I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don't get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he's teaching, he doesn't have one. Once he's back on active duty, he's allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn't require an arm to teach.
If it's not required for your specific position, you don't deserve to be made whole. It's a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren't the good guys.
Not only are they not the good guys, the military started a fight where none existed in order to justify its existence.
Buenos Aires was 100% a false flag, there's 0 chance bugs in any system other than this one could have, in less than ten thousand years, encountered humanity and started lobbing asteroids at them.
Even if they had the knowledge of where humanity is from, and the ability to target asteroids in order to reroute them, they simply don't have the technology to speed an asteroid enough to be a threat to another planetary system.
The military hauled an asteroid to hit a human population center. 100%.
In the book there's an additional interesting scene with Rico and the recruiter: Rico runs in to the recruiter as he's leaving the office. The recruiter does actually have prosthetic legs, and he's walking out the door. Rico asks why he didn't have them on before. The recruiter explains that his job is actually to scare away recruits. He's supposed to show potential recruits his missing legs as a consequence of his service. That way those that aren't really serious about it, those who are doing it because it just seems like a cool idea, don't go through with signing up. He then explains that the government doesn't require him to be a living warning sign in his off-time, so he puts on his legs and goes about his life that way.
I really disagree. The aliens being insects is perfect because it provides a justaposition with the human characters. The idea is that the insects are a swarm of mindless drones. Meanwhile, the humans are...well, also a swarm of mindless drones. Which is sort of the point of the movie. The fascist society they inhabit actively dehumanizes them and robs them of their ability to think for themselves. The visuals of the film reinforce this in the larger fight scenes: the mass of gray bodies that constitute the human forces all blend together into a single swarm, much like that of the insects. And by the end of the movie Rico is completely hollowed out as a character: literally just inhabiting the same role as Rasczak, and even parroting all of his phrases from earlier in the film.
In the books it’s explained the man is missing his legs specifically to scare people away and show them the potential consequences of service, so people really understand what can and does happen and do not sign up just for fleeting glory or to look cool.
I really didn't feel like that needed to be more obvious than it was in the movie. Where would you even find trees to make even more massive clue-by-fours to hit people over the head with?
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
A lot of - I dare say most - people reach for fiction as a form of escapism, and they do need a suspense of disbelief to enjoy it. So if someone points out that in-fiction events are obvious caricatures of real ones, they don't like it because they don't want to see it, that's why they are there and not in the real world.
I have no doubt it's satire, but for me it's always been more of a fun escape into a ridiculous, militarized sci fi fantasy world. I'd never want to genuinely set foot in that world though. Except the sexy coed showers. Booyah!
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like "No Russian" missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant "whitewashing" of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you're playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who's just trying to survive.
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said "If I'm evil, I get cool items, if I'm good, I get nothing, why is that?" and they replied with "If you're doing it for a rewards, you're not really being good, are you now?"
You do in fact score points in the "people love me" stats if you do things like that. But the "people love me" path is far less powerful than the either of the "Religious fundamentalists love me" paths.
RDR2 I think did it really well. In RDR2 you have that good/bad meter, and people react to your presence based on that. Do good stuff, and they'll greet you nicely. Do bad, especially in a specific town, and they'll shoot first ask questions later. You didn't even need to do anything if your bad meter was even full a little bit, they'd just be more hostile to you, and scales based on just how far the meter was on bad. Anywhere from NPCs mouthing off telling you to kick rocks, getting punched, getting shot at, and having a posse gathered hunting you down.
I don't think warhammer can do that though, because if you know anything about that universe, you're solidly in the evil category. But that's every species, even the "good" sect of the Eldar aren't exactly good guys.
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There's a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn't progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn't work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden "better ways", like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn't have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there's a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with "no Russian", which is a map that's offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don't. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That's a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn't have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn't have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn't give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don't have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it's so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn't get what agency is.
If you don't give a player agency, you can't then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn't actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don't get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It's like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don't give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that's kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it's favour.
I think it forms part of bigger meta narrative, and the end of the day you still go through with the white phosphur attack as the game is forcing the choice on you to proceed as the only way to solve the problem - which is what the character believed in
Its message is,to me, "are you having fun" playing a game of murder -it forced, albeit clumsily, the reality of war when you feel you have no other option - a choice you are forced to make like pulling the trigger of a gun. You can leave the game and not do it or you pull the trigger.
You are still killing after that point soon after, with character quick to stat blaming others and you are still going on for the ride by playing- to finish the game, to get to Komrad- it comes off pretentious i admit, but the wp was acting as a turning point and was using a blunt force narrative to make you start asking questions about the character' sanity
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player's character you are playing decided that it was the "only way" and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
"No Russian is shock value, but there really isn't much player consequence as it doesn't matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it"
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don't and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
Again, conveying that is not easy and what they did could have been conveyed better. You are seeing things from the perspective of a dude with severe ptsd and you have been murdering people up to that point on fragile pretense
::: spoiler spoiler
Especially since the whole point was to scout for survivors and head back - and that turned into a quest for Konrad that destroys whats left of Dubai on the orders of a broken man
:::
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
My problem is that the game does tries to do it both ways. It tries to give you in-game options to "be less bad", in the crowd scene and the hanging scene, doing a very game-y thing by going straight. But then it ALSO does the WP scene where it's going for "The only winning move is not to play" thing by breaking outside the game.
And that ruins both angles for me, it feels really lazy, like they just kinda shoehorned the angle in and felt super smart afterwards, when to me it just feels like they're covering up for bad writing. They didn't commit.
“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
You couldn't skip No Russian way back when it first released, that was patched in later because of the massive public outcry over that map. That's not really my point, my point is that as a writer, it's fine to engage inside the game with the characters OR place it on the reader/player, but doing both makes both miss the mark.
I know this is subjective, but I had embraced the narrative and got into the character's head as he slowly lost patience with everything
My decisions were at :
"The hanging was screw you, I am not playing by your rules"
and
at the crowd scene, things leading up to it made me just as frustrated at the characters, that I also was getting sick of things, and gunned them down because I got tired of it all and I inhibited the character - that was a point that I felt just as tired as the characters and thought everyone can die, no one here is worth the effort,
Them doing the cop outs does make the scenes weaker, I agree, - the hanging I feel was early enough before things went off the deep end, but the crowd scene, for me, was memorable because I made a mistake in the heat of emotion, when I let myself be engrossed in the role-playing as the soldiers physically, mentally and emotionally break down, it was what stuck with me especially when you reach the end and you realize how you've been played for a fool the whole time.
Would it have been better if it was tighter and they fully commited to that descent into madness, yes. Did they have to go so heavy with the messaging, not really.
The no russian mission, I felt initially shocked the first time, but once the police arrive my illusion was broken.
You can just walk through the whole civilian section and do nothing and be blamed for the attack anyway - it had more impact if you were killing people but it also has initial shock value but it is all an illusion like the choices in Spec Ops.
There was a bit of a disconnect with how was it, 5 men in only body armour made a fool out of russian equivalent of swat - they were performing riot police procedure on men armed with machine guns and grenade launchers - no different than spec ops in the last stretch of the game where you are killing juggernauts and armoured vehicles, the airport guards I can understand - but the special police were funneling into killzones - and maybe that was the idea for the context for war but it was like the North Hollywood Shootout, only both sides were carrying equivalent weaponry and only one side was really using it
I know Makarov was connected with politicians and the whole thing could have been decided to be green lit as a false flag to have a pretext.
GW constantly pushes Space Marines and to a lesser extent the Imperial Guard as a majority of time as the protagonist. People don’t have the media literacy to understand that protagonist does not equal the hero. The protagonist is just the main character of the story and they can be evil or good or anything in between.
I feel like the satire is being washed out to support the line that shall always go up.
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you're playing as, which means they can't entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don't get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
I would like some more grimdark in warhammer games. At this point Rimworld seems better for it, as you can commit most warcrimes in that just fine. Even new things that are not yet yet in the Geneva suggestions! Like executing POWs with eldritch horrors after you have harvested them for most of their organs to sell on the blackmarket.
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they're really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years.
So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
And to be fairrrrrrr.... The emperor himself wants no religion at all, and it's the corrupt and zealous officials that spread the "the emperor is a god" thing, he straight up destroyed a planet because a chapter of marines converted it to Emperorism once. That was before he got stuck on his death throne, obviously.
Anyone who genuinely admires ANY of the factions in 40k just doesn't understand it.
They all suck. There are no good guys. Honestly I'd say the closest thing to good guys there are would be the tyanids, because they're just doing what tyanids do. You don't get mad at cows for being cows. Or wolves for being wolves. They are what they are and they do what they do. It isn't malicious intent.
But hey, if you want papa nurgle's blessing, go for it.
While the runners these days may not have any kind of satire in mind, it's pretty obvious a large portion of the Imperium is based on a mixture of 1940s German and (80s-now) modern American ideals, as well as capitalism in general. The Eldar are arrogant isolationists and the dark Eldar are gluttonous.
Most of 40k can have parallels drawn to modern society and the dials are all set to overload.
While they may not have a direct point, I do think it still can have a message.
