Prev: Ch. 1 Ch. 2

At the end of year 251, Mostibkun was left with three issues:

• Shortage of fuel, with work underway to drain a pool with a few logs in it to get some charcoal to initiate coke production.

• Not a ton of stored drinks, no plump helmets, and no plump helmet spawn.

• Besieged by the undead.

We jump right into year 252: Mostibkun, "Orangecat": Chapter 3 "A Brief Opening"

SPRING

1st Granite

I'm not too creative or good with words so I'll just begin my time as annalist by introducing myself. I'm Nil 'santb' Akrulgutid, the colony's woodcutter.

Me, about to burn the last piece of fuel in the fort

I haven't seen a tree in almost a year. Decent herbalist too. Ain't like I enjoy going outside more than any other dwarf, but I don't mind it, and I have jack shit to do down here. Somehow I ended up working in the forge. I've seen it done a few times, I guess. Since I have the time I also thought I'd write this year's log. Long story short, as I was waiting for the furnace to heat up, I read the last of the previous year's entry and learned I was burning the last little bit of the fortress' fuel. Luckily there was still enough unburnt for us to refine some coke. One problem solved, and faster than getting that pool completely drained.

3rd Granite

Plenty of coke on the way now. Fuel supply secured.

6th Granite

We're not dangerously low on drink but there's not a comfortable amount either. Somehow we wound up with no plump helmet spawn. One of the cats dragged a bag of raspberry seeds out of some barrel somewhere, though, so we can try to plant those in our little walled courtyard where the animals are penned. Raspberry wine sounds different.

7th Granite

With no fuss, the invaders just quietly left. They might have been gone a couple days before we even noticed. Another problem solved!

We're opening the gate. Now the caravan should be able to come, but we'll still plant the raspberries outside the gate.

11th Granite

There are so many stray dogs here too, for a fortress named "cat". We're building a dog pit to train them as zombie fodder. The cats are too smart for that treatment.

18th Granite

Someone remembered to rescind the prohibition on going past the gate. Plenty of stuff to bring in, especially logs.

27th Granite

There's some worry that the partially-drained pond could provide an entranceway for unwanted visitors.

We've begun covering it.

Drink stocks quickly depleting. I don't think they'll last until the caravan, but raspberries and also some sweet pods are on the way.

3rd Slate

Though we are no longer besieged, there are still no migrants.

9th Slate

Dwarf spirits feel lower. No one's mentally breaking yet, but it's not a good trend. Crafted stone always helps the mood. Making cabinets for each bedroom and cat statues to fill the hallways.

25th Slate

The child Tun Akumrisen is now by far the unhappiest of all of us. I can't see why. The worst that's happened to her is getting caught in the rain. She does disdain leisure. Maybe she's such a maximizer of work that the frivolities of childhood are unsuited for her.

28th Slate

We are still haunted by the ghost of one dwarf named Sigun.

This does seem to upset people.

2nd Felsite

Raspberry wine is delicious. We'll be making drink from sweet pods soon too. Booze supplies are no longer an immediate concern.

3rd Felsite

DESECRATION!

No wonder Sigun cannot rest. I noticed a dwarf corpse in our garbage heap next to the bones of vermin. We're building him a coffin immediately.

17th Felsite

We've dug out a common tomb and quickly installed the first coffin.

19th Felsite

Finally, Commander Fath laid the ghost to rest. We'll get another coffin ready right away - someone will probably fill it soon enough.

27th Felsite

Our dog pit is increasingly filled with war dogs.

SUMMER

Fuel supply's secured, the siege lifted itself, and we have a decent stockpile of drinks. A good spring! We continue to armor our squad and improve our habitations.

18th Hematite

More dwarves are in a somewhat low mood. Some seem to desire prayer. Why don't they pray? Do they need an altar?

21st Hematite

The child Tun is thoroughly miserable now, and it's still not clear why. We worry about her. Perhaps she is still traumatized by memories of Sigun's ghost?

23rd Hematite

Tun interrupted 60horses' gem-cutting just to complain about everything and nothing.

24th Hematite

Though we can go outside again, Commander Fath's been hoarding all the tree-cutting duties. The pool by the front gate is covered in stone now, and a floodgate connection to the brook makes it a cistern we can refill.

25th Hematite

My wife Kivish had a baby girldwarf, Lor! We managed to grow our population even without mass migration.

1st Malachite

And that's all we're growing for now - no migrants this season either.

2nd Malachite

The child Tun has resorted to drowning her sorrows in alcohol. It's good to see her start to grow up and make mature decisions.

4th Malachite

We started digging exploratory tunnels on one of the deep levels, and immediately struck gold. Luck is with us!

6th Galena

We began construction on a small hospital. Sarvesh, the miner, has been to the doctor a few times and thinks he could figure out how to diagnose what's wrong with a dwarf. This makes him the most qualified for our Chief Medical Dwarf. Maybe I'm better off not working as a lumberjack right now.

AUTUMN

Summer was a good period of consolidation. The squad's full suits of iron armor are almost complete, and our home is a little more comfortable. Stockpiles of food, booze, and fuel are all healthy.

9th Limestone

The Cudgel of Cats is now fully armored in iron. We'll make enough weapons for each dwarf to have their favorite now.

11th Limestone

The caravan has arrived!

Piling up figurines and gems at the trade depot.

14th Limestone

Well. Mistem the broker was too stingy, got the merchant all riled up, and now we can't trade this year either. There wasn't much we badly needed from them, but now we still have no plump helmet spawn. I miss good old dwarven wine.

That nasty goblin that says it's from our people says the traders will want fish next year. If they're willing to trade. Not the most useful request for us...

27th Limestone

The squad is now armed with their favorite melee weapons.

4th Sandstone

Now that we're more established, the squad will start alternating months between full-time military training and other fortress work.

The first month of training is underway.

22nd Sandstone

Migrants have arrived. Nine of them, one a child. They include Reg, a supremely talented woodcrafter, Edem, a dwarf-famous musician now assigned to the temple, and Athel, a veterinary gender affirmation surgery practitioner.

9th Timber

Poor Tun is still miserable, though she has no unmet needs and only a few things annoyed her recently. No one can figure out what's wrong.

WINTER

We finally received migrants and a failed caravan. Maybe the goblin turned the merchant sour on us. I've never seen them so testy before. But we are doing well enough that the missed trade opportunity is not much of an inconvenience, except for missing dwarven wine.

1st Moonstone

We are again besieged! Nine of them, six zombies and these "dark hunters" that are their masters? caretakers? companions? We saw them as they came over the top of our fortress' hill.

No, more. At least 20 shambling corpses. Too many to face.

2nd Moonstone

The gate is shut once more. But the cats do as they please, of course, and some are trapped outside.

9th Moonstone

HORROR

The monsters have no mercy. The squad's training feels grimmer, more determined.

24th Moonstone

The undead continue to roam. We see them ravage another cat, and a couple more are unaccounted for. We hope some of them fled.

24th Opal

Our cistern now feeds an operational well. Hopefully we won't flood the fortress, and hopefully we'll never need to actually DRINK the stuff. We finally retrieved those logs that were almost our last chance for fuel.

Life under siege continues comfortably enough, except for thinking about those poor cats outside.

28th Opal

Tun is somehow less miserable and now she only says she's "unhappy". Who knows.

17th Obsidian

Dwarves hang out long enough in a besieged fortress, they start calling each other funny little pet names. 10 more of us have nicknames now, @gaslamper @WillowWalker @MatsurisAhoge @Downie @mineral @BFBugleberry @I_am_living_in_your_walls @CustodialCrusade @IslamWasRightAboutWomen and @Spysix . Curious names we come up with stuck down here.

22nd Obsidian

An undwarflike loss

The alpaca couldn't survive in the fortress halls - there's nothing to graze on. But why didn't it graze in the pen enclosure?

26th Obsidian

Athel's first patient

Seeing as how we're more cat- than dog-focused, we've gender affirmed most of the male dog population to limit their numbers. The cats are all still intact especially since some were lost to the dead, but if their numbers grow too much we could transition tomcats to tomboycats.

SPRING

As I turn this chronicle over to the next author, I think I've given up hope about the woodcutting. We're fairly well-prepared for siege this time. I'll focus on my military training.

The state of our fort:

Surface: Raspberry field, enclosed animal pen, barracks, dog pit, and wood heap

Upper dirt level: Dormitory, well, cistern

Lower dirt level: Workshops, farm fields, food barrels, temple, trade depot, general stockpile

1st level: Bedrooms, hospital, dining room, kitchens, offices, stone pile

2nd level: Furnaces, jeweler shop, ore & gem pile, bar & block pile, common tomb

So at the end of my year:

• Under a different siege

• Still no plump helmets but plenty of drinks

• Tons of fuel and food, plenty of iron, some logs

• Mostly contented dwarves, but some a little unhappy

• THEY KILLED CATS

I did save scum once trying to take on the invaders, I mostly considered it a freebie as I reacquainted myself with squad controls but it was also clear that the zombies were a fight, but a single "dark hunter", whatever that is, was a wipe.

I also have no idea if my hospital is operational. All the stuff is certainly there but I don't know how "locations" work. It also seems harder than I remember to figure out the dwarves' mental state and reasons for their emotion.

I was waiting for migrants to come to start giving spectator names, then got distracted by the siege immediately after migrants. So I did pick the first ten unused names from the poll but only assigned them in the last days of the year without time for anyone's dwarf to do anything interesting.

I will DM @Spysix with the save files later tonight.

Player list in order of succession:

@60horsesinmyherd

@Cream_a_da_crop

@s_a_n_t_b

@Spysix

@searcher

@BFBugleberry

@Rankine_911

@Yasharn

@Losercel

@Ninjjer

@duck

If you are a dramatard of a certain vintage (though there are news reports of this scam still appearing in 2023[1]) you have likely received some spam mail about some secret society or secret method or an anecdote about someone using said tactics to become rich and famous. This mail offers you some sort of free pamphlet which will divulge these secrets in exchange for your mailing address. Do this and you will get a pamphlet which just make more promises and tell you to buy more books for absurd prices. You will then continually get more male selling books at very inflated costs of 150$ to 700$ a book.

This spam empire is built off the back of one schizo named Frank R. Wallace, real name Wallace Ward, and is being continued by his son Mark Hamilton, real name Wallace Ward. F Wallace was a research chemist at DuPont until he quit over a declining stock price he blamed on bad ideology. He then moved into self help publishing with [Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life by Using the Advance Concepts of Poker] a book where F Wallace purports to teach you how to win every poker game without cheating via lying, hypnosis, and picking the proper opponents.

This would later be expanded into a philosophy called Neo-Tech/Neo-Think/Zonpower which is an unearthly mix of Objectivism, Scientology, and Posadists. F Wallace has written tons of books of the subject many of which have been renamed, combined, or rewritten alot of times. At least in the 90s the primary text of the movement seemed to be The Neo-Tech Discovery[2].

The core of Neo-Tech philosophy is pretty standard objectivism but with more technobabble. The central idea is about neocheating which is just a fancy way of saying lying. So capitalism is based on reason and reason is truth and all forms of mysticism are "neocheats" to trick people into giving away money ("Give me money and authority because I am holy and God says so" "Give me money and power so I can help the poor" ect ect). To counter this you need to follow "fully integrated honesty" or just not lying. He adds in a bit of Dr. Julian Jaynes Bicameral mind theroy to explain why humans seem so drawn to those neocheating mystics. The only real interesting chapter is chapter 4[3] where he talks about how Dupont's stock prices fell due to them chasing altruistic ideology over creating valuable products (or in modern chud language "go woke get broke"). This is mostly just randian pro capitalism but F Wallace has some first hand business experience which gives him perspective Rand doesnt have. Chuds may also like learning HR woman nonsense is a universal problem among business. he is also very obsessed with humans becoming scientifically imortal. He also puts this very funny table at the end:

There are many more neo-tech books like Neothink which teaches you how to think outside of the Bicameral mind and Neo-Tech Cosmic Business Control by Mark Hamilton which outlines a future business model which removes neo cheating bosses and HR women. The model was used for Wallace and son Wallace's Neo-Tech Publishing (NTP) Company called Integrated Management Associates which basically runs on MLM on principles where everyone is their own boss and probably explains why neo tech affiliated people send so much spam.

The true magnum opus of the Neo-Movement is Zonpower where he reveals that following neo-think will let you become an all powerful Zon and also that any civilization that has nuclear power and space shits has to follow Neo-tech as any non neo tech civilization will nuke itself. He also rants about "goy politics" and criminal minded goyium [4]

Neo-Tech became somewhat popular in the early days of the internet and usenet groups with users having their own email list and group with members frequently spamming other groups with posts[5] and also causing so much shit on the objectivist and philosophy groups that all talk of neo-tech had to be banned [6].

Why Neo-Tech Sandbagged the Objectivist "Leaders"

As previously done with selected officials in government along with certain white-collar-hoax businesspeople, Neo-Tech sandbagged various self-proclaimed leaders and strutting authorities on the Internet as part of the world's biggest poker game. On the Objectivist newsgroup (apo), Neo-Tech sandbagged its flamers along with many ersatz Objectivists. Thus, through those sandbagged dupes, Neo-Tech achieved its apo agenda. ...The results of that agenda will be published in the forthcoming book titled Flame-War Justice to be released in 1997 by Neo-Tech Worldwide.

Is part of the Neo-Tech agenda to "convert" apo Objectivists into Neo-Tech Objectivists? No. Such an agenda is much too narrow and minor -- a waste of time. Neo-Tech instead sandbags self-appointed leaders and false authorities who are harmful to advancing Objectivism.

It seems like Neo-Tech planned on ever publishing a book about these flame war tatics.

Other drama came when F Wallace was tried for 3 charges of tax evasion and insisted on using his own custom oath which replaced mention of truth with his own term "fully integrated Honesty" while he was intally denied this and charged on all 3 counts in 1991. He appealed on the basis of being denied his first amendment rights to religion (but F Wallace I thought religion was neocheating!) and was allowed to use his special oath in a 1993 re trial. He was again convicted on 3 accounts of tax fraud. [7] It turns out saying "I agree to tell the fully integrated honesty and nothing but the fully integrated honesty" doesn't make you innocent.

Other classic Neo-Tech moments include when Batman writer Alan Grant and artist Norm Breyfogle created a 4 issue miniseries about the villain Anarky who originated as a leftist ancom but in this miniseries became a neo-tech supporter due to Alan Grant being very into the philosophy. Neo-Tech was a popular ideology online and comic people were more likely to be online then. In an interview with some neo-tech people Grant laments that

for political reasons, Batman had to, well being the hero, had to beat Anarky who is looked on by the DC people as being a villain. So Anarky was wrong and confessed…[8]

Breyfogle seemed less interested and simply looked at it as a modernization of objectivism: [9]

I had more input on Anarky than many of the other characters we developed because we spent so much time on it and because we were involved in discussions concerning Anarky's philosophy - which is really Alan Grant's philosophy. I learned a lot from those discussions and of course I see lots of truth in objectivity (Anarky is an objectivist); I'm a modern western male, after all! Alan was calling his philosophy ‘Neo-tech' but it's basically a modernized version of Objectivism, which was Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Now, I think the very term ‘Objectivism' implies an outlook that's kind of one sided because there's also Subjectivism, and they're both true in their own realms; they both exist. In our discussions I was always trying to balance Alan's arguments with the opposite point of view, which in my view also has merits. That did feed its way into the stories to some degree, especially near the end when I had more ideas for Anarky's life.

The rational wiki falsely claims that introducing Neo-Tech ideology into the book caused sales to dip and for it to be cancelled after 4 issues which is disingenuous as it was solicited as a 4 issue miniseries and Anarky was so popular in the 90s he ended up getting his own ongoing monthly series in 1999 off the back of a highly successful trade compilation of his past appearances.

Following the death of F Wallace, his son Wallace Ward Jr., became the face of the organization using his trademarked nick name Mark Hamilton who is really playing up the trashy pimp guru vibes of the organisation.

Hamilton continues the spam empire under the neothink society and the 12 visions party. The political party of neo think which takes its name from the book The Nouveau Tech Package of Miss Annabelle's Secrets: Neo Tech Secret Society, Earth's First Immortals where a woman named Miss Annabelle has super smart kids that solve all the worlds problems and rule america using a 12 visions vanguard party. The whole party blatantly calls itself a get quick rich scheme that will make everyone rich! [10] Other products by Hamilton include a 7400 page book for $196 [11].

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales used to be a usenet Neo-Techer so he made a cry post about how trolls were desecrating the memory of his great father on wikipedia! [12]

>I challenge journ*lists and bloggers to go beyond their low-effort, safe-and-easy cheap-shot “evil business” attacks on our marketing and pricing ($139 for our 1200-page gold-embossed leatherette library-edition Neothink® Manuscript) and instead put out effort, read my father's Neo-Tech® Discovery or my Neothink® Manuscripts, and then let us see what they write about us. Most will write nothing. They accuse and convict us of being a scam without so much as glancing over the product that they label a scam!

In the comments here we can see a ride of die 2023 neo tech Trumper named ted hosfer

Let no one ever forget that it was the Neo-Cheating owner of Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) who made it his mission to suppress conservative viewpoints – especially during the Donald J Trump years.

His frequent request for “donations” is met (at least with me) with non-participation. How he can ask for money, while simultaneously spit on contributors is pretty outrageous. Lack of donations and support is the consequence of ALIENATING more than half of your audience.

Who thinks magatards and neo-tech believers make up 50% of the wikipedia user base LOL.

In 2023 Hamilton did an interview to some journos doing a basic scam callout on the secret society stuff with some pretty funny lines [1]

Ward told me that he believes his critics haven't taken the time to study his materials.

In our interview he acknowledged that it's inappropriate to send such letters to the elderly, and he vows that he's trying to cull the mailing lists he buys to attract a younger audience. But the lists, he says, are mostly populated by the elderly. Old school.

“I haven't been able to figure out how to market this online,” he confesses. “I've tried over and over again to target younger people, but I haven't been able to make that work through direct mail at this point in time.”

In his prime, he sent out 20,000 letters a month. Now, he feels lucky if he can get 2,000 out each month.

you can only make money via stupid old people yet you arent trageting old people via this scam.

That is the funniest thing about Neo-Tech is that it has some sort of strange rabid fanbase/bot army/alt army to defend it. On any video, even recent, ones talking about the scam you find atleast one r-slur saying how actually the 300$ book that says lying is bad totally changed their life.

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2023/03/02/my-89-year-old-mother-in-law-gets-invited-to-join-the-secret-society-what-is-it/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090504055314/http://www.neo-tech.com/discovery/index.html

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20090505045529/http://www.neo-tech.com:80/discovery/nt4.html

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20090508104227/http://www.neo-tech.com/zonpower/chapter19.html

[5] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.individualism/c/uM-HeQbd6sM

[6] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.neo-tech/c/-Qksa8EWpRk/m/0iihwm1SzMAJ

[7] https://books.google.com/books?id=Hpy9BwAAQBAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/19980218141349/http://gocomics.com/alangrant.htm

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20080131191559/http://www.adelaidecomicsandbooks.com/breyfogle.html

[10] https://twelvevisionsparty.com/

[11] https://www.scamnet.wa.gov.au/scamnet/Scam_types-Buying_or_selling-Psychic__clairvoyant-Nuova_Tech_Society_NeoTech_Publishing_Company.htm

[12] https://www.wikipediavsneo-tech.com/

Other Sources:

https://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Setzer/From_Objectivism_to_Neo-Tech_and_Back.shtml

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neo-Tech

!effortposters trying something a little different with the effort posts make it a little more casual and more interetsing let me know if its good

The setting

So this past weekend, the Pokemon World Championship happened in Japan. It's where the biggest nerds best players gather to compete for the title of world champion in the various Pokemon games. The oldest and probably most prestigious of these contests is VGC - the video game championship. It's exactly what you'd expect: people use the newest mainline games (Scarlet and Violet at this time), bring six mons and battle each other. For reasons only The Pokemon Company (TPC) understands, instead of using these six mons to battle one-on-one as most players would suspect and as 99% of these games play, the VGC format is choose-four-out-of-six and use them in a double battle (2-on-2). While this is a bit of a tangent, the important takeway is this: TPC does not particularly care about competitive play, it does not have its finger on the pulse of the community and is frankly pretty much r-slurred when it comes to handling the biggest media franchise on the planet.

But this year, they did something truly heinous - they actually tried to stop cheating.

Gotta catch 'em all - or do you?

Competitive Pokemon has a bunch of boring rules, but the relevant one for this drama is one that has existed in a form similar to this since the very beginning:

As a little background, Pokemon games have been hacked for a long time. And as early as 2002 (probably earlier, not gonna bother checking ), people figured out what 0s and 1s you need to build a little monster. This resulted in programs like PokeGen, where you can easily generate (or "gen" as it will be commonly called) a Pokemon with whatever moves, abilities and stats you want with the click of a button. I really cannot overstate how simple this process is. Naturally, this is a big help for people really serious about battling: no need to bother with all that tedious catching, training and breeding of perfect Pokemon, you can just cheat and get them instantly. Of course this goes against the spirit of the series and the fairness of the competition, hence the rule against manipulated mons. And surely TPC with all its money and influence is very serious about checking and enforcing this rule, right? Well, no. In its usual incompetence, TPC did little to nothing to inspect for manipulated mons. Aside from checking if your Charizard has Hydro Pump, they really didn't care. And without punishment, people started cheating. A lot. Here is someone analysing teams from last year showing just how widespread cheating had become, especially in the West:

Note that these checks could easily been done by TPC itself to stop the most obvious offenses, but they choose not do that. Until this year.

TPC, in a move I can only assume was sheer coincidence, actually realised that as part of their relatively new Pokemon Home service (a storage for all your Pokemon to move them between games), they 'tag' Pokemon that have been stored. Among other things, this tag can tell if a Pokemon had its stats changed in an impossible way since Home last saw it and, perhaps more importantly, it also shows that any mon that would require a transfer through Home (such as those only available in older games) yet lacks a Home tag was obviously injected into the game through illegtimate means. And for once, they actually used the cowtools at their disposal to check for cheating. And the result was LOTS of top players getting disqualified.

The drama or "what do you mean I can't cheat?!"

Now in any other game, you'd think that cheaters getting ousted is a good thing and the community would celebrate. But not in the VGC community. Almost 20 years of almost completely punishment-free cheating have made the practice so widespread and accepted, players actually grew entitled to it. Here's one demanding respect for his noble non-effort:

Got disqualified from worlds last round on 4-2, I cannot stop crying. So many effort put in this season for literally nothing, cancelling the open less than 1 month before worlds + this new hack check last minute way its no sense. We spend money for this, we need RESPECT.

> most prepared VGC player:

Well that's silly, surely there are more reasonable takes. Ah yes, this looks better.

DQ'd at 2-0. Should have gotten my mons myself!

Half my team was modified/genned

I didn't have Legends of Arceus to get the Lando

And I didn't have my copy of Sword/Shield to get Urshifu

I tried trading for the mons with a reputable trader, but the mons didn't pass

Here's the paste I was gonna use, sorry y'all. I'll do better next time

Time to enjoy my time in Japan!

Just calm acceptance, surely a role model for the com-

Anyone else down to go on strike this upcoming season?

If numbers of competitions go down, they might try to come up with a solution to increase player attendance.

What we want is genning to be legal.

We know that Pokémon can't do this with the primary genning method being a third party software.

Ideally this forces them to come up with a solution.

This solution may involve changing the rules to allow modified Pokémon or creating a battle simulator game.

If enough people are on this idea, we can consistently send support tickets to demand the changes we want to see.

This is a lot to ask, and we as a community would need to work together to make this happen if we really want genning to be official.

>LET US CHEAT OR WE STRIKE

A bunch of people sympathetic towards cheaters because, you know, they paid money to be there and stuff and obviously nothing is their fault

No shade at all. It's just insane to me that someone could probably spend over $5000 to travel and stay in Japan. Just to get disqualified for genned Pokémon.

I honestly feel awful for the people who spend $1000s to compete at Worlds to then just get DQ'd.

I understand fair play absolutely but I just can't help but feeling bad for those who legit didn't even know they owned genned Pokémon.

This situation sucks for everyone involved.

Some true competitors display a real sigma grindset and try to get legit mons at the event at the last second:

(this is not actually the context of this image but it popped off and is funny so there you have it )

Now as people kept bitching about being disqualified and it started to cause a fuss on twitter X, naturally a lot of more casual observers became involved. And of course, those more casual observers saw people cheating, saw they got disqualified and started to wonder just what exactly the problem was here? Isn't this supposed to happen? Our brave competitors were quick to adapt of course - they needed a justification. And they found one in accessability. Clearly, expecting people to actually go through the effort to catch and train your mons legitimately is totally unreasonable:

Sorry, TCPi, we don't live in the anime world so no one is gonna treat competing in Pokémon like a full time job and grind thousands of hours for their perfect team.

Expecting people to put some time into their hobby when they're trying to be the best in the world?! Oh the audacity!

Aside from the time investment, a bunch of people also tried to argue that's it's just way too expensive to compete. It costs like, 200 bucks a year. Who can possibly afford that for a hobby?

But again, people quickly pointed out that a person buying tickets to fly to tournaments all around the world can probably also afford to actually buy the fricking games they wish to compete in and that the Pokemon games have made it increasingly easy to build a competitive team. Gone are the days were your IVs (your Pokemon's genes, basically) were set in stone. Every game throws more shit at you that makes catching and training mons in exactly the way you want more and more accessible. But our brave cheaters have an answer to everything:

"It takes 30 mins to make a legit team"

🔹soft resets for specific 0 IVs on legendaries

🔹need certain 0 IV Dittos for a specific IV

🔹EV train all 6 Pokémon

🔹Grinding for Tera Shards (need 50 btw)

🔹For a shiny, hatch 100+ eggs

This takes 30 mins? Yeah aight

Note: Shininess makes a Pokemon have an unusual color and is completely irrelevant in battle. While I'm sure this person included this in jest, it's still very funny to include it in your super serious list to justify cheating.

And if all else fails, there's always one completely bulletproof defense - "who cares lmao" :

Making the game more inaccessible is horrendous for the game. If people's Pokémon stats are legit and it doesn't alter game play at all, who cares how they got it.

DQing people at worlds with suddenly stricter rules is such a bad look. So sorry to all who were affected.

I would say cheaters getting banned is a very good look for any game, but that's just me.

the Pokemon VGC discourse is so laughably charged like do u think Ray Rizzo was the best player of his era out of skill or because he was REALLY good at hatching eggs

Yeah man who cares that training and building your team is supposed to be part of the competition. He clicked the buttons so shut up.

Pokémon company or whoever needs to stop crying about this hacked mons shit. Grow up and let the players play man

No blunder not you too I actually really like your content Though he hasn't played an actual mainline game in a decade so it's expected I guess

I genuinely cannot fathom going to Pokémon worlds and getting fricking disqualified because your perfectly legal Pokémon with completely valid stats wasn't "caught and rained with love uwu" like who cares!!!!! And then some people had them and weren't even aware!!! It's unfair lol

>The pokemon were hecking cute and valid so who cares!!!

Though that last post raised an interesting point, which others also noticed - you could get disqualified for using a Pokemon someone traded with you, not knowing it's illegitimate. But how could this happen? Surely there's a way for you to check if your Pokemon is legit? Surely TPC would prohibit these trades and use the same checks it uses for tournaments to also check mons ingame?

As it turns out, TPC in their endless incompetence just tells people to not use one of the core features and selling points of the franchise - trading:

Just a little side note to keep you updated in the stellar performance of TPC to do anything.

Side drama

Not content with only one dramatic event, TPC really raised the bar this weekend by also failing to properly set up their consoles, leading to disconnects and sudden deaths.

And to top it all off, at the end of the event they announced the location for the world championship next year - HAWAII

Aside from people feeling it is somewhat poor timing, it also lead to a sizeable donation from TPC to the hawaiian recovery. Of course, this also invited the usual suspects to tell people to boycott the event because the natives hate tourism and it ruined their island and imperialism and all that stuff. You know the drill, typical twitter lefty stuff. Not really unique to Pokemon so I don't wanna get into it. Knock yourself out if you really care.

Conclusion

/vp/, 4chan's Pokemon board, summed it up like this:

In my personal opinion, this is a good move. While I sympathise with the people who really only care about battling, the fact of the matter is that Pokemon games ship as monster catching, training and battling games. The first two aspects are kind of a big deal. Gotta catch 'em all is the fricking tagline (or was). If you truly don't enjoy these aspects, that's too bad. Pokemon Showdown is a pretty popular Pokemon battle simulator. Just play there if you don't want to bother with the rest. Of course, then you lack the prestige of the official Pokemon world champion, but guess what? If you want to be the best Pokemon trainer, you need to actually train your Pokemon. That's the fantasy these games are selling. Deal with it.

PS: This was my first effortpost, be nice.

Greetings Dramastrags!

For those of you who have even a cursory understanding of modern South African politics, or who have been forced by Aevann mandated mindrape sessions to be forced to read every single word of my terminal longposting, you would have been made aware of the 3 largest viable political parties in modern RSA.

The dominant ANC, the party of the Mandela Administration, which has dominated the country for the past 30 years. The DA (Democratic Alliance), the party closest to resembling a more economic left-wing Yank Democrats party, and least corrupt of the bunch (low low bar in RSA), which is sometimes called the coloured party as they have dominated the Western Cape and Cape Town, and is the only party with diverse racial demographics, so coloured is a shitty attempt at a joke pun referring to both the race coloured and the ethnic diversity of the party makeup.

WHAT IS THE EFF:

And finally the 3rd in line is the poster child for modern RSA political r-sluration, and civil r-sluration in general. The EFF can best be described as a far-left, pan-Africanist and Marxist–Leninist political party. But the road to how they got formed is pretty fricking dramatic and hilarious because Julias Malema has been the undisputed clown of the country for nearly 20 years now.

Much like Trump, Malema found his rise in infamy due to coverage by the mainstream media of South AFrica, with liberal and wingcucks histronically going on about how his rise to power as the end times, yet when the lowest common men in South African society heard his words and stupid antics, they liked what they heard. Thus, the more the mainstream political media tried to portray him as a madman - the more the black youth liked what they heard to say.

There are many striking parallels between the 2015 Trump pre-election coverage and Malema rise to power, though Malema's fame was 3-4 years in the making rather than 1 year. There are also great differences, but the similarity has to do with the fact that the more media tried to fuel his evil and supposed undesirability, the more his appeal and cult of personality grew.

It's also important that it was both black pro-ANC mainstream party media and white liberal media trying to assasinate his character, because Malema was a great internal party division threat, and had made many political rivals and enemies as the ANC Youth League leader, within the ANC main party itself.

Today, I wanna talk about Juju Malema, his rise to power, and the creation of his party, the EFF.

Because holy shit this guy is fricking hilarious, even if he's gonna me!

ANC YOUTH LEAGUE:

The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) is the youth wing of the ANC, and had been their basic recruitment arm since the apartheid days way back in 1960, of course in its modern incarnation it was more of an indoctrination club, and a connections between powerful people set to inherit the government positions by the elder folk of the mainstream ANC party.

Yet in spite of that, it's founding was sincere. The idea of the formation of the ANC youth league started in 1943, in Orlando, Soweto at Walter Sisulu's house by Anton Lembede, A.P. Mda, Jordan Ngubane, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo (the biggest and most famous black activist leaders) . Its founders felt that ANC was dominated by conservative and older generation who cannot relate to the youth. Anyways that' not important.

What's significant if we fast forward all the way to 2008, was the election of Julius Malema in April 2008, which was initially disputed after a bitterly contested election with another dude called Saki Mofokeng. And it was a pretty close affair -

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-04-07-malema-elected-as-new-ancyl-leader/

By this point the RSA public both black and white had no idea who Malema was, but political commentators and other equally very boring experts had noted that he was an extremely radical individual, and predicted that a massive schism could be in the future of the ANC, if this Malema's views became mainstream with the new generation of ANC in the Youth League - and holy shit was the predictions right less than 4 years later.

"M&Gthat Zikalala's opposition to Malema as the league's next president had nothing to do with his loyalty to Zuma, but more to do with his alienation from the current ANCYL leadership." Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeee

Anyways up until his most infamous outburst in 2010 against the BBC journ*list whom tried to ask him about hi support and praise for Robert Mugabe as a fellow lar-leftist despite the cataclysmic events ongoing in Zimbabwe, like the Hyperinflation and the fact that nearly 10 million zimbabweans had fled to RSA illegally to literally not starve to death, Juju Malema famously had an outburst where he chased the BBC journ*list out.

This moment in 2010 was an unprecedented lack of professionalism, and like Trump in burgerland, landed him in the spotlight where political commentators rifled through his life and views to find out what the man was about - they found him to be intensely abbrasive and radical, against mainstream ANC standards.

Yet the more his personality and insane words came to light to the general public, the more his popularity grew from the black youths all across RSA whom were in dire pocerty and disenfranchised by ANC incompetence and after 15 years of post-Apartheid rule still languished in unemployment and squalor. Malema channeled this discontent not just against the ANC's general national corruption and incompetence, but also racially against south african whites.

Between 2008-2010 he steadily grew, but it was post 2010 where his influence and popularity grew at an unprecedented pace - with the usual histronics that tribal warfare would be caused by his ethnic inflammatory remarks and populist rethoric.

MALEMA CREATES DIVISION IN THE ANC:

By the end of November 2011, the rest of the mainstream ANC party was getting pissed at Juluis Malema, as his outrageous behaviour and statements was causing the ANC deep embarrasment. They found him guilty of provoking divisions within the ruling party and of bringing the organisation into disrepute, and suspended him for five years from being able to work as an ANC member.

https://www.news24.com/News24/Julius-Malema-suspended-for-5-years-20111110

The specific flashpoint which broke the camel's back, was his remarks on supporting sedition against the democratic government of then Botswana, in order cause a regime change into a communist government. Such open threats against a country which was strong ANC ally, and RSA trading partner caused a severe diplomatic incident with Botswana.

MALEMA FIGHTS SUSPENSION:

Our boi Malema was a true drama queen and would not take anything lying down, he fought the suspension up until the very last bitter end, through the ANC regulation appeal's process.

https://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-24-malema-expelled/

His public tantrums and continual lack of respect for the ANC process got to such a point, that the ANC mainstream finally snapped and changed his suspension into total expulsion. Basically telling him to please frick off

"Subsequent appeal processes changed the suspension to expulsion. On 24 April 2012 the appeal process ended when the National Disciplinary Committee of Appeal confirmed Malema's expulsion with immediate effect."

====(from article)

Julius Malema's expulsion from the ANC has been upheld, the ruling party's national disciplinary committee of appeals announced on Tuesday.

Late on Tuesday evening committee chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa (this guy will become president later ) said Malema's appeal against his expulsion, which was handed down in February, was dismissed. This marks the formal end to disciplinary proceedings against the controversial youth leader, which began in August last year.

Malema was originally found guilty by the national disciplinary committee (NDC) of sowing divisions within the ruling party in November last year and was sentenced to a five-year suspension from the ANC. He was found to have done so by unfavourably comparing the leadership style of President Jacob Zuma to that of former president Thabo Mbeki, and for remarks on bringing about regime change in Botswana.

His suspension was turned into an expulsion after Malema appealed the sentence and the NDCA granted the young firebrand and the ANC the opportunity to argue in mitigation of the original sentence. (basically he rolled a 1 in Charisma )

====(end)

ANC YOUTH LEAGUE MINI CONTROVESIES:

SUPPORT FOR JACOB ZUMA IN 2008:

Among the shitload of controvesies Malema generated while he was still the leader of the ANC Youth League, or rather the manner in which he voiced his support.

The Youth League generated significant controversy in 2008 when Malema publicly declared its willingness to use violence to prevent Jacob Zuma's being prosecuted for corruption charges, stating that the Youth League was "prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma". In further remarks, Julius Malema has called for the elimination of so-called "counter-revolutionary" forces, which include the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. This statement would make the DA permanent enemies of him and the future EFF since.

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-07-02-malema-wont-withdraw-kill-for-zuma-statement/

INSULTS AGAINST HELEN ZILLE IN 2009:

In 2009 Juju continued to make statements which have drawn significant public criticism, and the ANC has on occasion distanced itself from Malema's remarks. The ANC specifically distanced themselves from Malema insulting Helen Zille.

The context of this was Helen of the DA called out Jacob Zuma for being a womanizer, which in turned procted a real nutcase response from Malema which was really undiplomatic

when https://mg.co.za/article/2009-05-12-anc-youth-league-slams-fake-racist-girl-zille/

Right so even fricking FURTHER context - the story and background for this public spat goes like this:

In 2006 Jacob Zuma was on the rise as a political power to dethrone Mbeki as president, but prior to Malema in 2006, he was the most controversial figure in politics. His most infamous Trump-moment was when in 2006 he made the remark that you can cure AIDS by simply taking a shower, insinuating that taking precaution to prevent the spread of AIDS was not needed. This came during the height of the South African AIDS epidemic, which caulsed some REAL fricking national sneed let me tell you

https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/zuma-stands-his-ground-on-shower-comment-277106

====(article)

"Firstly, I'm not certain how and why the shower thing was singled out," said Zuma, adding that he had made the contentious shower comment during cross-examination by state advocate Charin de Beer.

