any American which of the two would be the best person to be president.

Mr. Biden would give a normal speech even if it went through his eyebrows.

It sounds like it was after they heard that the perpetrators had been subdued.

---

I started going to later pages, like page 9 and beyond, where the more controversial comments seem to be. I'm not sure exactly how yahoo.jp sorts the comments

It's too well done, could it not have been a set up?

As for the ear wound, is it really a bullet wound?

I saw a picture of his ear right after he was shot.

It's completely intact, just red with blood.

If hypothetically a rifle bullet had hit his ear,

the ear would be blown off, not pierced.

If the bullet had missed in the first place, the case would not have been so serious.

On the other hand, if the bullet had hit him, he would have lost his life.

The very fact that the bullet grazed such a small target, the ear, drew the public's attention to it.

This scenario is too good to be true.

It is understandable to think so, but since several people were killed or wounded, it must be true that the shooter or someone fired a shot.

If a shot was fired in real life, it would have been a Golgo 13 move to graze the ear, and such an order would have been too unrealistic.

The idea that he killed the crowd by firing from other locations to make them think that he did so would be too large a crowd to do so secretly, and shooting two or three people with it would be overkill.

Someone noticed the suspect going up on the roof and told the police.

They didn't do anything about it.

In the first place, the Secret Service shooter

The Secret Service shooter had already caught the suspect on the roof before he shot him, but he didn't shoot him.

before the shooter did, but didn't shoot him.

In other words, he obviously knew about the suspicious suspect before he shot him, but didn't shoot him.

He shot and killed the shooter after the shooter took the shot.

In addition, I heard that all of the shooter's social networking relationships were completely erased.

I think they reported that the bullet didn't hit him directly in the ear, but that it hit him somewhere else and the shrapnel hit him in the ear.

Hmmm...

I highly doubt that such a top secret would be easily available on the internet, no matter how many times it is posted on the internet, by any chance ^^. It's like Dr. Suidobashi or Mr. Komiya, the red light, with a preconceived, >> >> hardened head and a translator's face.

I'm sorry.

A civilian is dead... that's inappropriate.

Why does the story seem too good to be true from an objective point of view?

To drop Biden even further in his fall from grace.

The performance is the best I've ever seen.

Just as the actions and backgrounds of the suspects are unclear at this point, Trump has a history of many questionable crimes.

Trump has been involved in many questionable crimes in the past, and it is quite possible that he is using this opportunity to dramatically set up a performance that will give him the upper hand.

He is a person who could have been preparing for a dramatic performance to take advantage of this opportunity.

It's a fishy, scandalous story.

My first impression is that it is hard to believe.

He has been bluffing and covering it up.

He is a person with low credibility.

Trump's blood had already stopped for some reason, lol.

If his balls had been hit, that much blood wouldn't have been enough.

It was unfortunate that he died in the travesty, but I boo Trump a lot if he goes to such lengths.

I don't think the comments are nested and I don't know what's going on

It was reported that it went through, right?

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I knew the photographer was making a living off of other people's misery. A presidential candidate was shot, this picture is worth money. That's what you thought. That's because if you control guns, you'll have less material, so you're against it.

journ*lists are against gun control so they get more work

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There are SO MANY comments like this one, just so many:

Photographers are like that on the battlefield.

It is said that even if the surroundings are dangerous, they become less scary when they look through the viewfinder.

I've translated dozens of comments just for them to be a short variation on the virtues of photographers

I don't think you need anymore to get the idea

(the last 10 comments I translated at this point where about photographers being built different...)

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This is going to be a historic photo. And if you look at the close-up photo of Trump's ear when he was shot, there really was a hole in it. I'm amazed that there are idiots who would call this a staged event. They're crazy.

---

I hope that Trump, who himself was targeted with a gun, will take this opportunity to work for gun abolition.

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This picture is great.

I think it is definitely up for one of the best pictures of the year.

Trump holding up his fist powerfully despite being shot and bleeding, and the big stars and stripes in the background.

I don't think even a movie director could draw a composition conte like this.

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The further down you go, the more controversial it gets

Now that's a Trump fix.

Japan needs to get a hostile strike capability as soon as possible so we don't have to pay the US any more money.

NUKE THEM BACK

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Mr. Trump shouted "USA" forcefully even after being shot at.

In comparison, Mr. Biden misspoke and gave a tasteless answer.

Trump is the only one who can entrust the U.S. now.

Trump, the hero who has defeated despicable terrorism!

Mr. Trump is the one who will save America and the world.

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I'm sure a documentary will be made soon that focuses on this cameraman, not Trump or his camp.

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Almost 100% of the equipment used by professional photographers is made by Japanese optical equipment manufacturers.

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What camera equipment did you use?

Nikon, Canon or Sony?

Did a Japanese camera record a scene from history?

At this point most of the last comments I translated were focused on the virtues of photographers

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I think Rei Shiba's comment is what is "extremely problematic".

This comment refers to the special comment on the top of page 1, that has no replies and some kind of special badge.

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This has 10 happy faces. Does it also refer to the special comment?

What? This author comment

Rei Sheba's comment appears on the left of the article, so it's pretty likely she wrote the article.

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I've sifted through countless pages of comments, and there's still many more. I've tried to source dramatic comments from yahoo.jp before, and failed. They have a tendency to make the same opinion comment 40 times which really sucks to sort through when you have to copy paste every comment. This post is so long that I have to use ctrl+F to look at the preview

...and there are now over 500 comments!

Your honor, my client could not have been the one to strike Mr. Rittenhouse. You see, the state of Minnesota is a Fire Emblem state, and Mr. Huber is a licensed Fighter class. As such, he can only move 4 tiles per turn and could NOT have been able to reach the 5 tiles it took to be in attack range of Mr. Rittenhouse. The prosecution rests.

— @GlowieKong

Feels weird to post something like this so soon after the recent news but weebshit waits for no man

Today's RWBYffort post is about the superior Nintendo slop saga (Inb4 some in the comments says Advance Wars) It may not be the deepest thing in regards to writing or strategic gameplay, nor was it built around a grand and inspiring concept like Spore, but I think these games are fun af and you have to give them credit for chugging along thirty three years running

Fire Emblem is a turn based strategy game series known for its rpg influences and focus on narrative. It basically codified the tactical role playing subgenre and some people actually do outright refer to the games as RPGs. It was originally very niche but has grown over the years to become one of Nintendo's flagship franchises. I would seriously argue it has surpassed the likes of Metroid or Donkey Kong in importance among Nintendo's line up.

Some people have serious issues with it.

What set the games apart back in the day was the emphasis on storytelling and the way this paradigm influenced gameplay. FE's basic formula involves controlling an army of units on a grid in a standard turn based strategy manner, but unlike Advance Wars, Nobunaga's Ambition, XCOM, or many other games of the type, Fire Emblem units are not randomly generated nor is there ever a guarantee of replacing losses. The units of your army are very much like companions in an RPG; they're a finite amount of characters with set in stone, predefined strengths and weaknesses and fighting styles, and they're unique and named individuals rather than abstractions of, say, a swordsman or a sniper or a whatever else. Until more recently every game was also built around non-optional permadeath so losing these companions/units in battle could set back your campaign considerably even to the point of it becoming soft unwinnable. Fire Emblem's unique combination of difficulty and RPG elements in a turn based strategy series immediately earned it a small but dedicated fandom.

I used to love Fire Emblem but then they discovered the weeb waifu market and went from Kino strategy games to waifu match making simulators. Gatekeep your hobbies or this is inevitable.

— @GubeRubenstein

Though nowadays the newer games are also (in)famous for waifu-ism and dating sim elements not unlike what you'd see out of modern Persona games or BioWare rpgs. It even has a gacha game that's been going for the better half of a decade It's created an interesting fanbase that can be split into three distinct groups,

If I had the choice, I would eliminate not 100, not 200, but 100,000 CASUALS WAS I GIVEN THE CHANCE. You casuals will never understand the constant pain we felt from YEARS of oppression, which you gladly caused immediately after killing Fire Emblem in ONE YEAR. You hate us Elitists, because we know the truth! The ONLY way to fix Fire Emblem is for you vile casuals to bleed! Once you casuals are purged from our Emblem havens, we will finally MAKE FIRE EMBLEM GREAT AGAIN 👑👑👑🙇🙇🔥🔥🔥🗿🔥🔥🔥🙇🙇👑👑👑

— @Bruhfunny_Thrall

The Elitists

/feh/ is the worst thread on /vg/… constant ritualposting, the first dozen posts of every thread is made up of the same posts made by the same people in every thread, usually unfunny jokes about their husbando/waifu

gigaschizos who will spam the thread the very instant someone says something about a particular hero (i.e. Nina)

zero discussion about game mechanics whatsoever

"what mode"

— @ChristoffWChanderson

The Casuals

Never cared about Strag Emblem other than for its BBC snowbunnies

— @BWC

And Der Coomer

So just how did this longrunning genre defying and defining series come to be? And how has it evolved since then?

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The First Fire Emblem

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Everyone wanted to know what kind of game it was. Back then there was nothing like it, and I would say it's closer to an RPG than a simulation game. So at Square, when it came out, we bought it right away, and everyone gathered together to play and study it. I can't say it was the easiest game to pick up and play, but I felt something very special and addicting in it. And of course I've been playing it ever since!

— Hironobu Sakaguchi (Creator of Final Fantasy)

The first Fire Emblem game debuted on the Famicom way back in April 20th, 1990. At the time many of Japan's game journos found it confusing and strangely unlike anything in the conventional strategy genre, but this was also the very quality that endeared it to fans. Fire Emblem may not have invented "tactical rolepaying" but was a huge step forward. Arguably the first game to hit it big while being all in for that genre, rather than just dabbling in it.

Brief History of TRPGs

A tactical roleplaying game is something of a nebulous subgenre that combines strategy game aspects with those of RPGs, usually leaning slightly towards one or the other. The games owe some of their inspiration to classic tabletop RPG games in which stats and strategy controlled encounters and forced players to think about their actions.

Some earlier RPGs to feature major strategy elements include 1982's Tunnels of Doom, The Dragon and Princess and Ultima III: Exodus. 83's Bokosuka Wars featured an army in phalanx formation that had to be led across a battlefield in real-time against overwhelming enemy forces while freeing and recruiting soldiers along the way, with each unit also able to gain experience and level up through battle. Though not turn based, the game did introduce tile based combat involving a party of characters and can be said to have laid the groundwork for future games like Fire Emblem. 88's Silver Ghost is another early example of such a game in real-time format.

Fire Emblem's direct predecessor within Nintendo was 88's Famicom Wars, the first game in the Wars series that is now better known for Advance Wars. This game was Nintendo's early foray into strategy games and was also the first such game to be developed by Intelligent Systems, the developers of Fire Emblem.

The game features turn based control of units and particular map objectives that must be accomplished in order to complete missions, but it lacks the fantasy and RPGs elements of IS's later property.

These attributes may have been inspired by 88's Master of Monsters, itself a game that took the gameplay of a militaristic predecessor (the Daisenryaku games) and applied fantasy themes. Master of Monsters is turn based and features an army of units on a board with a master unit that triggers a game over if killed () It notably featured experience bars for the character units.

Kaga himself also cites 88's First Queen as another strategy influence. More traditional RPG influences for Fire Emblem include none other than Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I call it "roleplaying simulation." It's a new genre. Basically, it's a strategy game. But strategy games typically are kind of "hardcore" and dry. (laughs) You only care about winning or losing the battle, and there's no space for the player to empathize with the characters or story.

I love strategy games like that too, but I also love RPGs. By adding RPG elements, I wanted to create a game where the player could get more emotionally invested in what's happening. Conversely, one of the drawbacks of RPGs is that there's always just a single protagonist. Thus, to a certain extent, you can only experience the linear story that the game creator has prepared for you.

I wanted to create a game where the story and game will develop differently for each player depending on the units they use. Thus I added the strategy elements and arrived at this hybrid system.

— Shouzou Kaga

Development for the first Fire Emblem began after Famicom Wars was released and Intelligent Systems decided they wanted a similar war simulation game but with roleplaying elements. Shouzou Kaga was in charge of conceptual design and would go down as the patron saint of elitists the series creator. The project was first proposed to Nintendo by Kaga with a design document detailing all the basic elements, story, and gameplay mechanics. The project was initially called "Battle Fantasy Fire Emblem".

The game's genre necessitated the extensive use of the Famicom cartridge's memory. Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light exceeded these limits, so Intelligent Systems used a portion of memory dedicated to saving games to get around this limitation. With Nintendo's help, they created a new chip for the cartridge that could process and display Japanese text.

I think this is something people understand once they play the game, but most of the characters are usable. And characters who at first seem like crappy, throwaway characters–if you take the time to build them up and nurture them, they can become incredibly powerful. We made a lot of characters like that.

It allows friends to brag to each other, "Hey, I did it this way. Here, let me show you!" I think that's a key difference between Fire Emblem and Dragon Quest. When people share their experiences in a game like Dragon Quest, it's more like "I got here, how far did you get?"… but in Fire Emblem, it's all about "I did it this way."

There hasn't been a lot of room for the player's originality in previous RPGs, because if you gave the player too much control, it would break the structure of the game. That's the advantage of including strategy mechanics: there's a million different ways to accomplish the same goal, and there's actually room for the player to make choices. And the accumulation of all those choices made leads to a very different experience for each player.

I don't consider Marth to be the protagonist either, except in the sense that if he dies, it's game over. It's totally fine to see the story as revolving around the particular characters that you're partial to.

— Kaga

Kaga has said the staff never considered the game as a commercial product but instead as a dōjin made on a whim. To make this game accessible to a wide audience, Kaga did his best to avoid emphasizing stats and other numerical data. It was instead intended that players could find multiple ways to clear the game through their own play style, without being forced to follow a specific meta or take a very linear path. Any combination of units could see you to the end of the game so players could "use their favorites" and there generally wasn't a wrong way to play the game as long as you were getting kills and xp while avoiding casualties.

Yeah, but after restarting [Final Fantasy] who-knows-how-many times, and finally beating it and seeing the ending… it was extremely satsifying. That's why I don't think easy games are so great. Isn't the important thing how you feel after it's all over?

— Kaga

Though at the same time Kaga was a big believer in difficulty and his idea of accessible doesn't line up with modern AAA developers Fire Emblem came to be known for both its unusual concept and the challenging nature of its permadeath mechanic.

What set Fire Emblem apart?

Kaga: It's not a big problem if some of your characters die in Fire Emblem; I want each player to create their own unique story. Don't get caught up trying to get a "perfect ending." Have fun!

— Kaga (This advice is ignored by almost every FE fan )

To be sure, Fire Emblem is turn based strategy first and foremost but draws inspiration from RPGs not just in narrative, but in the gameplay regarding how your army is handled.

Units in FE are not randomly generated and generic grunts, but named characters who will always appear and be recruited in the same way. Narratively they have small snippets of personality and premise that can influence a mission. As examples; Matthis starts as an enemy looking for his lost sister Lena and can only be recruited by her, Navarre is horny an edgelord and so will fight Prince Marth to the death but join the player if spoken to by Princess Caeda, Tiki is a brainwashed dragon girl and can only be freed and recruited by fellow member of her kind Bantu.

In gameplay each unit has predefined strengths and weaknesses. Older games also assign each one a permanent class though class changing became possible later in the series. The differences between classes isn't at all unlike how units work in countless other strategy games, for example you may enjoy x and y because they're both cavaliers or a and b because they're both archers.

But each unit being a distinct person also gives them stat based differences from each other, like x being stronger and y being faster, or a dealing more damage per shot and b being more likely to land his shots. You're meant to develop a preference for certain characters — because of their personalities, because of their specific strengths regarding their class, or both — and so which units you choose to frontline throughout the game will vary between players to create the emergent storytelling Kaga was going for.

The game also gives you plenty of redundant characters for all the classes in case you lose MPVs in battle. So even if you preferred having x as your star cavalry unit, you can still fall back on y if he dies and soldier on.

I wanted to make a strategy game that was more dramatic, something where you would really be able to feel the pain and struggle of the characters. That's why characters can't be revived once they're killed, to impart a sense of gravity and seriousness. In turn, I think the result is that the more love you have for your characters, the more rewarding the game is.

— Kaga

On that note, Kaga's infamous unit permadeath defines the game and the acceptable strategies that will see you through it. You're always outnumbered in Fire Emblem and you're meant to get through each and every level while minimizing casualties, or ideally not suffering any at all. There are only so many units you can ever have, 52 to be exact, and if you lose a handful each battle then you will assuredly burn out before reaching the end (though Marth can never die or it's automatic game over) This problem is especially acute with specific classes, i.e. there's only a few mages and if you get every one killed you'll just have to learn to play without them. Fire Emblem is also stingy with resources and forces you to use them efficiently or suffer severe opportunity costs. The game's balancing in general favors conservative strategies and mitigation of risk. Kaga may have wanted players to be able to win in different ways, but he also wanted them to have to work for it

Fire emblem was also unusual in the amount of effort behind its writing. Most strategy games at the time only had about as much story as Famicom Wars — red vs blue take it or leave it. There wasn't much reason to include anything more since the Famicom only had so much available space.

Fire Emblem was written to have the epic storytelling RPGs were associated and featured extensive backstory inspired by classical Greco-Roman mythology. This was presumably the main reason Marth was originally designed without pants The evil dragon Medeus was also inspired by those sorts of polytheistic elemental figures and was originally called Gaia. There was also supposed to be a whole second water dragon boss inspired by Neptune but this had to be cut due to hardware limitations.

Kaga wanted multiple playable scenarios to break up the linearity of the missions, but storage limitations made this impossible as well. There was also a plan to create setpiece graphics for major moments of the game as well as events that the player might potentially experience in their runs such as Jagen or Princess Caeda dying in battle. The dev team even adopted a new kind of memory chip to make such an unusually grandiose Famicom game possible, but in the end the chip's one megabyte of memory didn't allow for everything. Even just the amount of text in the game was unusual for the time and required that new chip in order to display properly on a Famicom.

