WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I finally broke in my new gaming table proper, and had my two oldest friends over for a proper game night. Drank beer all day (without spilling any on the upholstery), ate pretzels, and played Azul, Terraforming Mars, Pandemic: Fall of Rome and capped the night off with Chaos in the Old World.
I had been so long since I played Terraforming Mars, and there are so many expansions in the big box I got, I forgot which components I even needed to just play the base game again. So that took some sorting out, but once we got through that the game flowed as easy as it ever did.
Azul was some light fun, and Pandemic: Fall of Rome we lost in rather short order.
After dinner we delved into Chaos in the Old World. The guy who loves Khorne lucked out and pulled him. I ended up with Slaanesh, a god I haven't played very often, and the last player had Nurgle. Khorne came out hot, and got into an early lead, as he's wont to do. However, on the second turn an old world card put heroes all over the map which robbed him of board position for the entire rest of the game. He hung in there, but it was rough. At some point I squeaked out a turn with two dial ticks as Slaanesh, forgetting that he has the shortest victory dial. The same turn Nurgle crossed 50 VPs to win, I also turned my dial to it's victory position. Since the dial victory takes precedence over score, the victory was mine.
Chaos is one of our absolute favorite games that will never leave my collection. My buddy said he'd been looking for copies, but they all go for $200+ these days. And that's without the expansion. It's out of print, and the rights to the IP and the rights to the game design shall never be reunited again. I've seen Eric Lang say in interviews he doesn't regret Chaos being out of print, because he believes he's made much better games. But that's a bold faced lie, and IMHO Chaos in the Old World remains his greatest work to date.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
This entire illusion rests on the sole condition that nobody asks any hard questions so she can maintain ambiguity. It's not a bad strategy when the media is on your side, Obama ran on the same sort of emptiness, but it's very fragile.
Is it fragile? Obama won re-election.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I'll put DeSantis down as a maybe, but Vance, Thiel and Musk are radical libertarian opportunist. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have their help, god knows we need it. They might even put off the abolition of free speech 5 or 10 extra years. But their entire temperament is wrong to "conserve" anything. Their have that typical silicon valley mantra of "move fast and break things". Works great when you are building an unmanned reusable rocket. Less great when you are attempting to restore the republic.
Unless you are using the Romans as your template. But that only buys a generation or so of time, at most. Though it would be satisfying.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I want to argue with you, but it's hard to. I've also been profoundly distressed that Trump is the best our nation can muster in defense of it's founding principles, before they are abolished entirely and written out of history. He's like a fucking child, pretending to be Thomas Jefferson. He can gesture at ideas he doesn't understand, but knows the adults in the room talk about with reverence. He governs like my four year old pretends to woodwork in the shop with me. Which is to say, he sits at his desk, mimes some actions he thinks he's seen politicians do, but has no understanding of how to work the levers of power. He's also not allowed to use any of the real tools actual politicians use to govern.
And yet, he's it. He's all that's left. Americanism has been extirpated from all the institutions that train up future leaders. Nobody with experience working the levers of power will ever believe in our founding principles ever again. That's how thoroughly our nation has been attacked and conquered. I'm waiting for three letter agencies to start quartering troops in our homes just to teabag the bill of rights completely. It's going to be an increasingly centralized command economy, increasingly looting the country to give party members in good standing the spoils, and fewer and fewer rights and standards of living for everyone else. And probably flooding the country with people who will rape, maim and murder the founding stock of the nation.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I'm reminded of this deep dive video into wrestling. It covers a lot of ground, but the relevant part is the WWE tried hard to make Roman Reigns a thing for a time, and the fans revolted. The WWE kept writing fights that tried to make him look cool, and the fans in the audience would chant back "THIS STILL SUCKS". But it took a long time to get there, and even once it was there, the WWE never broke kayfabe and acknowledged it.
This feels like the DNC right now to me. They've written the script for this election to make Kamala look awesome. They've moved past the sale, and are carefully curating all her appearances to create the illusion that she's the hottest thing since Obama. I'm not shocked it works on "low engagement voters" or other euphemisms for NPCs.
I have a friend who's all in for Kamala. But he generally uncritically loved whatever advertising tells him to. He loves all the new Star Wars stuff, Star Trek, the big gay diverse Forgotten Realms. He even still loves every Final Fantasy that comes out. He didn't shut up about how awesome FF13 was for months. He's the ultimate slop consumer, and he's all in for the DNC.