The e.tv reporter insisted: "So do you advise South Africans to take showers as an additional means to protect themselves (from HIV)?"

Zuma answered: "If they don't take a shower after having s*x for many days, they'll be wrong."

Confronted by suggestions that some of the evidence he had given in his r*pe case trial had raised questions about his credibility as a leader, Zuma responded: "I'm not an angel, I live in this world. I think the court is a different place.

====(end)

This batshit insane commentry from possible future president of RSA drew alarm from the press, and the very famous political cartoonist Zapiro would mock Jacob Zuma for the rest of Zuma's career by drawing him with a shower cap - literally a show cap

Among these were the various controvesies of Zuma's unfaithfulness to his wives, his adultery and even rumours that he had r*ped some of his wives (plural). This is a separate Loooonpost but basically this prompted Helen Zille, the head of the DA to remark in 2009 that Zuma's morally bankrupt disturbing behaviour could risk him spreading AIDS to his wives, and even set example for the rest of the Zulu people whom were vulnerable to the deathly disease with his eccentric and unfaithful behaviour.

This made Juluis Malema go fulllll raaaaage mode and make daily sexist remarks about Helen Zille which was way beyond what the normally conservative and reserved mainstream ANC leadership could tolerate.

https://mg.co.za/article/2009-05-12-anc-youth-league-slams-fake-racist-girl-zille/

=====(from Mail&Guardian article above)

The African National Congress (ANC) Youth League has launched its most personal attack yet on Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille in response to her remark that President Jacob Zuma has put his wives at risk of contracting HIV.

The league said it was ”disgusted by remarks attributed to the racist girl Helen Zille, who when failing to defend her stupid and sexist decision to appoint predominantly white males into her Cabinet, attacks the President of the Republic of South Africa (sic)”.

”Zille has appointed an all-male cabinet of useless people, majority of whom are her boyfriends and concubines so that she can continue to sleep around with them, yet she claims to have the moral authority to question our President (sic).”

The Sowetan on Tuesday quoted Zille as saying: ”Zuma is a self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views, who put all his wives at risk by having unprotected s*x with an HIV-positive woman.”

Zille is the only woman on the team. The ANCYL threatened to take ”militant action” against the premier.

”If the fake racist girl Zille continues to speak hogwash like she has been doing during elections, we will take militant action against her, and demonstrate to her that she does not have monopoly over the Western Cape (sic),” it said.

”The fake racist girl who was dropped on a head as child should understand that South Africa will never be a Mickey-mouse Republic like she wants to portray it (sic),” it added. ”An absolute majority of South Africans support President Jacob Zuma and will find it very disgusting for a fake racist apartheid agent to continue undermining the highest office in South Africa (sic).”

The ANC has also condemned Zille's statement, saying it was ”astounded by the extraordinary attack by Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille on the person of President Jacob Zuma”.

Zuma conceded during his r*pe trial in 2006 that he had had unprotected s*x with his accuser, an HIV-positive family friend, but said he had showered afterwards to minimise the risk of infection

====(end of Mail&gaurdian article)

MALEMA SINGS SHOOT THE BOER IN 2010:

Of course the most famous drama to foreign Mayos is the 1st time Malema preached inflammatory hate speech, and swept up his supporters into having a pan-african race based ideology in South Africa as a central prominent political talking point.

In 2010 Julius Malema sang a controversial apartheid struggle song "Shoot the Boer", which drew further criticism in light of the numerous killings of white farmers and black labourers across South Africa. The South African Equality Court ruled that the song motivated genocide and was thus declared hate speech and interdict for its singing in public and private meetings, was issued. The ANCYL stated that they are willing to contest the judgement in the Constitutional Court.

Even the mainstream ANC wasn't this radical, and was embarrased by Malema's public tirades and insanity, soon after he would be suspended from the party

FUNNY HACKING DRAMA IN 2011:

On 30 March 2011, the ANC Youth League's website was hacked with a fake post under its news section, "Latest ANCYL News". The post's headline, "Julius Malema to Step Down as Youth League President" was posted as a statement by Julius Malema tendering his resignation because he had "made a fool of himself."

Some reasons were listed for his resignation: "I have brought my party the ANC into disrepute (sic); I have disrespected my elders and have made a fool out of myself; I promote my own agenda over my country and parties; I promote the singing of racist songs to promote violence and unrest in the country."

https://www.itweb.co.za/content/Pero37ZlBDRqQb6m

Whether this was a whitoid hacker, or an ANC rival who disliked Malema, it didn't matter, but it did cause some minor seeth and cope from ANCYL supporters who took the website seriously for s short moment

The primitively designed main ANCYL website would be further hacked in 2011.

On 13 June 2011, the ANC Youth League's website was hacked again, this time with a fake post under its news section, "Julius Malema defects to Cope". This is in reference to the COPE party which I had covered earlier this year.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110617031521/http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-06-14-hacker-attack-on-youth-leagues-website-puts-even-more-spotlight-on-malema

Then some further fun when a subsequent hack on 24 July 2011, placed a banner at the top of the home page with the statement, "HA HA HA I have a 16 Million Rand house And all of you dont!!!!", in reference to allegations in media that Julius Malema was building himself a R16 million house in the elite Johannesburg suburb of Sandton.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/29910-ancyl-website-hacked-again.html

Lastly, his was followed the next day, 25 July 2011, by another hack superimposing the faces of Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma, on the poster for the movie Dumb & Dumber.

CREATION OF THE ECONOMI FREEDOM FIGHTERS PARTY:

https://www.dispatchlive.co.za/news/2013-07-12-malema-launches-his-economic-freedom-fighters/

When Malema was finally expulsed and shitcanned from the ANC party for causing widespread embarressment to the ANC party in 2012, and deliberately rallying divisions, he we swore that he would create his own ANC with blackjack and hookers ad commies.

In 2013 Malema would declare the founding of his own party - the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) yes they were being very super serious with their dramatic name.

https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2013-07-28-eff-readies-for-election-registration-as-over-1-000-members-recruited/

"At a 26 July 2013 press briefing in Soweto, Malema announced that the new party had over 1000 members, double the 500 required for registration with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC)."

FF+ BITCHES ABOUT THE NEW EFF PARTY:

The biggest belligerent to the founding of the EFF was the FF+ (the Freedom Front Plus) party which was basically the only South African equivalent of the yank Republican party, and contained most of the right wing white boomers of the country (they were however a politically and numerically insignificant party).

Their gripe was the 2011 period in which Malema had re-popularized the "shoot the boer" song and inflaming racial tension in south africa with his abbrasive remarks against boers/afrikaners.

https://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-05-malemas-eff-to-contest-2014-elections/

=====(from above article)

The new party's registration was delayed thanks to a complaint to the IEC by the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) requesting the body decline the application of Malema on constitutional grounds.

"The EFF propagates the nationalisation of land, mines, banks and other assets without compensation, and, in particular, on a racial basis. It is unconstitutional," said FF+ chairperson Pieter Groenewald.

He said Malema had not shown remorse and would continue his "unconstitutional actions" by using the EFF as a vehicle for discriminatory actions and policies. The party was forced to postpone its official launch, planned to take place in Marikana, North West, due to the incomplete process at the IEC.

Malema said: "EFF extends its gratitude to the Independent IEC for refusing to bow down to right-wing formations and thecurrent murderous regime, which sought to prevent the registration of EFF as a political party."

=====(end)

EFF DOES POORLY IN 2014 ELECTION:

And yeah that's basically the story of the formation of the EFF and it's split from the ANC. For the next 10 years Malema would be in the news cycle at least every 2 months, and his brand of nutcase would be a household name.

There was genuine fear in the 2014 election that the EFF would supplant the ANC as the dominant party, and cause a similar disasterous ruling as Mugabe had done in Zimbabwe with his extreme far left views and policy advocation.

Yet when 2014 arrived the supposed revolution tide garnered a mere pathetic 6% of the general vote after all of that fricking hype and self indulgence

It came out that most ANC boomers preferred the slow and steady and stable change of the ANC mainstream party, similar as to how USA black boomers preferred Biden's "safe and steady" moderate policies over radical leftwing bernie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_South_African_general_election

SOME EFF STATS:

Some final statistics before I end your suffering for reading my woooords

"According to a November 2013 Ipsos survey, the party's supporters are younger than average, with 49% being younger than 24, overwhelmingly black (99%) and mostly male, with women representing only 33% of the support base. A disproportionate number of supporters live in Malema's home province of Limpopo (28%), while only 1% live in KwaZulu-Natal, a more populous province.[71] A 2018 survey conducted by social research company Citizen Surveys found that around 70% of EFF supporters were between the ages of 18 and 34, overwhelmingly black (97%), mostly based in major metropolitan cities (48%), predominantly male (62%) with 43% of their support base located in Gauteng Province."

Point is most of Malema's core supporters are young disenfranchised unemployed black men, and thankfully for mayos not the majority.

This article is especially if you don't care about burgerball, but I'll sum up here and give you some reddit reactions to laugh at

TL;DR

Background: The Blind Side

In 2006, a book came out detailing the story of Michael Oher, a boy born into poverty, who grew up in the foster system, but who was adopted* by rich wypipo (The Tuohys) . After the adoption, he gets his grades up, learns that he's really good at football*, and goes on to receive a full scholarship at a reasonably successful university football program (the same one his adoptive parents are alumni of ) A real rags to riches story After he was drafted into the NFL in the first round a film (The Blind Side) came out starring Sandra Bullock that got her an Oscar . Sounds great right? He was given the opportunity of a lifetime, seized it, and was able to carve a nice 7 year career in the NFL for himself. Only...

The Twist

He was never adopted-he was tricked into signing a conservatorship signing away the ability to make his own business deals

The 14-page petition, filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

That's just the start of the drama! Apparently his conservators used this power to negotiate the film deal to enrich their biochildren and themselves, while leaving Oher with nothing!

The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story "that would not have existed without him." In the years since, the Tuohys have continued calling the 37-year-old Oher their adopted son and have used that assertion to promote their foundation as well as Leigh Anne Tuohy's work as an author and motivational speaker.

Also-despite what the movie would have you believe, he was known to be good at football BEFORE this agreement was put in place Talk about a grindset-these guys pretended to adopt a majorly sought after football player, guided him towards signing for their alma mater, helped make a movie about him and made a big payday for themselves and their children to boot

Today these allegations came to light-what do folx think?

The Reaction

You mean to tell me that a bunch of holier-than-thou, bible thumping, Ole Miss boosters from the South took advantage of a poor black child with an unstable home life because he was a clearly gifted athlete and had million dollar contracts in his future?? NO WAY! Who could have seen this coming??

That's so silly bro, this nice white family with a young daughter just took in a 300 lb black guy out of the kindness of their hearts and it just so happens that he's good at football

Just a legal form of slavery and all… we capitalize on all things you and your work… we hardly lift a finger.

I mean, this situation sucks but the guy literally signed away his rights and STILL ended up a millionaire I wouldn't say its quite the same as

The BEST the Tuohys should have gotten is 50/50 w Oher. But really it's his story and should have been like 80/20 in HIS favor.

These people are wealthy, white, and from Mississippi, no? Exploitation is endemic to the place. It's always been.

Exploitation is endemic to capitalism. It's not just a Mississippi issue.

From /r/cfb, rivalries are the sports version of wingcuckery and I love it

Fan of Oher's school:

On the flip side, didn't this family literally give him an opportunity at success? Oher had nothing before this family, correct?

Fan of that school's biggest and most hated rival, bitching about recruiting battles from over a decade ago :

Lol as a state fan who has been following Ole Moss shenanigans for years this is just the tip of the iceberg really. Y'all remember the era where they signed the #1 class? They “somehow” convinced all the 5 stars to come to Oxford Ms….

Fantastic drama from everywhere!

• r/nfl thread

• r/cfb thread

• r/entertainment thread

• r/popculturechat thread

!nonchuds come and post about how you always knew this was a white savior movie in 2009!

Archived non-paywall version:

https://archive.ph/3xfU3

Our boi juju was making headlines in 2010 as his batshit insane and radical nature began to become famous even overseas. And the spat with the British reporter was a consequence of the Bong reporter asking him about his praise of the genocidal and totalitarian Mugabe as a fellow communist.

CONTEXT:

By 2010, the Zimbabwe economy was completely cratered by Mugabe's policies, from his genocide of Ndebeles, the forceful expropriation of white farmers, and the inane policies concerning overprinting the zim-dollar to make up for the now spiralling national debt. By 2010, it was estimated that about 10 million zimbabweans had fled to South Africa, as they were either facing quite literal starvation or feared reprisal from Mugabe's infamous 5th Brigade - his personal genocide army - from killing them for having supported the largest opposition party which had nearly toppled Mugabe in the very famous point of no return, the 2000 Zimbabwe election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Zimbabwean_parliamentary_election

In 2000 a large wave of discontent had manifested from Urban educated and the youth demographics of zimbabwe, as Mugabe's 1990s policies were shit and exascerbated income inequality. The hopefulness of the first half of the 1980s were long gone, and half of zimbabwe would murder Mugabe if he wasn't always protected like putin in a permanent state of a fortress.

Though Mugabe had successfully intimidated the ZAPU, by genociding the Ndebeles (descendants of matabeles) - the largest ethnic group which supported the most prominent ZAPU membera - and exiling much of ZAPU's top leaders, in the decade after the genocide, much momentum had been gained opposition to Mugabe's rule. Among those had been the charismatic Morgan Richard Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Tsvangirai

It was after Morgan came within an inch of actually toppling Mugabe that our autocrat went fully schizo full r-slur and supported policies to expropriate land from old whites and far left communist policies. His rule rapidly became more dictatorial and totalitarian and many zimbabweans would flee from 2000-2010 for reasons fearing his violent reprisal for having supported Morgan and the MDC party.

Morgan himself was intimidated and arrested over the years between 2000-2010

MORGAN 2000 ARREST:

https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/952796.stm

MORGAN 2007 ARREST:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050215001529/http://zvakwana.com/html/prev/2003/nl/030606_033.shtml

Widespread intimidation of civilians by Mugabe's ZANU-PF supporters and the military became a common sight in the country. People and politicians who protested were jailed or beaten senselessly.

"Police refuse basic rights of prisoners

Police treatment of people arrested during the week of mass action June 2-6 has been shocking. Part of the pre-trial punishment has been the withholding of food from detainees. In a number of incidents family members have been arrested for attempting to provide their relatives with food. Human rights activists trying to provide this basic humanitarian service have been threatened with imprisonment. On June 5th human rights activists Jenni Williams and Sheba Dube-Phiri in the company of human rights lawyers, Trevor Ndebele and Kosam Ncube tried to get food to prisoners in Bulawayo. Read about their experience at our website

Bulawayo Church Service

CIO and Senior Army Officers arrived at St Mary's cathedral and spoke to Archbishop Pius Ncube in advance of the planned church service for Justice and Peace. These agents of the state were reported to have been in a very intimidating mood. This interview continued for half an hour. The Archbishop was instructed not to march after the service and told that there were to be not politics in the church, no political slogans, posters or dress denoting politics of any kind. When the PA system was being installed, the Security Forces then demanded that it be taken down. The situation is tense as prayer time nears.

Sent in at 13:30 hours"

=====

""Brave students in Harare are leading the way. Two accounts from students at the University of Zimbabwe

Story 1

I just wanted to give info to zvakwana and hopefully you will be able to act on it. Firstly the number of casualties at the U.Z. is 45, this is the official number of students that we have been able to ascertain as having been injured in the Monday protests. There are however three students who at the moment are missing, there have been sms that have been saying that these three are dead. I can neither confirm nor deny that but what i know for sure is that they are missing. A semblance of the damage done and human rights violations by the police and army can be found in room G4 new complex 5, also known as Baghdad at the UZ. The room is spluttered with blood, the mattress is partially burnt. I was there this morning and wished I had a camera. If someone can access the room they can be able to testify, the occupant of the room is still unknown to me as of now, but I am trying to establish that. Sad stories can also be heard from the several female and male students about the amount of brutality wrought on them by these state agents.

Story 2

Pliz come to UZ and see the amount of destruction caused by these uniformed forces of Zimbabwe. Doors of our residence were vandalised, so many students were beaten up and got injured in the process, some of them sustaining severe injuries and are now hospitalised. Our food was looted, properties like cellphones destroyed! Taikandirwa mateargas mumarooms edu kuti tibude, tirohwe, misuwo ichipazwa tichiponderwa imomo! These guys were really dressed for mass killing!""

=====

unfortunately this early 2000s black-zim anti-mugabe website doesn't exist anymore. Jesus christ almighty there is something depressing at seeing a 20 year old attempt at resistance and energy from forward thingking black africans snuffed out by dictators

MORGAN 2007 BEATINGS AND TORTURE:

https://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_re_af/zimbabwe_unrest_4

"On 11 March 2007 a day after his 55th birthday, Tsvangirai was arrested on his way to a prayer rally in the Harare township of Highfield. His wife was allowed to see him in prison, after which she reported that he had been heavily tortured by police, resulting in deep gashes on his head and a badly swollen eye.[27] The event garnered an international outcry.

He was allegedly tortured by a Special Forces of Zimbabwe unit based at the army's Cranborne Barracks on 12 March 2007 after being arrested and held at Machipisa Police Station in the Highfield suburb of Harare. Using sjamboks, army belts and gun butts, the soldiers attacked Tsvangirai until he passed out. One of the soldiers poured cold water all over Tsvangirai to resuscitate him. Tsvangirai regained consciousness again at around 1:30 am... One vicious woman was left to work on him. She removed an army belt from her waist and used it to assault Tsvangirai until he passed out again." — Police Officer, Mail and Guardian

"He was in bad shape, he was swollen very badly. He was bandaged on the head. You couldn't distinguish between the head and the face and he could not see properly," Innocent Chagonda, an attorney, told Reuters after visiting a Harare police station where Tsvangirai was being held."

2007 TORTURE OF WOMEN OF OPPOSITION:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-women-rights-idUSL1023413320071010

=====(from reuters Zimbabwe OCTOBER 10, 2007 12:10 PM UPDATED -16 YEARS AGO article)

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Zimbabwean security forces routinely torture and sexually abuse women opposed to President Robert Mugabe's government, a human rights group said on Wednesday.

“The women endured various forms of torture, including beatings with a variety of instruments ... baton sticks, booted feet, wooden planks, being slapped, and falanga (beatings on the bottom of the feet,” Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) said in a report. “Some violations occurred in the street during arrest, whilst others took place in police vehicles and/or in police custody.”

Mugabe has been accused of widespread human rights abuses. The veteran leader, in power since 1980, denies the allegations and accuses opposition groups of working with Western powers to oust him. WOZA, which says it has 55,000 members across Zimbabwe, said political threats, unlawful detention and psychological torture occurred frequently. The report was based on a quantitative survey of WOZA members from 2000 to 2007, it said.

“The forced removal of underwear when in custody is recorded separately as it implies threatened sexual violence,” said WOZA. “Other forms of degrading and humiliating treatment the women suffered included being forced to kneel or crouch for prolonged periods and being insulted and threatened by police.”

Mugabe has mounted a tough security crackdown as economic turmoil ravages Zimbabwe. The world's highest inflation rate and severe food, fuel and foreign currency shortages have forced millions of Zimbabweans to flee to neighboring countries. WOZA accused government security forces of taking babies into custody. “Some of the women are subjected to cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment together with their children, as the police do not separate the mothers and their children when they suffer this treatment,” it said.

Western diplomats have accused Zimbabwe's neighbors of failing to pressure Mugabe to ease widespread suffering. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been mediating between Mugabe and the opposition but Western diplomats say his quiet diplomacy will not work. “In the current climate there is no redress for the victims within Zimbabwe and state agents continue to act with impunity,” said WOZA.

=====(End reuters article)

A whole lot of widespread international condemnation followed from the 2007-2010 followed as the horrifying conditions of zimbabwe became internationally famous, every new week from there would be the new horror and atrocity article of the week from local or international papers of SABC news.

MORGAN POSTPONES RETURN TO ZIMBABWE AFTER ASSASSIN PLOT:

https://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0517/103416-zimbabwe

"Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has postponed his return home today after his party discovered an assassination plot against him. A spokesperson said the Movement for Democratic Change had received information from a credible source concerning a planned assassination attempt against Mr Tsvangirai. He was due to return to Harare today to prepare for the second round of elections against Robert Mugabe. The run-off election scheduled for 27 June."

Polls indicated Morgan might actually fricking win against Mugabe this time, Zimzim was near 50% closely divided.

"""President Mugabe acknowledged yesterday that he had suffered an electoral disaster in losing a first-round poll against Mr Tsvangirai on 29 March and lambasted his party for being unprepared. After leaving Zimbabwe in early April, Mr Tsvangirai was to return to Harare to begin campaigning despite evidence of violence and intimidation against his supporters and the risk of a treason charge hanging over him.

The election process has been marred by delays, violence and allegations of electoral fraud and the country's economic woes are growing deeper, with official inflation at 165,000 percent and unemployment of 80%. The 84-year-old Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the former British colony since independence in 1980, lost the first round by 43.2% to 47.9% against Mr Tsvangirai and is now fighting for his survival.

Despite numerous reports from human rights and civil society groups in Zimbabwe stating the contrary, Mr Mugabe accused the opposition MDC of fomenting post-election violence. Zimbabwean doctors, unions and teachers have reported a campaign of terror conducted by pro-government militias in rural areas against supporters and activists of the MDC since the March elections. The MDC says at least 32 of its supporters have been killed in the unrest."""

UN cucks could clearly see it was the ZANU-PF using violence and intimidation to cow the MDC supporters and not the other way around.

"These reports have been bolstered by the United Nations, whose representative said the majority of violence had been directed at MDC supporters, and rights group Amnesty International. Mr Tsvangirai has made a series of demands to ensure a free and fair run-off election, including the presence of foreign peacekeepers and election monitors, but these have been brushed off by the authorities. Authorities in Zimbabwe have rejected international calls for additional election observers for the second round of presidential elections." (i'll give u guyz a guess it didn't happen).

It goes on and on and ooooon , you guys get the idea

JUJU MALEMA PRAISES MUGABE:

I went on this very long drawn out spiel so that you guys can understand the context of the 2010 event in which Malema went tottally apeshit against a british journ*list.

All of us in South africa were fully aware of the horrors and depravity happening in Zimbabwe in 2010, and only the most wingcucked commie imbeciles could envision a world where Mugabe's rule in 2000-2010 was anything approaching benevolent - somebody like Juju malema.

https://archive.ph/3xfU3

which brings us back to the BBC article.

====== (from BigBlackPeepee article) A firebrand South African youth leader today threw a BBC journ*list out of a press conference, accusing him of "white tendency" and calling him a "bastard", "bloody agent" and "small boy". Julius Malema, president of the youth wing of the African National Congress, exploded in rage when Jonah Fisher, a white Briton, interrupted him at the ANC's headquarters in Johannesburg. The row began when Malema, who has just returned from Zimbabwe, praised Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party and poured scorn on the "Mickey Mouse" opposition. He mocked exiles linked to the Movement for Democratic Change, led by Zimbabwe's prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, for using offices in Sandton, a wealthy suburb of Johannesburg.=======

"""praised Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party and poured scorn on the "Mickey Mouse" opposition""" Holy sweet jayzus. Like you dramatards need to understand the magnitude of this wingcuckery and plain evil. Our far left grifter was giving Mugabe blowjobs and calling Morgan, the guy who opposed Mugabe a "Mickey Mouse" opposition plant. The mickey mouse thing is a derisatory remark against Morgan that insinuates that he's an american plant, while also calling him a loser small person. The same guy who got tortured into unconsciousness.

Anyways, when Juju went full r-slur, it was because the BBC journ*list asked him hard questions about his praise and support for Mugabe in spite of the international atrocities being reported by basically everyone who wasn't wingcucked commies.

The following exchange was fricking hilarious lmoa

Mid screetch Juju goes all like

"They can insult us here from air conditioned offices of Sandton," Malema told journ*lists at Luthuli House. "We are unshaken. They must stop shouting at us. They must go and fight for their battle in Zimbabwe and win … why are they speaking in Sandton and not Mashonaland or Matabeleland?" (Our boi juju is trying to insult the reporter by insinuating that he live in Sandton which is liek the rich people Beverly hills of South Africa - and implies why he is talking to him in south africa and not in zimbabwe, implying the reporter is a coward)

As Malema went on, Fisher interjected: "You live in Sandton." (and yes Malema did have a fricking house in sandton HAHAHAHAHAHA)

https://africanmansions.blogspot.com/2011/07/julius-malemas-house-and-wealth-in.html

Evidently stung, Malema replied: "Let me tell you, this is a building of a revolutionary party and you know nothing about the revolution." (The Beverly hills Mega Manshion is a house of the revolutionary party comrade!!)

Fisher pressed: "So they're not welcome in Sandton but you are?"

Malema snapped: "Here you behave or else you jump."

This prompted laughter from Fisher and others.

"Don't laugh," Malema growled. Fisher commented that the situation had become a "joke".

Malema then erupted, asking for a security guard to eject Fisher and telling him: "If you're not going to behave, you're [sic] going to call security to take you out. This is not a newsroom, this is a revolutionary house and you don't come here with that tendency.

"Malema announced that he would heed the ANC's call for restraint and stop singing the apartheid era song that has the words "Shoot the Boer", an incitement seen by some people as causing the recent murder of the white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche." (even the ANC was like bro pull it down a notch)

Unfortunately all the african wingcucks like malema's behaviour and don't comprehend the significance of the event in which he was grilled for his support for fricking Mugabe's violent regime, and only hype up the funny black Trump man.

These aren't rare or cherry picked comments either unfortunately

Anyways the 2010 interview was the moment where Malema would become supremely famous and virtually a RSA household name - many people who knew RSA politics knew of him before then, but this was the moment when you had to life under a rock to not be aware of his influence on the country. This was also the moment when britbongs became aware of him.

https://mg.co.za/article/2010-04-08-malemas-tirade-from-revolutionary-house

That's all I got, @A plz pin

Our characters:

Venus Palermo is a former lolita fashion sensation and is now a washed up alcoholic porn star. It's a typical story of what happens to child stars but this occured entirely from internet fame and the influence of one narcissistic fricking basket case.

Margo Palermo, a narcissistic and manipulative stage mother, managed her daughter Venus Angelic's YouTube career with an obsessive and controlling grip. Originally from Hungary, Margo moved the family to multiple countries before settling in South Korea, allegedly to further Venus's modeling career. However, her parenting style was very questionable, as she homeschooled Venus and kept her completely socially isolated, even sharing a bed with her. She desperately wanted to skinwalk her daughter and would do anything it took to live vicariously through her and to make money off her

Venus became viral pretty early in her life, her videos got a lot of reach as it was nestled right into that time in the early 2010s when anime was new and becoming more mainstream to lots of people. She made videos about how to do makeup and cosplay and random jfashion shit like that.

However Margo would force Venus to tailor her content in the way she thought would make the most money, often steering it towards a more sexualized clickbaity style, exploiting cringe Japanese stereotypes, and using a high-pitched “kawaii” voice.

Margo wasn't happy to stay in the background though, she wanted fame for herself dammnit!

She wrote and submitted an article about her daughter which centered her as the mastermind and main character.

Venus was also eventually featured in an episode of the reality show "My Strange Addiction" which was supposed to be about Venus but Margaret shows up in one scene and dances her leathery butt around in Venus's anime dress. It's so embarrassing. The clip has been removed and I can't find it in full anywhere

Here are some stills:

Margo's overbearing nature came out in full force in an interview where she dominated the conversation, even to the point of attacking the interviewer. She spoke for Venus and belittled her. (She literally covered her ears to keep her from hearing about feminism lmao.) Also can't find this video uploaded anywhere.

On social media, Margo didn't hold back either. Using Venus's accounts, she targeted and bullied other models who shared Venus's aesthetic, like KimonoTime and XiaoRishu. She would say they were copying her and threatening her and her mom.

For years people thought Venus and her mom were both attacking them but it later turned out it was almost exclusively her mom running the accounts all along. Margo would defend Venus on her accounts too so this psycho was getting Venus into drama using her accounts and then switching to her other account to defend her.

Margo was copyright striking other fashion youtubers to try and remove competition.

Margo even made tons of alts to harass other fashion youtubers:

This is actually how Venus initially became a lolcow, people noticed these random copying accusations and fashion drama and assumed she was psycho (she is psycho lol but she wasn't doing these things) so when it came to light it had been her mom all along doing this shit it was a major plot twist.

Margo would also beg another jfashion influencer to take a picture with her and then bad mouthed her and said she looked homeless in the caption:

Venus's aesthetic and social circles (really Margo's circles but you know) eventually led to her being introduced to a creep named Mr. Yan, owner of the Lolita clothing brand, Bodyline. Known for making sexual advances towards potential brand reps, he unsurprisingly tried the same with Venus. When she said no Margo got pissed at Venus for ruining the brand deal.

Later, Venus had started chatting with Manaki, a Japanese fan of hers, (this guy had kind of stalked her btw but he's easily the best moid in her life just neurodivergent) and their relationship progressed rapidly and they started dating. He showed up in a few videos and they did cute stuff together.

But weird shit kept happening.

A few months later video titles on Venus's YouTube just started randomly changing from "boyfriend" to "ex-boyfriend." so people thought they had broken up.

Eventually the real story emerged: Venus had moved to Japan to elope with Manaki to break free from Margo's grasp. Margo, having control over Venus's YouTube, altered the titles and made comments about them being broken up herself. (as some kind of cope attempt? To pretend Manaki hadn't taken her daughter away?) Following this, she switched from vigorously defending Venus to fricking dragging her through the mud.

(she killed her hamster )

Venus got control of the accounts again and so Margo started copy right striking her. After a few years of this back and forth shit flinging between mother and daughter, everything calmed down, though Venus's life has spiraled.

She's an alcoholic escort who's dying slowly every day due to getting an illegal stomach shortening surgery after moving out. It's pretty sad tbh. Her thread on lolcow is still pretty active and new crazy shit is happening all the time. Venus divorced Manaki but it seems she may be still fricking him recently. She basically just posts porn, cries about haters, and drinks. That's her whole life now. Venus is irreparably fricked and is so mentally ill that despite her annoying attention whore shit and alcoholism I still mostly just feel bad for her nowadays.

(there are so many pictures of her with alcohol jfc)

Her life is a shit show.

Margo married a US truck driver at some point, though they are divorced now. She is still apparently living in the US, people speculate she may be a meth addict and a 5 dollar truck stop prostitute. She's still desperate for attention on social media though she barely gets any engagement.

(i have no clue where this picture is from but it's so fricking funny)

TLDR for lazy fricks:

Venus has been a youtube celeb since she was 11/12 years old.

She has been dragged around the world and never had a chance to put down roots anywhere or a chance to make any > > > friends that weren't her mother.

She barely went to school and was mostly homeschooled so she's barely literate.

Her mother Margret basically used Venus as a meal ticket + a source of indirect attention for herself.

Venus eventually escaped her mother and leapt into the hands of manaki

She now is divorced and jumping from guy to guy while trying to scrape together enough pennies from onlyfans to afford sake. while her mom gives truck drivers blow jobs in America

_{Anyway, I hope this isn't what's happening with Lil Tay}

Edit:

Wondering about her dad?

According to @Joan:

>Margo being obviously batshit insane ran him off from the get go and he was never a part of her life in any meaningful way. He is a swiss national and lives in Switzerland. There was a video ages ago of her calling her grandmother and because they don't really speak the same language they thought she was asking for money or something and it didn't go well. She does not say if she is in contact with him at all.

Videos if you want to learn more:

I can't take this shit anymore. I've been playing online RPGs with this guy for three years now and yet, somehow, EVERY CHARACTER HE EVER MAKES IS ATROCIOUS. There's bad characters, like obvious fetishes. Khaoskid's characters are something different. They are inspired in their awfulness. Let me go over some of my least favorites with you.

Sans Undertale

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

Sans Undertale was a Bone Creature template Dwarf. His class was Truenamer. For those of you who do not know, Truenamer is the worst class Wizards of the Coast put to paper. Rules as written, it doesn't work. The difficulty of use for their truenaming powers grow exponentially as they level. Sans was optimized to heck and back in order to be even slightly useful. Outside of his ridiculous character name & art, he was actually a useful member of the party. I am simply amazed that this man played as a solo-classed truenamer for multiple years over the course of a level 1-20 D&D 3.5e campaign, and survived. Also he carried around a body pillow of Shinji's Right Hand everywhere he went.

Kasan Eteto

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: Player

Kasan Eteto was a succubus, using the Savage Species monster class. She had taken the Vow of Nonviolence and the Vow of Peace feats. This means she was forbidden from fighting any living creatures. She was an extremely talented diplomat, at least. She also went into Apostle of Peace once she finished Succubus' progression. Like Sans, she wasn't so much disruptive as she was shocking. Using Savage Species is insane. Using Apostle of Peace is insane. Combining the two is even more insane. In a strange act of self-awareness, Khaoskid realized he hates playing female characters and had Kasan kill herself. This is the only time he's ever played a female character. Her art has been lost to time, but she was literally just Kasane Teto.

The Mathemagician

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a light-hearted fantasy game. When we got into our first fight, the Mathemagician cast his first spell: Math Beam. We all asked him how it worked. He told us how much damage it did, and said "math." It wasn't terribly strong so we shrugged it off. Until he told the GM that he was casting it again, on the same turn. Then again. Then again. It turns out, he took Lightning Calculator, a trait that lets your character perform math instantly. Since Math Beam is cast by solving an equation, he could cast an infinite number of Math Beams per turn. The GM ended the game after that first fight.

John Matrix

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a Jojo's Bizzare Adventure game. John Matrix was a high school IT guy who thought he was a hacker. He had a Wildcard skill called "The Matrix" that could do anything. Literally any roll the GM asked for, he would simply use The Matrix in place of the normal skill. His stand was "Fear of the Dark." It was the creature from the album's cover, and it was extremely physically powerful. It also projected an aura of darkness that no light or sight could penetrate, not even John Matrix. It was also an independent stand, and evil. He could not de-manifest it. Against all odds, he made it to the end of the game. Khaoskid then warned me that if I ever ran Mage: the Ascension, he would play John Matrix as a Virtual Adept.

Jimmy Hoboken

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a Zoolander X JJBA game. All of our characters had to be male models. Jimmy Hoboken was a body positivity model. He was fat, r-slurred, and useless. His stand was Fat, which could eat any material and did a ton of damage with its bite. It ended up being very useful, as it could eat holes through walls and ruin the GM's dungeon designs. He ended up growing 30 feet tall and turning into a woman after playing a cursed game show. He died after rolling a nat 1 on the Die of Fate.

John & Monkey

• System: GURPS 4e, Call of Cthulhu 7e

• My status: GM

The game was initially titled "Black Friday Shopper Simulator 2021," and was in GURPS. The party's goal was to get the last Game Bronus at their local shopping mall, and to kill anyone who got in their way. Eventually, the game morphed into a Call of Cthulhu 7e game where the party were special agents for the United States Department of Unusual Incidents, and were stealing anomalies from the SCP Foundation. John is just an ordinary guy who is really, really good at biking. He knew special moves like "Bike Jump" and "Bike Spin." His skills impressed Jeff Bezos, who hired him to babysit his pet monkey, Monkey. Monkey is incredibly rich and has a smart phone. Somehow, the two are an effective duo, are still alive, and haven't driven me to end the campaign. Like Sans and Kasan, they are insane character ideas, but surprisingly functional.

Scholar

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

The game is set in the Eberron setting. Scholar is a warforged artificer. He's mostly functional, but has made some deranged magical items. Most notable is his Wand of Locate Bars. It does exactly that: magically locate nearby stores that serve alcohol. Also he's useless during fights, as his signature move is to use a Scroll of Tree Form to turn himself into a tree for an hour. Mercifully, last April Fool's Day, I let all of my players draw from the Deck of Many Things. Scholar drew "Donjon" and was sent to the Lair of the Keeper.

Thrikeepagh Dhakaan

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

To replace Scholar, Khaoskid made Geldrin d'Kundarak. Geldrin is actually a good character. His cohort, Thrikeepagh, is not. Thrikeepagh is a blue (psychic goblin subrace) weretoad. He has no class. Every time he levels up, he takes another toad hit die. Toads fricking suck. They have no attacks. Their movement speed is 5 feet. In order to move faster, Thrikeepagh took the Speed of Thought feat, which increases your movement speed by 10 feet if you are psychic. This is why he's a blue. He has no combat ability, and his only support traits are being able to turn into a toad. At the very least, he's relatively tough since werecreatures resist damage from non-silver weapons.

Gary Ryals

• System: Motholam

• My status: Player

Motholam is an AD&D retroclone. Gary Ryals was a fighter who refused to use weapons, and fought with his bare hands. Motholam has no martial arts system, so he sucked. While we were exploring the swamp, Gary picked a fight with a friendly giant toad. It swallowed him whole then swam away.

Utyronimar

• System: Motholam

• My status: Player

My character in the Motholam game we were in was Utumar the Somniferous, a wizard.

Khaoskid thought Utumar was really cool, so after Gary died, he made his new character Utyronimar.