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The FE Franchise

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When Fire Emblem first came out on the Famicom, the early reviews were really harsh. Every game magazine gave it pretty bad scores. There weren't really many games back then that combined the RPG and strategy / simulation genres, you see. It stung to see it get so much criticism for being "hard to understand", or for not looking that impressive graphically… for those reasons, the reviews said it felt like some old game from yesteryear.

A half year later, though, Nakaji praised Fire Emblem in that column of his for Famitsu… that was really when things started turning around, and the sales gradually picked up.

— Kaga

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light would ultimately go on to start a hit franchise, but it was not initially a huge success or popular with contemporary critics. The game's formula was new and many reviewers didn't "get it". It was also criticized for being graphically bland and ugly even by the standards of the time.

In contrast, popular opinion was more positive. In a poll taken by Family Computer Magazine, the game scored 23.48 points out of 30. Likewise, sales of the game were flat for the first two months of sales, but improved after word of mouth had spread. Slowly but surely the game became successful and Nintendo was willing to guarantee a sequel. The experimental hybrid of turn based strategy and RPG won the game its dedicated fanbase and would inspire many other game devs to create similar titles.

In Japan FE 1 is renowned for properly kicking off the tactical roleplaying genre and influencing many other such game franchises. The game doesn't have such a universal reputation in the west, but that's mainly because Fire Emblem wasn't released internationally until FE7 in 2003. By that point weebs had become more familiar with newer entries like the Shining, Ogre, and Disgaea series as well as Final Fantasy Tactics, but these are all games that were developed after Fire Emblem that often took direct inspiration from it.

Within Nintendo, Fire Emblem was also influential for that live action "opera" commercial as well as the magazine previews. Nintendo would continue this multimedia advertising going forward and applied it to existing franchises like Mario and Zelda

FE4 was the first one where it was turned into a eugenics simulator and that was when the original creator was still on board before he left after 5. Granted it was actually kind of interesting because in 4 they straight-up kill off almost the entire main cast so their children that you bred for have to continue.

From then on you have 6-8 as the GBA games which were okay but the plots were mostly just average with some fun character moments strewn about. 9 and 10 were on the GameCube and Wii and had better stories, but basically nobody played them.

They then made two remakes for FE1 and FE3 on the DS which were actually fun but their art style was garbage so no one bought them either.

Awakening was the game that revitalized the series a bit and really went crazy with the matchmaking + eugenics aspect that started in 4. Fates did it even more but upped the incest and fetishes.

Fates was criticized for really dumb plots and 1 dimensional character writing despite having some good gameplay so from there the team took a step back, teamed up with the guys who made dynasty warriors and made 3 Houses.

The thing is people were so fricking mad at how badly Fates' plot was even in Japan that they had to look to something like Persona to keep the dating simulator shit in-tact while still telling a story that was at least passable.

How to make it a tactics game again? It's a bit hard to get rid of the persona elements since 3H was immensely successful. FE Engage which came out recently is a bit more of a return to the GBA style gameplay but the writing is back to being weird. I have to imagine future releases will still include the Persona style shit in it.

— Ghost comment

In the next section I'll give a short overview of the franchise's evolution from FE2 to the present day. I'll try to be brief but I could also make dedicated effortposts on the more notable games if anyone wanted

Sequels: The Kaga Era

When you defend the Three-Fates-Awoken games, you do not receive love from Maeda, not even a PINCH of respect. Instead, after your long, tight peepeesuck, he pulls up his pants and says, "That sure was a peepeesuck, I guess?" then he leaves you in the brothel without a tip like the rest of his lesser evolved casual simps.

You get no respect, no thanks. No NOTHING. To IS and Maeda, you're just another naive, juicy casual child plump with organs to sell on the black market, so they can use the earnings to ruin the franchise even more and keep poor fools living on licorice and cup noodle running their corporate machine.

On the flip side, when I defend Genealogy of the Holy War, me and Kaga have respect, AS MEN. As a consumer, not only has he benefited me, but I have benefited him by maintaining his legacy. Unlike Three-Fates-Awoken casuals who SHIT on it daily, they don't even know what the frick a Thracia is.

— @Bruhfunny_Thrall

The era all the elitists love though very few of them actually played Gaiden.

The second Fire Emblem game was 1992's Gaiden, the last developed for the Famicom. This game features new main characters and set the series standard of most games taking place in new areas, though the continent here is part of the same world as FE1. Gaiden is also retroactively notable for including some mechanics — like a world map, branching storylines, and unbreakable weapons — that were unusual at the time but would reappear in newer games many years later. Gaiden was also popular and commercially viable though it would go down as kind of a weird game, sometimes compared to Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and Castlevania II: Simon's Quest as the "black sheep" of the series.

Next came 1994's Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem for the Super Famicom, a story sequel to the first game that also includes a short retelling/remake of FE1 (there was originally going to be a Super Famicom remake of 1 before its development was merged with FE3's)

FE3 was made to be easier and introduced support conversations to the franchise — a mechanic where characters can talk to each other outside of battle for the benefit of weebs fujoshis people who appreciate storytelling. FE3 sold well and further established Marth as the face of the franchise (though FE doesn't have a true mascot like other major Nintendo properties)

1996's Genealogy of the Holy War was an ambitious soft reboot of the series (set in the same world but in the distant past on another continent) It's also the game every elitist creams their pants over even if they never actually played it and are just trying to fit in

FE4 added the weapon triangle where sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword — a mechanic that has reappeared ever since along with additional variations. The game has an increased emphasis on storytelling and worldbuilding, and the missions are famously long and massive with battle maps being synonymous with entire chunks of the continent. FE4 was actually the first game in the series to introduce romance and "dating sim" elements though it was done for a particular reason. As the game goes on all the first generation characters will eventually die and are replaced as playable units by their children The second generation units have their stat values and personal skills influenced by the assigned attributes of their parents and their talents can vary wildly depending on pairings.

Kaga's last game and the favorite of the super elitist. Thracia 776 is something like a side story to Genealogy and was released in 1999 through a Nintendo Power Cartridge — a video game distribution service for the Super Famicom and GameBoy.

Thracia is known among the ten people who actually played it for its added fatigue system that punishes overuse of individual units and its unintuitive levels (elitists actually enjoy this ) One of the more infamous levels involves escaping with your army across a map. Something that isn't clear to everyone especially considering the language barrier is that protagonist Leif should be the last to cross the line. Sending him away first will end the level and literally delete the rest of your army

Thracia was originally meant to be just one of several potential "add-ons" to FE4 — dlc obviously wasn't a thing back then but Kaga still desired expansions of sorts to Genealogy. Thracia's delayed development made releasing it as anything but another game unviable, and its launch promptly ended the Judgral era of the series, but it's still interesting to think of what might have been. Kaga was fascinated with the idea of telling FE4's war story across different POVs and was even considering a game from antagonist Arvis' perspective

FE4 and 5 are also famous for incest (and they wouldn't be the last )

GBA to Tellius to DS: FE6 - 12

The series started to go downhill when the anime visuals started to turn into the aesthetic of the entire series. It was better when the it was just the coincidental art style for bootleg rehashes of Hamlet and psuedo Romances. When they branched into making proper weebshit the kitch charm of the Medieval Romances was gone, having most female units be archers and magic users with the occasional Joan D'Arc style knight was cool, now it's just generic jap fantasy. I want my Song of Roland simulators back.

— @Downie

The era that introduced filthy casuals also known as westerners Elitists do favor the Tellius games though. A handful of coomers were also born thanks to Lyn and her Mongolian underwear.

Shouzou Kaga left Intelligent Systems after Thracia's release and went on to make Tear Ring Saga for the PlayStation, another elitist favorite. The series continued without him and finally made it to international release starting with 7.

The Binding Blade was released for the Game Boy Advance in 2002 and was the first game in the series on a handheld console. It was also the first to depict an entirely new setting with no connections to previous games. It features branching mission paths to a greater degree than previous games and has toned down difficulty after Thracia filtered normal people.

Fire Emblem

And I'm out. Knowing that there is a Fire Emblem game called Super Smash Brothers is already enough for me. Their shitty fans can throw themselves over the bridge.

— @IraniumDonGER

It was also around this time that Super Smash Bros. Melee was released Smash Bros creator Sakurai is a big fan of Fire Emblem and Marth was originally meant to appear in the very first game. He finally made it in with Melee alongside The Binding Blade protagonist Roy, the latter to advertise that at the time upcoming game (starting a tradition regarding FE and Smash Bros )

Back then no Fire Emblem game had ever released outside of Japan and it was intended that Melee's localizers would simply remove the two for the international copies. They didn't and many westerners were introduced to the series for the very first time through these two mysterious swordsmen they knew nothing about. Marth and Roy proved popular though, and by Nintendo's admission this contributed to the expansion of the next game's release.

Meanwhile Fire Emblem characters have continued to show up in newer Smash Bros titles. Many Smash fans absolutely despise this fact so make sure to remind them at every turn

Released in 2003 as just Fire Emblem in some markets, The Blazing Blade was the first to be available worldwide and finally brought the franchise to the attention of the west. The game is a prequel to Binding Blade and features Roy's father Eliwood Roy from the hit game Smash Bros.

FE7's success saw the birth of the Anglosphere fandom and is where most of the thirty year old boomers were introduced to the series This game was also the first to include multiplayer, though that feature does not universally reappear and tends to be off and on across releases. It's technically the first game to feature a self-insert stand in for the player in the form of the tactician Mark, but he's not actually playable.

The last game for the GBA, 2004's The Sacred Stones created yet another unique setting and brought back the overworld map from Gaiden. It also introduces branching class evolutions, for example a cavalier can be promoted into either a Paladin or a Great Knight.

This game is also known for incest, though it's actually unfair in this case

Bring back radiant dawn era Ike, just a bear of a man single handedly destroying entire countries

— @Szechenyi

For a time there was a Fire Emblem every year, and the series returned to home consoles in 2005 with Path of Radiance for the GameCube. FE9 was a more "big budget" release and was the first to feature 3D graphics, full motion cutscenes, and voice acting. There are also playable furries

2007's Radiant Dawn for the Wii returns to the previous game's Tellius setting, creating a duology much like FE6/7. It was the last time the elitists were ever happy

The game has new protagonist Micaiah alongside Ike from the previous game Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They lead two different armies and there are times when the player must actually fight units from your other controllable army There's also a unique save file transfer that allows you to inherit bonuses from a Path of Radiance playthrough. Other changes include a high ground bonus, double promotions on classes, and expanded supports so any unit can support any other unit instead of just a few. To my knowledge this is also the only FE with crossbows

But what FE 9 and 10 are really remembered for was low sales despite their positive reception and popular reputations into the present. Path of Radiance had middling sales compared to the GBA games, but Nintendo was still willing to give it a sequel. Radiant Dawn's performance made them rethink the viability of the series and almost killed Fire Emblem outright.

The Tellius series' poor performance has been blamed on a variety of factors; poor marketing from Nintendo especially in the west, the "sudden" transition to home consoles (from a western perspective), difficult competition from the big name games of 2007 GameCube unpopularity for 9, being a sequel to a game not everyone had heard of for 10, and so on.

Whatever the cause, Radiant Dawn's poor sales alarmed the Nips and the next two games were scaled back.

2008's FE11 was the series' first remake, a modernized take on Marth's original adventure for the Nintendo DS. The game was made on a reduced team and budget and played it safe, notably returning to handheld and finally fulfilling the FE1 redo that had been tossed around as an idea since Kaga's time.

Shadow Dragon actually made a significant improvement to the series by adding class changes beyond promotions. For the first time units could be swapped into entirely different classes, i.e. your cavalier could now be a mage or archer or whatever else. Individual characters still have their talents and may not perform well in certain roles, but the choice is yours. The game otherwise left out narrative developments, and one of the main criticisms was the lack of long since expected support conversations.

Anecdotally Shadow Dragon was my first FE and I think there's a lot to like about it, but the game was generally disliked at the time especially in the west where fans had no nostalgia for 1 and compared it unfavorably to Blazing Blade. Because of poor sales overseas,

2010's FE12 was only released in Japan, the last Nip exclusive and almost the last FE at all. New Mystery of the Emblem is a remake of 3 without the original's partial FE1 retelling. It continues Shadow Dragon's modernizations along with expanded supports. It also introduces OC Kris, the first "avatar" or "MyUnit" to be a playable character. Kris' appearance is customizable and can be made into any starting class. Purists hated the self-insert and still do but this would become a tradition going forward.

New Mystery is also popular with the fandom but didn't sell well either. In the long run Fire Emblem had been on a downward trend with the original FE3 still the best selling game in Japan as of 12's release. Blazing Blade was a breakout hit thanks to an international release but western sales soon fell off. Nintendo wouldn't have continued at all if weren't for the following entry.

Dating Sims Persona Modern Fire Emblem

Fire Emblem has been trash for years now anyway, it went from a Kino butt series about warfare and tactics into a fricking weeaboo waifu match making simulator with more p-do bait then a middle school volleyball game.

Pretty much everything after Radiant Dawn is dog water unless its a remake of an older game.

-- @GubeRubenstein

The era of coomers, with normie casuals in second place. Elitists desperately cling to Conquest to sustain themselves.

Always something of a niche franchise even in the best of days, Fire Emblem exploded in popularity with 13 and immediately went from life support to one of Nintendo's A-listers. This success continues into the present and has guaranteed intentional releases for all subsequent games. There have also been a few spin-offs.

Awakening could honestly be its own post and is arguably the most impactful besides 1. Awakening started development as what may have been the last Fire Emblem and was made as something of a swan song. Among the staff members were veterans of the Fire Emblem series, including project manager Masahiro Higuchi, who had first worked on Genealogy, and Intelligent Systems producer Kouhei Maeda who first worked as a scenario writer for Binding Blade.

Released in 2012 on the 3DS, Awakening returns to the original setting but advanced two thousand years into the future. Regular protagonists Chrom and Lucina are even descendants of Marth. A few justifiably long lived characters return for the narrative and the dubiously canon spotpass levels allow characters from every previous game to become playable units. The game balances its own storyline along with 12 games worth of easter eggs.

Awakening also furthered 12's innovation through the (in)famous self-insert protagonist Robin. As an avatar/MyUnit Robin is something like a BioWare/Bethesda protagonist and is completely customizable. Robin is also set up to be completely overpowered and comes with both a unique class and the ability to become almost any other class, excelling at any role you give them. Robin can also bone literally every other playable character and there's no denying how much this contributed to the game's popularity among certain people

Indeed, Awakening went full r-slur with romance and shipping and created a now recurring mechanic where supports between certain characters could reach an intimate S rank to pair them off. The player can choose their own waifu with Robin and then play matchmaker with your other eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, a development that attracted everyone from turbo-coomers to tumblr types writing 500,000 word OTP fanfics.

Said shipping also brings back the child units from FE4, except that they now coexist with their parents thanks to time travel Your exact pairings between potential mothers and fathers will change their stats and inherited abilities. Child units can easily end up stronger than any first gen character and the game's harder difficulties all but require you to play eugenics simulator

Awakening's other gameplay improvements include pairing up units to support each other in combat/map movement, a modified reclassing system that can be gamed for practically unlimited level ups, and benefits to placing units beside each other on the map like stat bonuses and blocking of enemy attacks. The game was also the first to finally do away with non negotiable permadeath, the final obstacle to the casual infestation Casual mode allows fallen characters to simply return at the end of a chapter. Awakening offers a wide variety of difficulty settings in general, some of the easiest and hardest in franchise history, and all with both casual and the permadeath enabled "classic" as options. The game is particularly infamous for "Lunatic Plus" which is designed to screw you with rng.

Awakening was also the first Fire Emblem to receive downloadable content. It even got an expansion of sorts, The Future Past.

…do you reckon that it has more to do with Awakening propelling a new era of the series to emphasize more of the weeby waifu/husbando proto-gacha simulator, or is the blame on Smash for making FE popular to begin with?

Awakening was a real yolo attempt from the devs, series had to adapt or die.

-- @AmericanShippingCompany and @Fabrico

Awakening was massively successful on release. The devs were told during production that Fire Emblem would be discontinued if the game failed to sell 250,000 copies -- upon release the game reached that goal in its first week. FE13 would be like Blazing Blade on steroids, bringing in a massive wave of brand new fans and placing the franchise solidly on Nintendo's radar. As of January 2017, the game has sold-through 1.9 million copies worldwide, with 500,000 copies sold in Japan and 1.4 million copies elsewhere.

2015's Fates is an original setting but is very much in the same vein as Awakening. It continues the majority of FE13's developments including shipping, child units, and a new avatar. Fates' main gimmick was a release not unlike how Pokémon games are done. Birthright and Conquest are two separate campaigns that both received full priced physical releases. The full experience requires you to buy one and then pay to digitally download the other. A third Golden Ending campaign, Revelation, was released later as a digital download. It didn't have a physical release outside of the game's super duper limited edition that retailed for something like seventy dollars

In fairness the three campaigns feature unique levels and rosters. Conquest in particular was designed to be tougher with limited resources for an old timey FE experience Still, Nintendo's model for Fates wasn't appreciated by the fan base and generated backlash. The game sold well but the Nips actually listened and haven't attempted this again.

This game is also known for incest.

This period also saw several Fire Emblem spin-offs for the first time. Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE was a 2015 crossover with Shin Megami Tensei.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a 2017 gacha game built like so many other examples of the genre. It's far from the deepest game but it generates tons of money because of images like this.

Not much else to say about it really

Another 2017 spin-off, Warriors is a Dynasty Warriors esque game made by Omega Force and Team Ninja from Koei Tecmo. The game wasn't the end of this partnership.

The next 2017, mainline, and final 3DS FE game was a remake of Gaiden of all things and so far the last remake made. Like Shadow Dragon, Shadows of Valentia preserves some of the original, mainly map design and cantor spam but includes radical changes like visiting villages and limited third person dungeon crawling. Perhaps the most significant was a turn rewind mechanic that allows players to undo oopsies and replay turns without having to reset the map. So far this addition has been permanent.