The tyranids are an expression of entropy more than they are a species, they're very nearly a force of nature. They're not really "good" or "bad" in the same way that gravity isn't good or bad.
Now the Orkz I think are just fun and good dudes. They don't really hate anybody in particular, they just LOVE to FIGHT and will keep doing that unless stopped. They will gladly fight amongst themselves if no one else appears to fight with them. They don't really have grand dreams of conquest beyond swarming over the horizon to fight whatever is on the other side of it. The optimal end state of Ork supremacy isn't galactic domination, it's one big WAAGH cloud that rips across the galaxy in a giant loop and takes long enough doing it that the survivors can settle back down and bunker back up before the Boyz come back to town. They don't even necessarily want to win, they just love to fight, they think it's the best activity that you can do, and they want to share that with any and everyone.
From anyone else's perspective this is a horrifying wall of green skinned, brutal cunning monsters that will sprout up out of literal nowhere and reproduce faster than you can print more bullets for them. But from the Orkz perspective they're basically just asking you to join their football game. They're fun guys.
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years. So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
3,650,000,000 psykers are sacrificed since the Emperor went on the Golden Throne. That’s just over half the population of Earth.
Writers have issue with scope. 1,000 a day seems shocking until you compare it a 1,000 out of a galaxy of trillions or whatever comes next. It is a literal drop in the bucket.
I think the 1,000 was picked cause it’s high enough of a number for our brains to be like “That’s terrible!”
Honestly I keep forgetting the Imperium supposedly controls over 1 million worlds.
They really do have a problem with scope.
Space marines are bad ass in a fight but there's only 1000 per chapter if they're adhering to the codex, but that's nowhere near enough for an entire galaxy.
Even at a planet scale, 1k troops are not enough. Sure, each is worth 100 men or whatever, but that makes them always spread too thin. In a planetary invasion, which orks and 'nids often do, if they can't trick the enemy into chokepoints, they're fucked big time.
The Armageddon war had, what, 20 chapters deploying marines there? And that's with massive support from the local IG regiment, plus space navy
Totally agree. Space Marines are demi-god, death machines however there would be no way a 1,000 of them could take an entire planet, as you correctly pointed an entire galaxy.
My head cannon is that the Guard does all the work and their achievements are forgotten while the Space Marines get all the credit.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn't make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I'd say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
So the book presents an argument for and has a bias towards militarism, but it's not propaganda? Are you also going to tell me that Atlas Shrugged invites the reader to explore whether capitalism is good or not? Hard disagree.
I think it would help if you clarify what "propaganda" means to you, as I have a sense we mean different things.
For me, I understand propaganda as media/content/communication aimed at manipulating people towards a particular point of view. It's often characterized by reduction, misrepresentation/deception, disingenuous argument, and etc. That is also to say that I make a distinction between manipulation and persuasive argument. So, a piece of content can make an argument, display inherent biases, employ persuasive techniques, without being propaganda. That's because all forms of expression necessarily hold an ideological position.
It was basically a commercial for the military from what I can remember. There wasn't subtlety. The military was put on a pedestal. People that hadn't been in the military didn't get to vote. The enemy were reduced to inhuman arachnids. It's propaganda in the same way Top Gun is.
But my point was mainly the movie and book were very different.
Are you arguing the book is propaganda or the society of the book is heavily propagandized? The book itself is not propaganda if you fully read it. The horrors of war are on full, gruesome display. Heroism, cowardice, death, and dismemberment to the humans and arachnids. The society of the book is heavy on the propaganda, but the book itself is not propaganda.
I mean... yeah? I don't agree with it, but I feel like its to detailed and nuanced to be merely propaganda. Propaganda would be shit like the Red Dawn remake or almost any movie involving the US military that tends to be to shallow to be anything but propaganda.
It's nuanced like a brick is from what I remember and was basically a commercial for the military. The enemy were nonhuman arachnids, which doesn't come off as terribly subtle.
It's just a glaring lack of critical thinking brought on by our (sometimes willingly) ignorant masses. Satire is dead in this country because we didn't have the capacity to comprehend it.
People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because 'I'm just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.'
...
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver...
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath... maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don't hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who ... basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is...
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we've spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these 'cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man' type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
I mean... your plot notes are on point... but 'yuppie' derives from 'YUP', which means 'Young Urban Professional'.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with ... the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc... stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don't see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich... are any different, I don't get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era ... were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath... or at least, he seems to think he is... he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is ... he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms... which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the 'perfect' yuppie... and he cannot maintain sanity as a 'perfect' yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we're seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole... all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I'm trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class... of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman's interactions with others in that culture)
To people who like American psycho: read the book and get cured, it's one of the worst books I have ever read (long story short, I only had that one book over like months, so I finished it. A scoolkid could have written it + some unnecessary ultra violence, IMO).
Weirdly, I haven't seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.
As far as I know, yes. If it's not, then I should probably stop watching...
But they get pretty self-aware at times, they don't make any of the characters really look like they're doing the "right thing" for too long before they curb back around.
I love Rick and Morty but all the main characters are not good people. I don’t blame Morty or Summer since what else can you expect growing up surrounded by that family?
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
I really liked that after uncle slows death, they had this scene from his wife that shows the value in moving on. Not that she didn't care and love him - in fact you still see his picture at the end. It's such a good foil to how Rick approached things. They're happy too.
:::
In hindsight, it makes sense that an edgy series like Rick and Morty was originally written by a serial harasser. And people insist on separating the art from the artist, now THAT is a red flag for me
History is kind of the opposite. When someone says they like history I'll get excited and ask what period is their favorite. If they say "Romans" without any qualifiers like Early Republic or Late Eastern Empire, I get a bad feeling and they usually follow up with "and WWII"
my answer is "mesopotamian" because I like their goofy little sculptures
archeology is cool, humans are just little goblins that
really like to live on hills for some reason
Them dudes is wild though! They achieved so many recorded firsts and shaped so much of our culture that we often don't even recognize how huge they were!
I still yearn for the day we can move to a sexagesimal nubering system.
I was actually born at the "end" of it. I generally am interested in US-Soviet relations and how the Cold War/Communism became a major factor in political campaigns after WWII, specifically the Dewey-Truman upset.
It's funny, all through college I had either older people looking askance at me about why I'd be interested in "ancient" history or peers teasing me about being a Russian asset just for the interest... I just never thought the Cold War actually ended, and when I was in college in the late 2000s, that was a wild take to have lmao
When you look at the immediate aftermath post USSR collapse, nearly every ex-soviet country got into really fucking deep economic trouble. There was also the little fact that pretty much every position of power was achieved by being friends with powerful people, so corruption and incompetence were rampant. Combine the two and it's no wonder most people would rather go back to the old system, especially in the first 10 years.
I recommend anyone interested in the topic checking out how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
The truth is that every soviet country was already in deep economic trouble, that's what caused the collapse. There was also a ton of corruption before the fall of the USSR. The only difference was that during the cold war, the USSR wanted to pretend that their way of life was as good or better than the capitalist west. That meant that there was a ton of propaganda making things seem better than they were, and a ton of censorship about how it was in the west. It meant that the corruption was kept relatively quiet so that it didn't embarrass the government so that it looked weak compared to the west.
As soon as the USSR collapsed, they stopped putting all the effort in to censor the west and make the USSR seem great through propaganda. That resulted in people thinking that the economy had collapsed after the USSR, when the truth is that the actual economy was simply finally revealed to them.
how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
interesting. I'm most interested in the Khruschev era, during de-Stalinization and when the USSR was at its peak, and the satellite countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) the collapse just makes me sad.
Cold War spy stories are the best. It was a rare period of superpower vs. superpower and with enough technology to make it interesting. (I might be wrong, but I don't think a spy story where you had to communicate using carrier pigeons and spy by simply listening over walls would be as interesting.)
Outside of modern history I think my interest is more into technology and way of living than about governments and cultures though. Like what tools did they use, what did they eat, what sort of alcohol did they drink. How did they make it, can I have a recipe.
WWI is super interesting since it set the stage for so much of the current geopolitical landscape. My main issue with "I watched History Channel as a kid" types is that they really just think guns and swords are cool (which they are) and don't care much about the story of how people ended up in a war.
Also, I know what you mean about how interesting the day to day things from the past can be. I got really into preindustrial economies and how we used to make everything by hand. It's fun to go into old buildings and seeing the tool marks on the wood and guessing how they made it
The trench warfare of WWI is super boring / horrifying. But, the world just before WWI is so interesting. So many places that no longer exist: the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, etc. Also, everything being an empire or a kingdom.
I also like the weird technological quirks, like how the very early WWI tanks had a little hole so the tankers could release a pigeon to communicate.
I stayed somewhere build around the 1400s before, restored using the same methods used at the time. Though not likely an accurate depiction of how a normal person would have lived as the normal people houses are all gone and we just keep the impressive ones.
"Yes." Regarding historical periods is my answer. Particularly, a series of history books called "The Cartoon History of the Universe". Each volume has at least 300 pages, and they are quite large. There is about five books in the mainline series, plus another dedicated to American history.
They were what taught me to enjoy history in general. Humorous, lewd, bloody, with interesting trivia. The only downside is that scientific facts tend to be dated, on account of the series being started in the late 80's or early 90's.