Tavish McBane

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Player

Tavish' clan was McBane and his Generation was 1st. He was not a vampire. He was a 1st generation Scottish immigrant. He did not use any supernatural powers. He just cut vampires limbs' off with a claymore. Khaoskid would constantly speak in a shitty Scottish accent and pretend to be drunk, and would constantly pick fights with the other players and random bums on the street. The campaign ended when the party broke into the local Tremere's chantry. We had a few newbies playing with us. The newbies thought they were badasses and died horribly. Tavish and my character survived. The newbies quit the game, and the GM didn't feel like running for two insane people.

Yukio Noguchi

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Storyteller

When Khaoskid proposed playing as a Kuei-jin in a V20 game, I knew it was a bad idea. I didn't realize just how bad it was. Yukio Noguchi was a Devil Tiger, meaning his dharma required him to make people suffer. He was an expert martial artist, so he would just pick fist fights with people, beat them up, then torture them. He was also an overweight Japanese salaryman. I ended the game after zero (0) of my players came up with even slightly reasonable characters.

Nikolas Heidinger

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Storyteller

The follow-up game to the game with Yukio Noguchi, I instructed my players this time to come up with reasonable characters. Nikolas is so, so close to being one. He's a 10th-generation Tremere. He's loyal to the Pyramid. He doesn't breach the Masquerade. So what's the problem? He has dementia. The Tremere found him too late, and Embraced him while he was in his nineties. Now, he can learn Thaumaturgy, but still forgets his name. He is perhaps the most destructive character Khaoskid has ever played, because he's the most subtle. He's not literally Sans, nor does he run around with a claymore in the streets of Chicago, but he's still terrible. Like a real demented old man, he wanders away from the coterie while they're preoccupied with something. Whenever he gets a chance to talk, he rambles for minutes, if not hours. If this character was my first experience with khaoskid, I would fully believe he is a demented old man in real life too. His ability to waste time is unreal, and can only be truly understood if experienced first-hand.

!enemiesofkhaoskid This is why I hate him. He sucks so much.

CONTEXT:

South African Taxis mostly consist of the famous mini-bus taxis which very poor and lower-class people between home, work, school and families, between cities and between districts.

Taxi Rank:

South African taxis are famous for being the worst drivers in the country , ignoring all traffic laws, and generally dragging down the standards of the public traffic norms and behaviour with their careless and dangerous driving. Any conceivable stupidity which had caused massive death in cataclysmic highway crash deaths had been experimented with my the Darwin award-chasing recklessness of South African Mini-bus taxi drivers.

At least once every 2-4 months were hear of a national story of gruesome proportions where like 20 dead and 50 were wounded, and deaths involving in the double digits then you know that a taxi was involved because of the lax safety standards and the overcrowding which happens in terms of taxis overloading their minibusses with too many people than they were designed for.

https://www.iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/taxi-drivers-do-not-know-speed-limits-1626349

"Booysen found that taxi drivers were often ignorant of the 100km/h speed limit that applied to taxis and buses. When the drivers were questioned about the speed limit, most claimed their limit on the route was 120km/h. The drivers also blamed the passengers for their speed, saying that they encouraged them to drive faster in order to get to their destinations on time."

https://www.iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/taxis-the-worst-speed-culprits-study-1679769

A famous joke/ semi-reality is the recklessness of taxi-drivers go to such an extreme that they fricking drive with wrenches instead of steering wheels on the steering pipe. Why the actual fricking frick would someone do that, you dramatards ask?? Because what would happen is the taxi drivers would overfill their taxis with so many people - including the space TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TAXI DRIVER. If this confuses burgers because they drive on the right side of the road, where as Bongland and South Africa on the left side of the road, imagine the following:

If yo drive on the left side of the road, then obviously you sit on the right side of the vehicle to be closest the road middle-line and be able to see better - whereas if you drive on the right side of the road like burgerland, then you sit on the left, so for burgers to comprehend this RSA insanity, imagine you drive one of those yellow hollywood New York taxis and you are so full YOU FRICKING LET SOMEONE SIT ON THE LEFT SIDE OF YOUUUU! And to compound this overloading , you replace those whole steering wheel with a fricking wrench on the steering column to be able to have free space on the left side of your body and only requiring your right hand to steer as your left side is inert from someone sitting like a sardine next to you!!!

https://www.iol.co.za/motoring/taxi-driver-bust-steering-with-spanner-1714421

FOREIGNERS ARE CLUELESS MORONS:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66445019

As is often with South African events, foreigners are imbeciles and don't know wtf they are talking about. They often take things at face value, and don't question that south african peeps are liars or corrupt and distort truth. They probably cannot envision that now matter how bad a place like Bongland can be corrupt or dysfunctional, absolutely none of the worst corruption that England has to offer can hold a candle to the circus which is RSA modern realpolitik.

Example is the above BBC article covering the supposed cause of the Riots and taxi strikes.

"Five people have died in violent protests relating to a taxi strike in Cape Town, South Africa, officials say. The victims include a 40-year-old British national whose family is being supported by the UK Foreign Office.

The week-long strike was called in response to what drivers said was "heavy-handed tactics" by law enforcement authorities. The taxi drivers and owners said their vehicles were being targeted and impounded for minor offences.

Infringements included not wearing a seatbelt and illegally driving in the emergency lane, drivers said. They claimed others doing the same only faced fines. Minibus taxi operators across Cape Town also aired frustrations that the government was impounding taxis they claimed were not roadworthy."

MINOR OFFENSES!!!

If you read this short and shit article, you would come to the conclusion that the people striking are entirely reasonable, and the poor taxi drivers are being screwed over by the corrupt local government trying to make a few extra bucks by excessively fining the working man or something. Right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight?

That is not the case here.

FURTHER CONTEXT FOR SA TAXIS:

In south Africa the humble minibus taxis, their drivers and their everpresent powerful unions are a way of life for many poor carless South africans, which means black south africans. The government tends to be very dependent on the large taxi fleets which transport our lower classes to work and back every single day.

Our mines, factories, farms and private businesses cannot function if their workers do not arrive at work, and this has been a unique power chip which the very very very powerful and ruthless taxi unions of South Africa has held for the past 30 years.

Because of this, the National ANC government had been very softhanded with legislating bad roadside behaviour, and enforcing law specifically targetting Taxis' bad and dangerous driving behaviour via our national Traffic Police.

====

However, every 6 months or so , a province or small town finally has had enough, and the constant accidents and dangerous driving culture would force political sentiment even bigger than the taxi unions to force the local govs to actually fricking do something about it.

Often you'll find local governemnts or even the local residents (from both white AND black) neighbourhoods demand the installation of speed bumbs after a schoolchild had been killed or something for example.

https://www.news24.com/news24/community-newspaper/tygerburger/residents-request-to-have-speed-humps-constructed-in-their-neighbourhood-denied-20230524

https://www.groundup.org.za/article/residents-build-their-own-speed-bumps

https://www.kouga.gov.za/article/speed-bumps-installed-at-notorious-noorsekloof-stretch

https://highwaymail.co.za/302528/speed-bumps-needed

Usually these speed bumbs can refer all bad and dangerous traffic, not just minibus taxis, but taxis are the main culprit.

MOST TAXIS ARE UNROADWORTHY:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66445019

So coming back to the BBC article which is as dry and useless as most foreign media is from journ*lists that don't understand the context of why events happen as they do in South Africa, here is what REALLY happened.

After a great of (actually peaceful) protests and complaints and lobbying of Cape Town civilians demanding that the Cape Town government do something specifically targetting the reckless driving of Cape Town minibus taxis, the Cape Town city government was compelled to react and enforce actual strict measures to weed out minibusses which were not road worthy.

And when I say strict, I mean actually fricking fundamental basics which in 1st world nations like burgerland would have you instantly lose your lisence had your vehicle condition encroached upon these minimum standards. Example: study from way back when in 2001 the shit culture of driving vehicles until they literally atomized from wear and tear had been engrained into ghetto township taxi rank culture.

https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/95-of-taxis-not-roadworthy-tests-reveal-71843

=====(from article)

Officials from the Gauteng department of transport set up checkpoints in Johannesburg and in the Vaal region and took taxis to testing stations. The head of the transport inspectorate specialising in the promotion of public safety, Alfred Mohlala, said the most common shortcoming was poor brakes.

Other defects included faulty steering and suspensions, rusty chassis, and doors and seatbelts which did not work properly. In Johannesburg, officials tested 103 minibus taxis, of which only four passed, and in the Vaal, only six out of 124 tested vehicles were found to be roadworthy. Officials in Johannesburg also found two confirmed stolen minibuses and four other suspected stolen minibuses.

Mohlala said: "We have a problem in Gauteng that when taxis are involved in accidents, many lives are lost.

"Once a vehicle is declared unroadworthy, the owner must go and fix the defects and then take the vehicle for a roadworthy test. But if an owner ignores the instruction and continues to carry passengers in his vehicle, he or she will lose their permit," he warned.

Johannesburg Metro Police Department spokesperson Wayne Minnaar said last night that the high failure rate was due to the stringent roadworthy requirements, in terms of which vehicles failed even for minor faults.

But Minnaar said the high failure rate also indicated that taxi owners were remiss in keeping their vehicles properly maintained, thus endangering the lives of the thousands of commuters they ferry.

"It definitely goes to show that the owners of the vehicles, whose responsibility it is (to maintain the vehicles), are not making sure that the vehicles are fully roadworthy.

"Taxi operators and owners must know that an unroadworthy vehicle on a public road is not going to be tolerated. Over and above that, an unroadworthy vehicle does not comply with the law. People's lives and their safety are at stake," Minnaar said.

He warned that stern action would be taken against defaulting taxi operators. (This didn't happen unfortunately )

=====(end of article - remember this was 22 years ago )

https://carinsurance.arrivealive.co.za/minibus-taxis-and-road-safety-in-south-africa.php

"The majority of South Africans travel daily via public transport.1 These public transport vehicles may also be referred to as ‘taxis' in South Africa. Millions of South Africans go to and from work in urban areas and for longer journeys across the country's rural regions via such taxis. Minibus taxis provide a highly convenient and affordable means of public transport. The taxi industry has been a success for black economic empowerment on a vast scale. 1 Taxis therefore play an important role in South Africa's economy.1"

======

Ariticle from 2015:

https://www.news24.com/life/archive/watch-the-reason-why-taxis-disregard-the-law-20150821

You guys get the idea.

CAPE TOWN CLAMPS DOWN ON ROAD-UNWORTHY TAXIS:

So when Cape Town was forced by its citizenry to take strong action against the deadliness of dangerous taxi driving, even by the passengers of taxis who themselves felt generally unsafe to be driven by lunatic minibus taxi drivers despite being dependent upon them to ferry them to work, the Taxi-unions really REALLLLy didn't like that and a hellstorm would follow.

Then another wingcuck added fuel to the fire by contradicting Cape Town juristiction by siding with the Taxis: "On Tuesday, South Africa's transport minister Sindisiwe Chikunga ordered the immediate release of the minibus taxis impounded by the City of Cape Town. Ms Chikunga said the legislation used by the city had been "executed and implemented wrongly" and added that "it doesn't exist" under current laws." (This is a lie by the way.)

Cape Town has full juristiction within their own Western Cape borders to enforce the most basic vehicle safety standards and traffic laws, but the wingcucks and taxi-unions took this as affirmation that they were being uniquely bullied.

Taxis were being impounded because they were road-unworthy, but the taxi wingcucks deemed them unfair, because of course they fricking did, and threw a massive tantrum about it

The taxi unions declared a province wide 5 day strike in retaliation against Cape Town authorities, and things escalated from there as rioters and looters and tsotsies saw the opportunity to use the taxi strike for their own discontentment the past two years post COVID r*ped-economy and post Ukraine-war r*ped-petrolprices.

The escalation finally expanded into citywide violence and rioting, very similar as to the 1994 Rodney violence in burgerland.

STRIKES, RIOTS & VIOLENCE:

https://news.yahoo.com/five-people-killed-south-africa-191206733.html

"Five people have died in violent protests relating to a taxi strike in Cape Town, South Africa, officials say. The victims include a 40-year-old British national whose family is being supported by the UK Foreign Office."

"The South African Ministry of Police said 120 people had been arrested since the strikes began on 3 August and they were aware of incidents of looting, stone throwing and arson. Police Minister Bheki Cele also confirmed a police officer was among those who died. The UK has issued a travel warning after the strike was listed as a high security threat for tourists visiting South Africa."

=====

https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/road-to-nowhere-no-end-in-sight-to-cape-town-taxi-strike-as-santaco-seeks-interdict-against-city-20230810-2

Ignore the liberal wishy washy talk. The Frivilous impounding are all road-unworthy wrecks barely kept on wheels by prayer and elbow grease. These ANC wingcuck taxi drivers simply do not want to be held accountable for safety standards, and are exploding about it. They do not want to spend extra money on maintenance and safety.

"Taxi services in Cape Town, and the greater Western Cape, will remain suspended until the outcome of an urgent interdict the South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) is preparing against the City of Cape Town, as sporadic incidents of violence continue and food shortages are felt in some places. This means commuters must continue making alternate travel plans as the public transport crisis escalates."

=====(from article)

Earlier, in a letter to Mobility MEC Ricardo Mackenzie, Santaco said it supported impoundments of unroadworthy vehicles operating without valid operating licences and those driven by someone without a valid licence, in line with the National Land Transport Act.

"Santaco is, however, opposed to impoundments for any other reason other than those related to the statutory provisions mentioned above, and it has been seen on many occasions where our vehicles have been the target of these enforcement drives instituted by the City of Cape Town and the MMC for Safety, Alderman JP Smith."

Santaco maintains it will continue the taxi stay away until the City institutes a moratorium on impoundments, especially in light of comments by Smith that the City would impound 25 taxis for every vehicle damaged.

"We believe that to return to operations while these issues remain unresolved will be reckless and detrimental to our members," Saaiers said.

Speaking after the prayer meeting, Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, said, after being pressed several times on Smith's statement, that the City would only impound taxis directly involved in offences and would not conduct "vindictive" impoundments. He rejected Santaco's claim that the City's traffic services were unfairly impounding their vehicles.

Premier Alan Winde expressed his deep disappointment that the taxi strike would continue. "The poor are suffering the most due to this strike and each day it drags on is a major setback. The impact has been devastating on them and our economy," he said. Premier Winde said that it is of utmost importance that residents be allowed to move freely in the province.

(translation - the Taxis are holding the province and City of Cape Town hostage in this showoff)

This will be the third interdict application since the start of the stay away on 3 August. The City of Cape Town and Golden Arrow Bus Services were granted interdicts ordering Santaco and its affiliates not to interfere with commuters using other forms of transport.

=====(end)

BUSSES BURNT DOWN:

Basically as people were forced to find alternative forms of transport, like city busses to go to work and not starve, our patriotic friends in the taxi-unions exploded in rage at the belief that their strike was being circumvented and violentely attacked many busses and ubers and virtually any vehicle they thought were participating in the circumvention of their strike - and this is where the really big violence started and escalated.

"Golden Arrow said 25 of its buses had been damaged. Multiple private drivers were injured when rocks were thrown at their cars, and at least five deaths have been reported."

https://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/480917/6-golden-arrow-buses-torched-amid-taxi-strike-it-isn-t-business-as-usual

"It looks like another turbulent week ahead for Capetonians as the taxi strikes continue with no end in sight. Last week, one Golden Arrow bus driver was shot and injured in Khayelitsha. Since the stay-away began, the company has lost six buses, each worth millions, due to arson attacks. Despite securing a court interdict to stop acts of violence and intimidation, the violence continues."

https://ewn.co.za/2023/08/04/golden-arrow-moves-operations-out-of-khayelitsha-nyanga-after-driver-shot

https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2022-08-25-golden-arrow-buses-torched-in-cape-town

"Golden Arrow Bus Services said in an update to commuters it was unable to operate in Nyanga and had temporarily halted services. “We condemn these senseless acts of violence and call on the authorities to fulfil their mandate of keeping our employees and passengers safe and ensuring that the perpetrators face the full might of the law,” said the company."

https://www.enca.com/news/truck-set-alight-langa

ROCK THROWING AND ASSAULT ON RANDOM CARS:

https://www.iol.co.za/news/traffic/cape-town-taxi-strike-roadways-opened-but-motorists-urged-to-be-cautious-over-high-risk-areas-5ed71e8d-0138-4613-8b27-56fcda3f9c11

People have been advised to avoid certain roads as for the past two days motorists have been attacked with rocks and bottles thrown at them by many black peeps ganging up on cars and trying to stop them - this doesn't appear as attempts at hijacking, only bad behaviour.

over 40 minibus taxis went blockaded the N2 national highway

Here cape Town police arrest rioters:

Oh yeah and in a moment of proudly-South African r-sluration our Minister of police went to the main Taxi union hub to negotiate with the taxi unions. Wat the fok. Instead of negotiating he should arrest all the ring leaders

CHAD INTERVIEW WITH MAJOR OF CAPE TOWN:

Still light at the end of the tunnel, as the current mayor of Cape Town is a filthy mayo, but at least he refuses to take shit from the Taxi-union tantrums.

Basically the interview starts of the journ*list asking the Mayor (Geordin Hill-Lewis) about what the frick the other ANC r-slur was talking about when he said that Cape Town was overreaching and not allowed to impound road-unworthy taxis or something bullshit.

Basically he replies that the Minister of Transport of a certified r-slur and a ANC wingcuck who was trying to win brownie points with the taxi-unions. He says he was astonished to hear the Minister of Transport arguing AGAINST enforcing basic public safety in transport and vehicles like minibusses.

And that the Minister of Transport (a woman ) basically argued against LESS STRINGENT enforcement against drunk drivers - as those were the primary taxi drivers whose vehicles were impounded when the taxi-unions bitched that their cars were being impounded when they were unroadworthy. Like holy frick you brainlet morons you were drunk1!!!!!!

He goes on to sow how illiterate the b-word (Sindisiwe Chikunga) was, he shows that in her own Acts over which she resides (The National Land Transport Act 5/2009). He goes to the axact passages where the law enables him in the country to enforce public safety as major. (Section 87) He even reads it out loud to show how fundamentally r-slurred the ANC b-word is.

Basically Cape Town can impound public transport vehicles (taxis) if they defy their transport Permit - you know like being fricking drunk .

https://www.gov.za/documents/national-land-transport-act

The taxi-rank unions and ANC wingcucks had also tried to make the mass impounding of road-unworthy taxis about racism , and tried to play the race card. The coloured journ*list asks the major directly if he had racist intent and allowed him to defend himself. And that the taxi wingucks moaned that there was desire to unfairly target taxis to screw over blacks and coloureds - which is what sparked the violent riots due to the Minister of TRansport's inflammatory comments.

Mayor responds that the City did the mass impounding action because they cared about the black/coloured passangers whom were in danger by ruthless taxi drivers.

He also says there is universal road-unworthy clampdowns on all other vehicle types and that they had not specifically targetted taxis, only that taxis had been the most belligerent. Every monday his department had released statistics of the vehicles impounded in the Cape Town district; and what vehicle types.

https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/santaco-disputes-citys-stats-on-number-of-taxis-impounded-ec8a03d6-d64d-401a-9735-85668b8441b1

https://www.news24.com/life/motoring/licences/watch-no-licence-no-numberplate-no-car-cape-town-impounding-vehicles-under-new-traffic-by-law-20230725-3

He stated they were even handed when prosecuting all vehicle types, and only due to taxi-specific negligence was nearly 50% of all vehicles impounded = minibus taxis!

Taxi-unions also lied that impoundment fees are not higher than that of other ANC run provinces. ANd that impoundment fees are supposed to be expensive as punishment so that taxis are not drive like hooligans once released - there is also no daily impoundment fee, anther lie by ANC and taxi-cucks.

Only a single fee on R7000 to release.

STRIKES STILL GOING ON:

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-08-09-western-cape-taxi-strike-extended-for-two-more-days-despite-santacos-9-august-end-date

Tantrums ongoing.

Hope you guys understand why the BBC article and all other foreign journ*lism about South Africa are generally worth shit.

Anyways that's all I got!

This is an update on Chris Niosi aka Kirbopher / Will Beaubien aka Brinnmations / Martin Billany aka Little Kuriboh / TeamFourStar and a decade of abuse: https://t.co/opOGhlFNlg

There's things that are either hard to find or haven't been revealed before. This is everything.

— 🍒Tara Welker (@lashiec) August 8, 2023

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oa86KCZpHAQQL7-97_J_QJl0yV5YNF1t-r9Xm0Q11QI

Repoasted without links for my ipgrabberbros

This is to provide an update on Chris Niosi aka Kirbopher and Bryon William Beaubien aka Will Beaubien aka Brinnmations aka SuperPsyguy.

This is also in regards to Martin Billany aka Little Kuriboh and TeamFourStar, and the various libertarians and serial abusers they have protected over the years and continue to protect. I am tired of dealing with this cursed knowledge alone. It has deeply affected my mental health and the mental health of many others. I am writing this to be as thorough and concise as possible, to get it all out there, to free myself from this. To have a document that can be referenced from here on out, should it ever come up again. Regardless, it deserves to finally all be out in the open. Silence safeguards the worst people. Given the trends shown here, something else will come down the line, and maybe this document will help them.

Who am I?

I'm Tara Welker. I made the first tweet chronologically outing Vic Mignogna - whose deeds were a well known thing in the con circuit and discussed in fandom spaces as early as 2003. I was one of the dozens of people who outed Bryon William Beaubien aka Bill Beaubien aka Will Beaubien aka SuperPsyguy aka BitPolarGame aka Brinnmations. I was right about David Smith aka Crikey Dave, and I was right about Chris Niosi aka Kirbopher. If you don't believe me, that's not something I'm going to concern myself with. My track record when I talk about these things is 100% and I'm right about this too.

An ex-collaborator of TeamFourStar has confirmed that they absolutely knew about my efforts. "Everyone knows the dirt on everyone in the TeamFourStar circle." Having briefly been proxy to it, I believe that.

"They only take action when a big enough stink is raised because then it affects their personal image. And then they will claim higher moral ground. I've seen it. You've seen it. It's gross. But no one will say anything. (Confirmed when Niosi was outed.)

Having been in that circle for an extended period of time, I can tell you right now the entire group is aware of you and your efforts. They are blanking you. Intentionally. Making conscious works to make your attempts not be heard and ignored.

The only time action can be taken is when it can't be ignored. When they have no choice but to address it because the wave is so immense." (Again, confirmed when Niosi was outed. In a silent cowardly way, but it severed their ties.)

First I'm going to go over things I was unaware of until the last couple years. Things many people clearly are not aware of. I will then retread the origins of this whole mess.

Last year ShadyVox posted a song that had people talking, particularly about WHY ShadyVox may of had anger towards Martin Billany as the lyrics show:

I am also namedropped in this song, as I am known for being a (loud) advocate for everyone hurt by Martin Billany and other people he associated with. I was hurt by them and witnessed a lot of things firsthand.

"And this is me being mild. Speed dial, Welker. Get it wild."

I am the Welker in question. I can shed some light on this.

A few years ago, a weird email gave me an audio file with NO context. I sat on it for a while, not being able to do much because I needed to know exactly what it meant. Eventually I learned more about what it meant.

It starts here with this audio:

ShadyVoxAudioFile.mp3

This is an audio message of ShadyVox upset with Martin Billany - he is confronting him about knowing about a particular event, knowing the lies surrounding that event, and Martin being okay with it - in line with the long standing trend of Martin protecting and platforming abusers.

The event was this, or so I am told:

XTheDarkOne / Tom Livesey was 24 when he engaged in s*x with a 17 year old minor. Even without the age concerns, he had gotten her drunk in his home. He then proceeded to take advantage of her. Consent is a concern. He not only hid this from ShadyVox and others, but when confronted he lied about the ages, hence the 'do the math' portion of the audio. XTheDarkOne claimed the ages were 18 and 21 - it was clear he knew he was in the wrong. Martin Billany absolutely knows the real ages and the details of this situation. Facebook pages with dates of birth were referenced. I cannot personally say I witnessed the events of this – but after reading the rest of this document you may see how it fits. I -do- recall Bryon William Beaubien/SuperPsyguy being very irritated about it, claiming ShadyVox had no right to be upset about it because the girl in question was an ex of his. Now that I know the context... Yikes.

People learned to stomach this for a time. A lot of bad blood would happen later. I did not witness and was only a proxy to this event.

The Niosi reference in the song is obviously Chris Niosi.

The ‘Shady could've done it better' at the end is a sardonic jab at Martin in reference to an injoke, which is used extensively in this video:

// Lyrics: https://l-hit.com/en/1726230

(Bonus: direct reference to Bryon William Beaubien/Psyguy and the podcast they both were on the regular. Just in case anyone wanted to pretend they weren't friends and collaborators for years.)

Following up from above, if you wanted to know “Why was GX Abridged canceled?” This, alongside other deeply concerning things not mentioned here are why. Especially in light of the other libertarians and generally horrible people Martin Billany chummed around with and protected for his own interests.

Here's Martin Billany talking about it being canceled, suspiciously avoiding mention of the other person who worked on it, ShadyVox.

https://x.com/yugiohtas/status/1108453573233250304 // https://archive.is/F56lE

Here's Martin Billany a year before, well after protecting a whole clusterfrick of terrible people, reprimanding ShadyVox publicly in favor of XTheDarkOne.

https://x.com/yugiohtas/status/1004105010689421318 // https://archive.is/bo03Q

Do you think Martin Billany and XTheDarkOne are still chummy? Yes. They worked together on the regular after the key event as well.

https://x.com/search?q=from%3Ayugiohtas+to%3Axthedarkone&f=live // https://archive.is/i8J3o

Now to lay out the whole messy ordeal up until this point.

In the middle of 2014, enough was enough and after well over a decade of abuse involving 20+ people Bryon William Beaubien was outed. (He is also known as Psyguy/Superpsyguy aka BitPolarGame aka Brinnmations - the list is long because he's unfortunately still active and unfortunately still getting involved with minors even after this happened.) Dave Smith aka CrikeyDave was also outed. Both had groomed a minor into a sexual relationship and created the legal definition of child porn with them via sexting. Bryon William Beaubien was also outed for multiple accounts of being involved with minors, being abusive, sexually coercive (aka r*pe) and commiting various instances of fraud involving money and using people for various things, including s*x, labor, and content creation.

Here's a colossal and in depth document concerning that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O0jYmwagR5FxNAfO8yQDzEqbz-oxby9M-WhQxF3F_MU/edit

Both were heavily involved with Martin Billany and TeamFourStar. They did voice work and animations for them (like the video above), and they all had a podcast called 'Wha-chow'. I was privy to a lot of the Skype calls of the time and had witnessed plenty of the more egregious claims. I witnessed Martin Billany witnessing it too. I witnessed Chris Niosi witnessing it as well.

The reaction to this event was huge and immediate. Despite having dozens of testimonies, a huge pile of audio evidence via Wha-chow, and everyone having a long trail of evidence of their involvement with them, the backlash was severe.

The people who gave testimonies were pretty clear: they had dealt with and witnessed some pretty terrible things over a 15 year span, it was time to make things right and put a stop to it. The backlash was unreal, and it did not take long for people to rightfully want Martin Billany's support: he was a regular and the huge draw on the Wha-chow podcast and had witnessed an ABSURD amount - including a doxxing attempt on one of the people hurt. He had watched Bryon William Beaubien court two minors in a state (Texas) where it was violating established Romeo and Juliet laws to be a 30 year old pursuing 15-16 year olds. One of them is named Madison, and Martin would regularly foist them off onto Bryon. The abuse would intensify after some episodes. He had also witnessed the severe abuse that was occuring in several instances, most notably with Liz aka Blizooka/Rimeshard in the testimony document. Both myself and Liz pleaded with him to help when Bryon William Beaubien came back and made it clear he was digging his feet in. People started getting rightfully upset when he refused and abandoned everyone.

This is when Chris Niosi attempted to defuse the situation - I suspect mostly because he was stuck between worrying about losing the star of his TOME animations and trying to curry favor with his ex-girlfriend Liz - who he is still obsessed with. When it was clear that no one was happy he was 'frick you, got mine' about the situation, and OneKids Mike came in telling everyone that Martin Billany was suicidal and that we would be 'welcome to email him once the episode was over.'

To quote someone in the know, "Martin claims he will always believe the victims, and then posts about striving for a better world of understanding and responsibility, while doing nothing. He's a fricking coward who falls back on his personal struggles as a safety net for sympathy when he gets called out." I can confirm this, I've held back for a long time even now saying certain things out of fear of this.

This ended up ringing true because by the end people felt manipulated because the promised response never came. People of course stopped when the suicide part was mentioned, because what else would any reasonable person do? What if it suddenly became reality? I fear a Alec Holowka situation. But also: that fear in itself is a terrible thing in the first place. So they're just not responsible for anything they do…ever? You get to use that as a shield every time consequences for actions or inactions happen? You get carte blanche to do whatever? Chris Niosi would also frequently scream at people that ‘no one would be happy unless he killed himself' when consequences arrived and that's beyond gross and manipulative. I know he has wished death on me before, but I can still say I've never returned that favor. There is more than one testimony where it's mentioned he was pushing people to suicidal ideation.

To reiterate, public image is all that matters here. Once consequences start happening, it's all but guaranteed this tactic will start. It happened to me, it happened to others. Any time he has had to axe anyone because it had become untenable it has been silent, with no mention of his involvement or extended defense/silencing of people.

Coincidentally, the guy who played a part on this, OneKids Mike, also turned out to be abusive. https://archive.is/6oDkC

So it was like...okay, Martin Billany was an attraction for a lot of the people who flocked to the podcast and subsequently got abused, and he witnessed the bulk of it. He was FRIENDS with people who were abused who were pleading for his help. But it was clear he wasn't going to do anything to help, so let's just drop it I guess.

…Except Martin Billany started trying to rehabilitate and replatform the people outed!

Martin Billany tried to bring Crikey Dave back to the fold after he was outed:

https://x.com/search?q=from%3Ayugiohtas+to%3Acrikeydave&f=live // https://archive.is/wip/DSUoS

Here's a later photo of them together:

https://archive.is/C8ZV3

Here's a bonus photo of Martin Billany and XTheDarkOne from earlier taken by Crikey Dave because why not:

https://archive.is/tHup6

Here's the leader of TeamFourStar, KaiserNeko aka Scott Frerichs being buddy buddy as well, note the drop off date:

https://x.com/search?q=from%3Akaiserneko+crikeydave&f=live

https://archive.is/3XAWD (He is a serial namesearcher and incriminating tweet deleter, so some parts may be missing, but the dates don't lie. He 100% knew.)

I naturally gave him a lot of grief, and they eventually stopped after I kept mentioning it. I've never been quiet about it, and Martin was also a serial name searcher of himself who would frequently get into fights with people around this time, so I can only imagine he saw these:

https://x.com/lashiec/status/776940034062741508

https://x.com/lashiec/status/1151222706068701185

https://x.com/lashiec/status/943176573221515265

A few years later it became very clear that Chris Niosi also had a lot to answer for. Old unknown grievances, and new, currently active things. I talked about it at length FOR YEARS while Martin Billany / TeamFourStar knew, and they maneuvered to silence my efforts and continued working with him. I literally had fledgling voice actors come up to me gaslamping and playing defense for Niosi. (Some apologized to me directly later. I will address others further down.)

Please note the dates of when Chris Niosi was finally forced to deal with all he had done...

https://x.com/lashiec/status/1152721859625902082

https://x.com/lashiec/status/1151586001963405313

...and the last time Martin Billany spoke with him publicly.

https://x.com/search?q=from%3Ayugiohtas+to%3Akirbopher&f=live // https://archive.is/9hOB4

…and the last time the lead of Team Four Star spoke with him publicly.

https://x.com/search?q=from%3Akaiserneko+kirbopher&f=live

https://archive.is/ScpMJ

(Special note: KaiserNeko aka Scott Frerichs has spoken rudely about the Superpsyguy situation in the past and is a serial namesearcher and incriminating tweet deleter, so some parts may be missing. The fact he and Martin platformed Niosi for years is significant - I actually didn't know how bad it was until recently, I had no idea how many works they were casting each other in - it was quite a bit. I had purposefully avoided anything to do with TFS for my own mental health, plus a general lack of interest. I avoided Wha-chow even back in the day, and didn't show up in the audio evidence much as a result. The podcast started getting gross and the weird worship around certain cast members was hard to stomach if you weren't a fan.)

July 17-20, 2019 VS July 12, 2019

In a follow up I made it very clear Martin had been protecting him all that time, mocking people speaking out against him for years (confirmed by ex-collaborators), and facilitating silence around it.

https://x.com/lashiec/status/1155178100411588608

I also revealed in the tweet thread above that Chris Niosi had gone on a show promoting ToeJam and Earl with Nick Robinson. AFTER it was revealed he was abusing his position to sexually harass women. Please note the replies to the show tweet, and this. I was not the only person aware of and saying this stuff by any stretch. I emailed everyone I could well before this.

Martin Billany and the rest of TFS dropped Chris Niosi like he was radioactive the millisecond it was clear their efforts would not work anymore.

So it finally stuck - but only because Niosi had abused someone people knew, someone recent, someone other people knew in real life and was much harder to hide. And he tried to lie about trying to take sexual advantage of them while they were drunk - this was a catalyst. So they had to deal with the fact I wasn't lying all that time. And that the silencing efforts by them directly led to someone else being hurt.

This follows something the ex-TFS collaborator had said: "My mistake for thinking he'd stand up for what's right when there's clear evidence in the past that he simply does not give a shit as long as it doesn't interfere with his public persona."

Team Four Star and Martin Billany does not give a frick about you, me, or anyone else if it may potentially paint them in a bad light or may simply make them miss out on work. They're fine working with abusive buttholes, sexual predators, libertarians, they just don't want you to know about it.

Martin Billany was very cool with Chris Niosi, despite me talking about what Chris Niosi had done on the regular. Despite me contacting Martin (and others) directly about what he had done prior to him being outed:

https://amethystlashiec.tumblr.com/post/149095962046/regarding-chris-kirbopher-niosi

https://amethystlashiec.tumblr.com/post/168720647771/violetviolence-cyndermizuki-since-when-do

I was not quiet about Niosi AT ALL. Several other people weren't either.

Another notable person both Martin Billany was very chummy with for a time, (and Niosi is continuously chummy with) Andrew Peepeeman:

https://x.com/lashiec/status/1417400637327826952

Peepeeman actually confessed to sexual assault and other terrible things in January of 2016 and then deleted it later on his ancient NSFW tumblr. It was a known thing at this point, and was when both were chummy with him, as seen below. I have the archive of the confession and gladly offer to spread it to relevant parties and have - it unfortunately does out three of the people he hurt and it is always for them to decide if it gets posted publicly, I cannot make that decision in good conscience. Peepeeman has gotten blacklisted for this particular event from studios. Niosi is still amicable with Peepeeman to this day and it's one of like....a dozen reasons I don't ever plan on forgiving him. Niosi is exactly like Martin where he will not abide by any notable value system in practice unless it makes him look good to the public or gets him something.

https://archive.is/LXlQs

https://archive.is/tKB9m

It was actually a request from several people Chris Niosi hurt to step down from voice acting. In my testimony I mentioned the allegations are older than his career - so he had gone in knowing that. Whatever your opinion is on asking him to quit outright, and there is nuance, he has not considered the feelings of others for a long time. Dubs are still a minefield for everyone involved. Less of a minefield, but one all the same. Sprinkle in some of his unionbusting for flavor.

I want to make this painfully clear: No one Chris Niosi has hurt has forgiven him. He never admitted to the sexual coercion, which was the bare minimum. He refused to drop his public relationship with another credibly accused male feminist, also the bare minimum. Chris Niosi skirted these allegations hoping no one would look into it, and unfortunately that tactic has worked quite a bit. Let me make this clear: Niosi is a sexually coercive creep and has done so to several women. He has stalked, and he has restrained people trying to get away from him. He physically manhandled women in public - and even tried to sexually take advantage of an ex while she was drunk. This event was a catalyst and some people close to him left him after excusing his behavior for far too long. He has used people. He has anger issues and blows up at women in private - hot blooded screaming. He employs DARVO tactics on the regular. He has sent countless abuse-by-proxy friends after people trying to get away from him, or speaking up about him. I had to deal with that during the worst of it several times. He has tried to ruin other people's careers. To quote Cailen from the testimonies document: you will never meet someone as self absorbed and selfish as Kirbopher. He calls the abuse, manipulation and sexual coercion of others ‘gossip'. Abuse that HE partook in and stayed silent about. To reiterate: no one relevant to this situation has forgiven him.

You often see it on twitter - “Oh! But they got better!” from uninvolved people who have no idea what he even did. One of the people Chris Niosi hurt the most and had the most to answer for had taken a leave of absence from the internet in response to the stress of it all. Chris Niosi saw this as an opportunity to SPEAK FOR HER, claiming “everything was okay - and that he totally never sexually assaulted anyone!''. This individual came back to the internet briefly and specifically to set the record straight and tell him to stop putting words in her mouth. Chris Niosi tried to use both myself and Liz in some weird rehabilitation plots and it was terrible and emotionally exhausting, especially knowing what I know now. He always wanted to be sure it was “enough” without actually having to straight up admit to the worst parts. Absolutely taxing. Chris Niosi is the only person who ever drove me to drink in all this.