The game was popular but also suffered the same curse as all other games the elitists don't hate -- sales were far lower than Fates. It's uncertain if Nintendo was planning any other remakes but that hasn't stopped people from asking for Genealogy

The one you've probably heard of, 2019's Three Houses for the Switch was another massive boon for the series and remains the best selling title. In many ways a take two on Fates, FE16 includes multiple campaigns without charging extra and intentionally avoided having a single best ending -- people die in every possible route Class changing is less restricted than ever and rewinding time is made part of the game's balance. The game also adds new game plus bonuses that make it easier on subsequent playthroughs if desired. Slice of life activities in your main base can provide bonuses to your units in battle. Waifu-ism remains but the game's not as sexualized as its predecessors. Note that it's @birdenthusiast approved

Three Houses wasn't developed by Intelligent Systems alone and Koei Tecmo was brought in to contribute after Warriors was finished. The game's scenario was written by Koei Tecmo's Yuki Ikeno, Ryohei Hayashi and Mari Okamoto which would explain why it wasn't as terrible as Fates and the next game.

This partnership also led to another Warriors game, this time set entirely within Three Houses' setting as an alternative timeline.

Three Houses is also notable for the sheer amount of autism it has inspired. The game's multiple routes/waifu wars have generated unending discourse and flamebaiting that continue to the present day. rDrama has covered this more than once.

The most recent Fire Emblem, 2023's Engage is kind of a shitpost mainline entry. It features an original setting but also has a crossover plot involving past FE protagonists. The game's gimmick is the ability to ENGAGE with past FE characters to give temporary upgrades and powers to whichever unit equips their summoning ring. Other developments include a more prominent weapon triangle, chain attacks and chain guards, and a less egregious home base system compared to Three Houses.

I refuse to play the new fire emblem for this reason lmao. I played Three Houses and thought it was pretty fun but they immediate reverted back to coomer shit like Awakening and Fates for the next entry for some reason.

-- @birdenthusiast

Engage sold less than FE16 and has a reputation little better than Fates'. Its drama is even more r-slurred than Three Houses'.

Time will tell how Fire Emblem develops in the future

But at this rate it's probable elitists will soon go extinct

---

And with that rDrama is now familiar with Nintendo's best series.

Genealogy remake for the Switch 2?

This effortpost is dedicated to its patron @birdenthusiast

Our story takes place in Bamban, an ordinary city of about 50,000 people in the middle of the Philippines.

I'm going to pick up where we left off in the first part. I'm going to limit myself just to stuff that came out in May. This is when she starts answering questions, weaving a fairy tale about where she comes from. I'll try to tell her story of how she came to be the mayor Bamban and center of all this drama. It won't be easy as her memories have change quite a bit from day to day. But to be fair, she's getting asked some pretty hard-hitting questions like "Do you have any siblings?"

In happier times.

We now get a dramatic origin story, fit to be a fairy tale. Her father was Chinese hog farmer Jian Zhong Guo, who adopted the Filipino name Angelito. At first she claims she doesn't know who her mother was, but later reveals it was Filipina Amelia Leal. Born July 12, 1986 as the love child of Angelito's forbidden affair with a maid, she was kept secluded on the hog farm, not even learning her own true identity until she was about 12-14. Recalling the shame of this part of her life is too much and tears well up in her eyes. Sadly there doesn't seem to be any record proving that Jian Zhong Guo or Amelia Leal exist.

Come on, you can cry more than that!

Alice grows up on the hog farm, which sounds like a downright magical place. She never attends school, being homeschooled by a teacher named Rubilyn, yet another very obscure resident of Bamban who didn't leave much of a paper trail behind. Later her education is continued by her fellow hog farmers who take her under their wing. She had a half-brother who now lives in China, but he must not have been important to her since she forgot he existed at first. Since she had been born at home, she never got a birth certificate. She gets one at age 17. That's not unheard of, but unfortunately she made a lot of mistakes so the basic facts about her parents on the birth certificate do not match any of her hazy recollections.

Maybe a stork delivered her.

Young Alice quickly proves to have a flair for business, perhaps coached by those loyal hog farmers. The first corporation is created in her name when she's only 24, and soon she has built her own little empire of 11 companies in a variety of fields from embroidery to smelting to (of course) slaughtering livestock. Looking for new worlds to conquer, she suddenly entered politics, successfully running for mayor of Bamban. Who taught her how to run a campaign so quickly? She gives the credit to the hog farmers, of course. Is there anything they can't do?

Actual footage of the hog farmers who take such good care of our princess.

Despite the demands of her many businesses and political career, Guo still enjoyed her hobbies. She loved cars, owning 16 vehicles. Well, I guess 17 if you count her helicopter. But one of these cars stood out from all the others, a beauty that nobody else in Tarlac or even the whole country could beat. She had her very own McLaren 620R supercar, one of only 350 ever built. We know because she took it out to display in auto shows and take pictures in front of it. Exactly where it came from is a bit of a mystery, as none were ever legally exported to the Philippines. One was seized from a smuggler by Customs and appraised at $672,080. Maybe Guo bought this one at auction, as no others are known to exist in the Philippines.

Maybe don't emphasize so much that you're the mayor of a town of 50,000 when you're showing off this car.

Remember that POGO that this whole story is about? One of Alice's business ventures was the Baofu Land Development Corporation. They did a bunch of real estate transactions. The important thing is, these involved Guo, the land the POGO was built on, the company that owned that land, and a Chinese guy named Zhang Ruijin. After being elected, Guo approved the construction of the POGO. In May, Zhang was coincidentally being prosecuted in Singapore over a massive $2 billion money laundering scheme that's a huge scandal in itself.

One of the 36 buildings in the compound.

At the end of May, there was no end to the hearings in sight. Obviously she came from China at some point, but when? For what purpose? Who does she really work for? Was she here to make money off internet scams or to spy?

Google is so bad that I searched for Alice Guo memes and this is all I got.

Next time we'll finally find out the true identity of Alice Guo! And hopefully I'll catch up to the present day because the drama just don't stop with this one. Today they put out a warrant for her arrest.

@GatanKot's coverage of the SFBA Rationalist Cult pulled me back in, I've had this draft sitting around for a while. The truth is it's not very good, but neither is this place.

Far from being a place where rightoids are subjected to the ridicule they deserve, this continues to be full of increasingly weak denialism about the fascism of Trump. You all really are this stupid, aren't you? The dude spent the entire debate in scare tactics about immigrants. The xenophobia is so apparent.

Y'all seem to think that Democrats don't have policies on immigration but there are ways to debate immigration without centering fear and alarm. It's a panicked approach for Trump because Trump knows he's a weak candidate.

Hence his desperation around Project 2025. What, you think that because Project 2025 doesn't contain passages from Mein Kampf that the concern over it isn't sane? It's the Christian theocracy in agenda form.

So you're all pointing at the leftists freaking out about the theocracy that Republicans definitely want to instate. That Trump is definitely tied to, in fact when he's tried to distance himself from it that's caused problems for him! Hilarious.

Point is that the intelligent people have moved on. I don't like to write here. I'm not up to the task of abusing the rightoids anymore.

It's just that @TracingWoodgrains wrote an article that was _really bad_. I'm not saying it couldn't have been a good article, but it definitely was evidence of a person broken by being online.

Trace is in denial that he's still an SFBA Rationalist Cultist even as he performs a propagandistic action protecting the SFBA Rationalist Cult from one of its more successful detractors. The only audience for Trace's article is Rationalists. That's it. That's how insular Trace is, and how far he has fallen into mediocrity.

---

Woke Derangement Syndrome

Scott Alexander got really broken, mentally, by the woke moral panic of the mid 2010s. In combination with his face blindness which seems to have rendered him unable to smell the fascism, he managed to drag the SFBA Rationalist greater cult complex to this political zone where it became obligatory and necessary to platform white supremacists and fascists.

So you have this xenophobic impulse and this violent rhetoric and this authoritarian strongman. And Scott Alexander's take was: this isn't fascism because Trump took a photo op with a taco.

That's how easily duped these people are.

But I think it's worse than that. It's well known that Scott Alexander deliberately sought a neoreactionary audience. As a consequence /r/slatestarcodex's culture war threads were full of white supremacists and fascists.

You can draw a straight line from this decision to TracingWoodgrains absurd belief that the amount of white supremacists and fascists he experiences is 'about normal.' These people don't have a good barometer for how many racists is normal. They're not intelligent, they just LARP intelligence.

I mean you have Scott Alexander literally moaning about how Scientific Journals are bad and dumb and stupid even as his blog is the form and function of a journal: he accepts papers in his book review feature. LessWrong is deliberately a scientific journal.

But they think they're better than humans. They have ingrained the belief in their superiority so thoroughly that they believe they are humble because they claim to value criticism.

And they recreate the same normal people social forms but worse. Scott's substack is worse as a scientific journal because it's filled with smug superior dipshit cult thinking.

---

This is just a draft, and not a good one. It's too sprawling. I'm annoyed by the wasted potential TracingWoodgrains represents.

In a time where the man who lied his way to sending a mob at the capital on January 6th in an obvious coup attempt is running for president again, TracingWoodgrains is: attacking a defunct former wikipedia editor? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I'm not saying the piece on Girard couldn't be a good one, but it definitely isn't.

---

So Scott Alexander has recently been falling apart.

There was an article, I'm too darn annoyed to track it down, where Scott Alexander writes about 'part therapy' and his conclusion is roughly: isn't it good that we banished the demons?

But the whole point of parts therapy is that in this crucial way the demons remain.

Scott Alexander's reaction to fascism is pretty precisely this denial.

So Scott's right that like, we shouldn't teach kids that demons are responsible for their emotional problems. But the limitations of 'objective' rationality are numerous. (How does a cult function if it necessarily believes that it and it alone is capable of objective thought? It doesn't.)

This is the SFBA Rationalist Cult's tic: if it can't understand something, it decides it's stupid and doesn't exist.

The stupidity of people still occurs.

Trumpism is Fascism.

Witness:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically

I think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls. Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents' politics or statistical knowledge isn't a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events.

Scott Alexander's encounter with irrational people believing irrational things is: just ignore the irrational people believing irrational things.  This is how Scott Alexander ended up in a cult of irrational people believing irrational things while also believing in the superiority of their cult.

THE REEEEEAAL MEAT.

Following the continued bickering over the cultish nature of EA, Scott wrote this sad, sad piece. If you have a sensitive stomach or are allergic to people embarrassing themselves, please avert your eyes for the rest of the essay.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-stone-on-ea

EA hasn't always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics.

I don't believe that this has been demonstrated.

One of the first things intelligent people should learn is that they don't get to decide they weren't caught in a superiority complex.

That the SFBA Rationalist Cult is in denial of the superiority complex it has is really, really funny.  They have an entire course of apologetics about how no, they're not superior to anyone, they just are better than everyone at charitable giving.

Stone is repeating one of the most common critiques of EA as if it's his own invention, without checking the long literature of people discussing it and coming up with responses to it.

Hear the stuck pig squeal.

1: It's actually very easy to define effective altruism in a way that separates it from universally-held beliefs.

For example (warning: I'm just mouthing off here, not citing some universally-recognized Constitution EA Of Principles):

This is all any SFBA Rationalist Cultist does (Trace just mouthed off about a defunct wikipedia editor).

1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field.

This is just normal altruism.

2. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree.

This is just normal altruism.  It's only superior to normal altruism if you believe that your cult is in some way superior in reasoning power to normal people, and your cult isn't, specifically because your cult believes it is superior in reasoning power to normal people.

3. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON'T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY'RE "OBVIOUS" BUT THEN NOT DO THEM!

I think less than a tenth of people do (1), less than a tenth of those people do (2), and less than a tenth of people who would hypothetically endorse both of those get to (3). I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists (maybe adjusted for EA being too small to fully capture any demographic?) and most of the people who don't, wouldn't.

This is absurd stupid elitism and Scott Alexander should feel deeply embarrassed for having written it.  This is the worst paragraph where the elitism of the altruism branch of the SFBA Rationalist Cult is most evident.  They really believe this.  They really believe that they're more giving than other religions with tithing, more thoughtful about how they give than 'normal' people (and here's the contradiction that will break their robot brains: do they believe they're superior to normal people?  If so, that's the cult dynamic.  If not, then how did Scott Alexander come to write this absurd paragraph?), and better at following through with giving than a religion which gathers in person attendance.

The midwits caught preening, called out on their preening, double down that it's not preening because it's just being "rational."  It's just "correct" (and they have the math to prove it) to believe that the SFBA Rationalist Cult is superior at giving.

Step 2 is the interesting one. It might not fully capture what I mean: if someone tries to do the math, but values all foreigners' lives at zero, maybe that's so wide a gulf that they don't belong in the same group. But otherwise I'm pretty ecumenical about "as long as you're trying" […]

This is where the SFBA Rationalist Cult is actually worse than normal altruism because they believe in magical ritual math which makes them superior but actually just gives them braindead bizarre beliefs.

2: Part of the role of EA is as a social technology for getting you to do the thing that everyone says they want to do in principle.

"We know we're a cult but we call it a social technology to obscure it."

I talk a big talk about donating to charity. But I probably wouldn't do it much if I hadn't taken the Giving What We Can pledge (a vow to give 10% of your income per year) all those years ago. It never feels like the right time. There's always something else I need the money for. Sometimes I get unexpected windfalls, donate them to charity while expecting to also make my usual end of year donation, and then - having fulfilled the letter of my pledge - come up with an excuse not to make my usual end-of-year donation too.

They think they're atheists, but this is what they need to mimic a fraction of religion's power.

Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I'm going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can't get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven't done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).

And I'm a terrible vegetarian. If there's meat in front of me, I'll eat it. Luckily I've cultivated an EA friend group full of vegetarians and pescetarians, and they usually don't place meat in front of me. My friends will cook me delicious Swedish meatballs made with Impossible Burger, or tell me where to find the best fake turkey for Thanksgiving (it's Quorn Meatless Roast). And the Good Food Institute (an EA-supported charity) helps ensure I get ever tastier fake meat every year.

"I benefit from my religious cult, but it's not a cult, nor a religion, but it is better than religion."

Everyone says they want to be a good person and donate to charity and do the right thing. EAs say this too. But nobody stumbles into it by accident. You have to seek out the social technology, then use it.

"If I use the term 'social technology' to disguise the fact that the SFBA Rationalist Cult is a cult, I can still believe that I'm superior to normal people and not in a cult."

I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there's a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.

One of the common criticisms of AA is that it is cultlike??

(I admit other groups have their own toolboxes of social technology to encourage doing good, including religions and political groups. Any group with any toolbox has earned the right to call themselves meaningfully distinct from the masses of vague-endorsers).

But no group can claim a monopoly on being effective altruists unless they're arrogant smug dipshit frauds.

Shut the frick up Scott.  The difference between a cult and a religion is roughly that a religion is formalized as a religion (its dogma, doctrine, and/or culture are cognizant of the nature of the "soCiAl tEcHnOLogY" as a religion) and a cult has pathological behavior, patterns within it which are harmful to the cult members and others.

Factors like

• A persistent arrogance

• An entire literature of denialism about that arrogance

• Failure to believe in obviously true things about the world (Trumpism is Fascism and Scott, you're the reason your cult is out of sync with educated people about this!)

---

If you missed the fascism, it's not too late to be the people to notice the fascism.

If Trump is such a fascist, surely the system will handle him, they said smugly.

You are the system. You are the system of nihilism and playing pretend.

I'm tired of pretending the boomers aren't running this country into the ground. Biden shouldn't run. Biden should execute Trump and withdraw from the race. Yes, execute him: the Supreme Court ruled that Biden has immunity and Trump is an existential threat to our government.

You frickers

The people who piss me off here are those who want to pretend that politics doesn't matter, that nothing matters. Your nihilism is weak. Man up frickers. You've helped create this situation by carrying water for Trump. You laugh at him because he reifies your belief that politics is a joke. You are the ones who make your politics a joke. Stop forcing us to live in your clown world.

Man the frick up.

And ditch Trump.

Call it fascism. Because that is what it is. It's fascism. It's a xenophobic movement glorifying violence, attacking journ*lism, promoting an authoritarian strongman, creating the narrative that it is just and necessary to seize power by any means necessary.

Trump declared war on the constitution on January 6th. He's a treasonous traitor and deserves death. It's not more complicated than that, and it will never be more complicated than that.

Trump is an Enemy of the United States of America.

Disclaimer

_____

This will need to be broken into parts, this person has too much going on for ONE post. Also I can only take so much.

Meet Jinsol

_______

Jinsol Lee is a 29 y/o from the UK I came across his account when I was lurking, and saw a post from a Megatron521:

MG521: As an neurodivergent person, have you ever asked for an accommodation at work?

How did that go?

JSL: I got denied then I got fired after having a meltdown at work. I apparently "caused a scene"

I'm so sorry. That is very uncool of your employer.

Ableists gonna keep on ableisming

It was a decade ago and I've been out of work ever since. Safe to say I'll never work in retail again.

Comment that started it all

Now unfortunately, I couldn't find Jinsol's account of what happened, and that's why I went to his page in the first place.

I thought it would make for a nice, short, low effort post for shits and giggles.

Oh how wrong I was. What I found was bittersweet.

Jinsol is an neurodivergent, disabled trans man who's also Aegosexual, Gay, Poly, Intersex, and suffering from C-PTSD. He's also a self described "lefty, feminist, Helpol in private" who loves things like...

....Dinosaurs, g*mer, anime, manga & manhwas. I read BL, I like homestuck (act 1-7), huge skulduggery pleasant fan, Sims 4 Lot Builder, Old 2006 Emo, Kpop and Anime music 🎶, I have 11 anime tattoos, Skulduggery tattoo is my fave tat, pierced

• I had never heard of Skuldugery Pleasant, here's the Wikipedia page

• I assume "Helpol" is internet slang for "Hellenistic Polytheist" or "Hellenic Pagan" given that's in his bio.