As much as I want to rage at the dying of the west, the loss of our rights, prosperity and heritage, a part of me also can't help but think we deserve this. I just wish I wasn't being dragged down with them.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Kamala Harris can't actually hide for 3 months without facing: debates, domestic and global affairs, or some level of unscripted campaigning.
Can't she? Biden hid for 6 months before the election, and then 3.5 years after the election. He apparently hadn't met with congress for 2 years. It's possible if there had been no debates, he would have continued to hide right through November.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Apparently Thorkell the Tall has a "daughter" in the next story arc. A giant, muscular, stubbled "daughter" with pig tails. Reading the synopsis of the character is sounds like a case of Transhausen by Proxy, with the mother, Thorkell's wife, raising his son as a daughter so he wouldn't be taken away from her and sent to war. But it also sounds like the story, and the fanbase, don't treat that like the child abuse it actually is. Who knows, maybe I'll be wrong when we get there, but somehow I doubt it.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I'm reminded of a clip I saw of Bill Maher who said something along the lines of "Conservatives are right, abortion is killing a baby, and I'm OK with that. We need to be honest about it". And all his guest were just emoting some form of "Oh Bill.... no....".
Here is the clip.
Yeah, I can't exactly claim Vinland Saga is free of historical philosophic anachronism. But in so far as the characters play with ideas that aren't really of their time, its at least from a novel perspective instead of the same tired MESSAGE everything else keeps pushing.
Edit: I've been informed the next story arc for Vinland Saga features a tranny. So... yeah... I can feel the interest fleeing my body.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I can't speak for any of the games mentioned, but I finished both season of Vinland Saga recently, and a few things stood out to me.
It grappled profoundly with the human condition. It takes place during the viking age of pillage, conquest and slavery. Now if this had been an American or British production, like perhaps The Last Kingdom, they'd be shoving The Narrative in every chance they get. They'd put their thumb on the scale when it comes to depicting Christian versus Pagan beliefs, they'd make random characters gay or black or both. They have wildly anachronistic neo-liberal beliefs expressed by the lead characters. They'd be completely incapable of letting the past be a foreign country like HBO's Rome from 2005, they'd have to start soap boxing.
Instead, Vinland Saga largely deals with the human condition and it's universality. It discusses slavery without making it about race. "Race" is largely irrelevant, and there is no forced diversity. I enjoyed it profoundly in much the same way I enjoyed HBO's Rome, but which I find nearly impossible to enjoy modern works like The Last Kingdom. And I generally enjoyed The Last Kingdom, but it escalated it's current year nonsense to the point where by the last movie what started as some academic theory that a king of England might have been gay because he had no heirs, and was represented in The Saxon Stories I think as rumors other characters hear, turns into the King of England being so crazy for cock that an enemy spy buttfucks him into betraying his most loyal retainers.
The same has largely gone for video game for me lately. I don't play as much as I used to, but the last semi-recent at least middle market game I played to completion was Unicorn Overlord, and I found it delightful in it's distinct lack of The Narrative. I'm not sure how sensitive people are to the psychological damage the constant deluge of demoralization propaganda in western media is causing them. But I think whether they know it or not, they instinctively seek out media that isn't on some subtle level making them feel like shit about themselves.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Can we at least try the El Salvador solution before cursing people down seven generations?
I mean, I'd be willing to try that to be proven wrong. But we won't. So all I'm left with is my wondering.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data).
I often wonder if we're seeing some sort of terrible example the Founder Effect. Because African American slave descendants aren't just a random sampling of Africans that got plucked up by UFOs and dropped here. They were the losers of inter tribal civilizational fitness tests, captured and sold off. That has to have some sort of selection bias on what subset of Africans ended up in the slave trade in the first place.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Has anything really changed in response to the Key bridge collapsing?
I suspect rebuilding that will go about as well as maintaining the power grid goes in South Africa. Import the third world, become the third world.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I also won't ever travel to Baltimore for any reason anymore. I used to go fairly frequently as a kid to see Orioles games with my family, my dad being a fan, and Cal Ripken being kind of a local hero. As a teenager and young adult in the late 90's and early 00's, we used to go often for Otakon. That was definitely when I began to notice weirdness.