I have her tweets archived should I find a relevant party that needs them, but since they cannot be contacted I will relay the contents of the tweets without the archive:

“I was done with this, but he is trying to use me to shield him. This is completely unacceptable.

Let me make this as brief as I can. Any “progress” Chris Niosi has made has been reversed with an extremely foolish and nonsensical move. He saw my absence as an opportunity to manipulate my words into DEFENDING him and hoped that I wouldn't notice.

Let's be clear: I wrote a post that specifically talked about -two events- only to clear up some misconceptions. Again, only about those two dates. Now he is saying that I personally and completely cleared him of any sexual abuse. (This is in direct response to the manipulative tweet Chris Niosi posted: 1 )

As I tweeted earlier, this is what he admitted himself IN WRITING and what I accused him of IN WRITING. He groped me against my consent nearly every day of our relationship.

(this tweet links to two images: 1 and 2 First image is the closest he ever comes to actually admitting to what he did, and as you can see it is very calculated and severely lacking.)

This was not cute petting from a partner, this was full-on aggressive sexual grabbing every time I changed out of my clothes to hop into the shower. I was direct with him: stop doing this. I did not kittyfoot around telling him that I did not want him to touch me.

So, can someone care to explain to me what that is then if it's not some form of sexual abuse/harassment? Because I googled the definition and I can't think of what else it could be. Again, he admitted to doing this in his own words. Now suddenly it's a different story with him.

I cannot fathom any therapist of his thinking that this could possibly benefit his path to self-improvement. This is bullshit; I was done with it all. He is purposely dragging me back into this. This is not a changed man.

I am aware he has since taken down that Twitter thread but to me the damage was done. I do not want anyone to think that his most-recent ex-girlfriend would actually condone and attempt to protect the actions of this abusive individual. Thank you for reading.

I know it's real inspiring that he talked about his therapy and I'm glad HE feels better about what he has done, but no one he hurt has forgiven him. In conversation he was sure to bring this up repeatedly, not as a point of "i am working on getting better, to better myself, for myself," but "are you proud of me, is this enough, can I go back to normal with no consequences and voice act now, please let me omit the repeated sexual abuse" It was mentally exhausting and manipulative. He brought his friend Kajet in as well, and it was more of the same “we don't have to mention the sexual abuse stuff right?? Right? That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it?” I was being gaslit, and these talks went on for a long time, trying to exhaust my boundaries. I was being asked to provide an absurd amount of emotional labor, and I know I'm not the only one. I had completely unrelated people come to me talking about it. These are all relevant tactics to the testimonies. He just admitted what he thought he could bounce back from and refused to address the worst of it - they both pretended peace was made. It wasn't. He has hurt and stymied countless people - their lives and wellbeing are not worth less than his. He has already taken way too much from others. He hasn't changed an iota.

Please note in ALL of Chris Niosi's non-apologies over the years, he specifically does not ever reply to anything and generates a new post to do it. This is to keep as many eyes off the testimonies as possible, and to control the narrative as much as possible. Wouldn't want Amy, Liz, Cailen, Audrey or my own particularly darning testimonies out, would we?

Two abuse-by-proxy people for Niosi that did defense for him, who have never apologized despite that defense enabling him to sexually abuse women after the fact, and are still chummy with Niosi to this day? Lauren and Deven Mack. This is an all purpose document, so I'm mentioning them. They did serious legwork for Niosi towards people in private - I know this because those people came to me later. Both are also still very friendly with him. Make of that what you will. Here's me touching on it, cementing it on the timeline a year before Niosi sexually abuses the last known person: 1 I must note Lauren did come out in support against SuperPsyguy at points - but she only gets on board with people who have personally hurt her - so him and Liz specifically, and in regards to Niosi had said something along the lines of “I have a degree in psychology, so I'd know if he was bad” which is…a very dumb statement, to put it nicely. This was deleted because I think they figured out how it sounds - especially in light of new abuse revealed a year later. But they said stuff like that on the regular at the time. Lauren had done terrible things for SuperPsyguy, so they haven't changed much - they just picked someone else to cape for. Here's me being (understandably) pretty pissed about it.

TO REMIND YOU: Chris Niosi has never ever admitted to being sexually coercive to the three, possibly more, people I know of. Stalking them. Groping them. Sending people after them. Pressuring them for s*x, for physically restraining and making unwanted sexual contact. Trying to take advantage of someone who was drunk. For enabling other abusers back then and to this very day. You don't ‘get better' from things you don't admit to. You don't get better when you just continue doing what you were doing. He pretends he was just a shitty boyfriend. He was an absolutely terrible person well beyond that scope. You don't and can't ‘get better' from things you hide and hope no one ever mentions it again. There used to be entire art accounts and flash videos targeting Niosi because of his other past antics - I was his friend at the time, and while I'm sure some of that was mean spirited, I apologize for not seeing why people felt this strongly about him even back then, before it got worse.

I'm sure he's wished death on me some more, and really likes using the word ‘freak' and ‘talking out of her butt' in reference to me. Well, if I'm talking out of my butt, I really do wonder what one would call whatever it is he's doing.

I will give him this though: he at least would vaguely heed my warnings about Vic Mignogna. Not do anything, but I'm not aware of anything egregious.

Here's Martin Billany throwing shade about Vic Mignogna and his defenders which is...rich, considering.

https://x.com/yugiohtas/status/1180184783759929344 // https://archive.is/PSGNM

Very safe, that battle is over, easy internet points, anyone heavy in the con circuit from 2003-present very much knew what Vic Mignogna was like, and Billany knew it too. He was chummy with him back then as well. He loved to tell jokes about being seduced by / reiterated jokes about being the 'Vic Mignogna' of a group. So what does being the ‘Vic Mignogna' of a group mean?

https://archive.is/zfDyS

In fact, here's a 2011 Youmacon panel of the vast majority of these people mentioned palling around with Vic Mignogna an hour in:

Also notably on the stage: Testimony Liz aka Blizooka/Rimeshard, Chris Niosi, and Bryon William Beaubien/SuperPsyguy.

Guess when my tweets making it clear I knew he would sexually pursue underage girls originated?

2010. It was an open secret at conventions and discussed on livejournal for years at this point.

I was friends with several of these people at the time, by the way. They absolutely knew, I made sure everyone knew and he let all those people take the brunt of it alone when things got nasty in the last few years. At least he is consistent.

In case you feel the need to ask 'who knew?' about all this, I'm going to be blunt, all of TeamFourStar knew. Martin would regularly tell others to stay silent or delete tweets. Members/collaborators would actively privately talk to people who were losing faith as the rumblings got louder. His spouse knew. MasakoX knew. Lanipator knew. Takahata101 knew. KaiserNeko knew and would actively be rude to anyone who mentioned it to silence them. Chris Niosi knew. The editors knew. The bulk of the people they worked with at the time knew. Everyone knew. At best they ignored it or made light of it and at worst they got involved with damage control. This includes active gaslamping about Chris Niosi as recently as a few years ago. All while he was hurting someone that could've - in theory - been prevented. While Bryon / BitPolarGame / Psyguy / Brinnmations was preying on a new 16 year old girl by 2017 - three years after he was originally outed. While I have people 20 years younger than him in contact with me talking about how he tried the tactics described in 2014 all over again as recently as this year. While more than a few people had to do extensive amounts of therapy.

‘And don't you dare say you never knew, that's not true. The whole crew warned you.'

I'm sure these are people who have loved and lost, who have done good things, who have done bad things, things like most any person. I see that in them. I honestly believe some of them do not see it in me or everyone else hurt by this. Some of them have made that very clear.

Maybe they're better people now - even with the current concerns. But they still have things to answer for.

Coincidentally, Retroware Studios, who is publishing a game being worked on by the bulk of these people at TeamFourStar (Toxic Crusaders) is a namechange of Screenwave Media - the group that Bryon William Beaubien aka Psyguy aka BitPolarGame aka Brinnmations found solace and a platform in as "BitPolarGame'' from 2015 to 2017 - well after he was outed as a serial abuser, fraudster, and sexually coercive libertarian. I had to take them to task to get him removed - including revealing details of my own r*pe I was not comfortable with, but I felt I had to drive the point home after being continuously ignored. Controversy and this group are not a new thing, apparently. If you google ‘screenwave media controversy' more things show up. Take that for what you will. This could possibly be what inspired the company namechange. There was also a previous company before this. I don't know any specifics but it is something to note. The company is known-abusive-male feminist-libertarian friendly and apparently are also guy-whose-known–and-convicted-for-child-porn-who-served-time friendly, unfortunately. A good fit for TeamFourStar. Things haven't changed.

This is just the stuff I personally know, and it has been nearly 10 YEARS since this started. I'm worried about the stuff I don't know about. But this is the end-all, be-all. As far as I know.

Everyone has been contacted privately at least once prior to this. The writing has been on the wall for years, nothing else really could be done beyond bringing it to the public sphere.

Martin Billany doing this once, say with just Psyguy, would be one thing. That would suck, but then he just would've been an butthole and a bad friend years ago. It wouldn't be a pattern. It's unfortunately a small part of an established and very substantial pattern.

People like Vic Mignogna thrived for so long because he was a missing stair. Team Four Star and Martin Billany are the guys who work overtime for years and years to ensure that stair never sees repair.

Silence left to its own breeds silence. Be loud.

About 2 years ago Age of empires 3 Definitive Edition came out of early access, and a lot of dramarama was generated by the Microsoft-peepeelet devs having changed the Indigenous Indian civilizations to to be more accurate about their representation blabla you get the idea.

I don't remember the exact timeframe, but early access was October 2020, and the release in 2021.

AOE3 GAYMERS GOT NERVOUS ABOUT THE CULTURAL SENSITIVITY ISSUES:

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/ixz8mg/is_anyone_else_worried_about_the_cultural

I don't remember all the details of the changes, but the devs would change the names of two of the prominent Indian civs.

The devs had also made a big show of having had actual natives in their studio to give them "advice" on what was historically accurate and stuff, and this caused uproar, as one of the most major things they changed

ARTICLES COME OUT ABOUT CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL TO DEFINITIVE EDITION:

https://screenrant.com/age-empires-3-definitive-edition-changes

"The last change, and one that's nice to see, is that World's Edge Games is altering the Native American civilizations. In the announcement post, the studio says that they always strive to represent different cultures and peoples, and the Native American civilizations simply weren't meeting its standards. Although the studio hasn't said exactly what will be changed, it did work with tribal consultants to more respectfully portray the civilizations in the game."

https://www.cbr.com/age-of-empires-iii-definitive-edition-changes

"The Native American civilizations have also been overhauled to give a more realistic depiction of each tribe. The Sioux have been renamed Lakota and the Iroquois are now the Haudenosaunee. Some of the buildings have also been remodeled to portray the tribes more accurately. World's Edge, Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition's developer, worked with Native American consultants to ensure each tribe is represented realistically. The Age of Empires series has always strived to be as historically accurate as possible, so tweaking the Native American tribes to represent them faithfully was the right decision."

FIREPITS CHANGED:

https://www.theg*mer.com/age-of-empires-3-definitive-editioin-everything-new-changed

========(from article)

"You now build Community Plazas instead of Fire Pits; they function the same (set gatherers to it to get special benefits).

What were referred to as the Iroquois in the first game are now the Haudenosaunee; the former Sioux are now the Lakota. They are otherwise the same, mechanically.

The Haudenosaunee and the Lakota do not gather from mines directly; they must build special buildings (Tribal Marketplace) adjacent to mines to gather coin from."

========(article end)

Context from the firepits: the Native indian civs had the unique RTS ability which basically gave them very powerful bonusses for "free" - in the sense that letting their gatherer units (villagers) dance around the fire pit would generate powerful bonus shit based on the civ. Other resources like food/coin and wood deteriorated over time as they were used up, while Fire-Pit dancing was "infinite" and could be used indefinitely, with caveat of the time and opportunity cost you lost with your villagers dancing instead of gathering the other 3 main resources. But a skilled RTS player could juggle the advantages of using their villagers to dance instead of gathering resources. The Souix for example could generate an extremely powerful Cavalry unit every 30 seconds if like 5 villagers danced around your fire pit, and spawned a cav unit every 15 seconds if you had 10 vils dance, you get the idea.

With the usual early access tweaking and altering of an established Meta, the change in the Fire-Pit completely fricked over the strengths of the Native indian civs, at least early i don't remember when or how it resolved.

This put in the view that the Devs were more focused on Woke-shit, rather than using their time economically to improve upon the AOE3 remake in terms of mechanics or whatever.

SUB ERUPTS IN INFIGHTING:

Opposing opinions :

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/tyxe4z/how_is_the_definitive_edition_in_its_current_state

The view that devs focused more on woke stuff was compounded upon its release, as the AOE3 was much more buggy and unfinished than the Definitive Editions predecessors of AOE1: DE and AOE2: DE. Both the AOE1 & 2 remakes were buggy, not nearly as buggy or unfinished as AOE3 was incomparison. You'll note the game was in early access about October 2020, fully released in 2021 Feb/march (i dont remember) - but it took another 6 months before the game was in a state comparative to the AOE1 & AOE2 remakes.

Thus the player base which was much smaller than the cult following of AOE2 was split even further by the culture-war skirmish and the multiplayer being divided between two set of games - much salt for everyone!!!

https://www.reveddit.com/v/aoe3/comments/jzqm5l/age_of_empires_iii_definitive_edition_honest

"It's a shame because I was hoping that definitive edition would revitalize the player base yet all it has seemed to have done so far is fragment it further."

"I have been waiting for age 3 DE since they announced it back in 2017. Even took a week off mid October to play hundrets of 2v2 ranked games with a friend of me. We had been PR 40 back then in 2005/2006. But it was so buggy and i had so many drops, crashes and disconnects that we couldn't even manage to play 100 games in first week. After they fixed some crashes they destroyed ranked / games wouldn't countThen there was the file deletion bug. After one of my friends lost his files i had enough. I deleted the game. Pre ordered World of Warcraft Shadowlands and didn't look back. Played 200h and didnt had a single drop / disconnect / game crash. I was the definition of a die hard fan back then and i would have paid 150 euros for a stable and good working remaster. I would even buy a new pc for it. But they fricked up so hard that i wont come back, its not important how many fixes they do. I had been so angry after dropping / crashing 4-5 times a day in the first weak, that i would rather work for free then play this game any longer. My vacation week has been destroyed by Microsoft. Never again. 1 month later and it still sucks. They should have delayed it by 1 year."

"Me and others continuously asked the developers to postpone the release when it was still in what they called "beta " stage (which felt like an alpha stage to be honest). We told them this would happen, just as it happened to AoE1. Yet, here we are. It's really sad. I've been playing AoE3 since it released but I'm not going to buy the DE. Not unless they fix the game for good, and I don't see this happening any time soon..."

This is the uTube vid causing the bussy blasting

MONTHS OF INFIGHTING:

Months of drama and passive aggressive posting on the sub. Just scouring top of controversial section:

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/rc5m5s/the_real_aoe3

The racists want the fire pit back!

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/rc5m5s/the_real_aoe3/hnv3twa

UNBALANCED GAME

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/13ram9r/lakota_eco_is_ass_omg

THE WHITE MAN'S GAME!!!

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/mkdi57/for_what_its_worth

filthy mayos takes offence to that!

Don't say it's just a game - EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL

Some drama from the steam forums: where majority of forum posts were bitching about race!

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/ms55kw/aoe3_steam_discussion_the_blatant_racism_in_the

"I feel like the developers cant win. If they dont include any POC models for the US civ, people would have started a witch hunt. They added POC units and now there are people calling them racist.

Just frustrating to see all the negativity over this addition to the game. Especially over such small details. IMO Age of Empires should never be looked to as history. It should inspire people to look up the real history of the material in the game. That's it. If the game is fun and it pushes people to find real information then its done its job in the history mindset. I find it hard to believe anyone plays AoE and thinks, this is how it was."

BBC POSTING:

The black washing of scandinavian Gingercide angers the Swedistan cucks:

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/jc9pjv/they_made_indians_accurate_but_two_out_of_4

Hey look it's an Amazon series in the game!

"Have you seen Sami? They can be pretty dark. Plus every Euro civ in the original game was like this."

"Yep, most Euros civ have (and have always had) black/brown settlers. It's a way of acknowledging slavery without, you know, explicitly having a slavery mechanic. Sweden had slaves in its colonies, so all this fits. What is your point, exactly?" Swedistan has always been a New York Subway conglomerate of ethnic diversity sweaty!

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/mqdp4b/racial_imbalance_1819th_century_us_army

Amerimutt complains that 90% of revolution army was

"This mf's thinking that he's playing a documentary"

Lots of minging about the proportion of the US army was black or not.

Some random: Why do the devs hate the Swedes?

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/149yz2e/why_do_the_devs_hate_sweden

Because Allah has not yet purged europe from the Cuck yet1!!!

RENAMING DRAMARAMA!

Holy shit almost forgot about the renaming drama! The devs also renamed a bunch of shit in the AOE3: DE

THE COLONIAL AGE TO COMMERCE AGE:

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/j2b9gt/de_colonial_age_renamed_to_commerce_age

So in age of Empires they have the tradition to have your civs evolve into incrementally more powerful technology tiers, by advancing through what's called Ages , to simulate the evolution of a civilization through time - it's been a staple of the Age of Empires since the 1st game and is kind of part of its name.

In the AOE3:DE they fricking renamed the Colonial age to a more "politically correct" term.

Even the more liberally slanted subreddit found this one change indifensibly stupid.

"And the Discovery Age is called the Exploration Age and plantations are called estates. I get why they did it: They don't want every article about it on sites like Kotaku to be about how "oppressive and pro-slavery and glorifying of colonial atrocities the game is. C'mon, it's 2020." In this day and age, people would get hung up on that and Microsoft just wants to avoid the problem altogether.Doesn't make it any less stupid, though. It's still referring to the time-period colonization started; if anything, it's worse because they boil down colonialism to "it's great because they made a lot of money." And the Imperial Age is still called the same thing and obviously refers to the the time period the British Empire was at its peak. And, surprise! It was a colonial empire."

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/j2b9gt/de_colonial_age_renamed_to_commerce_age/g75q81v

"I am so disapointed with the rework's direction. Most major changes focus on BS instead of actual gameplay improvements. I wont support this game despite being a huge fan of the original AoE3."

PLANTATION RENAMED TO ESTATE:

https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/the-removal-of-the-term-colonial-from-the-game-why/104051/4

Chud gaymer mod the old names back in

ESSAY POSTING:

One Non-chud definitively (TM) owns the chuds with facts and logic

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/oracex/rant_some_points_about_that_pc_correction_in_the

About the politically correct

"Trying to be brief, since there have been lots of posts complaining about these changes:

I've seen several people saying that changing terms like “colonial age” or “plantation” is political in some way. One the one hand it's true, but people shouldn't forget that the original terms and framing were also extremely political. Not saying they were good or bad, but the concept of a game which is depicting the era of European Imperialism and framing it as a glorious age of discovery and conquest - that is inherently political, there's no getting around that."

"[Edit: many commenters don't seem to be getting this point, since they're still complaining about “political correctness.” If you think renaming the colonial age is political, but have never thought about the political implications of the term “colonial age” ... ask yourself why one bothers you but the other doesn't. Maybe some kind of bias?]

In a way, sanitizing that time period by replacing all the labels with neutral terms is even more PROBLEMATIC!!!!!!"

==========

Chuds disagree

Chud owns definitively (TM) the soys with facts and logic

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/oracex/rant_some_points_about_that_pc_correction_in_the

"I think this 'correction', somehow specifically servicing Native Americans, is a very conspicuous insertion of PC values, and coupled with the self-congratulatory blurb that we all see when we open the game, really calls attention to how hollow this is. Here's why."

Boils down to that the politically-correcting is haphazzardly applied and not even, especially to the Asian civs: He points out how full of it the devs were

====

"(1) Arbitrary name changes

Iroquois is changed to Haudenosaunee, and because that's what they called themselves and apparently calling it a foreign-given name is offensive. But then we don't see the game changing 'Germany' to 'Deutchland' or 'Japan' to 'Nihon' to afford everyone the same kind of respect. While we're at native civilizations, the Aztecs weren't accorded the same kind of respect either, because they're dead - they're called Aztecs instead of say, Mexica, the name they called themselves."

====

"(2) Cherry-picked dialogue updates

The native dialogue is changed, while the Chinese and Japanese dialogue at least, remain at 'shamefur dispray' levels. A lot of the Asian characters are also voiced by half-Asians of the wrong ethnicity, or outright non-Asians, and the grammar and pronunciations are both wrong."

====

"(3) What measure is a magical Native American civ?

They took out the things like fire pit dances because it's offensive to portray magical native americans, but the Chinese being led by this shaolin master who is in turn improved by technologies like 'supreme ultimate fist' is apparently ok. Magical natives no, magical Asians sure."

Plz pin this @XY

THE FOUNDING OF RHODESIA:

When the powerful Diamond-magnate Cecil John Rhodes deemed to create the most ambitious modern African cross-continental silk-route from Cape to Cairo, he applied his titanic ambitions in a region called Zambesia - so called as it was bounded by the vast african Zambezi river. Despite his larger than life influence, impact and ambitions, his lifelong ill health brought him to death at a relatively young age of 48, never having seen his objective of a trans-african railroad network brought to fruition.

Cecil did however see the establishment of the Rhodesia mining settlement province as a staging point for his enormous railway project in Zambesia. However, after his death, the colony of Rhodesia became just that - a regular settler colony, and any grand aspirations of trying lay down 4000km of railways was shelved by the miners and company settlers.

The Pioneer Column was a force raised by Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company in 1890, and used in his efforts to annex the territories of Zambesia. The most promising parts of the vast region of Zambesia was two kingdoms called Matabeleland and Mashonaland. Rhodes was anxious to secure Matabeleland and Mashonaland before the Germans, Portuguese or Boers did. Rhodes was the wealthiest and most powerful man in all of Southern Africa at this point, and the Pioneer Column contained a mercenary force of 2500 armed men.

Rhodes's company, the British South Africa Company (BSACo) had began to cut out vast swaths of land across Zambesia in the famous mad scramble for Africa's rich, seemingly limitless resources by the Western european powers, and their respective Industrial titan companies.

His first step was to persuade the Matabele King Lobengula (the ruler of Matabeleland), in 1888, to sign a treaty giving him rights to mining and administration (but not settlement as such) in the area of Mashonaland. Mashonaland was ruled by King Lobengula by use of coercion and murderous raids involved tribute-taking and abduction of young men and women. The defeated Mashonas had been subjugated by the Matabeles in a similar fashion in which the Zulus had subjugated the Xhosas under Shaka's regime, and the tribal-tribute was the manner in which Lobengula forced his will on the region of Mashonaland.

https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/rudd-concession-king-lobengula-matabeleland-1888

https://zimfieldguide.com/bulawayo/were-lobengula-and-amandebele-tricked-rudd-concession

Rhodes would go full corporate scumbag mode by fooling King Lobengula twofold in something called the Rudd Concession (so called because Rhodes's business partner, Charles Rudd, was instrumental in securing the signature) between Rhodes' British South Africa Company and Lobengula. First: the Rudd Concession was signed on behalf of Queen Victoria though without any official knowledge or authority - the rest of Britain was fully in the dark of this deal in which Rhodes made, and no royal authority was given by the Queen. It was all bluff. Second: he set out to occupy the land, NOT just mine the minerals. Lobengula gave permission for settlements for the purpose of harvesting minerals, but Rhodes and his company high command fully intended to to occupy the land. Rhodes's military advisers estimated that it would take 2,500 men and about one million pounds to win the war that would, they thought, inevitably result when Lobengula realised that Rhodes meant not only to mine but also to occupy his land.

https://zimfieldguide.com/harare/pioneer-column’s-march-macloutsie-mashonaland

https://zimfieldguide.com/harare/pioneer-column’s-march-detailed-maps

Now I'm going on a tangent, but just to demonstrate how batshit fearless and insane the founders of Rhodesia were, I need to include the numbers of the BSACo Pioneers column. The column consisted of 180 civilian colonists, 62 wagons and 200 volunteers (who ultimately formed the nucleus of what became the British South Africa Police). A further party of 110 men, 16 wagons, 250 cattle and 130 spare horses later attached itself to the column. The troopers were equipped with Martini-Henry rifles, revolvers, seven-pound field guns and Maxim machine guns, as well as an electric searchlight (which they later used to good effect to intimidate Matabele warriors shadowing the column). Under 500 men.

The column would travel over a distance of about 650 kilometres. The British union flag would be hoisted in what would become Fort Salisbury,

Realizing the Rhodes company and its mercenaries were here to stay, the Matabeles quickly became aggressive and tried to hound the column and miners at night, but electric lamps inspired great fear from into their impi soldiers.

THE FIRST MATABELE WAR:

Fought between 1893 and 1894, the First Matabele War pitted the British South Africa Company against the Ndebele (Matabele) Kingdom. Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, had tried to avoid outright war with the company's pioneers because he and his advisors were mindful of the destructive power of European-produced weapons on traditional Matabele impis (units of warriors) attacking in massed ranks. News of how the British army regulars had overcome the Zulus in the Natal Province, east of Cape Town, had reached all the way to Zambesia, and africans were very wary of any power who could defeat the dreaded Zulus. The Zulus had also been brutally defeated by the Boers at the battle of Bloodriver with a force of no more than 500 overcoming over 10 000 Zulus, thanks to their firearms. The Matabeles were now aware of the deadliness of european firearms. Lobengula reportedly could muster 80,000 spearmen, and yet even such a small group of european settlers such the 500 men of the 1st Pioneer column inspired caution for him.

Thus, the Matabeles tried to raid around the white settlements to cut them off from supply, and kill their Tswana labourers whom had started to work in their mines. The British South Africa Company administration felt that they had to intervene to avoid losing the confidence of the local people who complained that they were not being given any support against the raids.

A force totalling about 700 men, commanded by Major Patrick Forbes and equipped with five Maxim machine guns, moved on the Matabele king's capital at Bulawayo. The Matabele army mobilised to prevent Forbes from reaching the city, and twice engaged the column as it approached: on 25 October, 3,500 warriors assaulted the column near the Shangani River. Lobengula's troops were well-drilled and formidable by pre-colonial African standards, but the pioneers' Maxim guns, which had never before been used in battle, far exceeded expectations, according to an eyewitness "mow[ing] them down literally like grass". By the time the Matabele withdrew, they had suffered around 1,500 fatalities; the Company Soldiers , on the other hand, had lost only four men.

Lobengula and his warriors were in full flight towards the Zambezi. An attempt was made to induce Lobengula to surrender, but no replies were received to the messages. The war would continue until Lobengula died of smallpox. in 1894.

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/first-matabele-war

"The 1893 campaign had been successful for Rhodes and the British South African Company (BSAC). Ndebele cattle were considered loot and were divided among Jameson's volunteers. Each trooper had been promised 6,000 acres of land. By mid-1894, more than 10,000 square miles had been docketed for farmland. Lobengula's royal village of Bulawayo grew almost overnight into a European-style city."

This is important because each of these company soldiers would be the ancestors of the Rhodesian farmers making the main ideological war between Communists and Rhodesians 70 years later.

RHODESIA COMPANY RULE:

For the next 30 years the regions of Zambesia would be included in a vast amount of land gobbled up by Rhodes's company.

The absolutely massive amounts of land claimed by the British South African Company, included what is modern Zimbabwe, and Zambie. The BSAC and the Portuguese would frequently clash in skirmishes between each other over rulership of regions between modern day Mozambique and Zimbabwe - both factions would arm and train local africans to fight as auxiliary armies between the colonial powers alongside the white mercenaries or colonial army regulars, but no fullout war ever developed.

The Company initially referred to each territory it acquired by its respective name—Mashonaland, Matabeleland and so on—but there was no official term for them collectively. Rhodes preferred the name "Zambesia" while Leander Starr Jameson proposed "Charterland". Many of the first settlers instead called their new home "Rhodesia". This was common enough usage by 1891 for it to be used in newspapers. In 1892 it was used in the name of Salisbury's first newspaper, The Rhodesia Herald. The Company officially adopted the name Rhodesia in 1895, and three years later the UK government followed suit.

The biggest irony of all for Rhodes and the BSAC was that the fabulous gold mines they went to war for, never materialized to the extent that they had hoped. The Company originally hoped that gold prospecting between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers would reveal mineral deposits comparable to those of the South African Rand, and indeed acquired its charter in part because its founders convinced Whitehall that a "second Rand" would be found and exploited in what would become Southern Rhodesia, thereby providing more than enough capital to develop the territory without help from London. Unfortunately for our cucked company friends, the gold they had prospected didn't reflect the magnitude discovered from Gauteng.

The Company resolved after about a decade that it could not financially sustain its domain through gold mining alone, and therefore shifted its priority to the development of white agriculture. To maximize the potential of new, white-run farms, the Company launched a wide-scale land settlement program for white settlers. As part of this drive it re-organised the geographical distribution of native reserve areas, moving the reserves and often reducing them in size where the land was of particularly high quality. Comapany soldier veterans were given hundreds of hectares of land, always at the expense of the local Matabeles.

Agriculture such as Tobacco would become the main economic revenue for the colony. Wheat production also ramped up substantially as white settlers became aware of the appropriateness of the Rhodesian land towards wheat.

https://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php

Further Consequences:

The effects of the Pioneer Column were immense. Mashonaland and Matabeleland ceased to be the poorly developed backwaters they had slipped into since the decline of the Mwenemutapa state began about 400 years earlier with the arrival of the Portuguese. The Matabele were forcibly compelled to join the modern world of the West. This was accomplished through a hut tax aimed at forcing African men to leave their herds and their barter economy to join the cash economy of the West via wage labour. A new european elite snatched control from the Iron Age monarchy which had formerly held sway ,through demonstration of overwhelming technological superiority

SOUTHERN RHODESIA 1923:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Rhodesia

By 1923 Rhodesia had developed to such an extent, and populated by so many european settlers that the company structure of a corporation could no longer fittingly serve the needs of a fledgling nation state, and the white populace voted for an independent responsible government sseparate from the British South Africa Company. Rhodesia was officially a Nation State in 1923. The idea had been toyed with to combined Southern Rhodesia with the Union of South Africa, but by this point in time, the Rhodesians had developed their own culture and independent mindset, and didn't want to be tethered to the Union of South Africa, which had formed in 1910, and was seen as too much of a Mainland British dominion colony.

https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/zambia

So what's with the Southern Rhodesia thing? Why didn't Zambië (named North Rhodesia by the company) join Southern Rhodesia?? Why were there 2 Rhodesias?

While Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) contained the lionshare of white settlers, Zambia was relatively barren and sparsely settled. Basically Zimbabwe and Zambia is separated by the Zambezi river. Initially Rhodes' main focus was south of the Zambezi, in Mashonaland and the coastal areas to its east, where everyone believed rich gore ore lay similar to the Gauteng riches. and when the expected wealth of Mashonaland did not materialize, there was little money left for significant development in the area north of the Zambezi, which he wanted to be held as cheaply as possible. Although Rhodes sent European settlers into the territory that became Southern Rhodesia, he limited his involvement north of the Zambezi to encouraging and financing British expeditions to bring it into the British sphere of influence.

Additionally, Lewanika, king of the Lozi people of Barotseland (in Zambia) sought European protection because of internal unrest and the threat of Ndebele raids. Thus Rhodes sent Frank Elliott Lochner to Barotseland to obtain a concession and offered to pay the expenses of a protectorate there.

Lochner told Lewanika that BSAC represented the British government (again Corporate bullshit), and on 27 June 1890, Lewanika consented to an exclusive mineral concession. This (the Lochner Concession) gave the company mining rights over the whole area in which Lewanika was paramount ruler in exchange for an annual subsidy and the promise of British protection

https://www.lusakatimes.com/2012/03/07/barotse-agreement-product-british-deceit

Here is a seeeth article about how King Lewanika had no right to sell the ground beneath all the other tribes' feet on their behalf, and lots of slapfights still develop because of this today, not important right now.

Understanding this is important why in 1923, Northern Rhodesia or Zambia separated into a british protectorate, whilst Southern Rhodesia separated into an independent gorvernment and nation state.

Thus Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, and Southern Rhodesia became THE Rhodesia. A Self-governing British colony (1923–1964).

Economically, Southern Rhodesia developed an economy that was narrowly based on production of a few primary products, notably, chrome and tobacco. It was therefore vulnerable to the economic cycle. The deep recession of the 1930s gave way to a post-war boom. This boom prompted the immigration of about 200,000 white settlers between 1945 and 1970, taking the white population up to 307,000. A large number of these immigrants were of British working-class origin. The black population was about 6 million.

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/03/archives/a-split-in-rhodesia-ranks.html

RHODESIA DECLARES INDEPENDENCE:

From 1923–1964, Rhodesia had been a British territory. Although a self-governing British african territory with a vast amount of autonomy. After 40 years, Rhodesia now regarded itself as an independent sovereign state. The culmination of a protracted dispute between the British and Rhodesian governments regarding the terms under which the latter could become fully independent, it was the first unilateral break from the United Kingdom by one of its colonies since the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Britain was systematically given various countries independence, having no longer the capacity or political will to maintain oversees colonies.

https://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/11/newsid_2658000/2658445.stm

This was an extremely weird moment in time, where the White-minority elite rule were screaming for independence from Britain, and the black-majority underclasses were shouting for the country to REMAIN as part of butt part of a British protectorate type territory - similar to Zambia. The reason being is that Zambia would negotiate a reasonable and bloodless transition of power, and independence from Briitish rule a black african leadership. Meanwhile the Rhodesian whites did not want to dissolve the country under Britain, and lose their power and land. Remember many of these settlers were direct descendants of those few hundred to thousand farmers who earned large farming grants from the Rhodes company for their services - these lands were sometimes taken from the Tswana or Matabeles, and which race/ethnicty/people got what depended upon the manner in which Britain would negotiate independence of Rhodesia.

You thus had a balkan-tier shitstorm brewing with peeps having mutually exclusive incompatible desires about land ownership in Zambesia.

https://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/11/newsid_2658000/2658445.stm

Thus Rhodesia effectively went into Rebellion by declaring independence:

=====(from article from 1965)

The Rhodesian Government, led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, has illegally severed its links with the British Crown. Mr Smith made the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) after days of tense negotiations with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

After the proclamation he explained: "There can be no happiness in a country while the absurd situation continues to exist where people, such as ourselves, who have ruled themselves with an impeccable record for over 40 years, are denied what is freely granted to other countries." British authorities were only prepared to permit independence on the basis of giving the black majority population a fair share of power.

Under Mr Smith's system there will be white minority rule, where 220,000 white Rhodesians will enjoy privileges over nearly four million black Rhodesians. Harold Wilson told a packed and solemn House of Commons the Labour Government would not be sending troops to deal with the crisis. Instead he announced a full-range of sanctions including ceasing all British aid to and preferential treatment for Rhodesia, banning the import of Rhodesian tobacco and recalling the British High Commissioner.

Both Rhodesian opposition parties - the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu) have declared breakaway governments. They have both called upon the British Government to use force to suspend the Smith Government. Zanu has also petitioned the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity for assistance. "Treason and rebellion have been committed. The lives particularly of four million unarmed Africans are in jeopardy," he said.

=====(end of article from 1965)

Thus a hellstorm of violence and a contest of brutality in Southern Africa was imminent.

RHODESIAN BUSH WAR (July 1964 to December 1979):

The Rhodesian bush war is long and weird and complex, and would take a whole other Longpost to put into comprehension. What's important to know is that lots of people have extremely strong opinions about it, and that this is where the story of Robert Mgabe begins.

You'd be surprised to know that very large and substantial parts of the Rhodesian army consisted of Sub-saharans black people. A complex set of factors made this war an ideological shitshow. First was the Cold War pitting external superpower influences into Rhodesia as their ideological proxy war.

South African and Namibia were under the rulership of hard right wing white-governments, and were hardcore anti-communists. They followed the doctrine of NATO, and were highly motivated to stop the spread of Moscow and Soviet influence. The paranoia of the Red Menace was so fricking high, that people declared as communists in SA would be completely socially ruined. A common saying amongst Boers and Bongs in SA was that if communists were not stopped from infiltrating Namibia from the Angola border, then South Africa would have its last stand on the banks of the Orange river against the communists hordes. This hyperbolic fear is hard to transcribe to modern millenials whom had not grown up in the era of perpetual Red Scare fear.

Thus the Union of SA was Rhodesia's primary benefactor and would supply them with literally everything - arms, armaments and munitions. Rhodesia would basically collapse in 1978, the very moment SA stopped, thus ending the Bush War, but that's another story.

Funny enough, was that although NATO and the white-ruled southern afircan countries shared the exact same ideological and military doctrines against the Soviets, but the rapid liberalization of the West like Europe and America resulted in them being in the very very very awkward position of being "mutual partners" with problematic governments against communism. Liberals protested against Apartheid South Africa and the Independent Rhodesia as racist white-supremacist governments since day one, but these two nations were the only bulwarks standing against the tides of rapidly falling amounts of 3rd world governments falling to Socialism/Communism (from the eyes of the west). For the entirety of the Rhodesian Bush War, America would be cuked by circumstances to placidly ignore the Rhodesian Civil War, as most 3rd world governments were falling to communism, except in Southern Africa, and the ideological global Cold War meant burgers were stretched thin, and with fewer choice allies they would prefer.