I only saw ONE post about dinosaurs in the 39 weeks worth of content I scrolled though, so Jinsol is NOT a Dinochad

Also, !biofoids who do this kind of stuff, does this checkout?

Capricorn ☀ Taurus ☾ Scorpio ⬆, ENTP, numerology 8.

"About me"

Jinsol created his threads account last year, literally July 2023, and is chronically online. From my estimate, there's posts from almost every day since account creation. When Jinsol is posting about the BL comics he "reviews", he'll post somewhere between 5-10 times a day. According to the math @TheGoodTheBadTheBussy and I did initially, we believe Jinsol is consuming at least one BL volume per day a year.

But we'll get to that later.

Block Party

____

Jinsol getting clowned on

This seems to happen on occasion, someone will find Jinsol's account and make a few jokes.

Notice the use of the words "Block Party". Jinsol has a habit of screenshoting something he doesn't like or someone trolling his account and sicing his small following on said person and likely blocking them after the damage is done.

Here are some examples;

This is the block party list as of 34 weeks ago, he has yet to update it

It's one screenshot, but there are at least 50 usernames on that list that he's named.

I'll likely have a stand alone mini instalment on "block party" later.

Intersex Claims

____________

I was immediately interested when Jinsol claimed to be intersex.

Intersex is a real disorder that affects real people, however it's been copped by some in the Alphabet community as a fun badge to wear.

Some things you should know before we continue:

((Thank you to @TheGoodTheBadTheBussy for helping me explain this))

• XY female intersex is a thing, that means that the Y chromosome missing the sry gene

• That would not produce doubled gonads

• XY women can't get themselves or others pregnant, they are infertile.

• Internal testicles will not fully mature. Any combination of hormones that would enable pregnancy would also produce sperm that can't fully mature

Link to post

Therefore, no, Jinsol can't live out his bizzare boy love OMEGAVERSE fantasy. More on that in part 2.

To quote bussy: "Needless to say this person feels very special and wants to feel special and wants to pretend to be special."

Going Medical

_____

I have reason to believe Jinsol is now medically transitioning as a result of reading so much man on man smut. This is it. We came back to it.

Here's a small track of Jinsol's transition, there's honestly so much to unpack on this topic alone, it will require another small post later:

GENDER ENVY OVER SETO KAIBA???

Presumably pre 2019

3 month "glow up"

I have been self medicating testosterone since April last year. Don't ask me how I get it. Instead ask why I have to.

I was put on the waiting list in September 2016, I have had 1 general assessment appointment on the 3rd Aug 2023, a psych assessment on the 19th Oct 2023 and my next psych assessment on the 20th Nov 2023. I still don't know when I will get a prescription of testosterone.

7 YEARS FOR JUST A GENERAL ASSESSMENT, PEOPLE REALLY DO DIE ON THIS WAITING LIST.

Link to the OG post for text above, I need all the file economy I can get

Jinsol was approved for T. surgery

______________

"LittleMarsey, can you go into detail on the man on man smut hypothesis?"

Yes. Jinsol has a huge collection of BL books that he also reviews.

______________

Link to what broke me

DIRTY SMUT MANGA ISNT "BOOKS" JIN

When I bothered to start counting after the first batch of BL reviews, I counted over 60 titles in the 39 weeks of content I looked through.

We'll look at some of those later. But here's the Crux in my hypothesis:

All of this seems to have combined in Jinsol's mind and twisted into a sexual fantasy where he transitions into a pretty boy from the copious amounts of BL they read/write.

But... That's for the next part, as I've exhausted my file economy and can no longer post more screenshots.

_____

Part 1.5 is out

PREVIOUS

BEGINNING

---

My name is Sazir, "Spysix" Townbrews. Known as "the Decent Claw," also known as "The God-Forsaken Nightmare."

When I first introduced myself I was a so called carpenter, then I took on the mantle of a warrior, a captain, and purged an invasion of undead. Bringing a brief era of peace for the other leaders to focus on expansion and prosperity.

Now I am a commander and a might to be reckoned with. Elves want me. Goblins fear me. Undead hate me.

Things are a little difference since last time. I seperated from my wife apparently (Who was named @IslamIsRightAboutWomen now retroactively named @tempest) But they didn't stop us from having another child together and being fond of standing shoulder to shoulder in battle.

So many conflicts and fights have shaped me, I went from being a hardened individual to...

Having ennui...

Regardless, thanks to my station and past deeds I am a legendary fighter with legendary discipline. I've seen it all now from the undead above ground to the demons that spit fire and vomit below. I do not care for death, for those things I fight are worse than it.

---

2nd Granite

I will be preparing the squad and head down to-

Ah fook, really?!? I thought we were past this nonce sense. An invasion just day two into my job. Very well. Instead of going downstairs, we will go upstairs and greet our guests.

Wait, what the fook? Elves, goblins and dwarven mercenaries are fighting each other. What is going on??

They're just shooting at each other. One goblin runs off but bleeds out and dies. While the dwarven mercenaries and the elves duke it out

Meanwhile @ENGLANDSHILL is throwing another tantrum. Again. At least he's doing it in his cell. Fuggin bugger, boo hoo, trauma trauma. We all have trauma, just stop caring, it's that easy.

Anyway, I need to chase down one of these goblin preddators, seeking to take our children and GROOM them

Get over here you little shite!

Oh yeah, get fooked. I luv me axe. I need to train more with it perhaps if I am to confront the fire phantom. Perhaps it be fortuitious that I have such a target rich environment now.

Haha! Poor little elf boy!

I learned most of these goblins and dwarven mercenaries whom I can only assume are poor sods that were kidnapped when they were wee lads, Are from the Torrid Seductions. Perhaps once we resume armament production we can pay their little towns a visit ourselves?

Anyway, now that's over, lets focus back on the state of the fortress.

People are slowly sliding into unhappy, from what I can gather people feel their prayer and meditation needs are not met the most, crafting something a second, and drinking booze.

We do have a rather shabby looking Temple, it's basically made of siltstone and chert

Almost no better than a mud hut, surely we can be... better than this?

((OOC))

The problem is we're cramming shrines in a temple, causing an overlap and reduction in value despite a major value of the main temple of 6200 the shrines aren't getting that benefit. So the people looking to worship a particular deity are not getting the communion they need with a herd of animals and everyone else shoulder to shoulder praying to other deities and whowhatsits. We're going to have to make seperate chambers of worship for each. This will become a problem with polytheistic dwarves and they will be spending the most praying. But with high enough values in their temples, it should resolve once we get their own temples for the major worshippers. I'm listing the deities and religions that have >20 worshippers.

The Tin Iron - 20 - Minerals

Thabost - 25 - Mountains, Volcanos

Tosid - 43 - Fortresses

Rash the Ashen Crypt - 42 - Death

Anan the Gold - 62 - Metals, Darkness, The Night

Onol Violetpale - 69 - Jewels, Wealth, Trade

Gongith - 73 - Coasts

Istratth - 22 - Wealth

Uja Burialtombs - 30 - Death

That's a lot so we're going to have to consolidate some of them in their own areas just build the ones for the major ones like >40 and smaller will have their own temples that are smaller and possibly elsewhere. There is an ingame issue where polytheistic dwarves basically never get this need resolved even if you have dedicated temples built for all the gods they worship so this might be a challenge but we'll try.

((/OOC))

So will need to clear out extra spaces for worship

While they did and clear up the new chambers, need to focus on relocating our Trade Depot, right now if a trader had a wagon they won't be able to enter the fort via the stairs to the depot, thus I plan to make it more accessible.

I could try for something fancy and build ramps winding down to our depot, but moving the depot to the surface in an area where a wagon could get to it is the only option we can sort of go for. After all, most of our dwarves are distracted with their need for worship. This is perhaps why productions have been getting slowed.

So much to do, so little time.

7th Granite

@TheDunceonMaster2 has given birth to a boy, congrats!

and 11th of Granite

@Count_Sprpr has given birth to a girl, nice!

We're popping babies in this place.

One gremlin showed up in the caverns, we can take care of it. And we have a few Draltha running around too. They feed on mushroom caps and aren't aggressive unless we provoke them. Half the size of an elephant with the strength of one. We could try taming some...

Meanwhile I see we have some gold veins and even some platinum. That's good. Platinum can help max out the prestige of our new temples and even mint some coins for when trade wagons will come. Mineral wise I just need more steel production. For if we can't have Adamantine, Steel is the best substitute. We have established smelters and a forge below... roughly 150 levels down. With so many living above the time to get down there truly takes time to utilize our magma metallurgy.

18th of Granite

Scalies visit us, ugh. They're worst than furries.

20th of Granite

@HarryTrumanDorisDay and @seriousold (??) have married, congrats!

I need to figure out the stairs system we have going all the way down to the magma chambers, then down and up to the adamantine where that fire demon is.

Seriously following some of the up and down stairs that worm through the elevation is like...

I secured the stairs with some walls and a door at the -97 elevation. We got a migrant wave come in but just a few dwarves, bringing our pop to 161. With the expanded Trade Depot, temple's being cleared and to be designed, I'll then expand further below to have a proper mine outpost. Then adamantine weapons, armor and steel!

Also need to dig up some of that obsidian and some gems and other precious stones, it'll make these temples look real nice and distinct.

Lets get to work

27th Granite

Hey Congrats @R*pevann on your new girl!

I also included an order of like 90+ clothes items to be made since most of the dwarves around here are wearing tattered outfits or nothing at all. I know we're that kind of fort but this is getting silly and demoralizing. We're not poors!

Speaking of, with the amount of gold and platinum veins we're digging between the magma layer and the first cavern layer, we should get some platinum statues to boost the value of our halls.

While the miners and builders do their work, @tempest and I continue to spar and train. I have a feeling in order to protect our kindred and fellow warriors against the phantom flame, I would have to don our best armor and weapons and fight it alone.

Speaking of fighting, 11th Slate @Szechenyi decides to beat the shit out of a giant earthworm.

gross

I'm also making my ex-wife a leader @tempest of her own squad to lead a full company of competent swordwarves. Which, happen to be all female.

There is a troll just roughly 30 elevation below wandering around where we collect the webs for silk. Perhaps after some training we can see how well this new squad handles the threat? After all, we're going to need to have a squad above and below to protect the home.

It's already interrupting the hunting parties so lets see how they far now against the troll...

@obamacube and @Deuxfugee and an unnamed dwarf took their named weapons and literally poked, stabbed and stabbed some more, the troll tried one punch but it was blocked by a shield and it got stabbed some more to the point it got gelded and died. Holy shit! Bravo ladies!

Fricked Around and Found Out.

Still trying to get these gold bars smelted to design my temples and guildhalls required. Indeed the forges and smelters seem untouched and for the integrity of my beard I have no idea why. I'll try moving the ores and stockpiles around. It doesn't help our smelter and forge is now 150 floors below where everyone hangs out. We might have to split off half the population to live below at least then to perhaps expand our cavern farming and of course our industry to something more... organized.

25th Felsite

Someone decided to take artifact bracers in front of like... everyone at the general temple. After talking with witnesses (literally 42 people) it was clear @xa15428 was the culprit

You b-word.

She already scurried off and passed it off to a human at the edge of the map and they left. We will interrogate and find out where they were taken.

---

Just as Summer starts I have my report from @Ral , It seems Xa was corrupted by the human Gebdum Bankshelter and convinced to steal the artifact and pass off to scurry away with. This is unacceptable. We will find where they live and we will take the treasure back and perhaps even raze their darn town to the ground!

Meanwhile mid early summer the human traders come with meats, fish, and salads. We'll trade for them our iron junk and some platinum coins. That should give us a solid pantry for many winters while we continue our great works in the temples, the forges, and our mettle!

Mid-summer

Oh, so I learned two out of our three smelters dont have a magma tile under them, thus they have been useless, hence our steel industry choking. Meanwhile a bunch of human monster hunters have come to hunt, I suppose they're either after what lurks in the caverns below or perhaps eager to hunt and kill the fire phantom. Perhaps I should let them try? I know one is already killing a voracious cave worm. Fine with me, they're making the gathering grounds safe for us when I begin to send more dwarves to live below.

Which I will be doing now, at least having a barracks and training grounds there there will be proper armor racks.

10th Malachite

Congrats @sirpingsalot on birthing a boy.

On the 13th Malachite, we found Otukakul in the depths, a black metal breastplate of divinity.

Crundle have been showing up, little buggers are mostly harmless but can scare the shit out of our miners. We'll simply go through a hunting/killing exercise.

I did find this human guest kinda funny, forgive the lack of face its from my mod that isnt enabled in this game.

8th Galena Late Summer

Progress on Temples are coming in nicely. Here we have our temple of wealth and trade for the gods Onol and Istrath, each having their own end of a scale they're on.

And our Temple of the Ashen Crypt god near where we bury our dead.

Fall is coming upon us soon and I still need to make progress below for at least some burrows and barracks and the cowtools we need.

And even now this one is just done, dedicated to the god of the fortress.

I tried my best for I am no artiste, but I felt we now have the stamp of our Orangecat identity now carved into the mountain. Also if you're wondering who's naked in the screenshot, its a baby carried around by the engraver.

---

Another goblin raid comes for us. Alas I am not so lucky as to have another ambush of elves to meet them and thin their ranks. Well, it's only six of them so the Cudgel has been dispatched and dealt with the visitors swiftly. Like it was so fast didn't even bother to snap any pics of it.

Now, let's take a look at the state of our small world here and figure out who's pissed at us.

It's basically a goblin tribe known as Nifiquithe, The Torrid Seductions.

And the elven nation of Nifiquithe, The Bejeweled Flax. They got a lot of forest.

The ones I circled in red are the Torried Seduction sites where I think they come to invade. We're the yellow square. Undead invade from the North of those necromancer towers. We also have necromancer towers to our south but we're not at war with them. It doesn't mean undead can't just spill over though when they make too many.

The one I circled in pink is a FORTRESS of elves that count ~1000 strong. What the fook.

I once once we're steel'ed up we should start raiding and razing the sporadic settlements

11th Limestone

A goblin liaison from Atir Zas arrives, lets see what this green prick wants. We will need a 'Throne Room' to have any sort of international discussions.

Oh apparently he's from the homeland, wait, wot? wtf?

We can become the capital of our civilization now, sweet! I said yes and rising above my ego I appointed @60horsesinmyherd as the Baron. The Monarch will come soon along with some other nobles, I'll make their rooms when I have to later. I have underground expansions to deal with.

205%!? Heck's bells, I'll make them out of platinum!

With our dwarves less distracted, we're getting the fuel and getting them to pump out steel left and right!

https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/images/c/c8/Dwarf_blacksmith.gif

19th Limestone

Our cheesemaker made something, an artifact musical instrument out of chestnuts, I don't care right now.

25th Limestone

A new settlement has been founded within our nation. Maybe it will give us tribute?

9th Sandstone

We're launching raids against the enemy hillocks that surround our mountainhome. We will raze them. This should also bolster our skills and perhaps we will be skilled enough to deal with the fire phantom before winters end. First target is Leaffog, a necromancer tower where we first suspected the undead incursion were coming from. I am okay with doing this since we have now a second squad defending the mountain home.

15th Sandstone

We returned with great success. I lead the attack and the defenders were led by the dwarf necromancer Kogsak Theaterstood.

And @ManBearFridge struck down one of the necromancers. So did @Cream and @R*pevann went toe to toe against these undead nerds and slaughtered them where they stood. Every dwarf of Orangecat was taking no prisoner

@Santb killed a human necromancer

@Szechenyi shot and killed Kol Lancerskies, dwarven necromancer. Nice shot.

It was @Cream who went toe to toe with their leader and defeated him in battle.

Not like us.

After killing all the necromancers and their cohorts we looted the tower.

We acquired the following artifacts

Give Me The Holy Tresses

Annihilation In Practice (Ironic considering we just annihilated them)

Reflections on the Fort

Understanding Leaffog

Unusual Dwarves

The Sticky Uncles (wtf?)

Commentary On The Dwarf

Magician And The Head

Better Forest Retreat

After collecting these strange tomes we torched the tower and left it to burn to the ground. Good riddance.

Once we returned home we analyzed the tomes we have acquired. Most of it is fan fiction slop written by one of the necromancers. It turns out Annihilation In Practice is a tome of spells to raise the dead and even such spells to raise dark hunters!

While I still possess sunsetting authority I order its atomization. Once that is done we are raiding the next necromancer tower near us..

17th of Sandstone

We march on to Boatclapped.

@ggggbabybabybaby also gave birth to a boy, congrats!

While we raid someone stole Stalamem, Bustedcurled, from its pedestal in the mayors office. A dwarven child noticed the left, there were no other witnesses unlike last time. Can't have shit in detroit

We return a few days later with our report of slaying the necromancers, their dark hunters, their zombies, and their dwarven cronies. There was not much to loot so we burned this tower to the ground as well.

Get fricked, nerds!

One by one we're razing their towers, removing their blight from our lands. Once we take care of those, we can take care of the goblins. Then the only threat we'd face would be the elves, who's numbers are in the thousands, yet they only use wood weapons. We're more likely to die from exhaustion from swinging our axe arms than from their blows, hah!

Anyway, time is ticking and we need to be raiding more, I wonder if I should raid the towers that are very close to us despite not at war with them, hmm.

(Oh, I think I found house furry lol)

You know what, frick it, we'll destroy those towers too. They're also responsible for raising the dead and contributing to their rising numbers.

8th Timber - Late Autumn

After razing down two more necromancer towers we got visitors from below:

I guess they didn't like I called House Furry virgins.

Thankfully a few floors below them the Kittycat Squad has been training, I'll send them up to dispatch them.

@Seras one of our untested initiates was the first to arrive, dove in, killed one of them, but then started to flee in terror.

Thankfully the rest of the squad showed up and killed the remaining with our steeled and adamantine weapons. Easy. That should make them think twice before coming back to our neighborhood.

While this went on, we assaulted Taperedboots. Unlike the other raids, this one has stopped for within it, lives an arch demon.