I don't think I have a "favorite period" anymore, but the classical period is super interesting to me mostly with regards to the "losers" like Bactria (current day Afghanistan, conquered by Alexander the Great), Phoenicia/Carthage, Persia (several empires that "annoyed" the yuropeeans).
Out of curiosity are any of mine red flags. Early bronze age steppe peoples, the Late Bronze age collapse, the " Viking age" my interests are namely to do with Charlemagne and his influence on it, and pre-columbian European trade in the Americas namely the Greenland colony and the possibility that the Irish and Scots may have been fishing around Newfoundland.
Fair enough also I put it into qoutes for a reason, while the raids and shit are interesting I'm far more fascinated by the expansion of trade networks from Scandinavia to the Near East via the Rus. Though my favorite historical figures are Harald Hadrada and Erik the Red, mostly because of their stories as individuals. Also like I said how Charlemagne put pressure on the Danes during his genocide of the Saxons causing the creation of the Danevirke and possibly riling up the Norse as a whole eventually leading to Lindisfarne and the Viking age. Though this seems to just be a thing Scandinavians do, kinda like hordes invading from the Steppe.
But yeah the Viking age has a lot of Nazis obsessed with it, I just happen to have Norman and Gaelo-Norse ancestors so I became interested in how they came to be.
Also colonization of North America with Vinland, integration into the Roman/Byzantine Empire, and possible contact with China. For as relatively small as their population was, they sure explored a lot and went interesting places. Possibly because their home was unpleasantly cold.
I've had so many conversations come to a grinding halt while doing RC stuff, because I realize the person is not only veering the conversation to intentionally toward certain topics, they're expressing right-wing opinions or shoving religion in my face. I've left RC events because they opened with a prayer, or because I've seen too many red hats in the crowd.
I'm sure it's also because of the state I live in, but it's a little disheartening to see so many people in my hobby who would gladly stone me to death in the street once the government allows it.
Also weirdly mountain biking has me fucking confused. So many magats on my trails, and it was my impression that cycling in general wasn't as popular amongst the "anti-woke" crowd. Along with other things they view as a threat to their big metal death boxes that run on dead Dino and plant juices.
Lastly, blacksmithing. I do mostly bladesmithing, but like to try all aspects of it. This hobby is rampant with right-wing nut jobs and I've stopped watching MANY content creators over the years because they started making personal vlog style videos when Biden got elected bitching about how awful and hard it is to be a straight white male in America.
also target shooting but that's a hot topic no matter which way you look, but here's a reminder that armed minorities are harder to oppress
never partake of inebriating substances no matter what type while handling a firearm in any capacity. I've seen too many people at an outdoor range with a beer can beside them. This should get you banned from the premesis.
I don't go back, and I have no more outdoor ranges to go to that aren't too far away.
I used to go to a childhood friends house but after I moved we kinda drifted apart so it's weird to ask to use their backyard range.
I would love to have the property to put in at least a 100m lane and a large back stop to stop ricochets and the like. Then I don't have to go somewhere people will whinge when I shoot more than twice a minute, and I'm not at risk of an ND coming my way.
In my area (Utah), BLM land is everywhere, and there's plenty of unused state land an hour or so away. So we can just drive a bit and a flattish area with a natural backstop, and set up some comes or something so people can see the range.
My bad, I tend to think people have more knowledge of obscure things than is normal, I guess.
And I'm in Ohio, so while I technically could find some bit of land to shoot on, there's forests, fields, and cities. Anything in between is private property.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's more or less how it feels.
Thanks. :) I'm not too familiar with the legal terms here. Everyone is pretty gun-positive (we have Constitutional carry here), so the chance that anyone would call the cops is pretty low if you're outside city limits, and the chance the cops would do anything is pretty low.
Just be like my neighbor, his backdrop is a state park with hiking trails. He got his guns taken years ago when he flipped out and had a domestic incident but he got em back. Murica! Fuck yeah !
That's crazy to me. Why would anyone want to be consuming alcohol while shooting?
I know how I am when I smoke, and there's no chance I'd trust handling a firearm. Not because I'm violent or anything when bake (lol who is) but because my reasoning and decision making skills are impaired, maybe I mistake something for something else in a tense moment and something bad happens. Nope. Safe stays locked, and the door to their room gets locked and the key given to someone responsible, or put in the coffee tin. (I don't like coffee and baked me steers clear of it, so I figure it's better to be in there behind several obstructions)
Does this really surprise you? "Country folks" are much more likely to be regularly out in nature, more likely to be into fishing/hunting/camping, and more likely to run Conservative than the more Liberal urban folks.
At least in my experience. Which is something that has me super confused about the national parks thing, cause conservative people routinely poll higher for usage of public lands. But then again I guess it shouldn't surprise me to see them shocked when they invite the leopard into their house.
I have a Peloton at home and at the rare cases when I open the leader board, I am surprised how many people have some MAGA or Trump related tags. Ah well, even the OG Nazis were all about fitness.
I really do, and I would love to move to a different country.
However, I have no college degree, and no work experience beyond retail/food/3rd-party-labor, and about $200 to my name. Maybe $3000 if I sold all my big stuff, including vehicle.
So the chances of me moving without being a political refugee are low, sadly.
I think there are just more of them these days. Young men are an especially growing segment of Trump supporters. And the ones that used to hide themselves are open about it more and more every time Trump wins.
I see them in woodworking, pottery, gaming, hiking. And I live in a blue city in a blue state. I think we just have to accept that most Americans support conservative ideals.
That's maybe partly true, but pretty much everyone I've talked to in my very conservative area (Utah) doesn't like Trump. In fact, I saw more Ukraine flags in the first year of the war than Trump flags.
I'm no progressive (consider myself libertarian), though I probably align with the OP in all the ways they seem to care about. I want more legal immigration (my SO immigrated), more acceptance of LGBT people, less pollution, more separation of church and state (happen to be deeply religious too), etc. My main difference is that I don't believe those goals justify using government to restrict rights to effect cultural and social change.
So just be careful about how you tune your Nazi filter. I strongly oppose Trump, but I may get caught in the filter depending on the question.
For real. Riding in 100F temps in anything but lycra is out of the question for me. The only time I don't wear my cycling clothes on a bike is when I am pulling my kid in the trailer and we will be stopping at all the playgrounds.
Blacksmithing is sick. I would absolutely love to start doing it again (tbf I never really got into it), but I'm not at my parents that often (which is where the equipment is) and if I am I usually dont really have the time.
What's funny is that while Vikings are mostly remembered for their warrior culture, their success as a diaspora came more from their merchant and sailing culture. THEY were the 'immigrants.'
I own guns. I love my guns. But I'm not weird about it, I'm all about responsible gun ownership, I don't have an entire armory, and I ESPECIALLY don't open carry.
Ammosexuals give the rest of gun enthusiasts a very bad name.
I do home canning and a fair deal of baking. There's a lot of trad bullshit around this that makes me just go "I'm canning cause I love me some candied jalapeños, not because my husband demands I do"
Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it... There's this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I'm so, so glad when someone I'm talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don't need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don't suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I've seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let's not speak of online mentions. This is a relatively well-known, respected name in the industry. If you get to know people, you will meet many, many uncle bobs out there.)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
Me with my koi pond, before I discovered that most other pond owners are elderly right wing conspiracy theorists who don't believe in crazy stuff like the nitrogen cycle or that mailing invasive plants like water hyacinth or water spangled is illegal.
Nazi punks fuck off. This is not a good example. Every metal enjoyer I know is progressive. It's one of the few communities that is still mostly sane and decent.
Lemmy collected German military regalia; he had an Iron Cross emblazoned on his bass, which led to accusations of Nazi sympathies. He stated that he collected Nazi memorabilia because he liked the way it looked, and he considered himself an anarchist. He spoke against racism many times. Lemmy said he was against religion, government, and established authority. In 2011, he identified as agnostic, saying: "I can find out when I die. I can wait. I'm not in a hurry." Jeff Hanneman, the founder of the thrash metal band Slayer, befriended Lemmy due to their shared fondness for collecting Nazi memorabilia. According to Keith Emerson's autobiography, Pictures of an Exhibitionist (2004), Lemmy gave him two of his Hitler Youth knives during his time as a roadie for the Nice. Emerson used these knives many times as keyholders when playing the Hammond organ during concerts with the Nice and Emerson, Lake & Palmer before destroying them. Lemmy defended his collection by saying that if his then-girlfriend (who was black) had no problem with it, nobody else should.
I mean, completely fuck all Nazis, past, present, and future…. But if I somehow was given a legit historical Nazi thing, I would keep it cuz it’s insane history. I would never display or pay money for one, though.
To me nazi memorabilia would serve as a form of grounding more than anything else. Like, "yes, the nazis really did happen. And so did their horrible deeds. Do not forget this"
So, yeah, if I got some I would keep them as well, because its history, and it's important to remember history, and how it all can happen again. I struggle relating to any other way people would treat Nazi memorabilia honestly
Dude tell me about it 😭 especially if you're into overlanding or any kind of off road. Luckily I also have an old Miata and the tuner crowd seems to be chill
A long time ago, when I was a teenager and the first HoI was out, I was only playing Germany. Mostly because it was the only powerful country which felt somewhat manageable without wanting to cry in the convoy screen...