The Soviets and Red Chinese obviously supported any and all communist parties worldwide, either as democratic groups, or insurrectionist or rebels, and would fund and fuel, arm and train comnunist africans with Russian and chinese special operatives. Even communist Cuba would sent very large amounts of military aid and soldiers/trainers proportional to its size and population.

You could even go so far as to say that Rhodesia was the focal point between Socialist and FreeMarket powers from al over Southern Africa Angola, Zammbia, Mozambique vs Namibia and Union of SA. Neighbouring African nations, supported primarily by North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, used communist material support to begin launching guerrilla attacks on on Rhodesian civilians and infrastructure.

But black peeps inside Rhodesia were similarly divided with roughly half vying for communism, and half against. Many black peeps didn't buy into socialist paradises promised, or were already wary of the factions formed within the dominant communist groups like ZANU and ZAPU. Many black peeps were also loyal to white farmers after having their poverty and way of life uplifted under Rhodesia, even as secondary citizens with lesser rights.

Additionally Rhodesia was NOT racially homogenous in terms of its black population - if you dramatards recall, when the British South Africa Company arrived, the Matabeles were dominating the Mashonas, and the ethnic division still lasted 70 years later. There was valid fear that the loss of rulership of the white minority would lead to ethnic cleansing by one dominant racial group over another, as is what similarly led the the total destabilization of the Congo the minute it obtained independence - life under white europeans as secondary citizens was preferable to the hellscape of the Congo by 1964. Many black afircans also showed household loyalty to white farmers and police, as they obtained rank through meritocracy in european administrations, which they would not have obtained through their rigid tribal structures under inDoenas.

Important that this is not an endorsement of Rhodesia regime, or an attempt or wave away the systemic racism, but to demonstrate the compelx set of emotions and worldviews many blacks in Rhodesia had, and why they still supported the white-government, or opposed the rising communist movements.

Anyways, by 1975–1976, it was clear that an indefinite postponement of majority rule, which had been the cornerstone of the Smith Government's strategy since declaration of Independence, was no longer viable. Even overt South African support for Rhodesia was waning. South Africa began scaling back economic assistance to Rhodesia, placed limits on the amount of fuel and munitions being supplied to the Rhodesian military, and withdrew the personnel and equipment they had previously provided to aid the war effort, including a border police unit that had been helping guard the Rhodesia-Zambia border.

LANCASTER HOUSE AGREEMENT:

https://history.blog.gov.uk/2019/12/23/the-lancaster-house-agreement-forty-years-on

The beginning of the end for Smith came when South African Prime Minister B. J. Vorster concluded that white minority rule was unsustainable in a country where blacks outnumbered whites 22:1. Under pressure from Vorster, Smith accepted in principle that white minority rule could not be maintained forever. He oversaw the 1979 general election which resulted in Abel Muzorewa, a politically moderate black bishop, being elected Prime Minister. Both ZANU and ZAPU had boycotted the election, which did not receive international recognition.

Minister Margaret Thatcher surprised delegates by announcing that the UK would officially recognise the country's independence if it transitioned to democratic majority rule. The negotiations took place at Lancaster House in London, and were led by the Conservative Party politician Peter Carington

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/10/margaret-thatcher-apartheid-mandela

Mugabe refused to attend these London peace talks, opposing the idea of a negotiated rather than military solution to the Rhodesian War. Already Mugabe showed himself to be a firebrand. The ensuing Lancaster House Agreement called for all participants in the Rhodesian Bush War to agree to a ceasefire, with a British governor, Christopher Soames, arriving in Rhodesia to oversee an election in which the various factions could compete as political parties.

The plan was for a transition to formal independence as a sovereign republic under black-majority rule, also maintaining that Rhodesia would be renamed Zimbabwe, a name adopted from the Iron Age archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe.

The agreement also ensured that the country's white minority retained many of its economic and political privileges, with 20 seats to be reserved for whites in the new Parliament. By insisting on the need for a democratic black majority government, Peter Carington was able to convince Mugabe to compromise on the other main issue of the conference, that of land ownership. This is important to remember the thinking of Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe agreed to the protection of the white community's privately owned property on the condition that the UK and U.S governments provide financial assistance allowing the Zimbabwean government to purchase much land for redistribution among blacks. Mugabe was opposed to the idea of a ceasefire, but under pressure from other independent activists, Mugabe signed the agreement.

Mugabe would famously state that he felt cheated, and remaining disappointed that he had never achieved a military victory over the Rhodesian forces. Yikes. This was foreshadwing of what's to come.

ROBERT GABRIEL MUGABE:

https://mg.co.za/article/2019-09-06-robert-gabriel-mugabe-1924-2019-a-tragedy-in-three-acts

Mugabe was very intelligent and charismatic. He studied in Fort Harare in South Africa, during high apartheid. He would join the ANC Youth League and become a Marxist. Mugabe would return home to his country in Rhodesia and join the growing discontentment that learned black peeps had under white-minority rule in 1952.

His political career began in 1960-1963, where he became a hardcore anti-colonialist.

A dude by the name of Joshua Nkomo recruited Mugabe to the Rhodesian ANC party as he saw Mugabe's intelligence and charisma. But this love affair would immediately break apart and the two would splinter the entire anti colonial movement into two factions.

Nkomo lead ZAPU, and its twin was the much more radical ZANU PF under Mugabe. The Rhodesia Ian Smith regime grew wary of the "hardcore radical" rhetoric of Mugabe and ZANU PF members, and imprisoned them for sedition. Even when Mugabe's child died, he would not be allowed to attend the kid's funeral. After his 21 month sentence, Mugabe would immediately flee to Mozambique where he would become a formidable guerilla leader, and solidify his name amongst many Zimbabweans.

1980 RHODESIA ELECTION AND AFTER:

After the Lancaster House Agreement, Mugabe would return to Salisbury Rhodesia in January 1980, Mugabe was greeted by a supportive crowd.

During the campaign, Mugabe survived two assassination attempts. n the first, which took place on 6 February, a grenade was thrown at his Mount Pleasant home, where it exploded against a garden wall. In the second, on 10 February, a roadside bomb exploded near his motorcade as he left a Fort Victoria rally. Still to this day we don't know those responsible, but it's just as likely to be ZAPU versus ZANU PF infighting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Southern_Rhodesian_general_election

The 1980 election was also fright with widespread voter intimidation and brutalization, by both ZAPU and ZANU PF forces. Already the factionalization was underway. ZANU–PF secured 63% of the national vote, gaining 57 of the 80 parliamentary seats allocated for black parties and providing them with an absolute majority. ZAPU had gained only 20 seats.

A tense moment hung in the air. Everyone expected violence and reprisal, and that Mugabe would spout hate and vengeance and radical reform. And yet, remarkably his initial rule was very calm and moderate.

Mugabe's closest advisers had cautioned him not to alienate Rhodesia's white minority, warning him that any white flight after the election would cause economic damage as it had in Mozambique. Accordingly, during his electoral campaign, Mugabe avoided the use of Marxist and revolutionary rhetoric. He would imply universal healthcare where possible in public hospitals.

Although he did nationalize the mines of Rhodesia, and removed all public symbols and statues of Rhodesia's founders - including that of the big man Rhodes himself. The names of cities and streets would also be changed - the most prominent being the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury into modern Harare.

For the most part the early years of Mugabe's regime and rule would see him praised by international media, similar as to how Madiba Mandela was. His governemnt also received support from western governments in the form of development aid as promised.

Incredibly Mugabe was even quoted as follows: "Yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds me to you." This is an actual quote.

But quickly Mugabe would have dark streak.

DETERIORATING RACE RELATIONS:

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/18/world/whites-who-left-zimbabwe-fearful-of-future-drift-back.html

Mugabe initially emphasised racial reconciliation and he was keen to build a good relationship with white Zimbabweans. He hoped to avoid a white exodus and tried to allay fears that he would nationalise white-owned property. He appointed two white ministers—David Smith and Denis Norman—to his government, met with white leaders in agriculture, industry, mining, and commerce, and impressed senior figures in the outgoing administration like Smith and Ken Flower with his apparent sincerity. With the end of the war, petrol rationing, and economic sanctions, life for white Zimbabweans improved during the early years of Mugabe's rule. In the economic boom that followed, the white minority—which controlled considerable property and dominated commerce, industry, and banking—were the country's main beneficiaries.

Nevertheless, many white Zimbabweans complained that they were the victims of racial discrimination. Many whites remained uneasy about living under the government of a black Marxist and they also feared that their children would be unable to secure jobs. There was a growing exodus to South Africa, and in 1980, 17,000 whites—approximately a tenth of the white Zimbabwean population—emigrated. Mugabe's government had pledged support for the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid forces within South Africa, but did not allow them to use Zimbabwe as a base for their military operations. To protest apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa, Mugabe's government banned Zimbabwe from engaging South Africa in any sporting competitions. In turn, South Africa tried to destabilise Zimbabwe by blocking trade routes into the country and supporting anti-Mugabe militants among the country's white minority.

In December 1981, a bomb struck ZANU–PF headquarters, killing seven and injuring 124. Mugabe blamed South African-backed white militants.He criticised "reactionary and counter-revolutionary elements" in the white community, stating that despite the fact that they had faced no punishment for their past actions, they rejected racial reconciliation and "are acting in collusion with South Africa to harm our racial relations, to destroy our unity, to sabotage our economy, and to overthrow the popularly elected government I lead". Increasingly he criticised not only the militants but the entire white community for holding a monopoly on "Zimbabwe's economic power". This was a view echoed by many government ministers and the government-controlled media. One of these ministers, Tekere, was involved in an incident in which he and seven armed men stormed a white-owned farmhouse, killing an elderly farmer; they alleged that in doing so they were foiling a coup attempt. Tekere was acquitted of murder; however, Mugabe dropped him from his cabinet.

Racial mistrust and suspicion continued to grow. In December 1981, the elderly white MP Wally Stuttaford was accused of being a South African agent, arrested, and tortured, generating anger among whites. In July 1982, South African-backed white militants destroyed 13 aircraft at Thornhill. A number of white military officers were accused of complicity, arrested, and tortured. They were put on trial but cleared by judges, after which they were immediately re-arrested. Their case generated an international outcry, which Mugabe criticised, stating that the case only gained such attention because the accused were white. His defence of torture and contempt for legal procedures damaged his international standing. White flight continued to grow, and within three years of Mugabe's premiership half of all white Zimbabweans had emigrated. In the 1985 election, Smith's Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe won 15 of the 20 seats allocated for white Zimbabweans. Mugabe was outraged by this result, lambasting white Zimbabweans for not repenting "in any way" by continuing to support Smith and other white politicians who had committed "horrors against the people of Zimbabwe". (He was angry they were still voting for the people whom had opposed democratization of Zimbabwe).

Extremely fricking good Youtube video:

OPERATION GUKURAHUNDI GENOCIDE:

Ethnic tensions between Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo (the dude from the opposition party of ZAPU) continued to deteriorate.

https://mg.co.za/article/1999-07-12-zapu-wants-seized-properties-back

Violence between ZAPU and ZANU–PF supporters broke out among the battalion stationed at Ntabazinduna, soon spreading to other army bases, resulting in 300 deaths. An arms cache featuring land mines and anti-aircraft missiles were then discovered at Ascot Farm, which was part-owned by Nkomo. Mugabe cited this as evidence that ZAPU were plotting a coup, an allegation that Nkomo denied. Likening Nkomo to "a cobra in the house", Mugabe sacked him from the government, and ZAPU-owned businesses, farms, and properties were seized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukurahundi

The word "Gukurahundi" derives from a Shona-language term which loosely translates to "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains" oof

A colossal pogrom began against the Shona/Ndebeles in which several hundred thousand were tortured, brutalized and displaced. Between 20 000 and 300 000 were culled. We don't know exactly because there were little census records. Inter tribal ethnic tensions erupted, all from the days of Mashonas and Matabeles. The intention was to destroy or weaken the ZAPU party, by decimating its supporters at the root.

DICTATOR:

Mugabe's autocratic streak began to worsen until In late 1987, Zimbabwe's parliament amended the constitution on 30 December, where it declared Mugabe to be executive president - a new position that combined the roles of head of state, head of government, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This position gave him the power to dissolve parliament, declare martial law, and run for an unlimited number of terms. Thus he became the dictator of Zimbabwe.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/17/robert-grace-mugabe-missing-millions-money-zimababwe

Finally white farms would be "expropriated at fixed prices" instead of the willing-buyer-willing-seller which was agreed in the Lancaster Convention back in 1979's independence agreement with Britain.

Additionally as Mugabe and his inner circle and loyalists were getting more and more wealthy, the living standards of normal Zimbabweans deteriorated. The hope of early 1980s already disappearing and the living conditions of civilians worsening to way beyond pre-Zimbabwe standards. Things like life-expectancy lowered, while unemployment heightened.

https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/failed-states-in-africa-the-zimbabwean-experience-ari

Mugabe seeing his support wane, and his country decline felt cornered and put out increasingly r-slurred laws which gradually destroyed economic prosperity.

Example of the type of shit he would legislate:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/how-to-kill-a-country/302845

========(from "How to kill a country")

For all the lawlessness in Zimbabwe, the country in fact suffers from an overabundance of laws. Indeed, Mugabe has introduced so many economic edicts in the past year that most citizens have found it impossible to keep track. He fixed the price of a loaf of bread at half the bakers' break-even price, and levied astronomical fines on any baker who charged more. Bakers stopped making bread until somebody noticed that sesame bread, a "luxury item," wasn't price-controlled; by sprinkling a few sesame seeds on their standard loaves, bakers were able to get back in business. A pair of mortuary workers were arrested recently for running a profitable "rent-a-cadaver" business: because Mugabe had decreed that drivers in funeral processions would get privileged access to the trickle of fuel coming into the country, these entrepreneurs had begun leasing bodies to Zimbabwean drivers.

=======(end)

MUGABE FUELS ANTI WHITE SENTIMENT:

Most agricultural and manufacturing industries in zimbabwe were run/owned by the few white Zimbabweans holdovers. Mugabe's rhetoric became increasingly more severe and radical, and was once quoted publicly in parliament: "strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy". Something he had not said since the guerilla days almost 20 years earlier.

https://africanarguments.org/2017/07/zimbabwe-the-oppositions-urban-voter-problem

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070600656143

Mugabe began to lose Urban and youth support, as the new generation who did not revere him unconditionally as their liberator from Rhodesia demanded change and improved conditions from the corruption of the ZANU-PF.

Thus Mugabe would reinforce his focus on the more uneducated and rural supporters, and double down on racial inflamation whenever ZANU-PF corruption came to light, and his rule seemed on shaky grounds - he would focus on the white minority's occupation on Matabeles ancestral lands.

ZIMBABWE 2000 ELECTION:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Zimbabwean_parliamentary_election

Mugabe came extremely close to losing power against his new opponent Morgan Richard Tsvangirai, leader of the "Movement for Democratic Change" party which was fueled by the discontent youth and urban vote.

After this vote, with the inflamed tension, Zimbabwe guerilla veterans inflamed by racial hate speech by Mugabe, went into action to obtain their pensions squandered by corrupt ZANU-PF officials. Mugabe saw this rising pogrom movement as a golden ticket to regain momentum and power, and worsened the racial tension by publicly voicing aproval of the violence these violent attacks and pogroms by his rural supporters and veterans.

FARM ATTACKS:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/aug/08/zimbabwe.chrismcgreal

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-zimbabwe-election-farmers-idUKL015847720080701

https://reliefweb.int/report/zimbabwe/zimbabwe-veterans-invade-farm-three-trapped-inside

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/061300zimbabwe-attacks-rts.html

You guys know what happens next.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2000/04/13/zimbabwe-veterans-vow-attacks-on-white-farms-2

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2014/0707/Zimbabwe-President-Mugabe-s-new-attack-on-white-farmers

https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/08/12/violence.zimbabwe

https://www.refworld.org/docid/3df4becd10.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/zimbabwe-veterans-seize-nine-white-farms-9240374.html

"The CFU – which includes 4,500 mainly white farmers – said the militants, who have illegally occupied more than 1,000 farms since February last year, were in some cases slashing tobacco crops and extorting money, particularly in Mashonaland Central Province.

Aid agencies have warned of starvation in Zimbabwe due to declining crop output. At least three million people out of the population of 12.6 million have registered for food aid with the government. Aid agencies estimate Zimbabwe would need to import 700,000 tons of maize and wheat to avert famine.

Ms Williams said another farmer was attacked and barricaded himself for two days at his farm in Marondera. The self-styled war veterans had since confiscated the farmer's two adjacent properties and told him to confine himself to the land in which his farmhouse is located. Three other farmers were attacked at their properties in Guruve, Mashonaland Central Province. Another three farms in the same area were invaded."

Black zimbabweans who stood up for the white farmers were equally brutalized or killed. Opposition leader denounces the farm attacks: The leader of Zimbabwe's main opposition party said President Robert Mugabe was responsible for the occupation of more than 900 white-owned farms by black squatters, a crisis that was damaging Zimbabwe's already crippled economy. He said land reform must be done democratically and not through violence.

Finally Mugabe decreed that the gov can seize all white farms without warning or compensation.

CONSEQUENCES OF FARM SEIZURES:

https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/05/02/mugabe.threat/index.html

British Prime Minister Tony Blair instantly became frosty to this violation of the Lancaster Agreement, and cut off all foreign aid to Zimbabwe as they had done for the past 20 years.

https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/05/02/mugabe.threat/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/09/zimbabwe.chrismcgreal

Our boi Mugabe tells the UN to eat dirt:

https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/occupied-zim-farms-lie-unoccupied-96408

=====(from article)

Only about half of the eight million hectares of land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers has been occupied by new black owners, prompting fears of a drastic decline in agricultural output next year.

Most of the land seized from farmers under Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's controversial policies of confiscating white farms for resettling blacks is now lying fallow, much of it abandoned by new owners who were not given the resources to farm.

So bad is the situation that the government has threatened to re-confiscate land from the new black owners and transfer it to others. Reports said in some areas the government had already started reconfiscating the land.

Mashonaland East province, which had some of the country's most productive farmland and biggest tobacco farms, was the worst affected. David Karimanzira, the province's governor and resident minister, admitted that only half of the seized land in the province had been occupied, close to a month after the expiry of the first deadline for the new black farmers to move there.

"We have given the new settlers a deadline of up to the end of this month, failing which the land will be given to other applicants," Kariomanzira told the state-owned Herald newspaper. The deadline is the second issued to the new settlers in as many months. "We want production on the farms and people should be on their farms before the end of the rainy season," said Karimanzira.

(in other words they're saying that unless these veterans which had seized the commercial farmlands started farming by the raining season, they would lose the land they seized and have it given to other blacks who would farm the land)

Some of the farms designated for compulsory seizure were demarcated into small plots for redistribution to their new black owners. One farm was demarcated into as many as 61 plots, but only four people had been resettled there. Davidson was quoted by the Zimbabwe News, a website newspaper covering news from that country, as saying the end result of subdivision was to decrease efficiency.

"A lot of them did not realise the implications of what it means to start farming," Davidson said.

Most were unable to raise money to begin cropping or keep livestock, while many were reluctant to move on to their new plots without a ready-built home. Others were allocated land unsuitable for agriculture. "If there had been a properly scheduled take-over, this trough in production could have been avoided," Davidson said. "Clearly it demonstrates that this is not a land reform programme. It was done because there was an election coming."

Only about 400 white farmers remain on their land in Zimbabwe against a figure of more than 4 000 six months ago. The Farm Community Trust estimates that 250 000 farm workers have been left jobless and without any roofs over their heads by the indiscriminate land seizures.

Many white farmers, who had not been served with eviction notices, have been forcibly removed from their properties by rampaging war veterans. Many deserving landless peasants were left in the cold in favour of war veterans and supporters of Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party. Agricultural output is now expected to decline by at least 60 percent next year.

======(end article)

With no idea how to farm commercially, or not willing to even live on farms away from urban centres, more than half of these now empty white farms would just be defunct next year. Most black farmers would subdivide land into tiny subsistence plots, and would not farm for selling. The new black farmers could not maintain the same productivity as their white predecessors due to inexperience, no farming equipment, seed or willing labour.

The end result was that the sumtotal of commercial farming output halved, and then halved again.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/11/once-breadbasket-africa-zimbabwe-now-brink-man-made-starvation-un-rights

ZIMBABWE HUNGERS:

https://reliefweb.int/report/zimbabwe/zimbabwe-grain-production-shortfall-will-continue

"According to the United Nations (FAO/World Food Program), more than 6 million people are now at risk of hunger in Zimbabwe, and imports of 1.9 million tons of grain will be needed in the current marketing year to prevent starvation. The main reason for the current food shortage is severe drought during the spring of 2002, aggravated by an overall economic crisis. The Government of Zimbabwe's (GOZ) decision to take thousands of successful farms out of commercial production has made the situation worse. Zimbabwe and the entire southern Africa region will feel the economic, political, and social consequences of the land-redistribution policy will be felt for years.. Although the Government's goal of putting Zimbabwe's farmland into the hands of indigenous black farmers may have long-term benefits, food production will suffer in the interim."

For the 1st time in its existence, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe will have to IMPORT food instead of EXPORTING food. Agriculture was the largest revenue generating industry in Rhodesia. Now Zimbabwe had to import food for its citizens to not starve to death.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/11/once-breadbasket-africa-zimbabwe-now-brink-man-made-starvation-un-rights

The "Breadbasket of Africa" Zimbabwe now had 75% of its population relying on foreign AID not to die.

By 2001, Zimbabwe's GDP dropped 50%. The Mugabe regime was now heavily in debt, had substantially reduced tax revenue, and would waste and squander the remains of its taxes on the costly Congolese civil war to stoke Mugabe and the ZANU-PF's ideological egos.

HYPERINFLATION:

With many farms simply falling into disrepair or given to Mugabe loyalists, from1999 to 2009, the country experienced a sharp drop in food production and in all other sectors. The banking sector also collapsed, with farmers unable to obtain loans for capital development. Food output fell 45%, and manufacturing output fell by 29% in 2005, 26% in 2006 and 28% in 2007. Unemployment rose to 80%. White people fled the country in masses taking much of the nation's capital.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/390/inflation/hyper-inflation-in-zimbabwe

Zimbabwe had to continually print money to pay off its debt, which it could no longer recuperate as it had near zero tax revenue. But with each sequential printing of new money, the value of

the Zim-Dollar decreased proportionally as confidence in the currency fell.

The deadly cycle meant that eventually the currency crashed in 2007. Inflation would reach meme number per day, with a basic loaf of bread costing 1/3 of the average daily wage, and most could not pay their rent.

Educated doctors, engineers and pensioners found their savings evaporate, and forced into manual labour to survive.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/zimbabweans-have-shortest-life-expectancy

That's all I got, good night!!

@lain

We have the best marsey artists, folks.

Backstory

Recently valve announced they were demonizing all Dota 2 arcade games, which caused a ton of people to get mad. People had already bought various micro transactions for these games, and a bunch of them were shutting down since they had "development costs" and no income. OP claims to have caused this directly.

Sunsfan is a caster involved in professional Dota 2 and is basically the walking embodiment of a redditor. He is heavily involved in the creation of a Dota 2 arcade game called Ability Arena.

Bonus video of him and his wife being robbed while she livestreams on twitch with timestamps in the description

Here is a thread that is mentioned a lot from the day before, where they link a video and explain the changes to Dota 2 arcade that spawned this thread

It's basically "we wanted to make it better but valve couldn't so we took part in the shady business practices :)"

The Post

The linked post itself is worth reading but I will post the best parts.

TLDR: Sunsfan ran a highly illegal operation (GDPR, Tax, IP) knowingly from start to finish and now shifts the blame to me (for reporting as well as fabricating lies what actually happened) and Valve (For not coming up with a solution to fix the shady mess).

Let's start at the beginning: Sunfan stated in his video that an individual came to his Groomercord in an "aggressive manner", threatened peoples life, insulting them (Sunsfan, Jenkins and the "volunteer") and told them a GDPR notice will be send out because his "volunteer" did not give me access because of a wrong screenshot to the immortal rank groomercord channel.

This is somewhat 10% true and 90% Sunsfan fan-fiction to shit on me as well as Valves decision to shut them down.

What really went down:

I got linked a groomercord server to get better Ability Arena lobbies by a friend because public matchmaking was not good. After I joined I followed the procedure to get approved by sending a screenshot. After a few hours, I checked back and saw that the request was denied. Being puzzled why I was denied, I pinged a person (the "volunteer" Sunsfan is speaking about) in the Groomercord with a "Support" tag to ask, why I was denied.

The "volunteer" answered that I should not ping her/him via Groomercord notification because she/her had "more important things to do". I was pretty baffled to get this answer by someone whose whole purpose in the groomercord server is to verify and vouch players to play in these immortal lobbies.

So I checked who the "volunteer" is doing the groomercord "support" stuff to vouch/verify players. Why would someone who is so busy take a support role in the groomercord in the first place to handle these requests?

Turns out the "volunteer" is his wife, also known as Sajedene. Pinging her highness to actually do her job was a mistake!

This guy just sounds like he's a chuddy lawcel

In the meantime, I tried to figure out what I did wrong regarding the screenshot, found the error after some time, and re-uploaded a correct version.

I proceeded to say that if she is so busy, why she would even take the role as a volunteer to vouch/verify players and that they should build something into groomercord to automatically assign the roles so she does not need to be bothered by plebs like me. I proceeded to tell her that a correct version of the screenshot is now available.

Her answer was that she decided to vouch me later on, but "because of my attitude" she would not and that I should basically frick off. At this point stuff went south and I said a few things about her relevancy in the scene which have been certainly below the waist line but not too bad overall because it was technically true. But I still never threatened anyone life nor did I insult Jenkins apart from telling him to build a system to automate the verification process. I simply attacked Sunsfans decision to hire his wife to do the support role when she is clearly not fit to do so and rather let some community people who play Ability Arena handle it.

How did I come with the GDPR violation? (I am a specialized in GDPR Law due to my profession)

This guy is clearly seething and being rejected from a groomercord server but that's irrelevant at this point

What happened next:

I told Sunsfan that they are violating the GDPR and that they will have to cease operations soon (I already knew the outcome of Valves investigation long before it started, the question was only how much time will pass). He laughed at me, told me I am free to do whatever I want (He admitted in his stream that he does not even know what the GDPR is) and reset my account to Herald as a joke. After the reset, he posted a proud announcement that he "reset" my account back to Herald as a punishment. This had nothing to do with GDPR. To be fair, it was quite funny!

After that, Valves Legal Team contacted me, and asked if there is anything I want in particular regarding my Data. I told them to delete all of it since Sunsfan ignore my Article 15 request (Right of access by the data subject) send by mail (also on 1. April 2023).

Some time after that, Sunsfan was forced by Valve directly to reset my Account back to Herald, but this time because of GDPR data deletion request enforced by Valves legal team.

The rest of it is just boring lawcel stuff, it's all very smug

Reddit seethe

/u/SUNSfan even comments a wall of anger

It's nice to read this message after you have now:

1) Reported us for GDPR violations because you couldn't behave like a normal human being, while knowing fully that no other custom game follows these rules

2) Reported my Twitch stream for defamation (which I just got an email confirming your reports were denied)

3) Reported my wife and my personal websites for GDPR violations despite us obviously not holding any user information since they are just personal

You've scared my wife enough that you have triggered her PTSD that we literally went to the Police Station today to make sure they have a flag on our house just in case.

The reason I didn't name you is because I'm not a terrible person. Despite you being a complete peepee, I don't believe in doxxing people. You did what you did in a public groomercord (aka many witnesses to this and our groomercord bots keep logs of everything), so there's not much I can do to prevent people from figuring out who you are. And by the way, I hadn't looked you up until the other day and this behavior of yours seems to be a long and disturbing pattern.

I also should note that the GDPR issues are not the reason the arcade is shutting down (as I said in my video). After I talked with the Valve lawyer, they said as long as we can follow the GDPR guidelines it would be no issue. The real issue was that these lawyers then realized people were monetizing the arcade.

As for why I uploaded to the Artifact Cinema channel (i can't believe I have to justify even this lol), I stated live on stream that I would be uploading there b/c it is only fitting to upload this video about a dying game to another channel about a dying game. I don't really post videos on DotaCinema and haven't for a few years now.

All in all, you have won. I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish now. Enjoy your life and leave us alone please.

edit:We use Paypal & Stripe, neither of which gives us access to people's credit cards. Just wanted to clear that up as that would be ridiculous.

edit 2: After the GDPR complaint thru, we complied with the ruling and got rid of all your information. We were in the process of giving this option to all other users but then the monetization conversation took over

My wife's PTSD

It's funny how even reading this from your side it's really obvious you threw a tantrum about a groomercord server.

Way I see it, OP of this thread is definitely a butthurt weirdo.

But the big story is that you can't run a business like SUNSFan did. It's super bizzare that these custom games are running a business with EU customers and don't know what GDPR is.

Me either

found the error after some time, and re-uploaded a correct version.

I proceeded to say that if she is so busy, why she would even take the role as a volunteer to vouch/verify players

At this point stuff went south and I said a few things about her relevancy in the scene which have been certainly below the waist line but not too bad overall because it was technically true.

So basically this all roots back to you being petty because you were a jerk after you fricked something up? Huh.

Man, when you're giving your side of the story and still come of like a jerk, that's a bad sign. Cant imagine how bad you behavior really is. Imagine using a "it's technically true" reason to justify your temper tantrum personal attacks.

Considering how easy it is to know who you are regardless of your throw away (which was obviously not about safety) i hope you enjoy knowing hundreds or thousands of people will now know what a petty unhinged loser you are.

Yeah sure dude... Maybe you can fool some people here, but you won't fool anyone who saw how you acted on ability arena groomercord channel that day.

I don't think writing a GDPR itself is a bad thing. As many others said in the other thread, and as Sunsfan/Jenkins said, it was bound to happen sooner or later anyway, you only accelerated the process which is not a bad thing really. What Sunsfan and other people who like AA wanted was for Valve to legitimize things by using the existing passes, no one liked the sketchy payment process and p2w in arcades anyway. And if Valve doesn't intend to do something about it, then sooner it is known the better, less time wasted on developing an arcade game that'll eventually be forced to close.

While I wouldn't mind the GDPR complaint by itself, how you acted that day was not even remotely acceptable, and here you are lying and playing the victim once again.

- Anyone who modded in a big groomercord server probably knows how annoying the constant pings can get, and that mods do warn people that ping unnecessarily. I'm a mod in another server too so I can sympathize. Yes, you pinged Sajedene, and she said, in a polite manner, to not ping and read the instructions instead. Which does have the solution to your problem, since all you had to was to take a fricking screenshot.

- You lost your marbles as soon as she said that, you were definitely not acting like a rational human being like you're pretending to be right now. If any of the mods that are actually responsible for dealing with users was online you'd be insta permabanned the minute you started talking anyway. You did throw insults and threats at her, insulted all the other people trying to calm you down, belittled her for being a woman and went on a rant about how this was happening because it was a woman doing that job... I could go on. Then you calmed down, knowing your guilt deleted only your aggressive comments trying to hide your buttholery, threatened with GDPR and left.

As I said in my previous posts, I'm not mad at you making a GDPR complaint, I'm mad at Valve for not showing a small effort to save arcade games like AA and granting your wish. Sunsfan and Jenkins said the GDPR itself wasn't the problem in their video anyway. But you have a fricking problem in your head and you'd be hated just as much even if you didn't make a GDPR complaint.

I'm totally not seething right now. Being a nanny is seriously stressful stuff, broski

Yeah sure dude... Maybe you can fool some people here, but you won't fool anyone who saw how you acted on ability arena groomercord channel that day.

He is not fooling me, found a lot about this very unstable dude in less than 10 min of search. He has a history of abuse and for some one who is so worried about his personal data being stored online, he is very sloppy. There are footprints of him everywhere if you know how to look for it.

"who sows the wind will reap storm and the storm is coming"

Flirting with stochastic terrorism, buddy

The way buttholes justify themselves in their own mind never ceases to amaze me. Good effort into spinning this into legality issues, but we all know you did it out of spite and bruised ego.

Yeah I've never gotten so pissed reading a sentence. What a fricking butthole!

OP is a God, I love him

Shortly after making this post, OP is identified by evil redditors

Since nobody else will, guess I'll take the ban for it. Hid the names as best as I could but I think we can just expose OP already yeah?

OP in question is some low time German streamer with a whooping 209 followers on twitter.

This all started when OP is too incompetent to follow simple instructions to request the immortal rank on the groomercord channel.

As seen in this picture OP posted his profile twice before editing and correcting his first attempt.

The first time he posted and requested the rank was at 6:57 PM, at 8:04 PM he pings Sajedene while complaining about not having automated rank integration within groomercord (funny enough, this would require them to have access to your steam data, and have it linked to your groomercord account, ironic you complain about GPDR isn't it?), She told him to go and read the instructions.

Between 6:57 PM and 8:04 PM OP was spewing a bunch of sexist garbage, in his now deleted messages as you can see a random user replying to a handful of "original message was deleted" before Sajedene just left him.

But do not fear, OP wasn't done yet, man continued to cry and be a sexist piece of garbage, the 2 braincells he had jumped into action as he continued to delete messages shortly after saying them. during all this, man was actually livestreaming.

And some more non deleted message

shorty after that Sunsfan banned him.

So, long story short: OP is a late 20's man-child that threw a sexist tantrum because he can not follow simple instructions as a "software engineer".

For the mods, all this information is publicly available in the AA groomercord, I erased OP name because he want to stay anonymous, and is a self-proclaimed "specialist" on privacy and personal information yet fails to remove his traces of being a pile of human garbage. please go kind on me?, don't perm me :( the community deserves to know the truth to bs claim like OP.

What are some healthy ways to cope with inceldom? I'd like to hear your suggestions.

1. Avoid going to busy places

I'm not saying to be a complete hermit. However, going to malls, beaches, etc and seeing young couples is guaranteed to make you depressed. Why do that to yourself? When you go outside, opt for hiking trails, small stores, and other places where you are unlikely to see couples.

2. Avoid triggering media

Related to the above point, avoid music about love, romance movies, and youtuber couples. It will make you extremely depressed. You can create a media palette that is pretty non-triggering if you work on it. Anime is a good start, as it covers broad topics. Rap/Hip-hop can also be good if you find the right artists (tread carefully however, it can be pretty depressing to hear rappers talking about how easy they have it with women).

3. Imaginary gf

Having an imaginary gf is a wet plaster on a wound. It won't take the pain away, but it will make you feel better. The more you do it, the more vivid the fantasy becomes as your imaginary gf's personality fleshes out and you share experiences together. Turn to your imaginary gf when you're lonely or just need someone to talk to.

An imaginary gf will also be a good outlet for romantic impulses you have. Ever fantasized about proposing to your gf in a hot air balloon? Do it with your imaginary gf! Wish you could have a date night at home with your love? You can do it with your imaginary gf! Order some food, set up the table and light up the candles. I've had great fun playing board games with my imaginary gf, and it's a great way to spend a Friday night.

4. Warm showers

Warm water on your skin will help suppress the pain that comes from touch starvation. Don't be afraid to treat yourself to long warm showers. They are especially effective just before bed, as that tends to be the time when the loneliness really kicks in.

5. Stop pining

If you're an incel, it is inevitable that you will develop a burning crush on any female that talks to you. Acquantainces, cashiers, and customer service attendants on the phone will become the object of your affection. Girls from high school you haven't seen in years will suddenly become your soulmate and you'll be tempted to hunt them down online. Don't do it.

Your perception is distorted by loneliness and s*x deprivation. No, that girl that occasionally chats with you online does not have a crush on you. No, messaging an old classmate on Facebook will not work out. Absolutely nothing good will come from an incel expressing romantic feelings to a female friend. If you have any female friends, cherish them and don't ruin it with your horniness.

Stop pining. Stop fantasizing about a future with real human beings. This will only make things more painful in the future when you have to accept you can't have them, when you see them date others, or when they set boundaries and remind you that you are nothing more than a friend. Stick to imaginary gfs.

6. Get your money up

I have failed dismally at this, but I am trying to change things. The SINK (single income, no kids) life can be a good one. You can splurge on video games, travel, have amazing experiences (skydiving, submarine rides), and more. You can begin saving to ensure you have a comfy retirement. If you do have money, here are good subs to start browsing:

/r/FIRE

/r/childfree

I am unfortunately poor. There are so many awesome video game gadgets I wish I could buy and hobbies I wish I could get into but I am financially incapable of doing this, which makes inceldom even more painful. Get money, and you'll gain access to the best copes.

7. Don't lose religion

For the love of god (kek) don't lose your religion if you're not atheist. If you're religious, devote yourself to your religion and find solace in that. God, my life would be so much simpler if I could go back to my Christian childhood. Just reading the Bible and praying and pleasing god was enough, none of this incel crap. Now I'm too jaded and I can't regain my faith in sky daddy. Don't let this happen to you if you are religious. It will make inceldom harder.

8. NEETing is not the way

If you KNOW deep down that you deserve to be an incel, you're going to feel more depressed. Forget about your looks. If you're poor, uneducated, stupid, antisocial, and have achieved nothing, then it's obvious why you're an incel and it would be ridiculous to argue that you shouldn't be an incel. Literally nobody wants to deal with poor people, or someone who doesn't have any chance of a good future.