We lost @Cream and @Eskomse to the demon, Alath Dustsqueezes. This is a bit personal as @Cream and I were practically battle brothers, we were always the first together to meet any invaders head on before the others arrived.

Yet as mentioned in the beginning of this report, I do not feel.

At least @PatriceOneal gave birth to a girl.

So I am going use the remainder of our adamantium to forge myself an armor set, craft a silver warhammer, for the density will be stronger than one made of steel, and perhaps with enough force the demon can be banished from our realm.

First I will attempt this with my set of armor I have acquired on the fire phantom below.

22nd Timber

I will descend to the chamber and...

Well, that was anticlimactic...

One punch and poof, gone. Weird.

---

Let us look into more details of the Arch-Demon that has slain our comrads and is an absolute pest on our doorstep.

It has 107 notable kills and 386 other kills. Mostly elves, but notably it killed @Cream and @EskomSePoesOffical.

This fricker likes to wrestle with a dwarf like a gayboy.

An Arch-Demon is no fickle thing. It is titanic, yet, agile and brutal. We will need a full squad wearing adamantium to deal with the foe! We need more metal of the gods!

While delving deeper through the vein we found a divine spear of the gods. We might arm ourselves with these for the destined squad to take them on.

8th of Moonstone

The miners rumormonger of demonic whispers within the adamantium veins. I heard tales that these spires were supposedly 'corks' to keep the bottle of heck at bay. With the demons we've encountered popping out of them, perhaps that is true?

https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/images/8/82/Adamantine_mining_anim.gif

We need to dig around but not any deeper to see if we can find any more veins that perhaps are easier to extract.

15th Moonstone

Just in time, we have some adamantine gear for me and a few of the squad have some weapons, (still mostly steel armors) we'll put em to the test.

18th Moonstone

Congrats @Soren on giving birth to a girl!

24th Moonstone

@Aba has crafted a .... splint... and the fricker used some raw adamantium to use it! you FRICK. Someone forgot to NOT have Adamantine be in that stockpile in the craftsroom!

World's most expensive splint that would make american health insurance envious.

I was so cross by this I razed a settlement that just sprouted up aligned with the archdemon.

Our next raid was then the necromancer tower to the east. There each of us slew a necromancer each and the horde of undead.

51 animated elves

144 animated dwarves

223 animated humans

We could only slaughter ten each at each go and I think they were still getting revived too. We will have to strike again after a strategic withdraw.

All these necromancer towers at the doorstep of the elves and they do nothing? Of course, they can't do anything. Elves are fookin' useless. Worse than beetles.

There is so much undead though we might need to bring the kittycat squad to help.

17th Opal

We return in time for a dwarven vampire bard visiting and we decided to let him know how we feel about that.

Get fricked, stupid.

We head out again to frick with the zombie town but some cave dwellers decided to invade, thankfully @Santb was lingering home and singlehandedly slaughtered them.

1st Obsidian

Someone tried to take the artifact bucket Sosadmot. It was my Niece witnessed apparently. So our justiciar slapped her around some and we returned the artifact to the guild.

5th Obsidian

We razed another site belonging to the Seducers. I'm sure they're regretting invading us now. The next and last site on this side of the continent is called Badyear. Heh. It will be a bad year for them.

15th Obsidian

The last site (I think) Is here which would take too long overlapping the next year, I shouldn't venture out now as I only have about 8 days left. I think we just have enough time to raid one more necromancer tower run by humans.

22nd Obsidian

Most of you dramatards are just getting pregnant and popping out babies. @Toodley_doo just had a boy!

We returned just in time for the end of the year. We raided Pulleydrum, slaughtered all the necromancers and stole more fan fiction they wrote, thankfully none of them contained spells. We didn't have time to raze the tower down though unfortunately. But you could probably send one dwarf to do it. next time.

We end the year with wiping like... five necromancer towers off the map. Our steel industry and metal stockpiles are through the roof. We have dedicated temples as well as our generic temple and I converted our old trade depot area to a tavern for us and travelers to enjoy. The fire phantom is defeated so we were able to get some more adamantium to forge some additional armor and weapons. I hope the next in charge can take on the new year with a little less worry of invaders and industry resuming again.

This is @Starsix, signing off.

---

And that concludes the 10th chapter, bringing us to the year 260. And this month also makes it the First Year Anniversary of Mostibkun!

It took me a second to get unrusty but I managed. I think the biggest challenge was trying to trace the navigation from going from elevation 40 to elevation -115. It's a lot of steps for the dwarves! I was on my way to making burrow down there and @searcher you'll notice in some levels I think around -108 or something I carved out huge swaths of cave to prep building some rooms using blueprints but I wasn't happy with them and plus there was gold and platinum veins I'd rather mine out than give dwarves a bed, lol.

But if you wanted to build it we now have so much microline and gabbro blocks and gold and platinum bricks that you can make the most opulent dormitories if you wanted.

We have so much rocks I had to use some quantum storage to fit them in our lots.

Seriously we have so much plat and gold its probably why we were chosen to become the capital (Adamantine doesn't hurt either.)

I did commission a platinum statue of @Cream in his memory but I didn't have time to place it yet. Also I have no idea which cream it is because pulling it up there is like ten of you named after cream.

I also forgot to mention I built the second barracks below along with a hospital and a well that was built over some pocket water so its only got the water in there and thats it. I was going to make an opening for a waterfall but didn't have time.

I mostly focused on fricking up as many not-dwarves as possible around us since I think that's what this unfeeling commander would do. From carpentry to combat, he found his calling.

Looking up in legends, that artifact that was stolen. It was last seen held by a dwarf in Tinrooms.

Over to you now, @searcher

---

Housekeeping:

Added @Grue, then realized was in the game already so fixed there wasn't double.

Added @Patsy to the game.

---

Players, in order of succession:

@60horsesinmyherd

@Cream_a_da_crop

@s_a_n_t_b

@StarSix

@searcher

@BFBugleberry

@Rankine_911

@Yasharn

@Ninjjer

Good morning

Starting with a dive back into Threads, Instagram's limp attempt to revive old twitter.

I'd like to introduce you to Iggy.

I found their account when I did my first threads post on the lady who was mega-giga r*ped my NEIL GAIMAN.

Iggy is chronically online, they were actually continuously posting as I drafted this effortpost.

I think they're one of the only people who actually use Threads.

Iggy's account only went live 15 weeks ago.

Iggy's Story

_________

Iggy is a self described fat, neurodivergent, bitter, disabled, chronically ill 46 year old trans masc "birthing person" raising two kids alone who also practices witchcraft

My favorite is "You used to be able to work. You can work. You're just being lazy." As if health doesn't change for people?

ya. I'm 46 years old with degenerative disc disease that started when I was in my late teens, arthritis in my spine, stage 3 spinal stenosis with bone spurs, arthritis with bone spurs in both knees and both like to slide out of place... i could go on... not that I owe random strangers an explanation of why i can't work, or even what makes me chronically ill.

OG post

>Oh my god. She literally checks all the boxes.

Iggy also constantly posts about their experiences with their abuser, who they name and shame almost on a daily basis.

Link to single motherhood

Trying this again cuz I noticed a glaring gap in what I was trying to communicate: I'm not brave or courageous for sharing my story. I am just screaming my trauma into the void

to encourage others to do the same

so that people know if I meet an untimely end, my abuser likely had something to do with it.

Even though it's been nearly 62 years since I escaped my relationshit with Lafayette Demel Lawrence Sr, he threatened to kill me as oftem as i felt compelled to tell him i loved him (i didn't. i was fawning.)

He held a katana (sword?) to my stomach and throat on numerous occasions. he flashed his pocket knives for fun.

Ruminating is a sign of mental illness

I'll be referring to Lafayette Demel Lawrence Sr as LDL from here, since she mentions him in almost every post.

---

That post was literally an hour old when I saw it for the first time. Iggy's gotten some amount of notoriety for making these posts.

TIME LINE

1978

Born to "young, broke Christian convert parents." Who spanked her maybe they shouldn't have spared the rod

According to Iggy, she worked hard in school and did her best. Here's a post breaking all of this and more down, called bitter

1998

Began to date LDL, "graped" on May 3 that year.

May 3 post

2001/2002

Pregnant with her first child, and "reproductively abused" by LDL.

Pregnancy post

Iggy claimed to also be bullimic at this time

2006

Punched LDL so hard his gold grill fell out.

This confirmed a few of my suspicions that LDL was a hoodrat

2014

Left the church and seemingly tried to cut contact with her parents, who I'm sure loved her very much.

2018

Iggy left LDL and he apparently responded with "who's gonna believe you"

_______

Regarding the Allegations

I could not find any trace of this guy on the internet on the form of pictures, mugshots, court filings or anything. I really wanted to know if my other assumptions were correct.

Iggy claims that he has sired multiple children.

Link to irresponsible ejaculations

My thought process was even if Iggy is too r-slurred to call the cops, surely another baby mama would have. Apparently one did, once, but according to Iggy, nothing came of it.

I'm not going to release it.. That's it and that's all. There has not been enough long term accountability. It is my life's mission to make sure people who are willing to listen know what my kids' biological father has done and is capable of, as well as things that are serious cause for concern and suspicion.

My sense of justice is not satisfied if he stays comfortable abusing people and using people, and unwilling to admit what he's done.

Lafayette Demel Lawrence, Sr committed crimes against femmes, children, and animals. I will never let it go. How can I while he's still walking around, free to hurt others?

I don't think prison is a solution, either. (F*ck 12.)

Anyone who still is friends with him or lets him around them or their kids is either like him or he's deceived them into thinking THREE of his bm's and an ex girlfriend are just cr*zy and vindictive.

Thread to OG post

I did find a few obituaries of men with similar names and ages, but:

A. Iggy just posts this man's name in its entirety, why would they have changed it?

B. If he died, I'm sure Iggy would have posted about it, maybe they would have even pissed on his grave and uploaded a selfie.

In short, if any amount of this is true, it's completely on Iggy (and the other baby mamas) if this peice of garbage continues to hurt women and children.

It's blatantly obvious that they're only divulging all this now, because they want attention.

_________

neurosurgeon encounter

Iggy recently saw a neurosurgeon, hopefully to remove all those brain worms.

I've had time to process my encounter... appointment ... with the neurosurgeon and honestly after reading his notes

SHE, WOMAN, HER.. DURING PRIDE MONTH, when my gender and pronouns are in my chart, and the claim that i denied imbalance, when what i said was "I don't really know"

i wonder if he picked up on my anger and sarcasm when I said "Well it feels really great to finally be listened to"

Furthermore when i told him i believe I'm neurodivergent, his knee jerk response was to be dismissive. like.

why? he was talking to me for all of five minutes by then.

I am really tired. If one of you could help my kids sue Rochester Regional Health if whatever is wrong with me takes me out before I can get diagnoses, I would appreciate it.

also, he called me "dear"

😑 😠🤢

______

You're hysterical

Iggy's most Memorable Posts

So, I came across these gems while going through their threads. Enjoy.

_________

My Take Away

I initially felt bad for Iggy, I really did, it's overwhelminglt obvious that this... Woman... went through something. My sympathy melted away when I found out she never reported what happened to her or her minor children, for whomst it never even began.

______

ALSO 62 years since she left LDL?????

I caught that after I scrolled through the post.

What do y'all think?

And by train drama, I mean , not stuff. :marseydeception Grab a drink and stuff off your grill, we're going to look at a war that tore the model railroading community apart nearly four decades ago. It was waged for years across countless physical mailing lists, magazines, and proto-internet forums.

First, a background into model railroading. One could make the argument that it was the first true hobby. Sure, things like sewing and fishing had existed for far longer, but those activities have utilitarian purposes. Model railroading, on the other hand, had no practical applications. It evolved out of a bunch of men, living in a world where trains ruled, deciding that they'd like to create and run their own miniature empires. From the moment Lionel discovered they could sell hundreds of thousands of locomotives to kids who wanted to see one run around their Christmas tree, the hobby was off and running. By the early 1950s, 1 in every 5 American men admitted to owning and running a model railroad. It was something you could bring up and discuss in polite conversation. Walt Disney originally envisioned Disneyland as a place for him to show off his collection of large model trains.

Model trains: one thing that NBA stars, Nazis, and the Jersey mob can all appreciate.

Despite its widespread popularity, the hobby was relatively primitive. Most people limited themselves to premade plastic structures, horrendously ugly trains, and were content with a layout consisting of a loop of track on a piece of plywood painted green. Enter the GOAT, the Wizard of Monterrey, the Grand Poo-Bah. John Allen. A probable neurodivergent and professional photographer, he'd inherited a small sum of money from his grandparents in the mid-1930s. Over the next decade, he was able to invest it in such a way that, coupled with the proceeds of the sale of his photography business in 1946, at the age of thirty-three, he could retire to a small bungalow in Monterrey and live off his savings. Unmolested by desires for a wife and family I think he was a who banged the cute twinks at the local Navy base. His contemporaries occasionally use couched language to hint at such, but the only ones who would know for certain are nonagenarians who probably don't want to acknowledge that homosexuality exists he descended into comfortable NEETdom and set about the task that would occupy the rest of his life, building the Gorre and Daphetid (pronounced Gory and Defeated).

Model railroading was very much an abecedarian hobby at this point in time. The O gauge Lionel trains that most individuals had grown up with made no pretenses to realism. Knowledge was sporadically shared, most often through the burgeoning imprint of model railroad magazines. Because the hobby ties together so many different facets, you would inevitably end with modelers who could make one part realistic, but would struggle mightily with everything else. John Armstrong was widely regarded as being the first to really stress that model railroad layouts could be designed to accommodate realistic operations of a prototype railroad instead of the traditional loop on a table. Even then, he was content to using an incredibly unnatural third rail on his own layout for the ease of electrical wiring. Frank Ellison had a vision for what a model railroad could be, but he was regrettably unskilled as a structure modeler, being content to limit himself to painted buildings on flat wood, like a stage show. Constrained by time, money, and talent, individuals would build a model railroad that was excellent in one aspect but undeniably amateur in others.

This is where John Allen would stand apart. He had nothing but time and resources, and he'd decided to be the first to build a truly functioning world in miniature. He would build every locomotive, car, and structure on the railroad to an exacting degree of realism. He would place them all into scenery also designed to be indistinguishable from the real world. He would master and innovate in electronics and wiring as never before done. All of this would be done in service of creating a model railroad that would operate as a prototype of a real railroad.

At this task, he succeeded as no one had before. Burdened by nothing but free time, he did indeed become a master at making a model railroad. Word spread, and soon he was as close to the face of the hobby as possible. His skills as a photographer also proved to be handy, as far better than anyone before he could capture the results of his techniques and disseminate them through these magazines. Consequently, he became highly valued as a contributor to them all, and the magazines would proudly boast on the cover whenever a John Allen-authored article was contained within. For a time, his legend grew and his word was god.

Sadly, the god of the world of the Gorre and Daphetid was not an immortal deity. A self-proclaimed sloth, he was always portly and never the best physical specimen, presaging the fat nerds of today. Some three decades after he retired to begin his work, a few months before his sixtieth birthday, he died of a heart attack. The railroad lasted for less than two weeks more. After a memorial gathering at his house attended by close friends, someone left on a heater that John had never used. It ignited material around it, and the layout was destroyed by the subsequent fire.

The one surviving locomotive from the fire.

And thus the stage is set for conflict. :: With the elder statesman of the hobby dead, the magazines that had come to depend on his work and wisdom searched for a new torch holder. Enter the focus of this effortpost, Malcolm Furlow. Malcolm had not grown up with an interest in trains or models. Hailing from the southwest, he was a professional artist. He'd spent a number of years working for Disney ::, helping to design their theme parks. And now, he decided that model railroads would be his new medium of choice.

He came onto the scene right when the hobby press was looking for a flagship name. They needed someone who could regularly provide them with dramatic images to include with their articles and on their covers, and he was primed to deliver. Almost from the get-go, photographs of what he was modeling would regularly grace the pages of these publications.

Although from the very start images such as this would draw the first grumblings, as it represented something that no railroad in the world would ever have built, a clearly stylized interpretation of a western mining town, with an absurd retaining wall and confusing arrangement of railroading implements, even his detractors would concede that he had an artist's touch and eye for detail. Photographs of his work sold magazines, much as a busty redhead on the cover of Playboy does. Hobbyists wanted to replicate his techniques, and what he wrote was getting compiled into VHS tapes that you could buy and follow along with at home.

In 1983, it was announced that the trade press was giving him potentially the most responsibility of anyone in the hobby. The most popular magazine, the inventively named Model Railroader, had chosen him to design and build the next project layout. Every few years, they would create one of these features. Over the span of a year, readers would get to follow along and see, step-by-step, how a model railroad is made. They serve as a centerpiece for the hobby, and for many readers, either those new to the hobby or those who have been in for a few years and wish to progress to more than trains running in loops on a painted sheet of plywood, they are the most important part of their hobby development. Written in a "you can do this too" style, the expectation is that thousands of readers, in whole or in part, will follow along with your every word and replicate what is done on the page.

Readers reported being overwhelmed by the amount of work they had to do in following Furlow's techniques for building scenery and structures. Most concerning was the layout itself. Furlow had designed the track plan with a desire to create interesting visual impressions first and foremost. As such, he ignored conventional wisdom about practical design. The layout was constructed with track switches out of reach of any operator and would have required careful planning or extremely long limbs to even build parts of it. Model trains require minimum curve radii to not derail, and he pushed the limits in terms of tightness here. There are ways to circumvent these problems that an experienced modeler would know, but for the targeted audience they would be hugely problematic. Furthermore, given that he was the one writing the series, he focused on his strengths and ignored his weaknesses, namely a complete lack of the technical side of the hobby, such as the electrical work necessary to run trains. This is often the most difficult thing for amateurs to do, and he completely hand-waved past it in his articles. Following his advice would teach you how to paint mountains and weather rolling stock, but you wouldn't learn how to do even the most basic of wiring.