Navy management is actually quite easy, people just overthink it/don't understand that the AI is so flawed it doesn't matter in SP, you just need enough naval superiority in one zone for a single day to Sealion Britain as anyone from Spain to Ethiopia. It's also much easier now that you can claim navies in peace deals.
Is it bad that I played China in SP? I did pretty much take over the world...
It was an interesting run. Just surviving as China in the beginning is extremely hard, but eventually I controlled all of China plus Japan. Then Russia attacked so I took over almost all of Russia. Then the allies attacked, so I blocked them at India and eventually took over India, then North America and finally started pushing into Europe. With no DLC the endgame can become such a painful grind. The only aggressive wars I was in were the early wars to unify China. Other than that I was always on the defensive.
Legit, I have a teenager in the family heavily into it, and it is worrying. Are there any good articles on how to handle this specific thing gracefully?
Ask them what their favorite faction in that game is, or if there are any mods they've done recently. Could always just be a big nerd for WW2 cause they're a teenager.
My genocidal machine empire is gonna wipe the galaxy of all the filthy xeno scum. I don't even want your worlds, I'm gonna crack that bitch open like an egg because we don't need your pathetic "breathable air"
Yeah, but at that point it's not a red flag anymore. If everyone plays video games, it doesn't have predictive value anymore until you get into specifics genres or even specific games/franchises.
But....Isn't that the whole point of this post...? Playing video games doesn't mean you're a shitty person but there's enough shitty people into the hobby that you need to get clarification? Why phrase it that way when we're making the same point?
I haven't played Stellaris for years, but I thought one wouldn't go for Xenophobic on those races, but more for "I am the crisis", shared consciousness builds, which I think would be OK.
I'll be honest, I like playing stellaris but i tend to get burnt out after about 200 years or so, and don't fully know all the game mechanics because of this.
I legit think Stellaris is the best game if you want to roleplay inside 4X strategy. Which is why it's of course worrying if someone keeps making fashy races :)
I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom's backyard.
Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I'd never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.
The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn't white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)
I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don't bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don't want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.
Weightlifters seem to hove about similar parts make up very kind people who just want others to succeed and people who listen to Joe rogan and Jordan Peterson.
Whenever some city dweller says they like to go fishing, I immediately think "He's a right winger AND uses fishing as an excuse to cheat on his wife" - this seems to be the case often down here in Brazil
The species is called the Kin. Basically squats with a new paintjob who live in the galactic core. The Votann are both their first ancestors that left pre-Imerial Earth, and the current Ancestor Core computers that they worship as deities. They are cloned with beneficial stable mutations, resistant to chaos (minimal warp presence), and when they die, they get tossed into the blender where their experience is uploaded into an ancestor core and their biomass is repurposed. They frequently trade with other cultures, and avoid open combat if it would be deemed wasteful.
Tau like to preach about the Greater Good (the greater good) but they're no valiant champions of morality. Least shitty by far, though.
Orks are questionable because they do cruel things without purpose except the cruelty. It's arguable that that's just how they're genetically programmed what with being artificially created and all that, like how I would argue the tyanids are the only "good" faction by virtue of being true neutral and at many stages more or less animals.
All the other factions do evil shit to whoever they feel is standing in their way, including their own people.
I used to enjoy conspiracy theories, because I thought it would be cool if they were true.
Things like cryptids, aliens, etc...
But now all the conspiracy groups are filled with stupid right-wing science deniers.
Last group I joined had 'interviews' and it still didn't keep that one guy out... because an exception was made for a friend. One friend, and the whole group fell apart about a year in when he started doing racist caricatures. It's downright infuriating how common it is that just one exception does it in.
People who follow those “wellness” influencers who sell random supplements and shit and basically make up all sorts of shit as if it’s medical knowledge.
Those people tend to be super ableist and anti-disabled. As a disabled person whenever you interact with that sort of person they always lecture you about “not trying hard enough” to find a treatment and recommend you expensive magic powders.
These same kind of people mistreat their disabled kids, refuse to vaccinate, that kind of bs.
You know what the worst part of that is? The sellers make bank from the idiots buying. I met two people the other day who left their jobs as aerospace engineers because selling the online supplements increased their income by 6-7 times.
Like, I just want to spend too much money breaking my truck to go play in the mud or camping in the middle of nowhere on the weekend, not throw massive alcohol fueled frat parties in the desert and annihilate the environment in my jacked-up, curb princess of a Ram covered in a thousand miniature suns and "Don't tread on me Please tread on me, daddy" stickers
It was legit shocking to me to see the nascent Geek Dodecatheist neo-pagan movement be co-opted and then basically taken over by the fascists. I followed it from when they were basically tree-huggers, and last time I visited one of their Olumpus gatherings, I was shocked at the amount of fash rhetoric. Lost all interest right there and then.
Anytime someone starts dropping Warhammer lore, or shows a love of Boomer Shooters, I know I'm going to despise that person or they'll be my best friend, no middle ground, and I don't even like Warhammer.
Ah yes. I have this conversation occasionally. I know a lot of people who started explaining their reenactment hobby as "I'm with a reenactment for a british regiment and we do mostly ww1 and ww2, for a british group, playing allied soldier"
Hydroponics as well I guess. My DIY automated grow room with a water pump, grow lights, heater and plant shaker (for pollination) always has people think I'm growing weed but I just want chillies and tomatoes.
As someone who casually enjoys 40K, it has a tendency to attract some of the most rancid people. OSR has this problem too sometimes, but its not nearly as bad as 40k. And the general RC hobby. Part of the reason i don't fly fpv drones as much as I'd like too, can't stand the chuds at the airfield I've never met a more unhappy group of people, and they don't even fly anything there either!
Not as bad, but people interested in Ancient Greece / Rome / classical studies tend to be somewhat conservative. It's (to some extent) the only part of academia which is overtly conservative.
But yeah, you can do a lot worse, that's relatively mild
Yeah I'm not here for this. I just felt this massive wave of fatigue wash over me as I read it.
Like it or not you're going to run into weirdos in just about every hobby. All preemptively judging people does is teach people to keep to themselves. We're already building up a society of loners where people struggle to connect to each other with various other causes(loss of third places for example). We don't really need something like this pushing people further apart, especially when that ultimately drives peoples empathy for each other down too.
Viking depends in where you are. In my country, Norway, viking iconography is a pink flag. Yeah we have dipshit Nazis who use it, but it's fairly main stream. Viking rock is a little sus, but not necessarily as sus as elsewhere.
These hobbies aren't necessarily a recreational activity. There are those who claim to have sixth sense only for them to make false judgements on top of false beliefs. Hobbies can involve pushing for wrong insights and most definitely include a self-absorbed vanity project. I don't judge, but I do actively take note of false judgments when they arise.
Alas, I'm stuck with one but at least she doesn't know that I've apostatized.
Conversation on almost any subject can turn into a political screening test. I supposed that's always been true to some extent, but the difference today is that when someone detects wrong thinking, instead of just taking in the idea that you might not agree with them 100% on everything, they stick a tail on you and put a pitchfork in your hand and you irrevocably become Satan.
I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don't get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
Starship Troopers is so badass!
My dad legitimately thinks that's a great action movie. And to be fair, it is.
But he doesn't understand the deeper meanings.
More meat for the grinder is totally just a bad ass thing to say! Not at all like an orphan crushing machine, for sure.
"The mobile infantry made me the man I am today" shows off two missing legs and one missing arm
All the teachers are injured and in need of prosthetics and assisting devices, all of them served.
As Rico's dad said, it should be illegal to use schools as recruiting centers.
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he's teaching, he doesn't have one. Once he's back on active duty, he's allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn't require an arm to teach.
If it's not required for your specific position, you don't deserve to be made whole. It's a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren't the good guys.
Not only are they not the good guys, the military started a fight where none existed in order to justify its existence.
Buenos Aires was 100% a false flag, there's 0 chance bugs in any system other than this one could have, in less than ten thousand years, encountered humanity and started lobbing asteroids at them.
Even if they had the knowledge of where humanity is from, and the ability to target asteroids in order to reroute them, they simply don't have the technology to speed an asteroid enough to be a threat to another planetary system.
The military hauled an asteroid to hit a human population center. 100%.
In the book there's an additional interesting scene with Rico and the recruiter: Rico runs in to the recruiter as he's leaving the office. The recruiter does actually have prosthetic legs, and he's walking out the door. Rico asks why he didn't have them on before. The recruiter explains that his job is actually to scare away recruits. He's supposed to show potential recruits his missing legs as a consequence of his service. That way those that aren't really serious about it, those who are doing it because it just seems like a cool idea, don't go through with signing up. He then explains that the government doesn't require him to be a living warning sign in his off-time, so he puts on his legs and goes about his life that way.
Yeah, but the film is a glaringly obvious satire of the society it depicts, the book isn't.
Making the aliens actual bugs in the movie was a mistake and washes the rest of the critiques inside the movie away with it.