Work out. Learn to code. Self-improve and the sting of inceldom will hurt a little less.

• Brush up on your skills and improve your CV at uDemy Academy. Alternatively, check your local universities. They usually have short online courses to learn a new coding language, web design, graphic design, and similar skills

• keep track of your weight and keep a workout diary where you write at the end of each workout. This helps you remember your goals.

• for the love of god, speak to someone. Keeping all your emotions bottled in will not help. Denying the problem will not help either. You are an incel. Accept it, and then you can finally take steps to either do something about it, or learn good copes if you're fricked. The worst thing is being in limbo and denying your inceldom (claiming you're asexual, you just don't want a gf, you're waiting, nobody's good enough for you) while everything in your life is revealing the obvious. Accept your desires and accept the fact that they are unfulfilled. You are attracted to women, and they are not attracted to you. Simple as that.

9. Misogyny is not the way either

So here's the thing - women aren't bad for not liking you. If you're honest with yourself, you can probably give a very rational explanation for your inceldom, one which doesn't rely on women being evil. In my case, I'm 5foot2, poor, and uninteresting. I understand what the problem is, and it's not a particularly complicated one.

Spending hours of your life on incels.is or r9k isn't going to make you feel better. It's going to make you feel worse because you'll seethe and feel like a victim. Being sexless and lonely doesn't mean you're a victim.

That's all I have for now. I'd like to read what healthy methods you use to cope with inceldom. It's pretty scary as you get older and you realise what godforsaken path you're on ha ha the truth is that it gets worse as you get older and the existential horror only intensifies. You'll never stop crying yourself to sleep or waking up with an aching heart, but you do learn copes lol

Vladimir V. Putin (R-Moscow) has signed legislation banning Gender Transitions in the Russian Federation. Let's see the responses!

/r/anime_titties (SFW geopolitics sub for some inane reason)

Let's start off with the basics: LITERALLY HITLER

☒ Blame a minority group for all of your problems

☐ Invade Poland

☒ Invade another European country

☒ Have a bunker where you can comfortably shoot yourself when all goes down

Kind of out of order, but he is getting on the footsteps of his idol.

It's both remarkable and sadly not that surprising anymore how often American conservative values and ideas seem to perfectly align with the Russians. I'm sure there's some cross similarity in right wing parties in other countries as well, though I must admit I'm not as well versed.

everyone thinks i am crazy but i don't think its an accident. russia has been manipulating american public opinion and american politics for nearly a decade using social media. i think the west is a lot more resistant to that sort of thing now but it has done considerable damage.

vs.

You forgot Stalin and Mao. I wonder why

Convincing the population that there is some danger they need protection from is historically the easiest way to get people to give up their freedom.

This even occurs in countries that aren't dictatorships, because inventing enemies is a very powerful way of shifting priorities and the people's attention to something else

Yes like west did with covid, especially Canada Australia and Austria. It worked great and we saw how easy it was to turn on your neighbors like the nazis did.

LOL imagine being one of those r-slurs who compares what happened with Covid to Nazis.

But then you're the dumbass who says some shit about "women being incapable of handling rejection", so I can't be surprised of your ignorance.

People like you are literal kitties who fear everything, while warping reality to pretend you're always right.

/r/TransgenderUK

Time to stop comparing the Tories to Nazis... it's Putin now

Yes, they finally banned us.

While the Nazi comparisons are still uncanny in so many respects, the Tories' de facto ban on transition isn't far off Putin's actual one in the present day so I will, henceforth, be comparing the former to the dictator waging war on the edge of Europe.

Here's hoping this'll make the Tories feel a bit warier of using us as scapegoats & distractions while they continue to trash the UK, and give the other parties a bigger stick to beat them with.

Oh, I know, I wasn't implying that at all but I feel like, when I'm trying to get cis people to give a f**, my rhetoric has been having *less impact the more the Tories behave like Nazis because no matter how similar 1923 feels to 2023 their denial just seems to get stronger.

Putin, however, is right here in the present day, and much harder to deny.

I've already heard people from the USA call us "the Florida of Europe" and that's so close to the bone it hurts.

/r/worldnews

BUT MUH TRIBES!

"western anti-family ideology"

Siberian shamanist tribes had trans women

In fact, familial shamanism (having a female or trans woman shaman in the family that was married both to a spirit and a human husband) was considered important and honorable, and brought families together.

Well, Russia wiped most of them out through a combination of introducing new diseases and extreme violence during expansion, much like was done in the Americas, so they likely don't consider that an extant factor in Russian culture :/

It's frustrating because a bunch of ancient peoples around Kiev and eastward all had trans folks in their early history, but Russian imperial and later communist revisionism deleted a ton of info (similarly further west, there's so much history that's just outright gone because the only copies were all collected in Hirschfeld's institute before it was burned to the ground; there just is no replacement). We barely have a good grasp of the history of the Rus, and if you dig deep enough, all you'll find is halfcocked theories built off of slight coincidences from sources that were notably not within the power of imperial or communist Russia to destroy.

We only know the above thing I linked because it was created before the Bolsheviks could fully get a grasp on censoring it away.

The destruction of our history in the past 150 years has been an absolute incalculable loss to so many communities, trans folks very much included... And it allows for some both funny and disgusting appropriation...

Perhaps the Siberians are not considered Russian... But there has been a (rather distasteful to some) campaign to count ancient Scythians among the societies and people that become Rus since the 1700s. Even Putin himself has claimed this. The Russians have gone so far as to fire on and destroy Scythian tombs in Ukrainian territory during the invasion to try and bury evidence that anyone besides Russia are the inheritors of Scythian history... And the Scythians also definitely had trans priestesses, and perhaps even trans male warriors, and perhaps even the first known example of HRT (no, the mare-in-heat piss drinking theory was not true, but chewing raw licorice root for the testosterone suppressant effect definitely was)...

So when can we just ship the whole GOP to Russia?

Eastern Euro libtard meets him, 15 years later:

That's too bad. I think adults should have every right to choose what feels right for them and I wish them all well and hope it brings about the peace they are looking for.

Of course in the west I get called "far right" for not supporting hormones and mastectomies for children, but in Eastern Europe I'M the flaming liberal for supporting gay marriage and believing this. 😄

You just can't win with absolutists and fanatics. It's always "you're either in agreement with us 100% or you're the enemy!" 😬

There's no nuance, no room for reason or good faith discussion. I hate fanatics with a passion, they ARE the cause of our problems, whether it be far right or far left, but even saying that much usually gets you outcast because you don't WANT to play the stupid toxic reindeer games of partisan politics and be a political puppet shill. 😞

You're not far right for not wanting children to have mastecs. You're just an idiot for believing that's happening. You lack knowledge and nuance, and call others out for it. Get bent mate

Please do not force OP to get bent.

/r/Transgender

Top comment is just , a literal call to assassinate President Vladimir V. Putin (R-Moscow)

A bullet should ban Vladimir Putin from being alive.

Good idea…

Sad day for Russia, with so many in power living in denial of the reality of the need for such healthcare, simply because it doesn't match their expectations for how reality is "supposed" to be.

Leftoid schizo blames GOP actions against s in the US on Russia, only to be shown up by a blaming Russian actions against s on the GOP and Evangelicals.

Also, it's obvious to me that Putin has been working very hard to influence the US in exactly the same way.

To add some context, this puts into law a de facto situation that has existed for a long time now.

It should lead to no more than a continuation of the extermination of trans people in Russia that's been happening over the last few years, but now with more possibilities to substantiate refugee status and get the heck out of Moskva.

--

Read up on the World Congress of Families, which has extensive links to the Russian government and Orthodox Church.

The World Congress of Families are these guys, and this is a take stolen straight from Anatoly Karlin.

Yet another

Putin is the real head of the Republican Party.

/r/Transmedical

This is a sub for "Transmeds", or s that rely on medicalization legitimacy rather than Self-ID, and attempt to excise "Trenders" from the Trans movement.

Vladimir Putin Signs Law Banning Gender Changes in Russia

I feel so sad for transsexuals in Russia, now and for their future. This is what happens when Gender Dysphoria ceased to be a medical condition and became part of gender ideology, lumped in with gay rights.

Russia has never been a safe haven for most of the queer community. But still, I was surprised and saddened that it has come this far.

Simping for a doctor/SRS Surgeon by the name of Dr. Will Powers (who runs a subreddit called /r/DrWillPowers and is /u/Drwillpowers)

Russia is still considering transsexualism as a medical condition. They just consider it as a mental illness, group transsexuals with libertarians and treat both with therapy.

I think Will Powers is absolutely right about the key issue: trassexualism should be considered a medical condition, but an endocrinal condition, not a psychiatric one. And he's even giving a draft of the endocrinal profile of transsexual people (the Meyer-Powers syndrome), which means it could be diagnosed with a bloodwork and a genetic test.

I remember seeing Dr. Powers post on here a couple of times. It seems like he's always been on the side of transsexuals, not just in the sense of providing us with treatment, but seeking to truly understand transsexualism and how it works. People need to listen to him; he probably knows more than anyone else right now.

He is truly phenomenal. His research brings me a grain of hope for the future. His practice PFM is one of the only places I have ever felt comfortable being treated.

He'll definitely make a name for himself in terms of research into transsexualism, I'm sure. And I really hope he does, because he's the exact sort of person that we need.

Why not just kneejerk hate him like everyone else? Besides, if we can measure transsexualism, making up genders becomes way more difficult to defend!

Do people actually hate him? I always figured he was liked even amongst all the weird people.

sneeding about "Tucutes" (what Transmeds call non-transmed Trans supporters and non-dysphoric Transes)

i hate it even more because of the fact that the only existing russian "trans" community is made by tucute girls in tiktok with the bunch of pride flags on pfps who are "joking" about "cis are not people" and literally wishing death to everyone who disagree with them, so even a lot of lgb people are against us and support this law because of what image trans people have here. this mix of the insane trans trend and transphobic as frick society and goverment is so sick that i really can't.

I knew a Russian girl in her late 20s once. Not only did her mother wish for the Soviet Union to return, but being stealth at a house party, we somehow got to talking about LGBT stuff.

She got so heated up about transgender people. She told me, "Even drag queens are better than trans... at the end of the day, they at least know that they are men!!"

I was mortified, especially being at the passive end of the conversation. It definitely did not make me want out my history even more.

For a country where homosexuality could get jail time (I don't know if this is the case now), Putin has made his country worse, especially for people like us. I have always wanted to visit Russia, especially in Eastern Russia... but with a law like this, I wouldn't even dare now.

does NOT believe in Chaser rights!

Omg. This is the worst law change we've seen.

It bans hrt and even annuls marriages where one person had their gender changed. So someone married for 30 years will all the sudden be un married because one person changed their gender at soms point.

God. This is so fricked up.

Hello, Everyone! It's time for another installment of Mostibkun, "Orangecat"! There were some hiccups that I encountered that may effect the other players that I will discuss at the end. Otherwise I am happy to report that things are mostly stable, there was some early drama that threw a huge wrench into my plans but WE MADE IT! I was really rusty but We are advancing boldly onward from victory to victory creating a Strong , Harmonious , Just , society.

Now I present: Mostibkun, "Orangecat": Chapter 2 "Orange Cat Caged"

1st of Granite 251

Greetings to future generations of dwarves! My name is Cream Ustuthosed and I'm a miner in Mostibkun and I have been designated as the fortress historian for this year. I look forward to a productive year, 250 was kind to us we embarked and struck deep! This land is rich and we are willing to to take its gifts!

Here is an engraving of myself for our records:

Our goals for this year are to increase our standard of living while streamlining production for an increase in military capacity to prevent potential strikes by the wretched undead and greenskin hoards! Just as we have been blessed with this land, there are others that would seek to take it from us. We will defend this fortress to our last breath!

Here are our current expansion plans for the year:

Bigger bedrooms , Bigger dining hall and a dedicated level to create industries and stockpiles tailored to them.

We only have a limited amount of time before the filth in this region catches our scent and sends an invasion. We must start preparing immediately cutting down trees, digging tunnels, crafting weapons, cultivating foo...

We have been illegally invaded by orcs undead soldiers they may be small in number but they are immune to most damage that I know of, even if you cut off a limb it they will keep coming. You need to destroy their upper/lowerbody/head to fully kill these beasts and these ones have armor and a steel warhammer.

We immediately drew the bridge up and initiated a LOCKDOWN! This place is locked down tighter than an Elvish apartment during the chestrot pandemic.

They arrived to find us safely inside!

and so begins the "Year of the Caged Cat" we are in no position to attack them we have no weapons and no training. We must go on defense!

Seeing as this is an emergency situation a Militia Commander has been appointed named Fath Koganevud a woodcutter by trade and symbol of our hope!

She is joined by a squad of brave dwarves their names are:

Datan Rutodcatten

Nil Akrulgutid

Udil Lolokudib

Sazir Amostnamash

Kivish Therlethathel

Dobar Koliton

Cream Ustuthosed

and we all form

THE CUDGEL OF CATS

We will not falter!

We must continue digging just because we are stuck inside doesn't mean we can't thrive. We will forge new weapons and train our soldiers and strike back! Next I write It will be summer and we can then begin our counter offensive!

1st of Hematite 251

As our lockdown progresses we have only thrived and expanded our mighty home!

[I totally forgot to take a wide "in progress" pic }

Here our Broker and one of our miners Mistem Digs out a new hallway!

Learn from Mistem's good example! Mistem isn't effected by the lockdown and neither should you!

Learn from Ducim's good example! He forges our iron weapons so we may fight the invader!

All powered by our new smelting room!

Things have otherwise been quiet no great attacks by the invaders, seems they intend to starve us out seeing as they don't have to eat and we do.

In order to keep track of our stocks we appointed Id Avuzetar as bookkeeper a valuable service to the fortress!

Spirits are high, we still have food, and we are on schedule for our Autumn counter offensive. The next entry will be of our resounding victory in Autumn. Long Live Mostibkun!!!

1st of Limestone 251

Summer passed without incident. Our halls continue to grow and we continue to mine more precious metals and GEMS . We are chock full of silver and copper, everyone has not only their own room but stone coffers to store their possessions in!

We have also started splitting our stockpiles and creating wheelbarrows and bins to increase our carry speed and reduce clutter.

so clean!

There have been reports by other dwarves of feeling like someone is watching them. Other phenomena such as cold spots and whispers in the ear have been reported as well.

here's @60horsesinmyherd just minding her own business

The illegal invasion and siege has cut us off from the mountainhomes, there will be no migrant wave, there will be no caravan. Perhaps it's for the best, for all we know our "liason" is cousins with the necromancer that set these foul things upon us.

The biggest disappointment by far is that we made all these figures of Gostangkun for NOTHING!!!!!

We made like 20 of these to sell as merch to the mountain homesand now they're WORTHLESS!!!

Our Winter counter offensive is on schedule, the Cudgel of Cats have been training relentlessly in their barracks for this most important mission, but we haven't forged all our armor yet.

They don't know what's coming this Winter

I will write next at the break of Winter.

Winter has come.

A passing group of catboys(I swear that's what I read, the game crashed so I can't show the log but trust me) offered to try and probe the invader's defenses for us. I regretfully report that they were instantly obliterated by a Steel HAMR though I hear they are about to run out soon. As a result we have delayed our counter offensive until next spring when they will have used their entire stockpile of HAMRs.

Our weapons and armor production has stalled out, we've run out of logs to turn into charcoal for smelting. This is no good we may have to dig even further down to extract magma, but with our in experience with the substance it'd almost be safer to send someone out to cut a tree down before the undead run in. almost safer

In more up lifting news our Expedition Leader @60horsesinmyherd has taken up GEM cutting in her free time.

Things may be hard right now, but our stocks of food are still high, I'd even wager we could stay a whole other year down here if need be!

My next entry will be my last, the start of Spring and while things are hard I am hopeful.

1st of Granite 252

At last Spring has sprung! This year has been hard on all of us but our spirits and bodies have not faltered one bit. Mostibkun stands!

Sadly our plump helmet spawn has run out, this could pose a bigger problem later, but we have brewed so much drink that we should have enough to make it to the next caravan (or even into the caverns?)

In a fitting stroke of luck we struck some bituminous coal, but in a twist befitting our mascot Ostangkun this coal is virtually useless without an initial fuel to burn and create coal coke.

This would be a bummer, but then we remembered!

Earlier last year some logs fell inside a small pond in front of the fortress while cutting trees!

We attempted to drain the pond but our calculations were a bit off.

the logs have moved but the pit we dug wasn't big enough for all the water so the draining wasn't completed.

and then Spring came, I wish we could've resolved this issue before I leave my post but alas!

As my tenure as fortress historian comes to a close I reflect upon the year, while this year was harsh upon our dwarves we are stronger than ever and will only get stronger. I put my faith in all our dwarves, the stewards that guide them, and our future records keepers to record their actions.

Here is how the Mostibkun stands as of Spring 252

Long Live Mostibkun!

Notes for successor:

1. lack of fuel, we need to get those goddarn logs and make some coke!

2.Lack of plump helmet spawn, shouldn't be a problem for a while but maybe digging into the caverns would produce some for us to use without a caravan

3.The 4 undead fricks that are keeping us stuck inside (believe me I tried it ended in TOTAL DWARF DEATH twice and that's not !FUN! for a 2nd year succession fort maybe only allow TDD after everyone's played a year)

And that is that! It all worked out better than I thought it would given how rusty I am and the sinister area but we made it another year!

I sincerely hope you enjoyed my chronicling of the 2nd year of Mostibkun. It is really my first attempt at anything like this

The next player in line is: @s_a_n_t_b DM me when you're ready, I understand if you need a few days since this is before the 11th (end of my 2 weeks) but I wanted to knock it out

Players, in order of succession:

@60horsesinmyherd

@Cream_a_da_crop

@s_a_n_t_b

@Spysix

@searcher

@BFBugleberry

@Rankine_911

@Yasharn

@Losercel

@Ninjjer

@duck

Now for the hiccups

1. I had to "save scum" a little bit. This was because on the 24th of Malachite without fail the game would just close, no error message or anything just closed. This stopped once I had made a manual save within a few days of the crash spot. So I ended up making at least 10 manual saves (so I can leave my computer and prevent crash losses). I mentioned it because I don't want any other player to feel like they're cheating if they make a manual save, we just ask that you make a good story and don't reload to save a single dwarf you personally enjoy or something petty like that (but also how could we know if you don't tell)

2.WOW there are a whole 90 people that ant a dwarf named after them! This is spectacular! Except we never discussed how naming would work I just kept all the default dwarves for the Successors to name themselves after, then when a migrant wave came I would work down the list of voters, since there were no migrants that didn't work out. If there's a better way feel free to do so, also feel free to name all current dwarves if you see fit @s_a_n_t_b.

That's it! Thank you for reading I look forward to our future stories! If anyone has questions about the fort I'll answer since it can be disorienting to pick up after someone else!

The best site on the Internet!

Repost: had to actually embed the images

I opened every link on the front page to collect a wide range of angry comments for you pleasure. This took more than a day to write

They get increasingly rabid with each indictment, not only are the patriot threads full of fedposts, they are attacking each other a lot more now. And they seem to hate almost any other GOP politician

This week is a busy one for the feds

you're not wrong. I'm well-armed and comfortable, ready and able when called to defend what's mine. I'm 52 and will die for my grandkids future of not being non-binary BS and eating bugs, etc. It's not time yet. The commies are gonna commie and really a LOT is being exposed. I see the light at the end of this disgusting tunnel we've been on for many decades.

I will totes fight the commies to the death, but not now, it's not the time

So when we realise the presidency, congress, and the courts are constitutionally compromised is that when we are ready for 2a?

Sorry too comfy.

Exactly

It's the degenerate deep state that needs to pray. A reckoning is coming. And I was just following orders ain't gonna cut it. The deep state has completely violated both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.

With the compromised Roberts in charge of SCOTUS who said he would do whatever he could to ensure PDJT would not be elected, there is no point in the real POTUS going there IMHO. The same SCOTUS has refused to hear any challenges to the fraudulent 2020 election. The demons have dirt on many of them. Most of them have probably been told that their lives and their families' lives will be in jeopardy if they vote in favor of PDJT. Bolshevism at its finest.

The P in PDJT stands for president, they attached it to his name. PDJT doesn't replace GEOTUS completely though

really want to wipe these corrupt pigs off the face of the planet so motivated by this dumb corrupt shit

Sure, he truly believes commies are torturing and raping thousands of kids per day and plan to kill him and then enslave his family, but only now he's getting vaguely motivated

Persecution from an illegitimate regime, led by a cheap, corrupt, treasonous mafia should result in a revolution.

It's amazing to me how the Democrat communists can take wholly fabricated political nonsense and turn it into actionable lawfare against anyone at will, including impeaching and then indicating and arresting a duly elected president and get this far with it. Yet when an illegitimate thief of a resident has countless actual criminal activities uncovered with rock solid evidence, literally caught in the act, the weak butt GOP can't be bothered to lift a finger to do anything about it outside of drafting sternly written letters and statements at best, or silence at worst. Absolutely pathetic.

The average person commits 3 felonies every single day. All that stands between you and prison is a prosecutor who has better things to do with his time.

Three felonies per day you say

This is a battle for survival. The Left understands if Trump is re-elected, they are all being tried, convicted and hung for treason. They understand that they have to dispatch Trump before Election Day or else he will end every last one of them.

He'll surely lock Shillary up this time

Save those voter files while there's still an internet. Registered Democrats: full name, home address, etc.

But the idea that democrats will be genocided if Trump wins is just fearmongering you godless commie

Lol. Convict him. See what happens.

Going from prior experience, nothing will happen.

This time will be different, surely

UNLEASH HECK

It will only backfire if we win in 2024. If they rig again and steal like they did in 18, 20 and 22 we need more than "2 more weeks" and "Trust the Plan"

yes.. immediate revolution.. burn any democrat office and federal building.. any left leaning woke store or company as well.. go armed and ready for battle .. there's not enough of "them",, we just need the signal.. and THAT will be it.

It's about time to start delivering knuckle sandwiches to these sorry peepee suckers. Name these "grand jury" cute twinks so that justice can be delivered.. it's always unknown unnamed mother frickers.. actually there probably wasn't any jury.. just that PEEPEE TEASER making up shit.

I wonder why the names of the jury are kept secret, truly a mystery

They will be doing anything to keep power in the next election. What I see is only one of two things: 1. celebration by us for Trump if he wins 2. revolution against the lying criminals if they use obvious fraud to win. The deck is really stacked, so I see #2 coming. We will have to face illegal immigrant cops in places like Pritzker's Illinois, and there will be fatalities. I cannot put up with another 5 years of bans on gas, DEI and gay pride in my face, heads of the military, and criminal corruption in the DOJ and FBI and high office. 2024 will either make or break America. We may face The Battle of Athens x 1000 if Trump is taken out.

>Doesn't want gay shit in his face

>Idolizes ancient greeks

Just saying, if another Jan 6th happened but on a much bigger scale, it would be totally justified at this point. It obviously won't but.... Just saying....

A real insurrection needs to happen. Simple as that. It's what the Founding Fathers wrote about, and wanted to happen, if the govt became totally corrupt, like it has. However, times are different now. The sheeple won't do anything. Americans have the most guns in the world, and still, no one will do anything.

Democrats signed their death warrants.

And that is acceptable

When you allow too many psychopaths to live and breed, all of humanity suffers. Culling is needed.

Can a judge be disbarred in the middle of a trial? Right now might be a good time.

prefer dismembered

I want to watch his toes dangle in the breeeze

I want to stand beside you as witness. I want to pull the lever on at least one of them while there. I exist now only to witness true justice. Thats it.

Make it like an adult version of the pool drop kids play at parties. Except you take the shot at a target from 200 yards away, a bullseye releases the trap door. Oh, and the target is 8 feet above the subject, so if your sights are a little low.. 🤷‍♀️ 10 bucks a shot, 50 bucks for 10 shot special. .22LR only, we want them to actually stay alive if someone accidentally misses. A .308 or 6.5 would be a bit too quick.

Works for me. I long for the day we the people pull these traitors are pulled out of their seats screaming.. knowing full well what is coming to them.. and why its coming

I favor the Day of the Axe.

Everyone gets a swing at the abdomen.

Stray dogs clean up the mess.

They really like their fantasies

.22 Knee cap.. left in bright room with Trump rally blaring at 130d for a day. Day 2 2nd knee cap. Volume goes up.. covid jab injected in knee cap wound... leave for dead.

Too bad they don't put the same amount of effort in other parts of their lives

Incorrectly? That's what we peasants call a FRICKING LIE... the same doj will throw us in fricking prison for shit like this... ARREST whoever lied and... CASE DISMISSED!!!

If I say case dismissed, then it's CASE DISMISSED!!! Now release Daddy

If anything, this yet another bullshit ploy galvanizes 99% of Trump supporters. Maybe you don't understand that We see you evil, corrupt Frickers. If you frick the American people over in this election, I think it's pretty evident that either way the election goes, you're going to have your hands full of very motivated citizens that are going to have your frickin heads on a pike. Anyway, that's the talk around the water cooler.

I hope i live to see the day when these traitors are hanged, or at least read about them here getting what they deserve. Almost makes me want a civil war so things can be set right coz apparently the Republicans in DC don't give a shit.

A real man would take matters in his own hands and start the civil war himself

Donald you better hang every fricking one of these bastards.

If I was to fight back right now by shooting the bastards, I'd go to jail. We need to raise so much heck that there will be no consequences for our actions. That's when people will start to fight back

I will fight for my country to my last breath... as long as I won't face any consequences for my actions

I feel that everything is riding on the outcome of the 2024 election.

I pray to God We the People are ready to act when the BoIshevik rodents try to retain control of our stolen country.

If not, they will steal everything and enslave us.

Kinky

The infighting gets ever worse

A fricking Jamaican. If you were not born in the USA to parents born in the USA to grandparents who were citizens, you should not be allowed to serve in government in any capacity.

My grandparents came from Europe in 1908. My father served in WWII in France and died in 1957 from service a connected disability. According to you, I can't serve in government? I already did, as a police officer for 35 years. You are absolutely wrong in your stance on this issue. Please rethink it and try and come up with a better way to express your mind on this. Thank you.

Frick you!!! my grand parents are from Europe. And all Trump's family is literraly from Europe. You are a shill.

You need to go back

Just watch DeCute twink start shilling for FL and all red and purple states to remove Trump's name from the GOP primaries next year and the general election. Notice how there is not even one minor lawfare investigation against DeCute twink for a speeding ticket. They are treating him with kiddie gloves like they did with W Bush from 1999-2008. Any investigation against the Bush administration was limited to those officials like Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales and the Dems made sure to never do lawfare against W himself.

Shut up and stop acting like a kitty.

Stop simping for Meatball, cute twink

You sound like a fricking loser. Whining like a little b-word. Suck it up!

I would click the play button, but it's Fox News, so I won't. Frick them and everyone that takes a paycheck from them.

FRICK FOX NEWS

Jesse is right. Trump is innocent. Biden is the most corrupt politician this country has ever seen.

FRICK FOX NEWS We don't need a celebrity to tell us ANY of that, SIMP.

Nah. Crucify him!

Spoken like a true blue Godless heathen degenerate commie death cultist.

I just don't see the point in trump, you see I'm a latinx and he's spoken rude things about us.

There are a lot more trolls around the site than usual

Conservatives are worse than street shitters (who have no facilities)

Some are funny at least

It's funny how American Patriots watch Joe burn the USA down and refuse to stop paying taxes because they have no backbone. Do you want to end up burning down with America or can you muster up a mustard seed worth of courage and faith so we can save this Country?

Fed alert

A Fed would never recommend people defund them. Without your money, the Fed loses his job.

Trust no one

Jack Smith should be tarred and feathered

nope aren't you paying attention? It's all Jesse Watters' fault. His kids should be taken away and he should be thrown in prison, apprently lol

Read the room, simping cute twink.

No, not my safe space! Read the room!!

The mods still won't deport this Desantis cute twink with his Desantis cute twink talking points. tHeYre iNdiCtiNg hIm tO sCrEw DeSanTiS aNd ThE CoUnTrY. Stfu shill

Only Daddy circlejerks allowed

Or one could simply provide Honest Services and avoid all this legal hassle.

You're objectively a Dem and not a Trump supporter; how the frick are you not banned?

M-mods, bring the mop!

Right? "Oh too bad you got shot but the gun was illegal and therefore illegitimate" Wow b-word that makes me feel so much better.

You're the same cute twink who was saying you confessed your sins for cathartic reasons to libertarians right?

hat's me yeah. Who are you supposed to be, the local clown? 🤡

Papists get the wall!

MAGA and the GOP

There was nothing to unconstitutional or illegal about what Trump asked Pence to do, just because Pence was too much of a fricking coward to do it, and a trail following Dullard, that does not make it unconstitutional.

FRICK MIKE PENCE. He's a sack of wet shit.

If there was nothing illegal about what Trump asked Pence to do then why would Pence need courage to do it?

I really think the blackmail isn't r*pe, I think he is a closet homosexual, it goes well with the "never alone with any women on a trip."

At first I thought he was talking about the deep state threatening to r*pe Pence...

One day a horde of anal raping s from outer space will do a couch run with him

Lmao never mind

DeCute twink isn't a Republican. He is a RINO traitor even worse than Mike Pence.

Notice how DeCute twink hasn't given any support to Trump against these bullshit allegations and he even made a "joke" when Trump was indicted for Stormy Daniels in NY and he has stayed silent on the federal indictments and now he even says that 2020 was not stolen and was fair and square.

How dare he joke about Trump putting his peepee in a prostitute!

Jim Jordan is a phoney

he isn't. we have some good guys on the R side. when people fight evil, evil makes shit up about them. happens a lot.

He's a do-nothing grandstanding grifter & phony. But he was a great high school wrassler

But it's not only Pence and DeathSantis they have a problem with.

The Supreme's are gonna have a field day with this one.

They stabbed us in the back in 2020. They'll stab us in the back again. Those robed rats are part of the swamp, just like every other rotten piece of shit in DC.h

Add the Supreme Court to the list

Trump, Kari lake is the only political person who resembles you, in terms of being savage and not backing down. Don't pick rino Scott or some other republican loser. Kari lake is a fighter.

She's a grifter. "Fighting" election "fraud" is her "job" now, and the simps and the duped are paying her not insignificant wages.

Who do they even like at this point?

We should start two lists. One of the true MAGA we need to support as many of them are being persecuted and having their livelihoods and careers destroyed and even threatened with prison for speaking about election fraud, illegal immigration and defending Trump. The 2nd list of the FAKE betrayers.

TRUE MAGA

Mike Lindell

Rudy Guiliani

Steve Bannon

Peter Navarro

Ken Paxton

Lin Wood

Sidney Powell

Mark Finchmen

Catherine Engelbrecht

Greg Phillips and of course Kari Lake and so many more

This are the true patriots that will save America apparently

Other angry posts

Jack Smith is disposable. He is the face/name we are allowed to know and villify. Who is the man/men behind the curtain, pulling the strings?

Ask yourself: Was Obama smart enough to execute the destruction wrought against our country during his tenure? Same question for Joe Biden?

Find out who instructed multiple states, running independent elections, to simultaneously stop counting on election night 2020. Then you will know who is running our country.

Curious that no one seems to be asking this question

Every single conspiracy theory is asking these questions

he's been the head of a corrupt network for DECADES.. he has been shaking down and getting kickbacks for a generation. he is old and feeble but it's all old hat to him. I listened to his call with Ukraine President before Zelensky. He is a mob boss.. he knows how to play the game.. Just look at the video when he brags about firing the prosecutor..

Most of what he does is an act, he plays it up.. he's old and getting slower..

Others around him are pulling strings on the war and in other areas but he is 100% part of the con and using Ukraine to escalate the war to keep the $$ flowing..

The last thing you should ever do is make excuses for him. Just stop.

If only Biden was this cool

😍😍😍

Thank you, OP. This was high energy heart fuel. So uplifting. So calming. So inspiring.

Prayers said and donation sent Htpps://donaldjtrump.com. Trump 2024.

I hope this is a bot

In the 90s, based on some news of people being able to mentally affect random number generators, radio host Art Bell did an experiment of having his (millions of) audience mass-concentrate on 'making it rain' in a severely drought-affected area of the US. Causally or not, it did so. Then it wouldn't stop and there was flooding. So he did another show telling his audience to stop. And causally or not, it stopped.

Some time later, a famous race horse broke a leg and destruction was the only option. Bell again had his audience mass-concetrate good will and health for the horse. Unaffiliated mainstream news articles reported the bizarre unexpected turn towards health the horse had made. But a weekend of no new broadcasts interrupted. Causally or not, the horse returned to its original course and had to be destroyed. The whole thing freaked Bell out and he never had a third 'test' of this mass-intention.

Anyway, obviously this old anecdote has nothing whatsoever to do with 🖕Mike Pence🖕. Cheers.

Well done. Haha

On the subject you brought up, does this make you wonder about deities and deification?

Let's just hypothesize that humans are naturally gifted with some form of telepathic ability, no matter how weak or how little we know how to use it.

Could our mass prayers and worship not manifest the very thing we worship?

And if so, what woikd happen if a group, say, a political party, turned their governing body into a religion, and inspired millions to worship them through brainwashing and social engineering?

What is possible in an era of absolute communication across the globe, instantaneously?

Interesting to think ajout.

People in the field, who as often as not are laureated former laser physicists, theorize this is why 'horns and nose' need so badly to run their psychological games and have the mass populace feel hopeless and defeated. De-powered, as it were.

They left reality behind at this point

An American hero. Frick anyone who disagrees.

Also an important cultural icon! This is what they hate the most as they try to destroy US culture. Trump's endurance grows more into legendary status every day.

We need a peepee sucking marsey

You know the House can move to eliminate the DC district. Constitutionally it shouldn't even exist. Just saying.

Wingcucks when politics don't go their way

Like a fiddle, he plays them. Wen indickmint?

Q predicted this!

She'll order that he not run. Democrats don't care about judicial overreach. They love it. She will just simply legislate from the bench what a private citizen is allowed to do.

Maybe you should have left the abortion thing be then

If Trump is unable to pull out a letter signed just before leaving office which says ‘I hereby Pardon myself for any federal crime or offence against the United States I may have committed at any time before the date of this letter.' I would begin to have serious doubts about his 3D chess skills.

Truly a great plan, I hope Daddy thinks of this before he leaves the White House

What a beast. Literally the soldier blocking the arrows.

You see Trump's attitude folks? That's how you win. The man knows just as much if not more than us how bad it is and yet his message has remained unwavering.

The man is boldly walking to the future America we all envision without flinching, the thought of defeat completely alien. We all have to be the same in order to turn this boat around. NEVER give up. Put on the full armor of God and become UNYIELDING.

I will never be demoralized.

It is amazing with all he is going through how healthy he looks.

We've got your back Mr. President.

We are going to find a way to overcome all of this BS through the grace of God and make sure you are the next president of the United States.

It's that clear conscience look. Rarely seen on someone running for office.

This is what passes as healthy in Muttland

and shit run down his leg...

I'd take one for the team and scrape some off his leg and give him a shittler stash while he fish out of watered.

(They're talking about Biden btw)

He won't be president also because he just fricking doesn't get it. Things will never go back to the way they were before Trump, never. If Trump goes down to the uniparty communist regime, the system will be imploded. People will not vote. It's over.

Someone needs to explain to this guy just how important voting was under communism

I'm not supporting anyone in the corrupt GOP anymore. I'll vote for Trump, and write him in if I have to, but that's as far as I go. Time to form a new party

And republicans gave up trying to reach out to new demographics just to satisfy this guys

I agree. Not voting for any candidate that did not stand with President Trump when he needed support. I am voting MAGA, not republican.

It's not even the first time the GOP got backstabbed by the nutjobs they courted, why do they keep doing this?

Bonus posts I'm too lazy to write anything about

If you are not for Trump, you are the enemy.

I pray every night for President Trump.

Lord, please protect this man, who is standing up for all of us who love and want to conserve America.

🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏PRAYING FOR TRUMP...and also PRAYING THE RAT BASTARDS DOING THIS get their come-uppance...BEFORE 2024!!!

I plan on getting on my knees and praying. No man is perfect. We do t vote on perfection. We vote on men who lead on country with our values.

Let's start calling him Nazi Joe!

Despite all the bullshit, bad news and corrupt indictments every time Trump says “your favorite President, me” I smile, and he says this pretty often lol.

Kek to the square! Thanks for the belly laugh fren :)

Barriers outside courthouse have staved off at least 3 deadly riots so far... I guess walls work.

God Bless this man. He is a warrior.

I got you tattooed on me Mr. President. They come at you they're coming at me! God bless you and your family. Praying for you sir!

This man might the only person in the news I never suspect is lying.

JUDAS BRUTUS PENCE

Also of note. Anyone who has served their whole.life and doesnt know the constitution should also never be president.

Instead of Elon vs Mark, I'd rather see Trump vs Mike in a UFC fight

If there's any type of person I hate, it's fake Christians who lie about their faith. The only consolation for this is God will have a lot to say to him when he dies, and it ain't gonna be pretty for Pence.