Even if one could get past these hurdles and make the railroad functional, it turns out it wasn't fun to operate, something that anyone with a modicum of experience in designing track plans would have called out early on. The layout was great for photoshoots but not great for actually running trains. Given the ability to do things with your completed models has long been recognized as what sets model trains apart from model boats and planes, this was a serious flaw.

The San Juan Central. Probably not functioning.

And now, from stage right, enters Furlow's foil, Tony Koestler. A model railroader from an early age and an electrical engineer by trade, Koestler was as fastidious and scientific as Furlow was not. By day, he worked for Bell Laboratories, working as an editor for their technical publications and telecommunication journals. In his free time, he utilized his experience to gradually insert himself into the model railroad magazines, first as a volunteer contributor of opinion pieces and then as an assistant editor. He was eventually granted a monthly column, and he used this to expound upon his vision of the hobby.

To Koestler, the purpose of a model railroad was to model a railroad. If you had some magically shrinkray and zapped the Union Pacific with it, that's what you should have in your basement. Much like how coach potato COD players have rather particular ideas about the niceties of military special forces operations, he had a fervent desire to LARP as an actual railroad employee. Prototypical operation was the only way to do the hobby right in his mind. You shouldn't enjoy speeding trains around a chaotic spaghetti bowl of track. You should enjoy meticulously and ponderously moving a train along a boring, flat, straight section, as in real life. Every time your train dropped off a car along the way, you should stop what you're doing and fill out paperwork documenting the move, just as a real railroad does. Now that's fun. Even better if you have someone else sitting in a corner of the basement, and you have to call him on a radio before you start doing anything.

Normally such opinions would not have carried weight by themselves. The hobby magazines were full of middle-aged men bloviating on tiny trains. In an extreme case of irony, for a man dedicated to realism, Koestler himself was no more than a mediocre craftsman, so he could only sparingly write articles about his own railroad, as such articles required pictures, and the pictures would have revealed a layout that function as a real thing but looked anything but. However, he soon found a kindred soul in Allen McClelland, a man of considerable talents. He had independently developed a taste for extreme operational realism in creating his Virginian and Ohio railroad, and unlike Koestler had a product that looked quite good. Koestler quickly began featuring McClelland's work. Together, with a few other model railroaders, they began to engage in a massive LARP known as the Appalachian Lines. They would fastidiously document a fictional history of a railroad system set in that area of the country, would work together to model parts of it on their respective layouts, and would operate it as a prototype would. Koestler used his editorial power to heavily promote their way of doing things, regularly featuring articles on layouts within this system.

What a stud.

Back on Furlow's side, as the decade progressed, rumblings began to grow about his modeling abilities. Allegations flew that his works were no more than static sculptures or dioramas. Allegedly he couldn't master basic electrical work, and the aforementioned design flaws of his layouts, like the San Juan Central, were such that trains could not be run on them, according to those who visited his Dallas home. For a hobby that's primary purpose is to replicate a functioning railroad, this is disastrous. Even the most cartoonish of Christmas train loops at least moves around the tree. In addition, there were serious allegations that he had burned commercial clients. There are ways for skilled individuals to make money in this hobby. The first is, as mentioned, to write articles for magazines. A second approach is to be hired to build and photograph a company's model kits for their advertisements. A third is to work with the company to design model kits based on your structures. And a final method is to be hired by rich individuals to build a whole layout for them. Furlow was claimed to be doing all four, but he was doing all four quite poorly. Supposedly he had zero sense of time and deadlines. He would constantly miss delivery dates for commissions, ghost and burn clients, and generally just be a flighty, unreliable artist.

As such, private individuals and companies increasingly turned away from him, decreasing his prominence in the hobby. This was all the de facto kingmakers in the hobby, the magazines. Tony Koestler had consolidated his power immensely, being given official editorial status over many of the magazines and books published by the primary hobby imprint Kalmbach.. He would use this as a cudgel, preventing articles about more fantastical forms of model railroading from being run in favor of his grounded, prototype-only approach. Seizing on the commercial disdain for the man, and citing his failure to write certain agreed-upon articles on time, Malcolm Furlow was almost completely blacklisted. Others who would replicate his more fantastical style were likewise discouraged from sharing. Through Koestler's advocacy, Allen McClelland and those who ran railroads under the Appalachian Lines banner were the fare of the day in the trade press. If you picked up a magazine, it would near-exclusively feature how-to articles dedicated to replicating their style. A few exceptions existed, such as George Selios, but he was only afforded print space because his undeniable eye for detail resulted in an incomparable layout.

So, from being a contributor who would appear on the cover of almost every monthly edition in the mid-80s, Furlow gradually was in the press less and less. The breaks became larger and larger and the print space devoted to him smaller and smaller. By the middle of the 90s, he might be featured once a year, and these gaps became larger and larger. His last appearance in the press was in 2003, after the absence of several years, and it was deliberately provocative in its nature.

Oh boy

This cacophony of color and overload of objects is peak Furlow. No one could mistake this for a functioning railroad; it's a caricature of the subject. The internet had become the center of focus for discussion, and forums lit up with the vituperations of men in their 50s arguing about it. You can find their words on archived message boards, if you are so inclined. And with that last effort, he disappeared from the hobby. Leaving Texas, he moved to New Mexico and shifted his medium to brightly colored paintings of southwestern life. The Koestler-ites had won.

You can buy his work here

Their victory would eventually prove to be likewise contentious. The model railroad is serious business approach, which had gradually become codified in the hobby press of the 1990s, would prove to turn away newcomers. In person events would be described as hostile, with inane questions asked by these neophytes immediately dismissed. If you didn't have decades of experience with trains and their operations coming into the hobby, you would find yourself ostracized, with very few people willing to help. In what would later be regarded as apostasy, Koestler would even turn his column against John Allen, attacking him for not following Tony's rules of model railroading.

The trade press was likewise unbearable. Written by individuals with such experience, the magazines which once contained basic how-to information had degraded to articles focused on the most obscure of minutia. Want to know how to wire up your first layout so it runs? Not a chance. Want to know how to slightly modify your hand-build signals and electrical blocking so that you can replicate the New York Central's specific way of lighting train routes in 1937 instead of 1939? Yes. Unsurprisingly, the hobby's population began to decline, with fewer and fewer new people joining and the boomers starting to die off. In addition, the rise of other hobbies, predominantly video games, would prove to divert the focus of the slightly neurodivergent white man who had long been the hobby's principle demographic.

The long-term repercussions of this debate echo how the hobby itself has changed. What was once the most popular recreational activity for men in America has declined in interest. There are now countless hobbies for individuals to engage in, and railroads no longer hold preeminence in American life. The neurodivergent rivet-counters and flamboyant artists have gradually been forced to set aside their differences, as there's simply not enough modelers to go around otherwise.

Some twenty years after the war begin, you can find boomers still arguing about Furlow on internet forums. See the various internet threads I linked at the bottom for examples. However, even that fervor faded in all but the most passionate. News of Furlow's death in 2022, allegedly from long COVID, resulted only in respectful tributes and obituaries, even in the magazines that had once called for his head.

Perhaps most emblematic of this approach is the rise of module railroading. Instead of trying to build a layout on their own, modelers will make smaller sections according to certain national standards. At conventions, these sections can then be combined into one large railroad, permitting the running of trains at a scale otherwise impossible. Go to see one today, and you'll see that the modules can and do coexist in harmony, with a hyper-realistic scene of a train crossing the countryside connected seamlessly with one detailing a fantasy landscape. Even the most fastidious of modelers will keep a Thomas or two on their layout. For those dedicated to realistic operations of the Tony Koestler variety, it turns out that most are not nearly as concerned with scenic realism. One can unify a track plan designed for running trains in this way with a more exaggerated and fun environment to run them through, and most clubs now adopt this approach to some degree. Where the old guard would once have zealously guarded prototypical operation as sacrosanct, the current hobby is far more welcoming out of necessity.

In the end, what this conflict boiled down to was the Hegelian dialectic made manifest. Between the thesis that model railroads were artistic endeavors and the antithesis that model railroads are real railroads shrunk down in size, a synthesis has emerged. The truth is that model railroads are simply places for people to create their own worlds and see neat little trains run through them, and that's what the hobby has come to agree on. Fun, with a reasonable element of realism, has prevailed.

ARCHIVAL DRAMA TIME

Here's some usenet forums from back it the day. Great to see boomers seethe on 90s internet.

Example

Oh, no! The return of Furlow, the master spammer!!!! I thought we were rid of that parasite for good.

I checked out the website, and part of it's sales-pitch text says,

"Remember, Malcolm was the premier modeler of the early to mid-eighties."

No, he was the premier carpetbagger of theearly to mid-eighties. He was in it only for the money. His track plans were operational voids. Granted, his scenery was exceptional, but limited in scope.

Furlow was drummed out of the hobby for his shameless exploitation of Model Railroader as a free advertising medium.

I guess his career as a "western theme artist" didn't pan out and he's back to try to soak us again...

>DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM THIS MAN!!!!

Hating on Furlow as well as George Selios. Even John Allen catches some.

Furlow gets called a charlaten and carpetbagger.

Is Furlow using Photoshop in 1996 a crime against humanity?

Discussing Furlow's last image from 2003

Furlow Bashing. That's the thread

Seething still. Scroll down for discussion as to whether having the miniature people in your town be non-white is political correctness gone too far

It's been forty years, and Jannies still have to mop up and lock threads

And, for a change of pace, people hating on Tony Koester

More can be found if you search

After making my FrankBuns post yesterday, and being lightly introduced to /r/autism, I decided to go back and take a closer look at some of this sub's posts from the last month.

I looked at the most controversial, the top posts and the worst posts, so I could try to get an even slice of what this subreddit is like.

___________

The Good

These posts are characterized by generally harmless or even good intentions. These posts, however, tend to cause major Sneed in the comments.

As would be expected, nothing makes an aspie mad like being told to act like a functional member of society.

https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/s/yS7hV3shOu

The Glorification of Autism Needs to End! Autism is a horrible disability. I don't care if I'm labelled as a Neo-Nazi for saying so, cause I'm right. As a neurodivergent, autism has caused me nothing but pain. My stimming and biting of fingers has led to my fingers being in pain and yelling from my brother. Early on in my life, my autism was much worse then it is now, so I couldn't talk and wasn't potty trained until around the age of 5. Special Interests? I don't know if it's just me, but I have this strange issue where my Interests change every few months. I'll make my entire life revolve around something, and then one day my Interest will just die out, leaving me completely lost. Any form of change will leave me stressed, depressed, sometimes even suicidal. Does that sound like something to be glorified? And I'm one of the lucky ones! I'm fortunate enough to be high-functional (I don't think you can use that term anymore without being shot, but I don't care). Many others have had their lives stolen from them thanks to this horrific disorder. They can't talk, walk, eat, or do anything else everyone else, including everyone on this sub, take for granted.

This post by /u/TommyCola65 did cause a little sneeding in the comments:

But what I found interesting is that he made two of the most controversial posts in /r/austism this month.

Good for him, tbh.

Oh wait....

https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/s/qi3SLYdbsk

>why do the 0.01% get to keep their money?

I spoke too soon, I forgot the one immutable trait of /u/TommyCola65: he's a redditor.

We as Neurodivergents Need to Try to Be More Positive. This is something that me myself need to work on. Over the years I've been very negative. Even today it's about guaranteed that I'll cry about something out of my control....Neurodivergent people do live a harder life then people without it, that's goes for any disability, but blaming NT's or "Asperger's Supremacy" does nothing. Everyone on this sub seem to be under the belief that the world is out to get them. This is not the case. While autism does make life harder, that's just natural for a disability to do.

---

Honestly, more people could stand to be more positive but that's just meee.

_____

This presumably single mom jumped into the chat:

Cool, how many games will I need to play before I stop being angry about my children being denied an education do you think?

_________

Explain what you mean by "refused an education". This type of thing doesn't happen in the first world (or at least they shouldn't be) and I doubt people who live in Iraq use Reddit, let alone this sub on Reddit.

_________

Aw you're cute, testimonial injustice is a form of bigotry where reports of discrimination are not believed because privileged idiots don't believe the world can be like that because it isn't like that for them. Not only are my kids denied an education in a WEIRD country but I know of hundreds of parents in the same situation, know dozens that have court judgements that their child was denied education and know one who wrote a best selling book about how their child was denied an education. Maybe spend less time telling people they shouldn't be so angry and a bit more finding out why they are. Edit: also quotes generally contain the words people actually said.

Notice how mom of the year over here skillfully dodges the question regarding her own kid's education experience.

________

The Bad

Ah yes, the second member of our trio. Bad posts...are, well, bad.

Funny enough, it was butt patting posts like "I LOVE YOUR AUTISM" and "I LOVE MY GF WITH AUTISM" that made up a lot of the controversial posts, but I won't count those.

It's giving "muh updoots" nonsense.

Ironically, we're looking at the top posts, like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/s/TJj4QLsG9D

This is why you don't enable Aspie behavior.

My fiance thinks my neurodivergent daughter is just being a lazy teen when she doesn't want to take a shower.

>Long Update:

Buckle up. It gets r-slurred.

My fiance apologized and admitted that his reaction(s) were over the top and out of proportion for the situation.

He has been overwhelmed and rather than deal with his stuff he's been hyper focused on this one thing he doesn't have control over and getting upset. He admitted that he needs therapy to work this out for himself, but also we do as a family have things to work on.

But I do make sure to tell her how much I love her and how proud I am of her. Even if she tries to take a shower but then ultimately can't, I'm still proud of her for trying.

___

But she didn't even try?

___

Yes him being so upset is absolutely a red flag. But it's a red flag that he needs help

I will absolutely always choose my child before anyone else. Married or not. Living with her or not.

I grew up with a lot of ableist talk and sometimes I find myself regurgitating it to my daughter because it was how I learned and grew up.

STINKY

Yes she did also choose him. I would not have continued the relationship and moved in together if she was not comfortable.

____

So, /u/bonkersandtotallynutz completely bends the knee and starts addressing her fiance's actions as "red flags" and now they're looking for a marriage/family therapist.

Your child shouldn't have such a strong say in your relationship. Especially when this adult is seemingly the only person who cares about her hygiene.

So...how bad was the original offense? What did the finance do that was so evil? I'll let /u/totally bonkersandtotallynutz explain it

My (38F) fiance (39M) thinks my asd1 daughter (16F) is just being lazy and spoiled when she says she doesn't want to shower. The goal is for her to shower at least every other day. But sometimes she can't make herself do it. The idea of taking a shower and getting wet was sickening. I offered suggestions to help take the edge off, like taking a bath instead or I would just wash her hair for her or just do a whole body wipe down/sponge bath type thing but she said no because she would still have to get wet

She promised she would do it all tomorrow.

When I told my fiance he got very upset. He didn't say anything to her, just to me.

He didn't yell or go crazy or anything but he thinks she's manipulating me and I'm buying it. That I am just letting her get away with it.

He often says that not showering every other day is unacceptable.

It is of note that tonight she is watching her favorite streamer live, which leads my fiance to believe this behavior is manipulative.

_____

I can only imagine what this girl's room looks like. I bet it's cluttered, smells, and has all the trendy tiktok decorations.

She needs to take a shower.

_____

He is of the impression that "it's a ten minute thing, she could just bang it out and be done. You two spend more time talking about a shower and getting ready for a shower than she's actually in the shower."

He wants her to get therapy so she can shower regularly on her own. While I don't think therapy is bad at all, it won't "cure" this so to speak.

How do I not take it personal when it feels like he is attacking my kid and or my parenting??

How do humans life well?

____

He can start by leaving your butt.

____

I tell her she wasn't put on this earth to please other people, including me.

Your daughter will chronically stink and no one will ever "love her" like you do.

_______

The Ugly

Here's the ugly side of /r/autism; intersectionality.

"LilMarsey, this better not just be a train spotting post"

Oh, it's not. This is a basket case if I've ever seen one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/s/PBw37BMuIy

For context, I'm neurodivergent and also trans (ftm) and have known I was trans since I was a teen. I came out at 14 and started hormones at 17, I'm now 22.

My fiancee on the otherhand has always kind of known they were queer and for a long time just identified as gay. Even when we first started dating they identified as a gay man.

But through our relationship they have discovered more of themselves and now identify as a trans woman but use they/them pronouns.

They want to be taken out on nice dates, "shown off," and to have my cuddle up on them as ways to help them feel girly.

______

______

As for the dates, we don't have much money. In fact, we're in so much debt I had to take a loan from my 401k to be able to pay our bills.

______

_____

I don't know what else to do or how else to make them feel validated or girly. I try to compliment them but I guess I don't remember to enough.

Now, /u/thecircleisquiet is active in a few other subreddits. Most notably, /r/BPD.

This post especially caught my attention:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BPD/s/nlCwKF2FCG

But here's some screenshots:

Also, /r/AMA. This is actually very sad. It seems like she pulled a reverse McCurdy.

This is pretty ugly as well, but pretty typical for an FTM.

https://www.reddit.com/r/trans/s/mrFE5U4Eoi

See? This wasn't just train spotting.

_______

I hope y'all enjoyed my effortpost.

Greetings Dramatards, it's fricking cold in South Africa currently, and it's snowing in Sutherland, in the Northern Cape Province.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=458233760502109

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1147243579819012

And snow is extremely rare in south africa, so this is an especially cold winter At least for all of the inland provinces, record low temperatures, and all following on the tailcoats of the last El Nino weather phenomenon, means while the 2 years prior were abnormally wet, this year has been aggressively cold

https://snowreport.co.za/best-snow-photos-from-south-africa-lesotho-early-june-2024/

It's a running meme/steriotype that boers are immune to cold, or allergic to longpants

Which is where the gay boy shorts uniforms of the 1980s came from.

Lesotho (the country in the middle of SA) is also more prone to snowing, compared to the rest of the surrounding nation, due to its high elevation, and numerous mountain ranges.

Even high mountains in provinces not at all prone to snow, has light snow coverage on their peaks.