I really disagree. The aliens being insects is perfect because it provides a justaposition with the human characters. The idea is that the insects are a swarm of mindless drones. Meanwhile, the humans are...well, also a swarm of mindless drones. Which is sort of the point of the movie. The fascist society they inhabit actively dehumanizes them and robs them of their ability to think for themselves. The visuals of the film reinforce this in the larger fight scenes: the mass of gray bodies that constitute the human forces all blend together into a single swarm, much like that of the insects. And by the end of the movie Rico is completely hollowed out as a character: literally just inhabiting the same role as Rasczak, and even parroting all of his phrases from earlier in the film.
In the books it’s explained the man is missing his legs specifically to scare people away and show them the potential consequences of service, so people really understand what can and does happen and do not sign up just for fleeting glory or to look cool.
I really didn't feel like that needed to be more obvious than it was in the movie. Where would you even find trees to make even more massive clue-by-fours to hit people over the head with?
Wut?! How can someone not understand Starship Troopers is satire? What about all of the propaganda cut ins?!
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
"star trek went woke"
BITCH STAR TREK WAS WOKE FROM DAY ONE GET BENT
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
Honestly I don't know. Even when I point out super obvious ones, I'm "reaching to make a point"
A lot of - I dare say most - people reach for fiction as a form of escapism, and they do need a suspense of disbelief to enjoy it. So if someone points out that in-fiction events are obvious caricatures of real ones, they don't like it because they don't want to see it, that's why they are there and not in the real world.
I have no doubt it's satire, but for me it's always been more of a fun escape into a ridiculous, militarized sci fi fantasy world. I'd never want to genuinely set foot in that world though. Except the sexy coed showers. Booyah!
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like "No Russian" missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant "whitewashing" of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you're playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who's just trying to survive.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said "If I'm evil, I get cool items, if I'm good, I get nothing, why is that?" and they replied with "If you're doing it for a rewards, you're not really being good, are you now?"
This is moon logic. Yes, that's how it works in the real world, but you aren't in the real world. You're playing a game.
You do in fact score points in the "people love me" stats if you do things like that. But the "people love me" path is far less powerful than the either of the "Religious fundamentalists love me" paths.
RDR2 I think did it really well. In RDR2 you have that good/bad meter, and people react to your presence based on that. Do good stuff, and they'll greet you nicely. Do bad, especially in a specific town, and they'll shoot first ask questions later. You didn't even need to do anything if your bad meter was even full a little bit, they'd just be more hostile to you, and scales based on just how far the meter was on bad. Anywhere from NPCs mouthing off telling you to kick rocks, getting punched, getting shot at, and having a posse gathered hunting you down.
I don't think warhammer can do that though, because if you know anything about that universe, you're solidly in the evil category. But that's every species, even the "good" sect of the Eldar aren't exactly good guys.
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There's a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn't progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn't work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden "better ways", like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn't have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there's a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with "no Russian", which is a map that's offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don't. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That's a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn't have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn't have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn't give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don't have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it's so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn't get what agency is.
If you don't give a player agency, you can't then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn't actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don't get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It's like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don't give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that's kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it's favour.
I think it forms part of bigger meta narrative, and the end of the day you still go through with the white phosphur attack as the game is forcing the choice on you to proceed as the only way to solve the problem - which is what the character believed in
Its message is,to me, "are you having fun" playing a game of murder -it forced, albeit clumsily, the reality of war when you feel you have no other option - a choice you are forced to make like pulling the trigger of a gun. You can leave the game and not do it or you pull the trigger.
You are still killing after that point soon after, with character quick to stat blaming others and you are still going on for the ride by playing- to finish the game, to get to Komrad- it comes off pretentious i admit, but the wp was acting as a turning point and was using a blunt force narrative to make you start asking questions about the character' sanity
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player's character you are playing decided that it was the "only way" and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
"No Russian is shock value, but there really isn't much player consequence as it doesn't matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it"
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don't and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
Again, conveying that is not easy and what they did could have been conveyed better. You are seeing things from the perspective of a dude with severe ptsd and you have been murdering people up to that point on fragile pretense
::: spoiler spoiler Especially since the whole point was to scout for survivors and head back - and that turned into a quest for Konrad that destroys whats left of Dubai on the orders of a broken man :::
My problem is that the game does tries to do it both ways. It tries to give you in-game options to "be less bad", in the crowd scene and the hanging scene, doing a very game-y thing by going straight. But then it ALSO does the WP scene where it's going for "The only winning move is not to play" thing by breaking outside the game.
And that ruins both angles for me, it feels really lazy, like they just kinda shoehorned the angle in and felt super smart afterwards, when to me it just feels like they're covering up for bad writing. They didn't commit.
You couldn't skip No Russian way back when it first released, that was patched in later because of the massive public outcry over that map. That's not really my point, my point is that as a writer, it's fine to engage inside the game with the characters OR place it on the reader/player, but doing both makes both miss the mark.
I know this is subjective, but I had embraced the narrative and got into the character's head as he slowly lost patience with everything
My decisions were at :
"The hanging was screw you, I am not playing by your rules"
and
at the crowd scene, things leading up to it made me just as frustrated at the characters, that I also was getting sick of things, and gunned them down because I got tired of it all and I inhibited the character - that was a point that I felt just as tired as the characters and thought everyone can die, no one here is worth the effort,
Them doing the cop outs does make the scenes weaker, I agree, - the hanging I feel was early enough before things went off the deep end, but the crowd scene, for me, was memorable because I made a mistake in the heat of emotion, when I let myself be engrossed in the role-playing as the soldiers physically, mentally and emotionally break down, it was what stuck with me especially when you reach the end and you realize how you've been played for a fool the whole time.
Would it have been better if it was tighter and they fully commited to that descent into madness, yes. Did they have to go so heavy with the messaging, not really.
The no russian mission, I felt initially shocked the first time, but once the police arrive my illusion was broken. You can just walk through the whole civilian section and do nothing and be blamed for the attack anyway - it had more impact if you were killing people but it also has initial shock value but it is all an illusion like the choices in Spec Ops.
There was a bit of a disconnect with how was it, 5 men in only body armour made a fool out of russian equivalent of swat - they were performing riot police procedure on men armed with machine guns and grenade launchers - no different than spec ops in the last stretch of the game where you are killing juggernauts and armoured vehicles, the airport guards I can understand - but the special police were funneling into killzones - and maybe that was the idea for the context for war but it was like the North Hollywood Shootout, only both sides were carrying equivalent weaponry and only one side was really using it
I know Makarov was connected with politicians and the whole thing could have been decided to be green lit as a false flag to have a pretext.
GW constantly pushes Space Marines and to a lesser extent the Imperial Guard as a majority of time as the protagonist. People don’t have the media literacy to understand that protagonist does not equal the hero. The protagonist is just the main character of the story and they can be evil or good or anything in between.
I feel like the satire is being washed out to support the line that shall always go up.
But hey, Space Marines goes “Pew! Pew! Pew!”
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you're playing as, which means they can't entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don't get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Meanwhile stellaris exists with multiple different options for genocide.
I would like some more grimdark in warhammer games. At this point Rimworld seems better for it, as you can commit most warcrimes in that just fine. Even new things that are not yet yet in the Geneva suggestions! Like executing POWs with eldritch horrors after you have harvested them for most of their organs to sell on the blackmarket.
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they're really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years.
So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
And to be fairrrrrrr.... The emperor himself wants no religion at all, and it's the corrupt and zealous officials that spread the "the emperor is a god" thing, he straight up destroyed a planet because a chapter of marines converted it to Emperorism once. That was before he got stuck on his death throne, obviously.
Anyone who genuinely admires ANY of the factions in 40k just doesn't understand it.
They all suck. There are no good guys. Honestly I'd say the closest thing to good guys there are would be the tyanids, because they're just doing what tyanids do. You don't get mad at cows for being cows. Or wolves for being wolves. They are what they are and they do what they do. It isn't malicious intent.
It'the A̴l̴l̴ C̶̳̑ọ̷̓͂n̴̼͕͂̄ṡ̴̹̕u̶̘̿m̶̜̿͜ȋ̵̲́͜n̴͈̜̎g̴̰̝̈̇ Ḩ̴̛͖͚̣̯̟̗̮͔͓̝̜͆̓̈́̈́̇̓͒̕Ừ̶̲̓̃̂̉̎͛̀̒̕̚N̵̨̳͈͙̘̭̩̹͈̙͈͙͕̮͋̿̆͐̅̇͆̅̋̈G̵̛̛͇̗̘͓̐̓̆̓̌̓̃̀̂͛́̉͘͘͝Ę̸̙̩͈͕̒̄̋́̍́̔̔̉͝͠R̸̛͇͚̜͍͉̺̋̽̀̎͌̈́͗̀͌̓̊̂͜
I think the problem is that despite everyone being evil, they are all also cool, and there is no real satire in it when there is no point being made.
looks at nurgle
Uhhhhhh I'm not so sure about that one.
But hey, if you want papa nurgle's blessing, go for it.
While the runners these days may not have any kind of satire in mind, it's pretty obvious a large portion of the Imperium is based on a mixture of 1940s German and (80s-now) modern American ideals, as well as capitalism in general. The Eldar are arrogant isolationists and the dark Eldar are gluttonous.