One year the guy manning the desk at the hotel straight up stole some of the cash we used to pay for the room, and we didn't realize it until we went to check out and they said we still owed $100 that hadn't been paid up front. Being suburban teens, we were just confused, tired, in a hurry to leave, and dutifully paid again. We didn't realize we were stolen from until we had time on the drive home to talk about it.
Year after year the encounters we had with street people got weirder and worse. To this day, Baltimore had some of the scariest, most destitute hobos I've ever seen. One guy tried to lure us down an alleyway with the promise of prostitutes outside the convention center.
Many years later around 2019 we went to see Joe Rogan in Baltimore. The show was great, exiting the parking garage after was an experience. A car next to us, instead of waiting their turn, had the girlfriend just stand in the middle of the line of cars so he could back out. Cars kept going around her. Eventually he kirked out and just went for it, fuck the guy behind him he might back into. Then he spent the entire 30 minutes it took to slowly trickle out of the parking garage leaning out his windows, screaming at the guy in front of him who didn't let him in to get out and fight him. This being two cars behind us, my then pregnant wife was terrified he would eventually pull a gun and start shooting in our general direction, because Baltimore. And that was the last time. It's just not worth it.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
The problem with Baltimore is the people in Baltimore. I don't think genocide followed by suicide is an option the local government can exercise. But maybe when WWIII happens we'll get lucky, although I doubt our adversaries would do us that favor.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
One furthermore has to expect that even a Kamala Harris administration won't extradite a US citizen over hate speech.
I thought the same thing about how Jan 6 protestors would be treated given all the "fiery but mostly peaceful" protest all summer. Then they started sending grandmas who got waved through to pound me in the ass prison, and everyone went "Duh, obviously this was going to happen to regime enemies." Now I expect much the same. Everyone will act like there is no way Kamala would allow the UK to extradite Elon for hate speech, until she fucking does, and then they'll act like it was obvious and Elon was a moron for going against the regime.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Good luck on the 10k. Once upon a time I ran, but these 40 year old knees don't do it anymore.
Unicorn Overlord was a very pleasant surprise. I immediately craved more games like that, and found that there aren't any. A shame.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
Dude, it's legit confusing reading someone talking about doing their wife's master's final project for them. Like, I didn't even know schools allowed that. Do they allow that? It's like reading about someone just casually mentioning they took $100,000 out of their company's bank account, so brazenly and matter of factly you wonder if they are actually allowed to do that somehow? Like, you're pretty sure that's just embezzling, but they sure don't act like they are emblezzling.
So it goes with this casual matter of fact admission of academic fraud.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
Reporting in, and I post less largely because now that I have more skin in the game, When I imagine these issues impacting my daughter, I quickly become incandescent with rage. The least of my problems is getting modded here for being "uncharitable" to the monsters in human skin roaming amongst us. Far more worried about ending up on a watch list given that violence in my first, second and last reaction to the question of "What will I do when this arrives at my door?"
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
We had to put an 8' tall fence around our garden, mostly for deer. One day we did notice a bunny snuck under the door, so I had to close that gap. That seems to have worked.
The insects, drought, and hail storms on the other hand... My poor wife is totally demotivated after the carnage this summer wrought on all her hard work.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
My next project is a set of 4 chairs for my gaming table. So far I've scaled down these plans because I find them excessively wide and deep for my taste. They're 2 inches wider and deeper than any other chair in my house, and those are all perfectly comfortable. I also don't trust pocket hole screws to hold a hardwood chair together, so instead I'll be doing mortise and tenon joinery for everything. The angled joint near the bottom of the chair is going to be a new challenge for me, but I'm looking forward to it. I suspect I'll cut it straight using a router, and then come in later with a chisel to take out the rest of that shallow angle. Especially since I plan on doing the tenons using a coping sled on a router table as that will be fastest and easiest, and I've got a ton of tenons to cut for four chairs.
Anyways, first step is going through all my offcuts from the table and figuring out what can be used for what. I still have 3 whole planks of rustic walnut left over as well. I may end up only needing some 6/4 stock from the lumber yard for the legs.
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
I'm constantly tempted to get more home gym stuff, now that I have a home. I thought it would be dirt cheap second hand, but even heavily used, people expect $100's for a simple bench, bar and plates.
I do have a sizeable collection of kettlebells I use at home though, which has been nice because they store easily.
Well, this is a case of Fantasy Flight Games owning the design, but losing the license to the IP. It happens. It was in print for at least 5 years, which isnt terrible. Plenty of games, even best of all time games, end up out of print before that long.
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