Anyways point is it is abnormal conditions in SA currently, even though SA is usually already pretty cold at this stage of the year in its climatic history.

---

All except the Free State and much of the Eastern Provinces of South Africa, in which regions are currently combatting some of the worst and most intense wildfires of the past 5 years.

https://www.earthnews365.co.za/update-of-fires-in-the-free-state/

This is because places like the Free State are very arid Semi-Deserts in large portions of the province, and the winter counter-intuitively has higher rates and risks of forest and veld fires than in the Summer. This is because while summer's heat definitely aggravates circumstances to high risks of literal spontaneous combustion, it is also the raining season for inlands in most of the country, and consequently there would be a watering of the earth to combat the heat.

In Winter, especially in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, despite the cold, the velds and forests are much more prone to combustion. This is because of the hyper drought which yearly besets southern africa, and the Cold counter-intuitively aggravates dry circumstances. The cold means less evaporation and less clouds, and the freezing of water which prevents the evaporation of whichever water mediums remaining even further.

When Cold Fronts arrive, they can bring massive freak winds with them, and it is in high wind situations where veld fires really thrive. This recent Sunday a massive Cold Front froze the whole center of the country over and brought with it 70km/h consistent winds, which are abnormal in their strength and consistency.

Several thousand small wildfires have been breaking out hourly for the past 3 days, and several hundred fires continue to burn in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal whom were both hardest hit.

https://www.facebook.com/FSUFPA/

The fast sustaining winds meant that even the flicker of embers would explode into roaring flames as the extreme drought made every leaf and blade of grass a tinderbox

---

i was helping my father and some other boers here in the province driver hydrant and fire-firefighting vehicles around yesterday afternoon and night.

Which is a lot less heroic than it sounds, basically I was driving a water-trailer around for the real men to do the hard work.

Farmers have organized into Brandwag, or burning vigilance since forever, and a smoke trail on the horizon usually has bakkies scrambled to come to the aid of your neighbours, even as out of sheer interest it is in your desire to extinguish such flames in their cradle, before they become an uncontrollable firestorm spreading outwards everywhere, additionally the wind can always always change.

The biggest r-sluration is that most farmers and municipal teams working are usually all amateurs and most commercial farmers of even the small type usually has a shitty fire-fighting wagon in their store-house of 5 years old and only once tested, as per regulations,

and thus the 1st responders always being the most untrained farmers who've never even held a firehose in their lives is always comical in our ineptitude, before the Provincial Professional Firefigting response squads arrive which usually can be hours if not half a day late as the country is large.

There's this one 80 year old grandma lady who still works for the Municipality whom have been dousing flames since sunday afternoon - she says the perpetual amateur mistake municipal workers and boers not used to fighting fire makes, is not to totally overdose simmering flames,

as perpetually the teams had to go back and re-extinguish fires because they had failed to completely douse embers in their totality, and certain carbon remains, even surrounded by water, eventually dries in the extremely dry Free State, and literally fricking begins anew!

Here is a professional rural firefighting vehicle unit, if it looks unprofessional because it's not a classic Euro/American city firetruck then realize that a regular 4x4 vehicle with a trailer is by far the superior required vehicle for transporting water over seldom tread rural dusty dirtroads in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal. Since the potholes, underdevelopment, extreme isolation and offroad rugged terrain conditions, means that fire-lorries meant for cities, are completely unsuited for the velds of South Africa.

there are however sometimes special dedicated water transporting vehicles used, but these often are too specialized for poor municipalities - a provincial Toyota 4x4 with a water-trailer works just as effectively as fancy crap.

---

anyways just telling you strags this, cuz i haven't responded to the shitload of comments of yesterday, will fix that soon

https://twitter.com/ug_chelsea/status/1810273828720758919

There were a lot of hits and in cities that were supposed to be protected by patriot like Kiev and Khrivoi Rog

https://twitter.com/menchosint/status/1809861278917091768

This patriot system that was destroyed 2 days ago and obviously pro Ukrainian claimed it's fake. Was supposed to protect khruvoi rog.

Ukraine started campaign that Russia supposedly hit some hospital with x101 missile

It's a slowed down video so you can compare that missile with couple of x101 hitting same target

Ukraine also didn't mention that main strike was at night and only focused at that hospital.

Ukraine put a lot of effort in this campaign

https://twitter.com/mylordbebo/status/1810419215599620181

But question should been what do they expect from it ? US already rushed saying they won't let Ukraine use its weapons on Russian soil. There also wouldn't be any new weapons for Ukraine and Israel with Gaza made sure nobody would give a frick about this event.

But what's important to me is

I been telling for months patriots ain't going to do a shit. And now after Ukraine received more patriots than Germany has, and Zelenskyy promised it would stop Russian bombings. We are enjoying how effortless Russian is bombing a city that has most patriot defence on earth. As I mention in the past, patriots can stop around 100 missiles a year. It's probably less in reality because factories that build those often get caught in fire and storages etc in nato countries get blown up like this happened 2 days ago:

Only a year ago they were proudly claiming patriots are shooting down kinzhals

And now they have to beg Israel to give them ammo

>Could Turn the Tide

If Zelenskyy poo right now it could turn the tide, I mean everything is theoretically possible.

With new Orlan drones Ukraine is now constantly also losing Himars vehicles

https://twitter.com/dd_geopolitics/status/1810611257856213352

The targets Russian hit yesterday was some factories and some electricity generators but that's just propping since Russian main goal is to send Ukraine into blackout during the winter.

The winter part will be very interesting because with constant blackouts a lot of Ukrainian will move to the west.

But don't worry to Bloomberg Zelenskyy promised a new counteroffensive and that he end this conflict by end of this year. And yesterday signed some agreements with Poland and Poland promised to him they will shot Russian missiles that enter Polish air space. It's a good promise is will be as effective as:

Russian missiles are just couple seconds in Polish air space, shooting them in Polish air space + making sure it falls in Polish soil is kinda very hard to do. Russia has radars in that area so if Polish missile hits Russian missile in Ukrainian air space it will be a direct involvement.

Edit: seems later Poland did an back-steep

Tusk on the idea of shooting down missiles in Ukraine's skies: we need NATO cooperation for this

We need unequivocal cooperation within NATO for this, because this kind of action does require joint NATO responsibility.

So it was just some food for Ukrainian to feel good yesterday

Edit: Ukrainian twitter channel today flex that it got patriot from Germany on 5 June and something (probably ammo) from Romania on 20 June

https://twitter.com/ukrreview/status/1810618910154043565

They couldn't pick a better day to flex about it

Introduction

I was scrolling the dreges of reddit for content, as you do..

I like looking in the BPD subreddit, usually I can find some of the juiciest drama there

_____

Now as many of you know, most diagnosed BPD cases are found in women.

That means a lot of posts on /r/BPD deal with relationships, romance and raging hysteria.

Though, sometimes you get a rare gem. A BPD male, or in this case, a self diagnosed BPD male.

____

Meet /u/FrankBuns

A twenty something that managed to land one of the most controversial posts in /r/BPD this month.

Quite the accomplishment!

>So, I don't know how this subreddit feels about self-diagnosis, but that's where I'm at right now.

>Some context, I've been dealing with a lot of deeply rooted emotional upheaval throughout my life; Depression, Anxiety, C-PTSD, you know the gist, all diagnosed professionally.

I'll go over some of that later, FrankBuns has been pretty open on reddit.

>But after I got into a serious relationship (that ended recently) I began to recognize my behaviors and thought patterns as more than just my personality.

>I've had a tendency to be somewhat of a hypochondriac, so I know to take research via Google with a grain of salt, but knowing the symptoms and how BPD presents itself, and the anecdotal experiences of others with diagnoses had really given me a new perspective of things, and when I read these stories

>I can't help but think "I do that too! I never realized until now!"

>But, as my previous therapists in the past have told me, I'm pretty self-aware. And I recognized that self-diagnosis can be beneficial, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't just imagining things

>so I discussed it with my current therapist, and after he went over the questions to see if I fit the bill, he told me that he doesn't think I have it.

>It left me really confused and unsure how to proceed.

>I'm not sure if I should take his word for it, or ask for a second opinion, or just focus on treating the symptoms as symptoms and care less about the diagnosis aspect.

>Does anyone else's opinions and beliefs crumble under suggestions? I believed that it's like a spot on match for my experience, but maybe I'm wrong, and it's just symptoms of my other issues imitating what looks like BPD?

The Controversy

Now surprisingly, despite all the times I've seen otherwise, the denizens of /r/BPD did not pat FrankBuns on the back or butt and say "welcome to the community!!"

Apparently, the communal braincell all redditors fight over was well and alive in this post's comments:

Why worry about the diagnosis. In my experience having a diagnosis doesn't do much for you aside from changing how doctors think about you. Worry about treating the symptoms you're experiencing and improving your quality of life. Diagnosis are just unnecessary labels that can come with stigma and lack of understanding.

FrankBuns: Because I want to get better, and idk, I feel like that would have to be the first step. I think there's a lot of reason in your comment, I'd like to think that even if I don't have BPD (which I still believe that I do) then learning the skills to handle it would be beneficial if not for dealing with my issues, then helping a loved one or friend in the future who might be going through the same stuff.

Then do DBT, anyone can do DBT.

Redditor Sneeding about "the system"

everything's a racket, it wouldn't exist in a capitalist society if it weren't.

dsm just allows clinicians to standardize care and makes billing easier, it's not any grand insight into human existence. look up some articles about dsm5 and professionals in the field who take exception with the changes from dsm4. It's just academics bickering, whose pet theories get to dominate.

Yes, I'm bitter. Grants Pass decision was a direct indictment of the failure of American care, we had 40 years of funding to provide treatment and people don't feel like we were effective now and now we aren't focusing on treatment anymore. This whole field dropped the ball and vulnerable people will suffer. Frick the dsm.

You'd be better off reading the bhagavad gita or dostoyevsky than the dsm if you're trying to heal.

____

Right about now, you may be asking:

"wait a sec, Lilmarsey, how do you know that this is actually a moid posting this and not an FtM?"

I'm so glad you asked, now you'll have to see it, too:

I will not be posting the other two pictures, you can go to r/dadsandboys and look at that yourself.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DadsAndBoys/comments/1d7jz07/roll_around_on_the_bed_with_me_daddy_24_boy/

His whole butthole was out

It makes sense that he'd have some of these traits, given that this is a

✨ homosexual ✨

____

Hmm...funny you should say that.

_____

mental illness comes with friends

FrankBuns has also posted about shrooms and has expressed interest in DMT.

He was also a chronic masturbator.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/10pvv17/oops/

FrankBuns also has a track record of being a bit of a hypochondriac.

Making posts like "what is this dark spot on my foot", and "why does my foot have orange spots"

https://i.imgur.com/gallery/r-askdocs-QPuy48p

He's also a very active furry, and stupid enough to facedoxx.

I'm sure you may also be wondering

"Wow! I wonder the relationship FrankBuns ominously mentioned went?"

I'm so glad you asked:

The "break"

As we all know, either party asking for a time out in a relationship usually bodes badly for relationship stability.

"Wow, that didn't last long, did it?"

>Me and my boyfriend met at our work, and he ended up asking me out on a date after we finished one day.

>We have been dating for around 6 months now

>It's your typical "One cares too much, one cares too little." Situation.

>We've both gotten a break from work, and instead of making plans together, he applied to a part-time job, took a summer volunteer position

>We both were upset and questioned the compatibility of our relationship, and I suggested we take a break

>but I'm willing to put in the work

>Tl;dr Boyfriend closes up when things get hard, I latch on, we're having trouble finding a balance.

_______

TLDR: typical redditor that I spent way too much time writing about

Disclaimer: This is a rant and will probably be be boring and contain no drama, sorry guyz

---

OWLCAT:

Owlcat is the double AA indie company which published the recent Pathfinder: kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the righteous games, with also the recent 40K: Rogue Trader game, usually they are my favorite publisher, but basically they made a secret ending so fricking complex and batshit insane , that I've been spending the past 24 hours using (wasting) my lifespan on the Pathfinder subreddits and forums,

bitching about how the fricking Secret ending riles me up so much beyond reason and how my mouth-foaming reaction to it is so wildly disproportionate to its actual importance to the world and life at large, but then again this site informs us to blow shit as wildly out of proportion as feasible, so I'm GOING TO

I've been having discussions with other straggots who've managed to complete this secret ending, who've accused me of being salty of not being able to figure it out myself, which is what has had me SEETHING and COPING and DILATING the entirety of last night

---

SECRET ENDING GUIDE VIDEO DROPPED:

This is in response to the even more hardcore community in the Pathfinder: WOTR community after, youtuber dropping a definitive guide to actually obtain the fricking much vaunted and gossiped about Secret Ending of the WOTR game, which had infamy since the games release back in SSeptember 2021, so the game is pretty much 3.5ish years old already at this point.

The youtuber in question, MortisimalGaming, has carved his niche as the premier CRPG game reviewer, and also being unique in the gayming reviewer space by actually 100% percenting fricking games, via obtaining all steam achievements, if achievements or trophies are a thing in said game, as you can imagine his autism functions on an entirely other level from average mortals, which is very impressive as according to himself he's actually a father, and has a son (What's your excuse dramatards! ) Despite his impressive steam Achievement portfolio, he maintains humility and claims that he considers himself not to really be a hardcore g*mer, or even especially good/talented, and merely that his literal occupation as a gaymer-tuber enables him indefinite time to lay siege to games, and obtain experience as to how game devs have their design philosophies cracked to be able to defeat challenges which would turn away average mortals.

He especially made a name for himself as someone who made very useful guides for Pathfinder and Larians' Divinity: Original Sin 2. So he has that turbo nerd cred in CRPGS

So you guys need to comprehend the sheer levels of autism required to know these things, and for people to follow them, they are neurodivergents to neurodivergents, to what neurodivergents are to normal people!

---

OBSCURE FORUM SLAPFIGHTS:

On forums I wont name, there had even been arguments that the Secret Ending of WOTR (Wrath of the Righteous) didn't exist, or was too fricking convoluted to figure out, or was even fricking bugged for many to complete. Since September 2021, many completionists even bitched and complained that the extreme and highly specific actions one must perform to fricking unlock the Secret Ending of WOTR, and there had been minor turbo-autism slapfights frick-you-got-mine peeps who had somehow obtained the achievement, and those that were seeking it.

Many people didn't even believe or know the fricking secret ending existed, until people datamined the game and found a Steam Achievement for it or utilized Unity Mods to data mine the fricking game and discover flags that needed to be triggered in ingame events, similar as to the Biowhere Mass Effect game where you needed to complete actions to enable the ability to even unlock choices later ingame.

And again, due to the size and complexity of WOTR, there had been a metric shitload of bugs which affected anything from abilities not doing what they described, to literal pivotal plot points to proccing because of bugs - Literally up until last month, massive gaming overhaul bugs and pathes, literally more than 3 years since release, have involved fixing game mechanics not working as intended or dialogue bugs.

For many the entire Secret Ending was impossible, because bugs would prevent specific needed plot interactions at just one specific moment, meaning if they fricking did just that one thing wrong, the rest of their actions working towards the secret ending was entirely moot.

There had been guides to the secret ending, but prior to MortisimalGaming's guide, they had all been flawed, outdated or didn't take into consideration of bugs, cuz the writer themselves weren't affected by them. So Mortisimal dropped a mini nuke yesterday. with how comprehensive and complete his guide is, especially after Owlcat devs fixed most of the plot bugs after 3 years.

---

SECRET ENDING HAS LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG REQUIREMENTS:

And oh my god - just to make the rest of you neurodivergents on rDrama.net understand the level of autism involved in this shit - the video which I know none of you will click on, is a colossal 35 fricking minutes lonnnnnng

Just to make you guys appreciate the monumental amount of shit you guys have to do right accomplish this secret ending.

The effort to do this to unlock the secret ending, is wildly, wildly, wildly, wildy, wildly disproportionate to accomplish this. What's even more when i verbalized this frustration (autism) to other frickers on Pathfinder forums they just blocked me or told me it was totally easy and reasonable.

I'm going to waste your lifespan explaining why this shit made me

---

PATHFINDER KINGMAKER HAD SIMILAR ISSUES:

Back when Pathfinder: Kingmaker was released, it also had a secret ending, which the devs explicitly alluded to in their Kickstarter campaign, when they as an indie company had no capacity to fund themselves out of pocket, and they had actually went to monumental effort to both create this secret ending, to cater to their biggest kickstarter patrons.

When Pathfinder: Kingmaker was released back in 2018, like many CRPGs riding on the renewal of Obsidians Pillars of Eternity, they were overly ambitious in their inclusion of their Kingdom Management simulator portion of their game, and ironically this Kingdom Management was very unpopular and very controversial for many customers and even original Kickstarter backers.

The Kingdom Management was so controversial that it divided the fanbase, and actually almost cost the fricking devs sales of the game, as early reviews were so largely negative, stating that the actual adventuring and RPG mechanics was fun, but its tethering towards the Kingdom simulation basically made them stop playing or even refund the game!! the poor devs were forced to spring into lightning speed, to create an option to automate the Kingdom Management, to entirely skip this shit. I don't know if this was during the Early access phase as it was during my time at university.

But even this automated Kingdom button would be controversial Because basically, the actual events of you deciding with your advisors, and determining whether your kingdom would be evil or orderly was interesting and well written, and the manner in which you as a burgeoning new fantasy ruler have to deal with various crisis was intriguing,

BUT THE AUTOMATED setting meant that the fricking game made default choices for you, and bypassing much choice which was equally unsatisfying and COMPLETELY removed the roleplaying from the Kingdom part of the game which was pretty baked into the rest of the game, so you WERE missing out on a great deal of story and roleplay if you fricking went with this option.

It was a lose lose situation.