Most of 40k can have parallels drawn to modern society and the dials are all set to overload.
While they may not have a direct point, I do think it still can have a message.
"don't be like this"
Too bad we are failing...
Originally it was a parody of Thatcher's England.
Given the time it was created, that's not surprising.
Also a good time to remind everyone that thatcher's grave is a gender neutral bathroom.
The tyranids are an expression of entropy more than they are a species, they're very nearly a force of nature. They're not really "good" or "bad" in the same way that gravity isn't good or bad.
Now the Orkz I think are just fun and good dudes. They don't really hate anybody in particular, they just LOVE to FIGHT and will keep doing that unless stopped. They will gladly fight amongst themselves if no one else appears to fight with them. They don't really have grand dreams of conquest beyond swarming over the horizon to fight whatever is on the other side of it. The optimal end state of Ork supremacy isn't galactic domination, it's one big WAAGH cloud that rips across the galaxy in a giant loop and takes long enough doing it that the survivors can settle back down and bunker back up before the Boyz come back to town. They don't even necessarily want to win, they just love to fight, they think it's the best activity that you can do, and they want to share that with any and everyone.
From anyone else's perspective this is a horrifying wall of green skinned, brutal cunning monsters that will sprout up out of literal nowhere and reproduce faster than you can print more bullets for them. But from the Orkz perspective they're basically just asking you to join their football game. They're fun guys.
Different cultures I guess but in my neck of the woods, the hooligans down at the local football club don't rip my arms off if I refuse.
Oh sorry, I just realized I'm whispering.
OI YA GIT, HUMIES AIN'T GOOD KRUMPIN', MOST OF EMS IS TOO SMALL FER PROPPA FIGHTINZ, CEPT THE BIG BOYZ WITH THE BIG DAKKAS
3,650,000,000 psykers are sacrificed since the Emperor went on the Golden Throne. That’s just over half the population of Earth.
Writers have issue with scope. 1,000 a day seems shocking until you compare it a 1,000 out of a galaxy of trillions or whatever comes next. It is a literal drop in the bucket.
I think the 1,000 was picked cause it’s high enough of a number for our brains to be like “That’s terrible!”
Honestly I keep forgetting the Imperium supposedly controls over 1 million worlds.
They really do have a problem with scope.
Space marines are bad ass in a fight but there's only 1000 per chapter if they're adhering to the codex, but that's nowhere near enough for an entire galaxy.
Even at a planet scale, 1k troops are not enough. Sure, each is worth 100 men or whatever, but that makes them always spread too thin. In a planetary invasion, which orks and 'nids often do, if they can't trick the enemy into chokepoints, they're fucked big time.
The Armageddon war had, what, 20 chapters deploying marines there? And that's with massive support from the local IG regiment, plus space navy
Totally agree. Space Marines are demi-god, death machines however there would be no way a 1,000 of them could take an entire planet, as you correctly pointed an entire galaxy.
My head cannon is that the Guard does all the work and their achievements are forgotten while the Space Marines get all the credit.
Well they don't want to sacrifice all of their psykers. It is cheap, just a small part in the vast war machine.
Look at this traitor here^^^^
All praise be to Omnissiah. May his leadership and grace guide you to the one true path. Give yourself to him and become one.
Yeah they are really fucked up, but man....what great lore! Best thing about 40k baby
Yeah, this was on full display when Helldivers 2 launched. So many people just didn’t get the satire, and unironically leaned into the messaging.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 is basically a Starship Troopers video game.
Starship Troopers the book was flat out propaganda. It's only the movie that is satire.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn't make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I'd say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
So the book presents an argument for and has a bias towards militarism, but it's not propaganda? Are you also going to tell me that Atlas Shrugged invites the reader to explore whether capitalism is good or not? Hard disagree.
I think it would help if you clarify what "propaganda" means to you, as I have a sense we mean different things.
For me, I understand propaganda as media/content/communication aimed at manipulating people towards a particular point of view. It's often characterized by reduction, misrepresentation/deception, disingenuous argument, and etc. That is also to say that I make a distinction between manipulation and persuasive argument. So, a piece of content can make an argument, display inherent biases, employ persuasive techniques, without being propaganda. That's because all forms of expression necessarily hold an ideological position.
It was basically a commercial for the military from what I can remember. There wasn't subtlety. The military was put on a pedestal. People that hadn't been in the military didn't get to vote. The enemy were reduced to inhuman arachnids. It's propaganda in the same way Top Gun is.
But my point was mainly the movie and book were very different.
Are you arguing the book is propaganda or the society of the book is heavily propagandized? The book itself is not propaganda if you fully read it. The horrors of war are on full, gruesome display. Heroism, cowardice, death, and dismemberment to the humans and arachnids. The society of the book is heavy on the propaganda, but the book itself is not propaganda.
I mean... yeah? I don't agree with it, but I feel like its to detailed and nuanced to be merely propaganda. Propaganda would be shit like the Red Dawn remake or almost any movie involving the US military that tends to be to shallow to be anything but propaganda.
It's nuanced like a brick is from what I remember and was basically a commercial for the military. The enemy were nonhuman arachnids, which doesn't come off as terribly subtle.
It's just a glaring lack of critical thinking brought on by our (sometimes willingly) ignorant masses. Satire is dead in this country because we didn't have the capacity to comprehend it.
This country of Lemmy?
Is my American-centrism showing? My bad, but the majority of this problem is from here unfortunately.
I think we've all got our idiots, yours are just a bit louder!
Yeah I am having a great time with Helldivers 2 but damn if I don't feel this pretty much every time I play
Ooh, thanks for sharing this. I clicked on it thinking I had already read it before, but this is actually new to me. It looks interesting
People who like Rick and Morty.
People who look up to Rick.
People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because 'I'm just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.'
...
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver...
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath... maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don't hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who ... basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is...
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we've spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these 'cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man' type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
I mean... your plot notes are on point... but 'yuppie' derives from 'YUP', which means 'Young Urban Professional'.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with ... the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc... stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don't see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich... are any different, I don't get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era ... were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath... or at least, he seems to think he is... he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is ... he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms... which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the 'perfect' yuppie... and he cannot maintain sanity as a 'perfect' yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we're seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole... all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I'm trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class... of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman's interactions with others in that culture)
To people who like American psycho: read the book and get cured, it's one of the worst books I have ever read (long story short, I only had that one book over like months, so I finished it. A scoolkid could have written it + some unnecessary ultra violence, IMO).
Rick and Morty bangs and had some subtle anti-capitalist elements to it.
But yeah Rick is a nihilist with severe empathy problems. Although he is showing some very minor character development.
Honestly all the characters in that show suck. Except that one girl morty time-looped himself out of marrying. She seemed normal.
Oh and Planetina. There is only one solution to earth's pollution.
I've only seen a few episodes, but isn't that part of the joke of the show?
Weirdly, I haven't seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.
As far as I know, yes. If it's not, then I should probably stop watching...
But they get pretty self-aware at times, they don't make any of the characters really look like they're doing the "right thing" for too long before they curb back around.
I quite liked her methods tbh. Morty was just not willing to solve pollution.
He wasn't willing to do the things that need to be done to save the biosphere for as many creatures as possible.
Is there a big connection between them and "Dark Enlightenment" chuds or what?
I love Rick and Morty but all the main characters are not good people. I don’t blame Morty or Summer since what else can you expect growing up surrounded by that family?
I admire his dedication to his wife. I've never cared about anybody that much.
Season 7 spoilers
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler I really liked that after uncle slows death, they had this scene from his wife that shows the value in moving on. Not that she didn't care and love him - in fact you still see his picture at the end. It's such a good foil to how Rick approached things. They're happy too. :::
In hindsight, it makes sense that an edgy series like Rick and Morty was originally written by a serial harasser. And people insist on separating the art from the artist, now THAT is a red flag for me
I am interested in survivalism but it seems like most survivalists are a bunch of god-fearing crazy racist motherfuckers.
History is kind of the opposite. When someone says they like history I'll get excited and ask what period is their favorite. If they say "Romans" without any qualifiers like Early Republic or Late Eastern Empire, I get a bad feeling and they usually follow up with "and WWII"
my answer is "mesopotamian" because I like their goofy little sculptures
archeology is cool, humans are just little goblins that really like to live on hills for some reason
Them dudes is wild though! They achieved so many recorded firsts and shaped so much of our culture that we often don't even recognize how huge they were!
I still yearn for the day we can move to a sexagesimal nubering system.
When you can dig cave homes on the hills, like in the case of Petra and early people in current day Turkey, growing a beard becomes mandatory. 🪨 ⛏
Curious what is says about me that my answer has always been "the Cold War."
... Other than the fact that history feels far too present these days.
I was actually born at the "end" of it. I generally am interested in US-Soviet relations and how the Cold War/Communism became a major factor in political campaigns after WWII, specifically the Dewey-Truman upset.
It's funny, all through college I had either older people looking askance at me about why I'd be interested in "ancient" history or peers teasing me about being a Russian asset just for the interest... I just never thought the Cold War actually ended, and when I was in college in the late 2000s, that was a wild take to have lmao
Idk, no matter what happens to America, it's still not Russian, and that will always be a win.