Trump is now playing their game by their rules. If the other candidates had any sense, they would immediately drop out and donate their funding to organize massive ballot-harvesting initiatives like he is, but they're all self-important traitors.

Clever boy now they have to prove that election Interference never happened

A Trump base is an immovable base. Anyone outside of it is a cute twink of some sort

I am so pissed at mike pence, he should be 'Boo'd' off every stage he steps on. He sold us out to globohomos that are forming death panels to kill us.

He's had his most successful fundraising on these indictments, so thank you dems. I want the USA to return to a country of law and order. And better political sportsmanship. Not everyone wins, you don't jail your opponent or try to rig the game.

@A pls pin

As the gondolas wear mourning and Baldur's Gate 3 finally leaves Early Access and officially comes out today, I thought it was time to compose a post about almost every drama in the current and the previous installments of the main series so far. Didn't get what I was insinuating at the beginning? Don't look now. I've heard complaints that my posts are too prolix so in case you just want to jump right into the discussion for BG3 or the older games, just press CTRL-F and search for my favourite word "lackadaisical".

What's Baldur's Gate?

Great question, Baldur's Gate is a series of isometric role-playing video games developed by BioWare and published by Black Isle Studios (later acquired by Interplay Entertainment). Both games are set in the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Forgotten Realms campaign setting, a high fantasy world filled with magic, monsters, and epic adventures. Graphically horrifically outdated even at the time they were released, their gameplay mechanics were coded to conform to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition role-playing rules, with the game automatically computing rule intricacies, including tracking statistics and dice rolling but allowing the user to pause it at any moment. What sets the 2nd edition apart from the 1st edition of D&D that warrants a bold format? Besides a lot of details that only giga nerds care about, the 2nd edition introduced a concept called THAC0. THAC0, or To Hit Armor Class 0, is a system only created to filter out r-slurs. It's completely obvious to understand yet people claim it's too hard to figure out and that you need a calculator to get the math right while in reality it's just the number you need to roll on a d20 to hit an enemy with AC 0 with the general formula being Roll >= THAC0 - AC. So if you want to hit someone with an AC of 10 and you have a THAC0 of 14, you need to roll a 4 or higher. There are, to this day, still people questioning how exactly this works in Baldur's Gate:

Can someone please explain thaco and armor rating better than this.

I'm very confused by THAC0

Can someone explain the dice and THAC0 system to me?

THAC0 in Baldur's gate explained

The only thing that's kinda confusing is that in Baldur's Gate items with a +1 modifier to THAC0 do actually give a -1 modifier to it. This is similar to having to minimize the negative log-likelihood to maximize the likelihood or in rdrama terms, you have to maximize the success probability of your post by minimizing the disdain carp has for you.

God, I fricking hate you! Hurry up and post the drama!

Ok, okay I'm sorry, no yelling p-please! I do need to talk about a couple of things first.

As far as I know, there isn't really any drama in the original games that escapes its framework and finds mainstream appeal. Most of the time, people weren't happy with certain gameplay mechanics or story decisions but in general, the drama is self-contained in the games themselves. In case you are interested, some people claim BG isn't following true D&D guidelines, has weird class/alignment relations, changed the way a number of spells worked, and a bunch of other shit that is only meaningful to you if you have never seen another person naked. There are, however, some points of criticism that also make sense for ordinary mortals. Namely, in BG1, the city of Baldur's Gate is a role-playing and gameplaying nightmare. No one has fun fighting vampires and it makes no sense at all that random mages in dungeons can have abilities that they can use to wipe out the entire world. You see, while BG1 (especially in the beginning) is a low-level adventure filled with meaningless encounters and full of standard tropes, BG2 (and especially its expansion Throne of Bhaal) lets you fight impossibly powerful creatures that regularly clock in and tear you apart with wishes and meteors. To this day there are still debates about which of them is the better game, and it mostly boils down to what kind of level of fantasy you prefer. One of the favourite pastimes of the losers in /r/Baldursgate (apart from posting their incredible lucky rolls for a starting character for the umpteenth time in over twenty years) is arguing which of the two games is better: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There are, of course, a googol of potential mods, which range from simple edits of spells to new companions to extensive gameplay and mechanical changes. The most important is called Sword Coast Stratagems which adds about 90 optional components, mostly focused on improving monster AI and encounter difficulties, but also includes a number of cosmetic and ease-of-use components, to the game. While BG1 and BG2 are essentially trivial, the harder difficulties of SCS make them incredibly hard to play as enemies behave much more intelligently and realistically. BG (especially if you use SCS) is prone to min/maxing as it's basically figured due to its old age while in reality, you could beat the games without even knowing anything about their intricate mechanics by save scumming every time misfortune befalls your party. Now's a good time to talk about Lilura1:

Lilura

Lilura is, by all means, a clinically insane online persona that has infiltrated and taken command of all sites even the slightest bit related to video games. I tend to exaggerate, especially when I have to write lurid sentences to keep you on your toes so that you don't just scroll over this post, but Lilura is really terrific. ((She)) rose to fame on the only vidya website worth visiting - RPGCodex - by getting into hourly arguments about things you wouldn't even dream arguing about. Her thread in which she and other users discuss her equally indescribable blog is an absolutely delight read that only true connoisseurs will get. In case you want an appetizer, one of her first appearances in the thread is basically all you need to know as she said: " Sorry. I'm too busy posting authoritative write-ups for the greatest games of all-time, such as Jagged Alliance 2. It's much better than the garbage you play. It's also much better than the garbage gunman shits out." Not only does she criticize another user pejoratively, but she also criticizes their taste, portrays herself as a better person for not even daring to like that garbage, and shills a game that is so old that it was outdated when it first released while at the same time acting as if she is the authority figure when it comes to video games. Essentially, she's the amalgamation of all of RPGCodex's best traits. Her knowledge of CRPGs (Computer Role-playing Games) makes her a walking encyclopedia and her treatise on the evaluation of BG1 and BG2 is the pinnacle of pointless internet treatises: BG1 vs BG2 . It should not even be mentioned that Lilura does not like any video game created after 2007, especially not the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate.

Enhanced Editions

I'm not going to lie, so I have to acknowledge that BG1 and BG2 are very old and somewhat clunky games. Unlike truly timeless masterpieces like Trackmania Nations Forever or Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, both games look and play like shit by today's standards. That and the fact that Baldur's Gate was always going to be reworked [Cite something here] led to Beamdog, after a protracted and irrelevant dispute with Atari, Wizards, and other legal parties, getting the rights and reworking both games by releasing Enhanced Editions. Beamdog is apparently owned by previous Bioware lead codecels so they seemed like a good fit to do this. While the Enhanced Editions were supposed to solve the usual problems of old video games such as the terrible user interface, inventory management, compatibility with newer hardware, multiplayer, localization, performance, bugs, and glitches, they weren't supposed to alter the game and its companions in any meaningful ways. To give the devil its due, this came with some great improvements for playing on modern hardware, such as additional screen resolution options, further zoom-out, and other general quality-of-life issues. Beamdog began remaking the cutscenes from the original game to look more modern and polished. However, it was confirmed that the original cutscenes would not be included as an alternative option if you wanted the original experience. There are, however, a lot of essential changes to the gameplay in the form of new companions.

The New Companions

You see, games like Baldur's Gate have always truly lived and died by their companions. What nowadays seems like a standard approach to make role-playing games more lively, wasn't always the standard. In fact, a lot of the critically acclaimed RPGs have basically stolen the companion concept from BG (and other games) where you can decide which characters you want to have in your party and which you don't. BG, for example, had a sarcastic wizard who wanted to drop dead immediately and a dimwitted but kind-hearted berserker who, after too many blows to the head, thought his pet hamster was a miniature giant space hamster. Companions have their own personality and alignment, they can like each other, they can hate each other and they interact with your actions but you are free to pick up and kill anyone you want, including Minsc. Since you spend a long time with your companions in these kinds of games, the quality of the games depends a lot on the qualities of the companions. People were unhappy that in the switch from BG1 to BG2 some companions stopped appearing for various reasons, but the EE have introduced completely new characters which are just awful: You have Neera, a tumbr-esque whiny yet self-obsessed wild mage that is so quirky and brisk that you want to kill her as soon as possible, and even the more liberal redditors agree as Why did they make Neera so painstakingly annoying? and neera is a b-word. The worst of them all is by far Hexxat, who's a Black girlboss vampire who basically bosses you around, which wouldn't be so bad if she wasn't the only evil thief in the game making her basically mandatory for evil-themed playthroughs. There's a lot of seething about her, here: The tragedy of Hexxat., here: Let's talk (mechanically) about Hexxat. If you don't understand she's very strong... Read on. If you already think she's very strong, she might be more than you think. and here: So about Hexxat.

It would go into a lot of detail as to why exactly these characters and their quests are so terrible, but I think you get the point, at least to some extent. Beamdog's inability to write is the reason. All the new companions Beamdog added are inconsistent with the game's theme and tone, have dogshit-quality modern-era writing, and stick out like a sore thumb. As with the cutscenes, you are not able to toggle off these cringeworthy new characters and are forced to mod them out if you want a more genuine experience to the original game. That mod, I might add, is by far the most popular mod for this title. No big deal you think? I'll just buy the original games then. Well, that's the thing. You cannot. Beamdog had all the original games pulled from every digital storefront and instead forced them to be "bundled" in with the Enhanced Edition. Effectively being held hostage by the very company that spits all over the legacy of the games they claim to preserve. Essentially it boils down to Beamdog's inability to write and nothing shows this better than their own expansion of Baldur's Gate called Siege of Dragonspear, which aimed to provide the bridge between the events of BG1 and BG2:

Siege of Dragonspear

There was a time when the acronym SoD alone was so feared that any mention of it already triggered an incredible shitstorm. The older ones among us can remember the times of 2016 when the topic was really everywhere. Actually, long after the G*merGate issue had finally died down, Beamdog decided to spread their own opinion and choose a side in the never-ending blood war. Unlike the eternal battle between demons and devils, the battle between /r/SRS and /r/SRSsucks has come to an end, with the winner and loser being irrelevant from the start. The consequences of this battle can still be seen today in the appeal of the new heroines of video games. Besides the actual game, which is kinda whatever honestly as the gameplay is centered around fighting huge waves of enemies in a very linear game filled with borderline nonsensical writing and events that either ruin the companions of BG1 or spoil certain events and companions of BG2, Beamdog decided to use the game as a propaganda tool to spread their agenda. There are still people writing negative reviews about the game on steam and on reddit, and if you ever bring up SoD anywhere it's usually followed by a subsequent discussion.

So what's the big deal here and why is this so hated?

There are three major reasons for the hate:

• The inclusion of a Transgender NPC

• A refugee crisis happening

• Minsc saying "Actually, it's about ethics in heroic adventuring"

So the first thing is easily explained, a cleric in the game, Mizhena, reveals through one of the possible dialogue trees that she is transgender. The option opens up when you ask her about her name, at which she says 'I created the name myself several years ago. My birth name proved unsuitable' When asking her what was wrong with her old name she goes on to add, 'When I was born, my parents thought me a boy and raised me as such. In time, we all came to understand I was truly a woman. I created my new name from syllables of different languages. All have special meaning to me, it is the truest reflection of who I am.' It's a trans character in a world full of magic. Why was this added? Frick if I know. The refugee crisis thing, which totally parallels the Syrian refugee crisis at the time, was used as a plot device to start the story of this game. Of course, there is no resemblance to actual real-life events and persons but why even add it then? God, just writing the third line pisses me off. People love Minsc. I cannot state this enough. He is the figurehead of the games, he achieved popularity outside the genre, he is probably the second most famous D&D character ever. And Beamdog made him say the line that parodies G*mergate's infamous slogan. Why? There's no reason. At least they realized that the line is a mistake and the team admitted their mistakes and the line has since been removed. Altogether, you could summarize that Beamdog tried to push a 'social justice agenda' on the players, and g*mers are inherently anti-SJW. Here are some articles, if you would like to read more:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/baldurs-gate-expansion-receives-negative-reviews-trans-amy-walker

New Baldur's Gate Expansion Criticized For Including Transgender Character

Beamdog CEO: ‘We never thought a transgender character was a big deal'

Opinion: The Siege of Dragonspear drama and the video game community

I'll add some reddit threads because people still love talking about this game and its reactions:

Just finished Siege of Dragonspear and am I out of touch with the fandom? [150 comments]

Why is there so much smack about SoD? [100 comments]

Siege of Dragonspear? [100 comments]

Siege of Dragonspear! [100 comments]

And of course, the RPG Codex thread which has around 180 pages full of undistilled seethe:

BaldurGate: Siege of Dragonspear #baldur's gate #beamdog #bioware #controversy #enhanced edition #mizhena #mizhena saga #serious social issues #transgender

There are some really funny things here that are most likely lost to time like the time the Beamdog staff urged people to post a positive review or here or a YouTube video titled " Abuse" in which the player kills the transgender NPC with like a MILLION comments. One last thing I'd like to say is that the lead writer of SoD, a woman named Amber Scott wrote the following regarding the criticism of the game:

As I've said before (and I won't say much more on this subject other than to get my perspective out there):

I'm the writer and creator. I get to make decisions about who I write about and why.

I don't like writing about straight/white/cis people all the time. It's not reflective of the real world, it sets up s/w/c as the "normal" baseline from which "other" characters must be added, and it's boring.

I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many > > Social Justice Games in the future that reach as many different types of people as possible. Everyone should get a chance to see themselves reflected in pop culture.

Baldur's Gate 3?

The eagerly awaited Baldur's Gate 3 releases today. After Beamdog's frickups, the rights to develop this massive game were given to Larian Studios, most noteworthy for the creation of the Divinity games. Divinity is, to say it bluntly, reddit incarnate: Dialogues are incredibly unfunny, and everything is presented with a whimsical atmosphere. You can't take anything seriously, and the story and plot always lose the thread in Act 3 at the latest. A lot of people like and even love Divinity (especially the second game) for its multiplayer and its gameplay, and even though I played and finished both games, I'm not the biggest fan. My opinion doesn't matter because A LOT of people love these games. That's fine and all, but Divinity IS NOT Baldur's Gate. The game has been in Early Access for 26 years now, and the people of /r/baldursgate aren't the biggest fans as shown in the following threads:

• BG3 has nothing to do with the BG 1 and 2 besides setting - couldnt be disappointed more

• After months of being hyped over BG3, I am entitled to my own rant on reddit. Here it goes.

• BG3 really a BG Sequel?

• I think a name-change could abate 99% of bg3 criticisms.

All of which have 100s of comments containing a lot of seethe from BG veterans claiming turn-based-combat isn't BG and that Larian ruined the atmosphere and other things cba reading. Then there's also the whole bear intercourse scene I have to mention which generated a lot of interest around the world (game rose to the top 10 most wishlisted on steam) which is just an intercourse scene with a bear. Nothing major. In the trailer of the game. People loved it. Or hated it. If you think this is reddit being r-slurred, here are some of our more knowledgable drama users talking about the game:

@MayflyAlt98 - Comment

Cautious. The gay druid bear s*x scene showcase fell flat on it's face and them bragging about how many cutscenes it has made me Wish we still had Real time with pause although the classes do look decent to play. Really interested in how "The Dark Urge" origin will affect the game, I've always tried to roleplay a total edgelord villain

@kaamrev - Comment

No because it's not a fricking BG sequel, it's a DOS2 sequel with fricking turn based combat instead of real time pause, and an astronomically shit canon story linking the Bhaalspawn to the3rd game.

I should link a longposting drama about how BG1&2 veterans were gaslamp by DOS straggots by how the Bhaalspawn games were supposedly always bad by clearly DOS fans who never even touched the fricking original games

Similar as to how STAR WARS sequel fan fats gaslit original trilogy fans that they were always bad during the height of the Last Jedi internet wars

@arsey - Comment

I hope not. I was into Divinity at first but got bored and never finished. Looking forward to Baldur's Gate though.

@1066_International - Comment

Honestly I just want Baldur's Gate 3 to release already. I probably haven't been somewhat excited for a game launch for a decade now lol.

@CantorDust - Comment

It's the only time I've ever felt legit hype for a game ever. I love larian so much bros

@Losercel - Comment

In response to the previous: Literally the other way around. I love Baldur's Gate, I hate Larian. Cannot wait to see my boy Minsc again.

Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly

There's currently a lot of seething from game developers that Baldur's Gate 3 is an anomaly and not the standard for further RPGs b-because L-LARIAN had TOO MUCH TIME and the GAME IS TOO GOOD. WE CANNOT STOP DELIVERING SHITTY BROKEN AND CLEARLY UNFINISHED GAMES ON RELEASE, OK CHUD? GAME DEVELOPMENT IS A PASSION!

No, seriously, some game dev really said:

https://x.com/WritNelson/status/1677632079792668673

Like a lot of people, I'm deeply excited about what the lovely folks at Larian accomplished with Baldur's Gate 3, but I want to gently, pre-emptively push back against players taking that excitement and using it to apply criticism or a "raised standard" to RPGs going forward

...

As a TL;DR:

In an era of megagames, Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the largest attempted, built by a specialized group of people using mature tech specially built to make this specific game, reinforced by invaluable mass player feedback AND market validation ahead of its launch. This is not a new baseline for RPGs--this is an anomaly. Trying to do the same thing in the same way, especially without the same advantages, could kill an entire GROUP of studios.

And here's an article about that statement that summarized the sentiment:

Why devs consider Baldur's Gate 3 anomaly, not new standard for RPG genre: “It's Rockstar-level nonsense for scope”

tl;dr:

Long development cycle that started back in 2017;

Two previous games, Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin II, “worth of tech and institutional knowledge to draw from”;

Successful Early Access period lasting three years that provided Larian with community feedback, bug hunting, and cash flow;

Huge team of over 400 developers across seven offices;

The license for one of the largest entertainment IPs (Dungeons & Dragons).

He cited several things that separate Baldur's Gate 3 from most RPGs in the market and that's why Nelson Jr. is concerned that Baldur's Gate 3 could be considered a “raised standard” to the entire genre and applied even to teams that didn't have the resources, cowtools, and experience that Larian did. Some reddit threads about this:

The supreme irony of the "BG3 is an anomaly" discussion [700+ comments]

The good thing to come from the BG3 discourse [500+ comments]

Why devs consider Baldur's Gate 3 anomaly [800+ comments]

How can you not be excited when before the game is even out, other studios are already pushing back saying "please don't hold all of us to this insane standard".

Global Launch Times

Final Note

Are you going to play and what class are you picking? Did you already play the Early Access and did you already watch all tier lists to min/max the fun out of the game on release? Any ideas on companions? Let me know, and as always:

God, I knew I skipped over some things and I had to simplify some other things but I'm annoyed and this took forever. I wish I weren't so lackadaisical.

Ariel 30 and David 35, Louisville TX

Personal Lives:

• No kids

• Married for a year

Education: timestamp

• Husband

  • No college

  • Current career plan is becoming a dominoes guy? I'm so confused timestamp

    • Sounds like he's being sold down the river tbh but I'm paranoid

• Wife

  • BS in Rehabilitation and Concentration of Orientational Ability (not sure I heard this right)

  • Had to pass a test to work in the field but failed it and they wanted her to take it again so she tried to get a job in the process while studying for the test so she went for another area of work and never took the test a second time?

    • Salary for this is between 55k (average) and a 104k (top)

  • Started college for nursing but she couldn't handle vomit

Careers:

• Both have 80 hour work weeks

• Ariel -

  • Both jobs remote

  • Payment processing for an auto company

  • Second job at a comtech company helping build websites?

  • 40k salary from each job

• David -

  • Amazon Warehouse forklift driver

    • 39 hours 17.20 a week. Flex hours

  • Dominoes Pizza Delivery Driver

    • 40 hours

    • Around 260 biweekly and 600 a week in tips?

  • Donates plasma twice a week

    • around 120 a week

Debt:

• Why are you guys working so much timestamp

  • Claim they've already started trying to get rid of debt, almost gotten rid of husband's then dealing with the wife's after

• Didn't save money for their wedding, some of their debt is from that

• "Are you guys completely on the same page when it comes to personal finances?" timestamp

  • Wife wants to do things, husband wants to get rid of debt

• Wedding expenses discussions timestamp

• 2019 Toyota Highlander 44'332 => 32'806

  • $725 minimum monthly payment

  • 5.4%, 5 year

  • Thinking about selling it. Believes it's not upside down

  • At the time he'd purchased this, a year or two ago, he'd paid off ALL their debt except her student loans

• "I got all those credit cards because I was taught that.. you know... umm.. I guess... if you have higher I mean cards with higher limits on it you have I don't remember the technical term for it but I heard it's supposed to be better for your credit if you have a higher spending limit or something like that"

• (Card 1) FNBA Visa $3475: timestamp

  • Paid for Best Man of the wedding's travel expenses

  • 0% but not sure how long it will be

  • $70 minimum payment

  • "It's so low, we can definitely get that paid off"

• (Card 2) Navy Federal $11'714: timestamp

  • Wife tried to get into e-commerce "I took a course"

  • Two $5'000 courses, she got taken for a ride

• (Card 3) Navy Federal $3'378: timestamp

  • For wife's everyday purchasing

  • Made 116 payment, Bought $544 in new purchases

• (Card 4) Discover Card ($6'000)

  • Husband's

  • Two sections, 1 accruing interest, 1 not. Already paid off one that was

  • 0% interest ends on September 4th

  • Part of the wedding debt

• (Card 5) Amazon $1400 timestamp

  • $7.86 interest, $39 late fees, she thought she had auto pay on

  • 400 payments, 360 in new purchases

• Other credit cards all paid off now?

  • They said this after card 1 but there were so many more

---Intermission while she pulls up student loans---

Caleb (to the husband): "can you say something upsetting so I can verbally so I can get some equal treatment over here"

Husband: "I just wanted to stay out of it, I've talked to her enough I need somebody else to say something..." [he goes on but it's just filler]

---

• Student Loans (51'000)

  • Around 600 a month minimum payments when it starts up again

  • She thinks payments start back up in June 2024 timestamp

• Car 2 Around 16'097(?)

  • $366

  • 4.39%

  • 72 month term

Savings:

• Retirement Fund $1'000

• A collection of small checking/savings, none higher than 500 I think

Living Situation:

• $1600 a month 1 bedroom, thinking about a new lease or acquiring house? Wife burned down the kitchen? timestamp

There's a sub called /r/patientgaymer where they talk about avoiding hype and AAA Ubisoft slop, mostly because they are too poor.

One often slapfight inducing topic is difficulty, where boomer postwall gaymers lament their inability to have the same millisecond reaction time at the ripe old age of 31 vs their tween years, and how they enjoy gaymes on easy mode when their kiddies have finally gone to sleep or whatever.

Their natural enemies are the ultrastrags of Soulslike gaymers, where they have only one singular measure of worth in theri NEET lives - beating the most DIFFICULT games of all time!! Darksouls, the true value and bragging rights of a g*mer

Between the 2 groups the Soulshit cute twinks are the more obnoxious, any mention of easy and soul in the same sentence makes their eternal turbo g*mers lose their collective

Soulshit isn't for p*ssies! It's a manly man's gayme! Any suggestion of future Soulshit having an easy mode for grandpa, even if modded is an affront to god.

Right anyways for todays

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientg*mers/comments/15f70ao/the_absolute_joy_of_playing_games_on_easier/

Boomer gaymer says he enjoys easy mode, fights ensue

Most gaymer soy speech ever:

"We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience. So it's not something we're willing to abandon at the moment. It's our identity." -Hidetaka Miyazaki

It's toxic AF to respect the developers vision for their own games? Criticize it all you want, but at least respect their artistic integrity.

Defenders of Soulshit come forth!

Soulshit tantrums prove the guy right

RELEASE THE DOWNMARSEYS AGAINST THE HERETIC

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientg*mers/comments/15f70ao/the_absolute_joy_of_playing_games_on_easier/juceosp/

easy mode r*pes the integrity of the experience! or something

"There are untold hundreds, thousands of games with an easy mode, and people still find ways to throw shade at the handful that don't." wat

"No, try criticizing a From Software game for excluding difficulty settings and you will quickly be downmarseyd." DIE B-WORD DIE

Dark souls has a target audience just like any other game and any given game isn't going to be able to cater to exactly everyone. Even the games with a variety of difficultly options, because that game even with difficulty options may just not be their thing. The point of dark souls is that it's difficult, that is the “experience” I HAVE SO LITTLE DIFFICULTY IN LIFE I NEED CHALLENGE IN MY ESCAPISM FRICK YOU

Difficulty settings is not something that should be forced on developers

What the frick are these losers talking about lmoa

Translation: my farts smell so good

@XY plz pin

yall rn for some reason https://t.co/F3EwzZHyzl pic.twitter.com/EhefPw4gQv

— blue_axolotl64, doer of wokery (@blueaxolotl64) July 30, 2023

Background

Recently, Barbie, Oppenheimer (and Pikmin 4) released on the same day.

It turned into a big meme where people would say "Wow, Oppenheimer and Barbie are really thematically different, but I want to see BOTH of them. Isn't that wacky?" (I saw both and they were both great, would recommend )

It was the Twitter equivalent of when Animal Crossing and Doom Eternal released on the same day :

This meme carried on for a while until just last night, when Japanese users decided they had ENOUGH of Americans mocking their tragedy and retaliated

Team 1: Japan (and their white allies )

To start, the Official American Barbie movie account responded to a Barbenheimer meme:

: It's going to be a summer to remember😘💕

Japan got really mad at that, and demanded an apology. The Official Japanese Barbie Movie responded and I can't read Japanese but from the quote tweets I think it was something like this:

: Hey so Barbenheimer isn't Official and it was like super lame for the American branch to talk about Oppenheimer like he killed people and we demand an apology

Japanese twitter users added some whiny community notes to Barbie US's tweet too:

: At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945 (Showa 20), an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima for the first time in human history. The particular nature of the damage caused by the atomic bombs is that mass destruction and mass murder occurred instantaneously and indiscriminately.

They started the hashtag "#NoBarbenheimer" to show their distaste for the meme and you can find a lot of funny seethe. Here's some highlights:

: #Barbenheimer What do you Americans who use this tag to make jokes about the atomic bomb feel when they see this image? What you guys are doing is exactly the same as this. shame on you. #Barbie #NoBarbenheimer

They post this image to go along with the caption:

>Wants to retaliate against Americans

>Accidentally makes extremely funny image that Americans will laugh at

This continues with several Japanese people making Barbie 9/11 edits:

: #Barbenheimer #NoBarbenheimer How do you think? This is what you guys are doing. あなたたちがやっているのはこういうことです

: Hey American, how do you feel?

: It's Barbenheimer time!

: Can you do the same for Auschwitz victims or 911 survivor? #NoBarbenheimer

And here's one of Barbie commiting a school shooting or something idrk

They started long posting in the quote tweets of the American Barbie account too:

: The majority of Japanese are disgusted and angry against #Barbenheimer that is joking about the atomic bombs that killed 200,000 people at least. https://x.com/barbiethemovie/status/1682208852874526723?s=46&t=0d3rAKbcmJ8TvHLxlKGyuw… Personally, I don't care and it's just another freedom of expression. People criticizing it also are. However, if they can't do the same in the Holocaust or 911, it is a double standard for sure. And if somebody did those, I assume that they would immediately cancel the one who did that. Political correctness or diversity or whatsoever they claim is that level of hypocrisy. FYI, the Japanese Barbie account officially announced that #Barbenheimer is not official and claims that the response to the movement by the USA headquarters is lacking consideration and is extremely regrettable. They are apologizing to people who felt uncomfortable and are demanding the USA headquarters to appropriate response.

In typical white lady fashion, once they found out that even one person was made uncomfy by something, all jokes about it must cease probably because they love the chance to be morally righteous

The Japanese really got their breakthrough into American Twitter with this tweet:

: Scene from Barefoot Gen (1983) where it shows the effects of the Nuclear Bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on 1945.

It's from an animal showing the effects of the bombing and its at over 110k likes on Twitter and people decided that maybe bombs are not all fun and games

Team 2: African Americans

Before we can get started, you need to know about LegoMe_TheOG a 14 year old black kid who's really good at Lego animations and even animated the Lego section of Across the Spiderverse (great movie BTW ) he has been Twitter's star for a bit because his work is really impressive and he is also 14.

He jumped in on the Barbenheimer trend and even made an animation about it (very impressive stuff I think).

Terminal Reposter DiscussingFilm uploads LegoMe_TheOG's Barbenheimer render to his account (LegoMe_TheOG only got 35k likes and DF got near 90k )

The post did great for 7 days until Japan unleashed their attack yesterday:

: #NoBarbenheimer

There were more mad posts but Twitter sorts stuff weird and I don't feel like digging

Black Twitter caught wind that their golden child was under attack, and as far as they knew, Japan only started hating the meme when he posted very suspicious...

: yall rn for some reason

: The reason is anti-blackness. Next

: Crazy how once a 14 year old kid participates in the meme, SUDDENLY it's insensitive and inappropriate Y'all are snakes, every last one of you

: as soon as the black child prodigy hops on a meme yall suddenly get off barbenheimers meat and dont fricking argue about them "not knowing the wrath of the bomb" because you clearly havent even watched oppenheimer which delivers that fricking message in a powerful way

: Why is it that everyone and their mothers' has a problem with Barbenheimer once a talented black animator takes part in the meme?

There's a lot of copers in the replies like

nooooo it's not racism we all just turned on the meme when the black kid did it coincidentally

Conclusion

That was my post I hope you liked it

Who do you side with in the war? Which Barbie 9/11 edit was your favorite? Talk in the comments below!

(Heh, and if you didn't like my post... you better watch your back ...)

I met surveyors who worked in Mozambique before, and one curious tale which they had told me stuck with me many years later. It's that often in the few tar roads between Harbours and key resource locations, like mines, forestries and refineries there would be a feature which told a great deal about the nation's economic relationship with the world. From inland to the Indian Ocean, the lefthand side of the crumpled and overtaxed tar roads would be substantially more worn and torn than the righthand side.

You see like South Africa, Mozambique drives on the Lefthand side of the road. The mystery of the peculiar erosion of these tar roads heading into the direction of the ocean would have many 1st timers scratch their heads. I mean the whole country's road maintenance is in the gutter, Mozambique has actually worse road deterioration than RSA! So you know that's already an indictment of their dire economic situation. Yet still, why on earth was erosion always so concentrated only on one side? And always the lefthand side of the tar road, leading from inland towards the ocean. Many tourists may not have always remarked upon this, as it would be mostly foreign specialists like SA surveyors who worked in the mines or forestries, in the none-tourist regions of the country.

The mystery would be instantly resolved, the moment you saw trucks passing you and each other, to and from the Harbours and back - the trucks of all types coming from the Harbours were empty, and thus lighter; the trucks going to the Harbours were fully packed and laden with the extra weight of ore, putting that much extra pressure on the trucks, and subsequently extra pressure on the Left side of the road.....

THE BELT AND ROAD:

Greetings Dramatards!

I've talked before about our poor and absurdly unfortunate neighbours in the north of Mozambique in terms of their cataclysmic near 20 year long civil war, and its enduring consequences on the lives of Mozambique's citizens.

I've also talked before about grand drama when reckless loaning from Credit Suisse and other rogue banks to corrupt gov officials caused the country's international lending reputation to tank, when it became known that the country's loan amount was far far far larger than even the government itself was aware of, and how this crushed their credit rating, as the combined loans could not be feasibly be paid back by the country. Followed by COVID, like all of Southern Africa, they have had more than their just fair of bad luck, and are mostly in economic mire at this stage.

But one of the largest dramas regarding Mozambique tends to be its relationship with China, as it is the largest benefactor of China's Belt and Road initiative in Southern Africa.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-07-04/China-Mozambique-vow-to-advance-Belt-and-Road-cooperation-1boFjpcLWrC/index.html

For those of you who have no idea wtf the Belt and Road initiative is, basically it is Daddy Xi's equivalent of Stalin's 5 year plan, but on much much more grander and long term scale. In 2013 Xi launched his signature policy - which is basically the largest international infrastructure program ever endeavored by any one nation in recorded history. It attempts to build global infrastructure all around the 3rd world, particularly over Central and Eastern Africa, as well as between the Middle East and SEA. The idea is to recreate a modern incarnation of the old Silk Road of the middle ages. China would build or loan to these other 3rd world countries to build transport infrastructure like roads, railways and harbours, to facilitate the ability to transport goods between China, and the various 3rd world nations, thus expanding China's influence and favorable prestige from these future grateful 3rd world countries.

BELT AND ROAD SLAPS:

The Belt and Road initiative has been a perpetual slapfight between wingucks and r-slurs about whether it's actually a good thing in the long run, especially for the very poor nation states whom had gratefully accepted these loans and constructions from bid daddy Xi.

The anti-West and Anti-american wingcucks who hate burgerland and european influence basically support this blindly as a good alternative influences from a superpower capable of opposing the rancid cucks of Burgerland. The neoliberal cucks from the west opposes this as they dont trust china, and believe that any influence that China has is bad, because china is bad.

Opinion on these vast nation state sized loans are also complex and divided.

Western nations and more western oriented international organizations like the IMF have been extremely reluctant and hesitant to loan too much money or resources to places like Africa before. The largest private banks need to estimate the risks involved in any loaning endeavor, and often balk at the notion of risking loans of any substance to 3rd world dictator shitholes, or corrupt kleptocracies.

On the other hand, we've seen what happens when nefarious banks loan recklessly to those who didn't have the capacity to pay back in the 1st place. When Credit Suisse fricked over the country by overloaning to corrupt officials who spent the loans on personal gratification, instead of investing in public infrastructure, it made the IMF balk at future loans which even further fricked the country's interest rate and currency conversion rates, worsening their poverty. Cuz a country needs to maintain its image as a reliable partner for trade and a loaner who pays back his loans, especially a developing country who will always always always have need for future loans for itself or its local businesses to economically develop.

Thus, basically the rich 1st world have done very little comparitively when it came to financing African countries via economic loans, as the risks were always seen as outweighting the rewards.

But the Chinese have had no such qualms.

Here a basic wingcuck comment regarding the west and being unable to "stop countries from trying to better themselves." It's representative of how there is resentment towards Europe as post-colonizers, and burgerland for never having risked into african infrastructures for example.

Meanwhile China has shown support for many African nations since the 1960s, both as mutual cooperation between communist factions, and as a way to curry favour between other developing nations. Thus you can already see the political feelings between African nations people who criticize the Belt and Road initiative as nothing more than salty european cucks trying to keep them from finding their own prosperity.

POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES OF THE BELT AND ROAD:

Since 2013, China has spent 931 Billion $ worth on the project - 561 Billion$ on construction projects, and 371 Billion $ on investments. This has been spent on needed infrastructures like roads, electricity stations, airports, railways and hospitals

https://en.imsilkroad.com/p/314276.html

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/09/what-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-bri

The Belt and Road has changed lives for the better for hundreds of millions of people, this is undeniable, bike like an oily shadow, there has also followed a sinister underbelly regarding the grand project in its wake.

For all the good and needed infrastructures like roads and hospitals built by chinese investments in countries like Kenya, there has also been frivolous and questionable projects funded by Chinese loans. Shit vanity projects like sports stadiums and jank skyscrapers. Garbage projects that give tenures to good friend, but don't do anything to develop the economy of that Developing Nation which will help facilitate the offset to the interest of the loan in the 1st place.

https://www.scmp.com/sport/soccer/article/2061186/how-china-fuelling-african-cup-nations-through-stadium-diplomacy

https://www.nyasatimes.com/malawi-china-sign-loan-agreement-to-construct-new-stadium/

CHINESE DEBT TRAP DIPLOMACY - REAL OR FAKE?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy

This contrast of China being willing to loan money to nations with the lowest credit score on the planet where Eurocucks balk at, has prompted the view that China has been deliberately loaning out money to nations incapable of paying back loans in order to deliberately trap them in debt, so as to proc alternative concessions from these governments so that China may write off their loans - such as allowing China to directly stripmine mineral resources without input from that nation itself, thereby gaining ownership of fricking land in other countries, or forcing nations give up control of harbours, or force them to agree to house chinese military bases or something equally strategic. The idea being that China can easily afford to write of the loss of the defaulting debt, as it means them obtaining strategic or political concessions the host nation would never have agreed to in the 1st place no matter the financial incentive.

https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/chinas-debtbook-diplomacy-how-china-is-turning-bad-loans-into-strategic-investments/

The greatest example of this is when Shri-Lank literally leased a port built up with Chinese loans, to china for 99 fricking years after their loans defaulted. This make NATO shit bricks, as they saw it as China having skillfully turned a bad deal, into a geo-political strategic truimpth. This makes burgers believe than the entire Belt and Road Initiative is one giant mega conversion project where the aim is not to finance a modern Silk road, but for China to slink in its slimy tendrils into all of the world's developing nations, and basically catch them offgaurd to wrestle important infrastructure from these nations foolish enough to do deals with them!!!

Others view the Debt-Trap to be more complicated, and that the detractors of the Belt& Road initiative are hystericals.

https://archive.ph/81ENz

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/

"Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard. With a new administration in Washington, the truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue."