---

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/252382-pathfinder-kingmaker-definitive-edition/78928689

"Just know that in making it auto you will forfeit receiving any accomplishments that are normally granted by doing it yourself. Not sure what accomplishments as of yet tho.. I also don't know if you still need to visit your kingdom once a month if it's set to auto"

---

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/cff5a0/game_would_have_been_more_fun_without_kingdom/

"Beneath The Stolen Lands is so much more fun than the main game that I can't progress past the 2nd chapter in it because management sucks. I wish the game was like NWN1/2 with more of an adventure/crawl rather than loads of dice roll events trying to frick you every month in your Kingdom where Advisors will fail due to bad RNG and then continue to fail as they become worse."

"Auto is not a solution as you no longer have a say in anything and it ruins roleplaying. The management would have been fine if it had a "Off" button where failure in events and game overs relating to it were disabled but you coud still make choices and customize your kingdom in the usual way."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/cff5a0/game_would_have_been_more_fun_without_kingdom/eu9hql7/?context=8

"The only issue I have with Kingdom Management is that it's all stick and no carrot. Aside from a vague relationship between the kingdom stats and the artisans, you don't really get anything from having a booming kingdom versus one on the verge of revolt."

"If higher kingdom stats increased the number of merchants in your capital, conferred bonus stats on your party members, or had some other mechanical interaction with the game; I would consider it much less of a nuisance. There are the projects that give you bonuses while in your claimed lands, but pretty much every new chapter takes you out of your land so they never really matter. Artisans are nice, but their random nature makes them questionable - especially on a first run where you don't really know what you're getting from them."

https://steamcommunity.com/app/640820/discussions/0/3393916911755161624/

"Yeah they really really need to either let all your "potential" advisors actually take part to keep up with all the events if you are on top of things or, they need to make it so that all events pop up at the beginning of the month. I suppose its not really realistic but, neither is having an event pop on the 30th that will auto fail once it rolls over to the first of the month."

---

KINGDOM MANAGEMENT SUX:

The issue was that this Kingdom Management was possibly one of the worst of rulership simulations ever created in the entirety of gaming. In a vacuum it would be fine if not enjoyable, but the manner in which you as a player are introduced to fricking the management mechanics is horrific and highly cruel and unfair.

You received staggered information on the importance of significant mehcanics, like your need of Advisors which are critical, and critical to get as early as humanly possible. The game doesn't inform you, but basically you are in a massive stress inducing timer the very moment you begin the campaign, and if you camp spam too much, you will enable time to pass to much to the point of no return.

You as a fricking 1st time player will never know this, and for 90% of players, for whom this will be their 1st and ONLY playthrough, will only realize this calamity 20 hours into the game, past the point of no return, and when it is beyond their capacity to salvage their situation.

In the early game, in the 1st chapter, the way you are SUPPOSED to play, is make a beeline straight towards all Advisors to unlock their capacity to govern your various different parts of your government. You AS A Green fresh faced new will not know this, will not know that you are on a timer, or even WHERE on the overwolrd map to find them, or even that there will exist departments in your governments to fricking need a post in lategame.

Depending on which routes you take on the overworld, you will obtain needed Advisors based on pure fricking luck if you go in blindly. Even guides covering the RPG character builds dont often warn players of this critical fact.

And why is this critical?! Especially early game? Because the Kingdom Management will throw crises at you with incrementally more difficulty, which if you need to level your Advisors against over time. If you are up shit creek because your advisors were discovered too late, and have not been able to level them up in tandem with the increasingly difficulty of crisis management, then you will very quickly find a point of no return. Because guess the fun part of this shit Your Advisors ONLY levels up on successful crisis handling,

meaning if you fail even ONCE you will initiate the cockup cascade into your eventual demise, and if your underleveled Advisor, whom you had no way of fricking knowing would be important down the line was underleveled , then the cockup cascade is basically guaranteed

Basically the game would retroactively severely punish for suboptimal decisions you had made for as many as 20-30 hours, when you literally didn't even know you were making a decision at the time.

---

LONGTERM RETROACTIVE PUNISHMENTS:

It reminded me of X-COM which was a semi-roguelike which explicitly had baked in its design philosophy to have the player fail down the line, but to manage failure against success, I really fricking hated his game it too would punish you 20 hours down the line, and past the point of no return.

It reminded me of why RTS genre games would be by order of magnitudes less popular than regular shooters or other multiplayer games. If you lose or screw up or make a mistake, you are punished immediately and the consequences are inconsequentially short - you go back to teh starting line.

But if you make a mistake on an RTS game, even and usually especially a single player campaign, you will only realize your mistake maybe 1 hour into play, and will realize a suboptimal choice your had made strategically in the very beginning of the game is now retroactively punishing you 1 hour into the game, leaving you to the slow burn RTS death or quitting, yet even such a setback only ever takes an hour or afternoon of your lifespan.

What was especially aggravating and cruel about Pathfinder: Kingmaker's bullshit Kingdom Management, was that you would be punished retroactively into the game, for as much as 20-40 hours of gameplay! For a bad choice you didn't know you were making. For traditional games, or games which aren't as ruthless as XCOM, you pick yourself up from the dust and just fricking restart the mission. But for Kingmaker, you would effectively be throwing away 40 hours of play, and even if you willed yourself to fricking restart all the grueling effort, and wasting through plot twists which you thus already know now with hindsight, ruining the retread - this basically has a design philosophy in competing areas, to test your roleplay of a character against forewarned knowledge just to succeed in the fricking, which is NOT roleplaying

Even Dark Souls, is never this punishing to players (also it's not that hard, KEEP YOURSELF SAFE FromSoftsFantrags), the actual moment to moment failure maybe robs you of 1/2 hour of your life. And even crap builds can be and are expected to play through by the core design philosophy of Dark soulshit.

I really fricking despise thee notion of having your endeavor in a game be pointless, and especially despise the notion of being Retroactively be punished by devs, which is also why I personally hate Roguelikes.

---

PLOT OF KINGMAKER:

The other important thing which raised some in the CRPG shadows of the internet, was the difficult and convoluted manner in which peeps were able to unlock the secret ending of the game, which was similarly complex, but not nearly to the same degree as that of WOTR.

Summary of PLOT: Basically you and a bunch or brokeass mercenary strags are hired by Aldori dorks to subdue the massive banditry of the Stolen Lands and hopefully induce some level of stability into this historically unstable shithole, and as rewards, whichever loser mercenaries succeed and survive would be acknowledged and raised as a Baron/Baroness of the region by the neighbours of the Stolen Lands they just "conquered" to basically be their backyard buffer against banditry.

Your straggy main character becomes a Baron/ess and thus must thus play Sim City from Heck in the next 5 years, and basically put out the fires of calamity after calamity, as your new fledgling Barony appears to have the worst case of Bad Luck on the entire fricking planet, and is just fricking besieged by problems beyond counting. You manage sewage in the morning and fight off bandit invaders in the afternoon, and it appears like your new nation state is just filled to the brim with fricking 5th columnists hellbent of sabotaging your new nationbuilding project at every turn, and you also have to stop invasions of Fey Fairy frickers from the Fairy Fey dimension (not joking)

Basically it seems like the fricking Gods are fricking conspiring to burn down your new young Barony, and mid-game plot twist, after having faced off hordes or rampaging bandits, trolls and Barbarians (Micks ), you find out to your disbelief that there ACTUALLY ARE demigods conspiring to r*pe your kingdom to the ground!

The plot twist is that Narissa, a sexy Fey dryad treelady :marseyfoxxylove: chick, whom helped you from the very beginning of the game to overthrow the Bandit King to establish your Barony in the 1st place, is also conspiring to overthrow your new Barony as well. And has been behind every turn and twist and invasion and calamity which has befallen your Barony since you took charge!

The end game has you kill this cc*nt to finally establish peace and prosperity in the Region of the Stolen Lands, and you become a good/bad/r-slurred ruler whatever.

The super duper SECRET ending of the game, is you finding out WHY Narissa has been sabotaging not just your new Kingdom and that of the Bandit King before you arrived on the scene, but basically EVERY single kingdom and nation state in the Stolen Lands for the literal past 1000 years. In FACT you realize that the very reason the Stolen Lands have been so historically unstable and prone to banditry and chaos and shit has been because of Narissa all along!!!!!! And that she has basically sabotaged the nationbuilding of every single nation state ever endeavored in the region for the past millennium acting as this demigod 5th columnist over and over, breaking and sabotaging every single concurrent state or kingdom after one another.

You find out WHY the frick she would do this in the SECRET ending, as she had been cursed and her own Fey kingdom been cursedraped by the super straggy Lantern King in Feytopia (another dimension connected to your fantasy world, where the barrier was weak in the Stolen Lands) because she had made a failed coup against another Fey someshit

As punishment, she has to fill a magic jar with the grains of sand, where very single grain of sand represents ONE KINGDOM which she must destroy, in order to undestroy her magic Fey kingdom in turn, and thus she has been in constant 5th columnisting in the Stolen Lands for the past 1000 years.

======

It's a pretty good ending and extra story with a full extra 10 fricking hours of gameplay and fights after the traditional ending after you defeat Narissa. You can even redeem Narissa or romance the b#tch if you are an evil overlord!! (WHICH I DID BY THE WAY)

---

PAINFUL REQUIREMENTS SUX:

My problem?!!!!! Ulocking this super fricking r-slurred ending is in my opinion too convoluted and r-slurred and unfair1!!!111!!!!

Some buttholes on the sub or forum would be like "get gud" and how THEY totally fricking easily got the secret ending of Kingmaker and how it was all logical and shit, and only subhumans could not figure out how to unlock the Secret ending, and I was like

Because I actually DID UNLOCK THE SECRET UNDING in my 1st playthrough of Kingmaker, even as I was getting anally keelhauled by the Kingdom Management system, but the r-sluration was that I had done so with pure fricking unadulterated luck, I didn't accomplish it through any amount of thinking or logic or intuition or choices, I just stumbled my way through the right choices like and idiot-savant-r-slur and this ENRAGED MEEEEEEEEEEE

Because was just as likely to fail as succeed and would have been robbed of the choice 100 hours into the game had i been luckless enough not to have fricking made the right choices to unlock the Secret Ending in Kingmaker, and the ability to prone-bone the Fey tart

I am willing to bet half of the buttholes who got the steam Achievement of completing the secret ending had only done so with luck, and 50% sure as heck didn't obtain it through skill or reasoning

Like look at this shit to do it right!!

https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-kingmaker/guides/Best_Ending

LIKE LOOK AT THE SHEEEER AMOUNT OF SHIT YOU HAVE TO DO

https://www.pcg*mer.com/the-long-road-to-the-secret-ending-of-pathfinder-kingmaker/

Also you can secret romance the Badguy Narissa at the end if you're evil enough, and some had comments about her:

On a Steam forum thread where players theorized about the possibility, one suggested you'd be better off romancing literally any other NPC, since they "don't look like lettuce." A player who was more intrigued by the possibility replied, "She has 36 in charisma so she is a good looking lettuce."

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Now normally an ambitious game which creates content fearless if it will be missed by many, and is antithetical to games like Skyrim which hold your hand with markers, I would like.

After all many peeps complained that even story driven games like Life Is Strange have railroading throughout its plot, and many choices don't have meaning anyways,

But I hate this type of content blocking just as much, because you as a player may never even be able to KNOW that you were at a point in making a choice or your inaction would lock you off from a Secret Ending, and thus be retroactively punished by a game like Kingmaker by as much as 90 fricking hours worth of playtime, realizing too late you can't go back and change your decision!!!!

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RAILROAD BLOCKS:

I found this comment chain on a sub which perfectly encapsulates and verbalizes my frustration with this problem.

On the surface the ambition of these indie devs should be infinitely more celebrated over camp Triple AAA story slop where minor inconsequential choices never seem to affect the outcome of the main story in Developers like TellTales games, which have been accused of such, but are still highly revered by their main fanbase regardless.

Because it is the ultimate INVERSE problem, where you are railroaded too steeply in TellTale and other story games, instead it is TOO easy to block yourself out of specific lategame Secret endings like in Owlcat because you didn't fricking adhere to Adventure-Game-Moonlogic

It instead transforms otherwise praiseworthy design philosophy of ultimate choice into the g*mer's hands, as actually unintentionally blocking out too easily. Like you can be fricking AWARE of the secret ending an even be able to intuition your way into solving the problem of WOTR (Wrath of the Righteous) Secret Ending, but if you so much as unintentionally made a fricking mistake and made a specific binary chocie in the goddarn PROLOGUE of the game,

CONGRADULATIONS, you have just blocked yourself out of the secret ending of the game!!!!!!

I personally don't even mind bad endings in games if they are proportionally telegraphed by the devs ingame, like for example the Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines, has several bad and really bad endings, all of which are telegraphed over and over and OVER from the very beginning, and outside of very specific actions, none of the fricking endings are locked out to you, including a couple of "Secret Endings", or at least as cruelly easily like that of fricking WOTR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/9xih5a/guide_to_the_true_ending_all_the_spoilers_by_free/

"On one hand- this is awesome that "true ending" can be obtained only if someone is really determined to do so (I guess that person who wrote this guide in the first place must have spent few hundred hours to achieve this), but on the other- It's rather poor design choice to make it so railroaded (it seems like there's very little room for straying from the path, i.e.- failing Vordakai's curse check or killing Tartuk first- which is most reasonable choice as he buffs Hargulka). This feels sort of "gamey" for an RPG (I mean- it wouldn't be possible without being able to start over with previous knowledge of meta-game)."

"My point is that it takes very specific approach to reach this ending- not that it's too hard. If there was- for example- any indication that killing Hargulka first will yield different outcome than killing Tartuk than it'd be fine, now it seems arbitrary. I don't mind that it has to be done in certain order (although it would be cool to have such ending for characters that don't want to act compassionately towards Nyrissa), making encounters harder and being devoted to the goal, but it'd be nice if it could be achieved by wider array of characters and not necessarily gated behind skill checks (what's the point of reloading game only to have single RNG result different?)."

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YOUTUBE DISCUSSIONS:

Anyways I basically triggered myself with the release of this video, as it confirmed just how painfully specific the path ahead to the secret ending is in the game, even compared to that of Kingmaker.

A lot of peeps praise Owlcat and the fact that devs would include such a mountain of content probable never to be seen by the majority of players, which is an admirable design philosophy, especially in comparison to railroading Triple AAA slop,

but I personally feel like I basically fallen out of love with Owlcat because of this - it ticked me off beyond reason.

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Even a couple of Youtube-comments, through the usual blind praise towards the Youtube or circlejerk of the subjectmatter, also mirrors my complex feelings on the matter of the Secret Ending and how it is implemented in WOTR

"Very convoluted & cryptic way to get to the "secret" ending tbh. In fact it is so convoluted that I have even heard an opinion that conditions to meet are so "unfair" that a lot of people were apparently using some save editor tool to alter in-game date so it would unlock the ending (which apparently works)."

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R-SLURRED MORALITY OF SECRET ENDING:

there's also other reasons why I hate the Secret Ending.

Basically the main Posterchild Badguy, is Areelu Vorlesh, whom opened the Worldwound onto the fanatasy planet, which is basically an interdimensional portal staright to a demonic heck, and the setting of the game has been basically for 130 years the mortal humans/elves/dwarves have been fihghting desperate crusades to close this Worldwound super portal to save all of mortalkind

So Areelu Vorlesh is basically super fantasy hitler, and have caused absolutely tremendous suffering for the peeps of this fantasy world, yet in order to fricking fascilitate the Secret Ending, you have to fcucking understand her side of teh story,

which is interesting and cool, but morally can be r-slurred. She basically has that anime-cliche where she has a sad traumatic backstory, so all the horrors he had inflicted upon others is totally cancelled out

Additionally, you absolutely cannot finish the Secret ending as a Legend mythic path, which sees your protagonist giving up all their magic demigod powers, to become a Legend of mortalkind, and basically rule as an average everybody to save the planet from demonic invasion, and erect your own nationstate on the ashes of the Worldwound

It's my favorite mythic path because I enjoy narratives where you relinquish extreme power in favor of responsibility, yet due to the zany twister morality of the Owlcat devs this is inherently antithical to the Secret Ending, which sees you ascending into Godhood basically.

It sort of feels like the implied BEST ending is only achievable through the avarice for ultimate power for your character, instead of a form of redemption where you realize to live your remaining years amongst mortals as a hero - it's fricking weird

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SOME MORE YOUTUBE DISCUSSIONS:

Others on the youtube video share the sentiment that the requirements are too extreme, and feel like the game is sort of retroactively punishing them as in the eyes of the devs as they had no forewarned knowlegde to accomplish the demanding tasks to fulfill the requirements of the Secret Ending.

ALSO by the way, like the Kingdom Management in the 1st Pathfinder game, there is a Crusade Management system midgame, which is basically Heroes of Might and Magic

So if you pretty much hate that part, and hate Heroes of Might and magic as a genre, and want it automated like in the 1st pathfinder game, once again you are fricking shit out of luck, and have to engage with this system, in order to fulfill the requirements of teh Secret Ending.

I personally love Heroes of Might and Magic, and enjoy this "mini" game but can absolutely empathize with peeps who would abhor this shit, just as I had personally abhorred the Kingmaker's Kingdom Management system

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CLOSURE:

Basically in summary I really really fricking hate this Secret Ending, I hate the complexity of its requirements, I hate the fact that it's near impossible to do on your first run, I hate the fact that you can even realize of its existence and even figure out somewhat how to do it, but have fricking unknowingly locked yourself out via an unwitting earlygame choice - and I hate HATE the feeling that I am being punished retroactively by developers for having made a "bad" or suboptimal choice

Especially in very very Loooong games like the two Pathfinder games each of which can easily take a 1st run from 70-100 hours. Imagine the cruel sensation of playing for 50 fricking hours, only to realize midgame that you've unknowingly cucked yourself out of a secret choice you would have wanted to make, and that the ingame files are complex with tracking plot-flags, that even using Unity-mods are basically impossible to fix your unwitting frick up.

Even bad endings on Dishonoured, with its chaos system is telegraphed by the game throughout and you can change course midway.

This Secret Ending of WOTR leaves a very sour taste in my mouth