When you look at the immediate aftermath post USSR collapse, nearly every ex-soviet country got into really fucking deep economic trouble. There was also the little fact that pretty much every position of power was achieved by being friends with powerful people, so corruption and incompetence were rampant. Combine the two and it's no wonder most people would rather go back to the old system, especially in the first 10 years.
I recommend anyone interested in the topic checking out how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
The truth is that every soviet country was already in deep economic trouble, that's what caused the collapse. There was also a ton of corruption before the fall of the USSR. The only difference was that during the cold war, the USSR wanted to pretend that their way of life was as good or better than the capitalist west. That meant that there was a ton of propaganda making things seem better than they were, and a ton of censorship about how it was in the west. It meant that the corruption was kept relatively quiet so that it didn't embarrass the government so that it looked weak compared to the west.
As soon as the USSR collapsed, they stopped putting all the effort in to censor the west and make the USSR seem great through propaganda. That resulted in people thinking that the economy had collapsed after the USSR, when the truth is that the actual economy was simply finally revealed to them.
Well, I'm not sure if you can really say that reunification was ever properly completed.
interesting. I'm most interested in the Khruschev era, during de-Stalinization and when the USSR was at its peak, and the satellite countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) the collapse just makes me sad.
Cold War spy stories are the best. It was a rare period of superpower vs. superpower and with enough technology to make it interesting. (I might be wrong, but I don't think a spy story where you had to communicate using carrier pigeons and spy by simply listening over walls would be as interesting.)
For sure! I love the whole gadgetry aspect, especially how it bled into pop culture with things like Get Smart and Spy vs Spy.
And, of course, the whole Bond franchise.
That just means you grew up in the 90s with the History Channel
What if they said WW1?
Outside of modern history I think my interest is more into technology and way of living than about governments and cultures though. Like what tools did they use, what did they eat, what sort of alcohol did they drink. How did they make it, can I have a recipe.
WWI is super interesting since it set the stage for so much of the current geopolitical landscape. My main issue with "I watched History Channel as a kid" types is that they really just think guns and swords are cool (which they are) and don't care much about the story of how people ended up in a war.
Also, I know what you mean about how interesting the day to day things from the past can be. I got really into preindustrial economies and how we used to make everything by hand. It's fun to go into old buildings and seeing the tool marks on the wood and guessing how they made it
The trench warfare of WWI is super boring / horrifying. But, the world just before WWI is so interesting. So many places that no longer exist: the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, etc. Also, everything being an empire or a kingdom.
I also like the weird technological quirks, like how the very early WWI tanks had a little hole so the tankers could release a pigeon to communicate.
I stayed somewhere build around the 1400s before, restored using the same methods used at the time. Though not likely an accurate depiction of how a normal person would have lived as the normal people houses are all gone and we just keep the impressive ones.
"Yes." Regarding historical periods is my answer. Particularly, a series of history books called "The Cartoon History of the Universe". Each volume has at least 300 pages, and they are quite large. There is about five books in the mainline series, plus another dedicated to American history.
They were what taught me to enjoy history in general. Humorous, lewd, bloody, with interesting trivia. The only downside is that scientific facts tend to be dated, on account of the series being started in the late 80's or early 90's.
Idk. You're not trying to establish a divine monarchy characterized by inbreeding and a shadow government of priests, are you?
I would just say medieval because castles.
I like ww2 but not Romans (that whole period is overrated and mid), how racist do I have to be now?
I don't think I have a "favorite period" anymore, but the classical period is super interesting to me mostly with regards to the "losers" like Bactria (current day Afghanistan, conquered by Alexander the Great), Phoenicia/Carthage, Persia (several empires that "annoyed" the yuropeeans).
Out of curiosity are any of mine red flags. Early bronze age steppe peoples, the Late Bronze age collapse, the " Viking age" my interests are namely to do with Charlemagne and his influence on it, and pre-columbian European trade in the Americas namely the Greenland colony and the possibility that the Irish and Scots may have been fishing around Newfoundland.
Mainly the viking age, except for the fact that you know who Charlemagne is.
Fair enough also I put it into qoutes for a reason, while the raids and shit are interesting I'm far more fascinated by the expansion of trade networks from Scandinavia to the Near East via the Rus. Though my favorite historical figures are Harald Hadrada and Erik the Red, mostly because of their stories as individuals. Also like I said how Charlemagne put pressure on the Danes during his genocide of the Saxons causing the creation of the Danevirke and possibly riling up the Norse as a whole eventually leading to Lindisfarne and the Viking age. Though this seems to just be a thing Scandinavians do, kinda like hordes invading from the Steppe.
But yeah the Viking age has a lot of Nazis obsessed with it, I just happen to have Norman and Gaelo-Norse ancestors so I became interested in how they came to be.
Also colonization of North America with Vinland, integration into the Roman/Byzantine Empire, and possible contact with China. For as relatively small as their population was, they sure explored a lot and went interesting places. Possibly because their home was unpleasantly cold.
I'm a white, Christian, male firearms enthusiast from Texas.
That's a tough combination when I'm also extremely leftist.
I've had so many conversations come to a grinding halt while doing RC stuff, because I realize the person is not only veering the conversation to intentionally toward certain topics, they're expressing right-wing opinions or shoving religion in my face. I've left RC events because they opened with a prayer, or because I've seen too many red hats in the crowd.
I'm sure it's also because of the state I live in, but it's a little disheartening to see so many people in my hobby who would gladly stone me to death in the street once the government allows it.
Also weirdly mountain biking has me fucking confused. So many magats on my trails, and it was my impression that cycling in general wasn't as popular amongst the "anti-woke" crowd. Along with other things they view as a threat to their big metal death boxes that run on dead Dino and plant juices.
Lastly, blacksmithing. I do mostly bladesmithing, but like to try all aspects of it. This hobby is rampant with right-wing nut jobs and I've stopped watching MANY content creators over the years because they started making personal vlog style videos when Biden got elected bitching about how awful and hard it is to be a straight white male in America.
also target shooting but that's a hot topic no matter which way you look, but here's a reminder that armed minorities are harder to oppress
never partake of inebriating substances no matter what type while handling a firearm in any capacity. I've seen too many people at an outdoor range with a beer can beside them. This should get you banned from the premesis.
Alcohol at a range? Id never go back. Stone cold sober people are stupid enough handling weapons.
I don't go back, and I have no more outdoor ranges to go to that aren't too far away.
I used to go to a childhood friends house but after I moved we kinda drifted apart so it's weird to ask to use their backyard range.
I would love to have the property to put in at least a 100m lane and a large back stop to stop ricochets and the like. Then I don't have to go somewhere people will whinge when I shoot more than twice a minute, and I'm not at risk of an ND coming my way.
North Dakota?
In my area (Utah), BLM land is everywhere, and there's plenty of unused state land an hour or so away. So we can just drive a bit and a flattish area with a natural backstop, and set up some comes or something so people can see the range.
Is that not an option in your area?
Negligent Discharge
that's such a hilarious misunderstanding 😭
Apologies.
As deegeese said, Negligent Discharge.
My bad, I tend to think people have more knowledge of obscure things than is normal, I guess.
And I'm in Ohio, so while I technically could find some bit of land to shoot on, there's forests, fields, and cities. Anything in between is private property.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's more or less how it feels.
Thanks. :) I'm not too familiar with the legal terms here. Everyone is pretty gun-positive (we have Constitutional carry here), so the chance that anyone would call the cops is pretty low if you're outside city limits, and the chance the cops would do anything is pretty low.
Just be like my neighbor, his backdrop is a state park with hiking trails. He got his guns taken years ago when he flipped out and had a domestic incident but he got em back. Murica! Fuck yeah !
Was visiting some family in central Illinois and went to a range where they allow drinks. They were quite proud of it.
That's crazy to me. Why would anyone want to be consuming alcohol while shooting?
I know how I am when I smoke, and there's no chance I'd trust handling a firearm. Not because I'm violent or anything when bake (lol who is) but because my reasoning and decision making skills are impaired, maybe I mistake something for something else in a tense moment and something bad happens. Nope. Safe stays locked, and the door to their room gets locked and the key given to someone responsible, or put in the coffee tin. (I don't like coffee and baked me steers clear of it, so I figure it's better to be in there behind several obstructions)
Alcohol makes your aim more steady (in small to smoderate amounts.) It’s considered a PED in shooting competitions.
I believe it. The first hit of my thc pen makes my hands stop shaking, any relaxant is bound to make your aim steadier in just the right amount.
Still won't ever see me shooting when alcohol is present.
That’s completely fair hahaha
I can only imagine how much shit would hit the fan if their insurance company heard about that lol.
Does this really surprise you? "Country folks" are much more likely to be regularly out in nature, more likely to be into fishing/hunting/camping, and more likely to run Conservative than the more Liberal urban folks.
At least in my experience. Which is something that has me super confused about the national parks thing, cause conservative people routinely poll higher for usage of public lands. But then again I guess it shouldn't surprise me to see them shocked when they invite the leopard into their house.
that's an interesting explanation, didn't think of it that way 🤔
I have a Peloton at home and at the rare cases when I open the leader board, I am surprised how many people have some MAGA or Trump related tags. Ah well, even the OG Nazis were all about fitness.