"For a conflict-torn country that struggled to generate tax revenue, the terms of the loan seemed reasonable. As Saliya Wickramasuriya, the former chairman of the SLPA, told us, “To get commercial loans as large as $300 million during the war was not easy.” That same year, Sri Lanka also issued its first international bond, with an interest rate of 8.25 percent. Both decisions would come back to haunt the government."

The article goes at length to explain that the Chinese loan for the Shri-Lanka port had been sincere since the onset, and that it was mismanagement of the Port's finances by its government which tanked its viability.

"Steep payments on international sovereign bonds, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the country’s external debt, put Sirisena’s government in dire fiscal straits almost immediately. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress."

"There was also never a default. Colombo arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company—just as the Canadians had recommended. There was not an open tender, and the only two bids came from China Merchants and China Harbor; Sri Lanka chose China Merchants, making it the majority shareholder with a 99-year lease, and used the $1.12 billion cash infusion to bolster its foreign reserves, not to pay off China Eximbank."

In other words two separate Chinese banks bid for the port, and Shri-Lanka chose the one which gave the most favorable deal - that's a lot less evil chinese cartoonish strongarming the hapless locals.

The article also goes on to explain how the port is in a military strategic sense very shit, and was obtained solely from a business sense:

""Before the port episode, “Sri Lanka could sink into the Indian Ocean and most of the Western world wouldn’t notice,” Subhashini Abeysinghe, research director at Verité Research, an independent Colombo-based think tank, told us. Suddenly, the island nation featured prominently in foreign-policy speeches in Washington. Pence voiced worry that Hambantota could become a “forward military base” for China. Yet Hambantota’s location is strategic only from a business perspective: The port is cut into the coast to avoid the Indian Ocean’s heavy swells, and its narrow channel allows only one ship to enter or exit at a time, typically with the aid of a tugboat. In the event of a military conflict, naval vessels stationed there would be proverbial fish in a barrel.""

Additionally, if the Chinese had been persueing a debt trap policy, then it would have been a monumental waste of finances because China is currently in its own economic crisis Post-COVID:

In summary: our boi Patrick Boyle explains that China may have overreached itself in the amount of countries it had loaned and invested in for its titanic Belt and Road Initiative, because post COVID, many 3rd world nations had their economies basically bricked into oblivion, and found themselves defaulting and incapable of paying back their loans to daddy Xi.

This has happened before, but the problem now is that nearly half of its Belt & Road debtors all went into default ALL AT ONCE. This is a big fricking problem for China, because unlike the myths, china doesn't have infinite money. China's troubles are also agrevated by their Housing Crisis, meaning China is facing the dual threat of both defaulting foreign debtors, and internal domestic recession threats.

The point here is this: that chinese do likely have a sincere objective to seem many developing nations flourish and to have their loans be used for economic growth and prosperity, not because they are altruistic angels, but because seeing 3rd worlders develop into vibrant allies is a shared interest, and helps build China's soft power and economic influence. Additionally chinese politics have always been opportunistically predatory, meaning they likely took advantage of the Shri-Lanka port as it suited them when their opposing colleague was at their weakest and could be more easily influences, but it was also done with Chinese firms and banks bidding towards the Shri-Lanka gov, not exactly completely draconian.

The truth of the Debt-Trap is thus in reality very complex, and although the chinese have shown themselves to jump at the opportunity to bend the arms of nations in distress, the use of Debt-trapping states doesn't appear to have been their goal from the onset of 2013 deliberately. Again murky and complex.

VERY REAL WORLD NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BRI (BELT & ROAD INITIATIVE):

We do however have many great examples of how the Chinese BRI loans have severe drawbacks, demonstrating that the BRI is done solely for the benefit of China, and not its trade partners.

Much of the criticism of the BRI had been from competing countries against China, like America, Britain and France, but much of the criticism of the BRI had also come from the trade partners of the BRI, and the countries to which the BRI development loans had been extended towards - like Kenya.

Many of the projects receiving loans from the BRI are mired in good old fashioned corruption, so that roads don't get completed, costs more than they should, or go over target construction time, thus not creating the economic development the dirtpoor nations need to oddset the future interest of the loans.

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/study-links-35-percent-of-chinese-belt-and-road-initiative-projects-to-scandals-involving-corruption-environmental-problems-labour-violations/

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-belt-road-plans-losing-momentum-opposition-debt-mount-study-2021-09-29/

https://www.csis.org/analysis/corruption-flows-along-chinas-belt-and-road

Basically the same troubles as the Credit Suisse in Mozambique had where Chinese banks make deals with corrupt officials who pocket the loans, and fricks off to leave the populace to deal with future mega debts.

Other criticisms of the BRI are that the projects are overly expensive, with the chinese construction firms basically having a monopoly since western firms sure as shit dont want to build in backwaters, and charge extreme prices

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-why-the-price-is-too-high/

"The pressure China faces over resistance to BRI-related debt has forced it to renegotiate contracts with reduced project size and financial outlays. Malaysia had originally canceled a rail link that was part of BRI and would have connected its east and west coasts. China earlier this month renegotiated that and brought down the price by a third from the original estimate of Malaysian ringgit 65.5 billion ($16 billion) to 44 billion ringgit ($11 billion)."

But the criticisms doesn't end there: many if not most of the BRI construction projects are undergone by imported Chinese workforces, specially for a specific project like building a railwal, or digging a tunnel, and thus locals of these poor countries like Kenya and Mozambique do not directly participate or benefit from these mega construction projects which do nothing for local job creation.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-built-labor-and-belt-and-road-initiative

"The use of Chinese labor on BRI projects has been a contentious issue. The governments and populations of host countries usually seek to increase the proportion of local hires on such projects, to increase local income and skills transfer. Chinese firms, however, seek to keep labor costs down while accommodating Beijing’s political preferences. This often results in their importing Chinese labor for BRI projects rather than relying on local workers. Railroads in Laos and pipelines in Myanmar, for instance, have been reportedly constructed with a predominantly Chinese labor force. As of 2019, there were officially about one million Chinese workers employed overseas, with many additional Chinese citizens working overseas on tourist visas or in other unofficial capacities."

"Importing labor from China, for instance, allows firms to bypass complicated legal regimes that may favor locals over foreign multinationals during labor disputes. There are also claims that Chinese laborers are more productive than locals. The president of Sri Lanka’s Chamber of Construction Industry, for instance, suggested that Chinese workers are four times as productive as Sri Lankans. Politically sensitive investments may also involve more Chinese laborers, particularly near the end of projects, as Beijing puts pressure on companies to meet deadlines."

"In other cases, Chinese firms have been happy to rely on local labor. In Cambodia, for example, BRI projects have created an estimated twenty thousand jobs. Generally speaking, however, Chinese firms primarily hire local laborers for low-skill positions, limiting the possibility of skills transfer. A 2019 survey of Chinese firms in Angola and Ethiopia found that nearly all low-skilled jobs were occupied by local workers, while many high-skill positions or management roles were reserved for Chinese workers."

Basically china only ever hires local black africans for the lowest tier manual labour, and never hire locals for high-skilled work like engineering or surveying, thus locals get no experience or interaction with building projects.

But the insult to injury doesn't end there, often the Chinese import chinese traditional food to feed their workers to the worksite - like sushi in the middle of deserts.

From our boi Patric Boyle: " This complete lack of interaction with the local economy means that there's no boost in employment in the country in question, and that there's no transfer of high-level skills to the local workforce."

CNINESE EXPLOITATION OF MOSAMBIQUE:

Which finally brings us to Mozambique specifically.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-04-25-the-low-road-to-economic-ruin-as-illustrated-by-a-trip-through-mozambique/

This DailyMaverick article goes into depth about how fricked the transport infrastructure of Mozambique is, and how petrol stations are not placed strategically, and how roads are a mish-mash of good and bad in terms of conditions, meaning that tourists sometimes play a risky game of travelling inland in the hope of finding proper roads and stocked petrol stations!

"At one point, in the 70km between Changara and Guro, south of Tete, only a small strip of road was open for 30km, forcing an informal stop-go arrangement – and the occasional game of chicken – with the fuel, logging and other trucks that dominate the route. Save for the very good road between the port of Beira and Chimoio on the corridor with Zimbabwe, the surface followed a predictable pattern – an okay sector for a few kilometres, followed by disintegration of the road in the dips and around the bridges, and then whole sections where the road, for reasons of age, lack of maintenance, the quality of the original construction, and the extent of rainfall, had simply fallen apart into potholes, which sometimes spanned its entire width."

Additionally to show just how fricking corrupt and dysfunctional Mozambique is, here they tell of their very real experience of frequent speed trapping of tourists by starving Traffic Police swindlers.

"In the 1,833km from Maputo to the Malawian border at Dedza, we encountered 97 police and army roadblocks, being stopped at no fewer than 64 of them. Without fail they asked for water, sometimes food. There were nine speed traps between Maputo and Tete, at which we were stopped twice and forced to pay on-the-spot fines, one for travelling at 66km/h in a 60 zone (I was going 56 according to the GPS), the other for going 82km/h in a 60 zone. With no signs, it’s virtually impossible to know what the speed limit is."

As well as typical tourism tax!

"The sergeant pretended to write down our details on a small piece of paper at Save. As he circled the car, continuously tapping on our, by now, rolled-up windows, while his colleagues peered in the back of our Land Cruiser, we pretended to ignore him. Eventually I could take no more, rolled down the window and let rip. He changed tack, rubbing his hand on his stomach while pretending to drink a bottle. A Red Bull, bottle of water and 200 meticais lighter, we were again on our way, smiles all around."

I mention this article just to show you dramatards how very dysfunctional and poor as dirt the travelling conditions of Mozambique can be, even much much more so than South Africa.

(1) China is overexploiting Mozambique forests:

https://www.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/13597IIED.pdf

This research paper goes into detail about the sustainability of Chinese lumberjacks in Mozambique forests and the danger of it not being sustainable. The mozambique gov and people are so poor that they sell the woods and vegetation beneath their feet to the Chinx at dirt cheap prices, not caring about a sustainable future, because they are poors today.

The paper is extremely long and boring, but it concludes that national and international action must be taken for mozambique communities to unwittingly sell away their own woods, as part of the lumber supply for Belt and Road projects in Mozambique itself, or places like Kenya.

https://warontherocks.com/2021/09/al-shabaab-and-chinese-trade-practices-in-mozambique/

""The al-Shabaab insurgency will continue to profit from the illegal timber trade if no action is taken, and the human, economic, and environmental situation in the rest of the province will deteriorate further. A study published in 2019 estimated that al-Shabaab gains 125 million meticais ($2 million) per month from illegally extracted timber. A local expert on Mozambique’s timber trade stated that “we were unable to link Chinese traders directly with al-Shabaab … but we know that the timber harvested in areas controlled by the militants was sent to China and Vietnam.” He explained that al-Shabaab recruits many Tanzanians and Mozambicans who make sales in safer port towns like Mtwara and Pemba. It is likely here that Chinese traders are engaged.""

https://forestsnews.cifor.org/22055/surge-in-chinese-demand-exposes-cracks-in-mozambique-forest-policy?fnl=en

""Illegal activity in Mozambique’s forestry industry has increased alongside a surge in Chinese demand for Mozambican timber, leading to negative effects for the industry and for the sustainability of the country’s forests. But this could help spur timber and trade policy change, researchers say. Since China imposed a domestic logging ban to preserve its own forests in 1998, its expanding economy has steadily become hungrier for African wood. “China’s demand for timber has increased dramatically over the past 20 years, so that today, more than 80 percent of Mozambican timber exports are destined for China""

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr41/7851/2018/en/

Chinese worker gang bosses are ruthless in many african countries and have no qualms with exploiting the manual labor force of low-skilled workers. Often the workers are so poor, that dangerous and unpleasant working conditions don't deter them from signing up for our chink friends.

https://www.reuters.com/article/eni-mozambique-idINDEE92D0HA20130314

Chinese firms also suck the lifeblood of the country right out of the ground in the form of minerals or gasses.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-relations-mozambique-mixed-blessing

Even way back in 2008, there were signs that Mozambique was not an equal partner in their newest trade relationships.

"According to Daniel Ribeiro, a preeminent Mozambican environmentalist, Chinese timber buyers are targeting certain types of slow growing species due to their high value. These species are concentrated in semi arid regions, and the rate of cutting simply makes it impossible for rejuvenation to occur. These depredations, according to Ribeiro, will lead to the disappearance of large forest areas in the next 5 to 10 years. Soil erosion and the beginnings of desertification are becoming major problems in a country which was once a stranger to such phenomena."

Additionally environmentalists have warned that the deforestation of slow growing plant and tree types - which were specifically targeted by our fricked up yellow friends for furniture and luxuries - meant than desertification had already taken place in large swaths of Mozambique, which in turn also affects the agricultural capacity of certain land parcels.

"The Chinese timber traders have been so predatory that local NGOS now refer to the trade as the “Chinese takeaway.” The highly secretive manner in which many agreements are signed between the two governments further complicates issues of transparency and accountability. The Chinese did not bring corruption to Mozambique, but rather they had in many instances to adapt to the rules of the game they found there and feed the pockets of corrupt government officials"

Chinese takeaways lol, a morbid joke.

"Before the arrival of the Chinese, illegal logging was already a problem, but never in the current proportions. Unless the Mozambican government begins to act more responsibly, China’s and increasingly India’s appetite for African resources are likely to lead to more corruption and environmental damage."

"By and large, China’s assistance to Mozambique has been beneficial and has significantly diminished the country’s overdependence on its traditional western donors. Beijing’s support for Mozambique dates back to the early 1960s, when the country was fighting for its independence from Portugal. Since independence, China has provided extensive ajuda amigavel e gratuita (free and friendly aid) by building various important government buildings at the national and provincial level free of charge."

You can see there is a complex relationship between China and East africa like Mozambique - chinese infrastructure have in fact greatly aided many Mozambique people, but it comes with the unending exploitation of opportunistic chinese batards.

https://www.cadtm.org/China-s-role-in-amplifying-Southern-Africa-s-extreme-uneven-development

https://issafrica.org/iss-today/high-cost-of-having-china-as-africas-partner-of-choice

"The number of African countries indebted to China and subsequently handing over their assets or resources are in no short supply. Zambia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti are just some."

"Most of the projects undertaken by China are capital-intensive ventures like ports, railway lines, roads and even airports. Rarely does it invest in more basic amenities like sanitation programmes. China then reclaims and runs the assets for profit when countries default. The loans are big and the terms leave sub-Saharan Africa with little revenue of their own from commodity production while increasing their debt levels. Multilateral organisations like the African Development Bank, the World Bank and last-resort lenders like the IMF generally give loans at lower-than-market rates."

It's a tragically complex issue.

Anyways that's all I got, sorry for the anti-climax.

An explanation for the non less neurodivergent members of this board:

Dwarf Fortress is a colony simulator where you (in the form of a bunch of dwarves) set out into the world with one simple goal: build the biggest and longest lasting base you can. The tricky part is that the game is a roguelike (or "permadeath game" colloquially). Once every member of your fortress is dead, that's it. The fortress is gone and there is no reloading back to a previous save.

The game doesn't have a traditional multiplayer mode, so to compensate, players came up with the idea of a "succession fort". The gist is that players play through a year of the fortress on their own, then hand off the save file to another person, who also plays through a year, then they give it to the next and so on and so forth until it loops back to the original player. Hence the term "succession". If you want a taste of how snased a succession game can get, I'd recommend reading or listening to Boatmurdered.

The big twist of Dwarf Fortress (and why it's had so much staying power) is that your world isn't static. The game actually simulates everything. Every war, every succession of kings, every dragonflight, and even the lives and lineages of individual peasants are tracked. Your dwarves didn't just blip into existence when your fortress started, they lived entire lives before then. They have their own opinions about the world, and they react to everything that happens to them in their own unique way. When a dwarf fights an enemy, a sword slash doesn't just reduce an arbitrary HP stat, it severs nerves or bruises organs. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much else you could go on about, down to the geology.

So, given all of that complexity, the game is unparalleled when it comes to creating stories. Secret vampires murdering your citizens, a heroic dwarf wrestling a cyclops down a cliff, or a visiting performer turning into a werebadger in the middle of your tavern are all just a few of the stories you can expect to see unfold while playing Dwarf Fortress.

Mostibkun is rdrama's very own succession fort. Each player will write a log (perhaps in character) of what they did and what happened in their year, then post it in this thread. Updates will be posted within 2 weeks of each other_hopefully. You can see the current roster/order of players at the bottom of this post.

Now, with all that preamble out of the way, I present to you the first entry in the tale of Mostibkun, "Orangecat"

28th of Felsite, 250. End of spring.

We arrived at Mostibkun on the 14th of Granite, as scheduled. I've chosen to update this log at the turn of each season, as I have enough on my plate without worrying about this diary. As expedition leader, I've been tasked with getting this place up and running before handing it off to my successor, whoever that might be. For the sake of the records, here's an engraving of me.

Oh, and for good measure, here's an engraving of our heraldry. Carved this one myself, I did.

The noble who sponsored our venture didn't feel like wasting any of his precious time briefing me on the location. It was only on the trip here that I learned (from manlings no less) that the site was only a stone's throw away from a necromancer's tower.

Unnerving, but there was no turning back by that point. I've kept that information to myself for now. With luck, we won't have to worry about him and his ilk this year at least. Hopefully never.

I set our miners to carve out the initial outline of the place. Here's a drawing of the fortress, as of the end of Spring.

Before you say anything about the accommodations, know that I believe in functionality over form. Single bed pods are perfectly adequate quarters, and if the others don't care for them, they haven't thought to say so to my face.

With the basics of the fortress hollowed out, I called the few of us together to celebrate. We drank a lot of plump helmet wine. Horrible stuff, but we'll have to get used to it.

For better or for worse, this marks the beginning of the story of Mostibkun.

28th of Galena, 250. End of summer.

Not much to say for summer frankly. Not much at all.

I had the dining chamber carved out, and I've got our mason pumping out table and chairs. He's a slow worker. I had the pods furnished as well, and I've begun building up fortifications around the entrance.

The gates aren't hooked up yet, and the walls aren't as high as I would like them to be, but it should keep the wildlife at bay for now.

After a bit more digging, we found a solid bit of mineral resources.

Ah, and before I forget, there was a migrant wave. Seven, mostly adults. Not many of serious worth, except for this scruff.

Hopefully the mountainhomes send more of his sort. A bit of a fusser though. Always in a poor mood. Don't think he cares for his pod.

That's all for summer. We're up to 14 dwarves now.

28th of Timber, 250. End of autumn.

Autumn was a bit more exciting, but not by much. The liaison and his caravan from the mountainhomes arrived on time. Nothing surprising there on its own, except for the fact that he's a goblin.

I have a sense that this is incredibly fitting, but I can't figure out how or why. Anyways, here's an excerpt from our meeting.

I thought he was a childknapper when I first saw him. I was just about ready to send some of the dwarves after him, but he walked over, shook my hand, and told me who he was before I had the chance. He seems alright for what it's worth. He put in an order for windows and wooden cowtools, which'll be up to the poor soul who succeeds me to fulfill. I put in an order of my own for wine and cheese, as I've been getting complaints about the variety (or lack thereof) of food we have to offer. I sent our broker out to trade for some strawberries, as I've had a craving for sweet wine. We handed off some of our mass-produced cups and then they were off. They should be back next autumn.

The outer fortifications have been finished. Here's a drawing looking down from the top. It's around four stories tall, give or take. I'm just now realizing that I missed a spot.

The second level has been expanded a good deal as well. With the plump helmets in steady supply, I mandated the rest of the fields be left to other crops.

Try your best to ignore that outcropping in the storehall. The silt was waterlogged.

Around mid-Sandstone another wave of migrants arrived. I had a chance to speak with them on the initial intake. Rough folx. Aside from the children, they're all warriors. Looks like the duke knew this place was perilous the whole time, and is sending us some fighters for protection in case that bone molester gets uppity. I'm not sure if I should be relieved or pissed off.

We're up to 19 souls now.

There's been no other happenings. Winter is here. Hardly been a day, and I can already feel the nip in the air. This is the last season I'll spend running the place, and then this is all someone else's problem.

28th of Obsidian, 250. End of winter.

Nothing happened in winter. This ewe died. That's about it.

As I sit in my pod and reflect, I realize this year has been quite kind to us. The walls and gates have been built without incident, the workshops are running and the harvests have been good. Most are happy. Perhaps there's a real chance for us to succeed in this place.

That's about as much reflecting as you're going to get out of me. Back to business: for my successor, there's still quite a bit that needs to be done. We've no military, nor weapons or armor. We need to start making proper meals as well, and hopefully bring some variety to the beverages we're brewing. Even our most destitute alcoholics are getting tired of plump helmet wine. It's not necessary, but perhaps we'd like to dig down into the cavern layer. Some magma forges would do us good.

Ah, and don't forget to make windows and cowtools for the traders next year.

Not much else needs saying beyond that. No more overseeing for me, at least for now. I'm going to put my feet up and let the next ingrate worry about keeping this place running. Now that I think on it, they might just be whoever's reading this.

Good luck, you.

-Dódok '60horsesinmyherd' íkthagsibrek

And scene.

Next in line is @Cream_a_da_crop. DM me and I'll send you the files.

I'm realizing now that without the old forum "bump" feature, this thread will likely get buried fairly quickly. Probably going to need to find a way to fix that issue. Hypothetically, updates could just be separate postings, though that might makes things pretty hard to keep track of. I doubt a pin is going to last long enough. Maybe a ping group is the best idea? I don't have enough coins for it though, so we'd have to pool some funds together. Open to suggestions if you lot have any.

That's all for now.

EDIT: Thank your for the pins kind @Aevothy

Players, in order of succession:

@60horsesinmyherd

@Cream_a_da_crop

@s_a_n_t_b

@Spysix

@searcher

@BFBugleberry

@Rankine_911

@Yasharn

@Losercel

@Ninjjer

@duck

If you'd like to have a dwarf named after you, click "Yes" on this poll.

You will be pinged if they do something cool.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/158thxd/is_the_message_of_barbie_2023_going_over/

1st in the list is similar to @sneedman's interpretation in https://rdrama.net/post/189529/i-feel-like-a-lot-of where he/she feels like people misinterpret the movie's intended themes

Also i figured something out about reddit, if you do not vote, either up or down, then the % score never alters, so whenever you see a sub 90% score then it's often contoversial

as always you'll notice the pattern that the strongest counter/contrarian view bests or most elequently expressed is not the top comment in all these threads

this is

some polite disagreements; here is what i feel, and why i feel sneedman is disproportinately charitable to the film.

Barbie movies are very serious business

====================================================

Next on the list is top post of /r/truefilm

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/

less controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt45ypg/

The soy interpretation from /r/ftm and /r/menslibbers as usual

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt8c9il/

one brave soul says it was the most manhating movie ever!

chode gets worked up expecting what the chud media will say!

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt8cz2y/

lots of indivudual outrage

one fool calls out the mean spiritedness of the themes in the movie

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt2was1/

one let's it slip that he believes the movie totally ISN'T COMING TO INDOCTRINATE YOUR KIDS

Once again the most reasonable contrarian position is NOT the top comment after the echo chamber hugboxing

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt2lo3n/

redditor liberals are all stunningly full of shit

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt337a6/

And finally this comment, on why sneedman's review really REALLY bothered me

Alternatively why incels like myself took a different interpretation and dislike of the movie

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt2sz1n/

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt2jg9g/

ALIEN AND TERMINATOR WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE EXACT SAME REACTION TODAY

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/156zt07/the_barbie_movie_to_me_seemed_to_be_supportive/jt37mwt/

THE CHUD TUBERS LIKE CRITICAL DRINKER MISINTERPRETED MISSOMMAR

Oh by the way as for the Critical Drinker misinterpreting Midsommar as celebrating the cruelty against men as Yasss kween girlboss themes, here is a video from a deceisively liberal youtuber KillCount, where he tallies all the kills from Horror Movies In recent years KillCount evolved from a generic horror jank reviewer into a much better film analyst where he discusses the themes of films, and goes over the props, background and set construction of movies, making him stand out brightly in my opinion, as having more to add in the reviewing of horror movies than his peers.

I know he's very liberal becuase he's an unironic Trans Rights person, and regularly champions liberal stuff in his videos.

When Midsommar released, in the plot a shitty boyfriend suffered a truly gruesome horrifying fate, and many liberal and reddit peeps were Yass Kweening the fact that her divine just vengeance. Yet in context of the film, her supposed retribution was so wildly disproportionate a punishment to his misdeeds, and the celebration of the events online so alarming even to liberal men like KillCount, that he actually had to add a disclaimer in his review and podcast

Starting from 29 minutes; he states how this is NOT in fact a truly female empowered moment.

Even some of the top comments reflect their agreement of the climax end of the movie

Showing it's not just conservatards misinterpreting the core themes of movies these days, if it isn't successfully communicated via a film.

Greetings Dratastrags!

Today I wanna talk about a funny and dramatic event that occurred back in 2016. An afrikaans turbo Karen was having a and screetching to heaven and high. Two black Speedos (Traffic Control Police) had come to her stalled vehicle to aid her or to find out what was wrong, as her car was obscuring a lane.

Earlier her car had been burglarized by black thieves, and she had been helpless to stop them, as most foids are. Thus, she was already having bad bad day, and in meltdown mode when the traffic police officers had arrived to her car, with her in full distress and meltdown mode.

Being of the same phenotype of of Burgerland Karens, and somehow not having developed the self-preservation instinct which most boers and bongs in South Africa developed, namely keeping their inner-chud in check when other blacks are in the vicinity, or where you could get in serious trouble, in a country where the average white is outnumbered by a factor of 20 by their black countrymen, she went full r-slur mode when the two black traffic police arrived.

The officers arriving to assist her, suddenly found themselves the target of unprecedented vitriol and turbo karen-speak, all for only resembling the black thieves which had burgled her car. The more they talked with her, the more she went off like a volcano, and she seemed to take all of her worldly frustrations upon these two poor chodes. Eventually even the two cops got angry and started verbally bitching back, shocked at this unprovoked tirade.

And then boyz, our lady lucky, went off the deep end by calling the two police officers Kaffirs to their face. Not once, or twice, or thrice, but 50 fricking times! All of this would have been another misdemeanor story in the newspaper, if our unlucky Karen wasn't so unfortunate as to be recorded during her by bystanders on their smartphones.

Just like George Floyd having his death be particularly going viral over media, because of video evidence of his death, so too did this Karen land herself unprovoked into boiling hot water. National outrage by liberals and pretty much all of the black peeps in RSA ensured that this stupid tart would find herself in a highly politicized court case with large media following.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_(racial_term)

Just like our cousins in Burgerland with their multiracial nation, so too do we have our historic word of denigration towards blacks in South Africa. Just like N#gger, K#ffer has its legacy as a big no-no word, which elicits pearl-clutching and fainting wherever it's spoken out loud. It's a word of such mythic proportions, that even today historic books can be arbitrarily banned by the Department of Education, or streets renamed, or geographic features expunged in the National Land Survey Cadaster.

I shit you not, when I was at the Univercity of Cape Town, some students were called upon to aid in the researching of very old records in order locate and delete or rename any features or lands or landmarks with the K@ffer name attached.

I have to say my boer ancestors were a really unimaginative lot - they fricking named so so soooooo many landmarks like, K#ffer valley, K#ffer river, K#ffer mount, K#ffer berg/mountain, K#ffer street, K#ffer lane, K#ffer plateau, and on and on, you get the idea. Like holy shit, the earliest survey records from 1860s to 1880s still surviving in the various Surveyor Generals' archives in their respective provinces had sooooo fricking many features, and locations and landmarks censored because of the racial slur

Apparently our Burger cousins were ALSO once again plagued by this r-sluration: both their fricking Land Surveyors naming literally every 3rd hill or river as n#gger hill or n#gger river or whatever, as well as that they too had to the trouble of trying to move past the abundance of features now considered racial slurs in their modern era.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46531169

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/renaming-racist-places-board-on-geographic-names/621342/

Squaw Tits lmoa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_BIPOC_in_proper_names

I should make a Looongpost about american renaming of racial slurs on geographic features sometime, it's full of r-sluration, but anyways I'm derailing, back to k#ffir.

Basically the terms originates from Arabs, and their word Kafir - which refers to infidels and non-muslims, which they had used to refer to pretty much everyone non-muslim, regardless of race, but because of their trade with non-muslim Southern African blacks in places like Mozambique, which the Portuguese wrestled from the Arab muslims who were slave traders there. Thus already by the 1652 when Van Riebeeck landed to start a colony for a refreshment station, the word kafir was already in the lexicon of the dutch, through cultural osmosis from the Portuguese, and our dutch misconstrued the term as their word for black skinned african people.

It wasn't the only word for african black people, slur or not, but it was within one of the many in their lexicon. By the time the dutch and proto-boers fricked off from the Cape Colony to start their fabled Boer Republics, Kafir had become the main descriptor for black people in general, since most south african whites/europeans at that time would distinguish between favorable and unfavorable blacks - in terms of those who were friendly trade partners, like the Hottentots and Sothos, and those who were openly hostile and dangerous like the fearsome Xhosas and Zulu tribes. Thus Kafir was a general term for black skinned people, and wasn't in itself considered racist in its time, mere a slang for black africans.

It did however become a racial slur by the time the Boer Republics were conquered by the Anglo armies of Britain, as an ethnic slur, as modern thinking of proto-eugenics became widespread, and the rush for dividing africa by the European powers, and european thinking had solidified the idea that africans were an inferior form of humanity, as they were seen culturally and militarily inferior - they had not Naval ships, or gunpower weaponry, or cathedrals or castles. Thus, anything african made were fast becoming to be seen as inferior, and that Europeans were justified in subjugating them. Gradually anything african related itself also became a denigration as something lesser that that of their european counterparts, including the people themselves.

Thus Kafir became a slur, as anything black/african was inferior.

Lastly, since Kafir was mostly adopted as the go to descriptor by the dutch, it's pronunciation also changed. From Kafir, to Kaffir. Pronounced from Ka - fer, to Kaf - fer.

It comes from the longer efs that africaners say, and is also where the written joke of Sef-Efricans or Sif - efricans come from; from the very thick afrikaans accents like my own which struggles to say short fs without sounding like were are attempting to whistle whenever they utter a word with fs.

Anyways, by the time the Apartheid years arrived, k#ffer had been firmly established as the Southern African slur for black peeps, and even to this day they are understandably upset about it. The ANC pretty much explicitly targeted the word under the Mandela Administration, when they rewrote our constitution, and formed the laws forbiddingthe statute barring verbal racial abuse directed at another person.

And unlike our Burger peers with their N-word, our black peeps did not develop the curious culture of reclaiming their respective racial epithet, thus the word is as rarely heard as it tends to make eyes widen. From this I hope to have given background and context as to why this Karen lady was in supremely deep shit for having been caught by camera video uttering k#ffer no less than 50 times!!

https://archive.ph/CLBnD

The case took two years, and in 2018, a judge sentenced Vicki Momberg (our Karen) to three years in prison, with one year suspended if she does not commit the same offense.

Yeah that's right, another white officer had to approach her, to get her to calm the frick down, and not insult his colleagues, before she came down to earth.

Just to demonstrate how much she dug her own grave, and her absolute lack of self-preservation.

""In the past, South Africans have been prosecuted for verbal racial abuse under the crimen injuria statute, but they were just fined.Last month, a South African man was fined 100,000 rand, or about $8,460, for calling a black man the k-word during an argument. In 2016, a former real estate agent was fined about a total of more than $13,000 for repeatedly referring to black people as “monkeys” in a Facebook rant, accusing them of littering and being uneducated.

But in recent years, the South African government has been calling for far stricter penalties for racist and discriminatory behavior. Earlier this month, the country’s cabinet approved the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill, allowing it to be sent to Parliament for a vote. That bill would make hate speech or hate crimes punishable up to three years in prison for first-time offenders and up to 10 years for subsequent offenses.""

https://www.news24.com/news24/woman-arrested-for-calling-traffic-officer-k-word-20191005

https://theconversation.com/jail-time-for-south-african-woman-using-racist-slur-sets-new-precedent-94179

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-03-28-k-word-rant-lands-vicki-momberg-in-jail/

lolol

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-03-29-analysis-why-the-vicki-momberg-racism-sentence-deserves-scrutiny/

Now the real drama and sneed is that not recorded, since most media is liberal, but also self-censored by the journ*lists fearing public backlash should they not toe mainstream line of opinion.

The dumb Karen deserved her shit being pushed in by the justice system, but many non-black peeps had noticed the political fiasco the social media storm following this case had influenced judgement, and that the gov high command had pressured the justices presiding over the Karen case to make an example of the b-word , rather than conducting true law and order.

An example, the influencial and powerful Julius Malema had uttered pretty extreme opinions over the past 15 years, things that in South African context would make him a pretty hardcore NazBol calling upon the extermination, subjugation or just plain violence towards SA whites. Much of his words and statements through the years have been merely alluded to calls to violence, and some had been pretty explicit in their intention.

https://afriforum.co.za/en/prominent-south-african-politician-testifies-that-he-may-call-for-slaughtering-of-white-people/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11062235/White-people-target-South-Africas-Julius-Malema-warns-impending-violence.html

https://apnews.com/article/309bca2e4c7b4b6fa56dcf461f97f47b

https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/juliusmalema-tells-eff-supporters-we-want-white-people-to-be-our-domestic-workers-19496146

lol. White domestic servants

My point is these aren't just conspiracy victim-complex bitching from rightoid SA whites, these were decades long very extreme opinions normalized by ANC Youth and EFF politicians working under Malema. The good news is that they are so fricking incompetent, and perpetually infighting for influence between the ANC and EFF, that the practical ground level reality of these morns actually organizing anithing approaching an arab springs white genocide is very unlikely, but the racial hatred and intent is there.

I don't blame many of these black peeps directing their hatred at me for their squalid living conditions, but I do enjoy breathing, and being alive.

There were also other hypocracies throughout the country which demonstrated clearly that only white bigotry would ever be punished, and would further demonstrate that the prison-sentence of the Karen was not only wildly disproportionate to the crime, but motivated by political affectation.

https://mg.co.za/article/2017-07-05-court-declares-frick-white-people-is-neither-racist-nor-hate-speech/

=====(from article)

Magistrate Daniel Thulare shocked the Cape Party on Tuesday by ruling that posters bearing the words “Frick White People” are not hate speech or racist. The Cape Party, which is a registered political party seeking to declare the Western Cape a sovereign republic, had filed a case against the Iziko South African National Gallery for exhibiting the suit.

The posters, which were covered with the words Frick White People in black-and-white all caps letters, has been on display since 2016 alongside a chair and “goldendeanboots” as part of an exhibition called The Art of Disruptions at the gallery. The work was created by Dean Hutton, a Masters student in fine art at the University of Cape Town who wore a suit with the same print publicly before Iziko approached them.

The Cape Party sought an order for the Cape Town magistrate’s court to declare that the posters are hate speech and racist because they violate the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act. But Magistrate Thulare dismissed their case.

He criticised reactionaries to Hutton’s work with a “pity-me-I’m-a-victim attitude” which sought to suppress views like Hutton’s.

The Cape Party had asked the court to order an unconditional apology from Iziko for exhibiting the posters and to declare that it is hate speech to say, print, display or in any way communicate the phrase “Frick White People”. It sought R150 000 in damages, for Iziko to remove Hutton’s work, a restraining order against any other such displays, and a referral to the director of public prosecutions.

Cape Party leader Jack Miller told the Mail & Guardian that the party had used the Oxford Dictionary definition of “frick” to make their argument, but the magistrate said that in the context of art, a literal definition was not sufficient to explain what Hutton meant.

“It’s very disappointing. We’re quite shocked by the decision, because it’s a massive setback and it sets a dangerous precedent,” Miller said.

===========(end)

The judge is black btw

All the way back since the Zuma days, the hatred of whites in the ANC being open in their top leadership was known. I mean I get it, I understand. I just don't want my country's president talking hitler talk regarding me.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/12/julius-malema-hate-speech-lawsuit

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/19/jacob-zuma-investigation-hate-speech

Powerful men like Zuma, with influence were never punished, not even with a fine. But a civilian women with no power, got 3 years for using racial slurs (she deserved it, but you guys understand why there was discontent about this court ruling).

https://www.sahrc.org.za/index.php/sahrc-media/news/item/1629-calling-for-whites-to-be-treated-as-hitler-did-to-jews-declared-hate-speech

Here two politicians did apologize and make up, but you can understand that open hostile racism and anger isn't a rare occurrence in South Africa, or that same year as 2018.

https://www.sahrc.org.za/index.php/sahrc-media/news/item/464-zulu-king-s-comment-on-foreigners-hurtful-and-harmful-but-not-hate-speech-sahrc

More open hypocrisy as powerful men saying arguably worse were never even fined or punished.

Anyways I only mentioned this to put in context why non-whites were pissed by the 3 year court ruling as they believed it only occurred in a nation where 80% of the population were black and held political dominance, and thus the prison sentence of our idiot Karen, was an open political stunt, and a systematic scandal of justice.

However when her sentence would be criticised by newspaper journostrags, they in turn would be accused of racism, and that they approved of Vicki racially abusing the two Traffic Officers, rather than their complain at the disproportionate punishment instead of a fine.

The would go back and forth over social media

Anyways that's all I got, GOOD DAY