Yeah, it's really annoying being involved in target shooting when everyone thinks you're a MAGAt as well
I really do, and I would love to move to a different country.
However, I have no college degree, and no work experience beyond retail/food/3rd-party-labor, and about $200 to my name. Maybe $3000 if I sold all my big stuff, including vehicle.
So the chances of me moving without being a political refugee are low, sadly.
I'm going to decide RC is Roman Catholic.
Nah, that's less fun, I'm sticking with Roman Catholic.
I think there are just more of them these days. Young men are an especially growing segment of Trump supporters. And the ones that used to hide themselves are open about it more and more every time Trump wins.
I see them in woodworking, pottery, gaming, hiking. And I live in a blue city in a blue state. I think we just have to accept that most Americans support conservative ideals.
That's maybe partly true, but pretty much everyone I've talked to in my very conservative area (Utah) doesn't like Trump. In fact, I saw more Ukraine flags in the first year of the war than Trump flags.
I'm no progressive (consider myself libertarian), though I probably align with the OP in all the ways they seem to care about. I want more legal immigration (my SO immigrated), more acceptance of LGBT people, less pollution, more separation of church and state (happen to be deeply religious too), etc. My main difference is that I don't believe those goals justify using government to restrict rights to effect cultural and social change.
So just be careful about how you tune your Nazi filter. I strongly oppose Trump, but I may get caught in the filter depending on the question.
I'm a road biker who occasionally dabbles in gravel and mountain biking.
I think the right wing hatred of cyclists comes down to two primary things:
They have road rage over being behind bikes on the road, so they "hate cyclists."
They equate lycra/spandex as being feminine or at least "non masculine" if not outright "gay."
They are usually cool with mountain bikers because they aren't "in their way" on the road, and usually are wearing baggy "manly" clothing.
Ah, insecurity and overcompensation, what would we do without you...
Fellas, is it gay to be comfortable while cycling? My wife will be devastated.
For real. Riding in 100F temps in anything but lycra is out of the question for me. The only time I don't wear my cycling clothes on a bike is when I am pulling my kid in the trailer and we will be stopping at all the playgrounds.
Blacksmithing is sick. I would absolutely love to start doing it again (tbf I never really got into it), but I'm not at my parents that often (which is where the equipment is) and if I am I usually dont really have the time.
What's funny is that while Vikings are mostly remembered for their warrior culture, their success as a diaspora came more from their merchant and sailing culture. THEY were the 'immigrants.'
I own guns. I love my guns. But I'm not weird about it, I'm all about responsible gun ownership, I don't have an entire armory, and I ESPECIALLY don't open carry.
Ammosexuals give the rest of gun enthusiasts a very bad name.
I do home canning and a fair deal of baking. There's a lot of trad bullshit around this that makes me just go "I'm canning cause I love me some candied jalapeños, not because my husband demands I do"
This is a big problem as a leftist who likes to shoot guns.
It's the worst trying to interact with the community.
So much this.
I found pure sports shooting a bit better, because people either are there for the sport or feel bound by fair play, at least most of the time
There is a comm for that here [email protected]
Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it... There's this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I'm so, so glad when someone I'm talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don't need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don't suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I've seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let's not speak of online mentions. This is a relatively well-known, respected name in the industry. If you get to know people, you will meet many, many uncle bobs out there.)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
Me with my koi pond, before I discovered that most other pond owners are elderly right wing conspiracy theorists who don't believe in crazy stuff like the nitrogen cycle or that mailing invasive plants like water hyacinth or water spangled is illegal.
Warhammer 40K entered the chat
Nazi punks fuck off. This is not a good example. Every metal enjoyer I know is progressive. It's one of the few communities that is still mostly sane and decent.
Since we're on Lemmy and all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy#Personal_life
I mean, completely fuck all Nazis, past, present, and future…. But if I somehow was given a legit historical Nazi thing, I would keep it cuz it’s insane history. I would never display or pay money for one, though.
To me nazi memorabilia would serve as a form of grounding more than anything else. Like, "yes, the nazis really did happen. And so did their horrible deeds. Do not forget this"
So, yeah, if I got some I would keep them as well, because its history, and it's important to remember history, and how it all can happen again. I struggle relating to any other way people would treat Nazi memorabilia honestly
And by nazi memorbillia did he also have swastikas all over his room?
Why are you asking me like I would know?
Me but with anime and pedophiles
If someone enters a conversation saying child-coding isn't a thing, they get a free block
80% of car guys are racist and conservative 😩
literally everyone I work with is
Dude tell me about it 😭 especially if you're into overlanding or any kind of off road. Luckily I also have an old Miata and the tuner crowd seems to be chill
miata people are different
That's unfortunate. I guess I don't find that all too surprising tbh
I low-key hate my car because every time I use it, I'm helping to destroy the world.
Oh, you play video games....?
"Yeah, I'm a big fan of Hearts of Iron!"
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
"I'm currently playing through [single player game]"
Ah ok, we're probably good
A long time ago, when I was a teenager and the first HoI was out, I was only playing Germany. Mostly because it was the only powerful country which felt somewhat manageable without wanting to cry in the convoy screen...
Navy management is actually quite easy, people just overthink it/don't understand that the AI is so flawed it doesn't matter in SP, you just need enough naval superiority in one zone for a single day to Sealion Britain as anyone from Spain to Ethiopia. It's also much easier now that you can claim navies in peace deals.
...There were peace deals in HoI 1? 🤨
Is exclusively playing Trotsky better or worse?
Is it bad that I played China in SP? I did pretty much take over the world...
It was an interesting run. Just surviving as China in the beginning is extremely hard, but eventually I controlled all of China plus Japan. Then Russia attacked so I took over almost all of Russia. Then the allies attacked, so I blocked them at India and eventually took over India, then North America and finally started pushing into Europe. With no DLC the endgame can become such a painful grind. The only aggressive wars I was in were the early wars to unify China. Other than that I was always on the defensive.
Legit, I have a teenager in the family heavily into it, and it is worrying. Are there any good articles on how to handle this specific thing gracefully?
Ask them what their favorite faction in that game is, or if there are any mods they've done recently. Could always just be a big nerd for WW2 cause they're a teenager.
yeah, ww2 history is really interesting lol, it's more a yellow flag than a red flag
Yup. A guy I know was a big WW2 nerd. Also openly gay. Sometimes people just like historic stuff.
Nope, sorry. Even if he only installed the game, it's too late. We're gonna have to put Jr. down.
/s
Stellaris has entered the chat
My genocidal machine empire is gonna wipe the galaxy of all the filthy xeno scum. I don't even want your worlds, I'm gonna crack that bitch open like an egg because we don't need your pathetic "breathable air"
God damn biologicals.
But seriously, Stellaris is fucking awesome.
That could be literally anyone these days, though. My mom plays video games.
I know but unfortunately moms can be racist, too.
Yeah, but at that point it's not a red flag anymore. If everyone plays video games, it doesn't have predictive value anymore until you get into specifics genres or even specific games/franchises.
But....Isn't that the whole point of this post...? Playing video games doesn't mean you're a shitty person but there's enough shitty people into the hobby that you need to get clarification? Why phrase it that way when we're making the same point?
It's silly to blame "gamers" when gamers encompasses potentially the entire planet with every belief.
Blame conservatives who happen to be gamers. It's the same fucking people, every time.
From my experience playing online games, there's a higher percentage of people publicly using slurs than the general population.
That's not an admonishment of gamers as a whole, though. I'm not blaming "gamers" for anything
Those are 11 year olds who don't know any better.
We're not making the same point, though. Would you take it as a red flag to learn that someone often eats noodles or drinks cola?
…what kind of cola
That's a different question, same as "what kinds of games".
Nowhere did I say it was a red flag to play video games so you're countering a point I didn't make with reasoning that supports the point I did
Playing games is not a red flag in itself but some games certainly are. So getting clarification is about checking for red flags...
Becoming involved in niche video game communities made me realise how overwhelmingly right wing gamers can be.
It's because video games are a hobby you can play in isolation and being a shithead often has no consequences online.
Similar to how small towns tend to be more xenophobic than big cities due to a lack of exposure to different people and viewpoints
Stellaris > Extreme Xenophobic
🤔
I just like playing as the tyanids, okay?
Although I guess if you want to get technical, they're quite xenophilic... Gotta consume, maybe they're just into vore.
Damn, what a terrible day to have a brain that thinks such thoughts... (not into vore, but I don't kink-shame unless it's your kink)
Maybe I do have a problem...
I haven't played Stellaris for years, but I thought one wouldn't go for Xenophobic on those races, but more for "I am the crisis", shared consciousness builds, which I think would be OK.
I'll be honest, I like playing stellaris but i tend to get burnt out after about 200 years or so, and don't fully know all the game mechanics because of this.
I'll defer to your expertise on this one.
Don't know anyone who plays Stellaris so I have no idea how true this is lol
I legit think Stellaris is the best game if you want to roleplay inside 4X strategy. Which is why it's of course worrying if someone keeps making fashy races :)
I feel this - I really like Norse mythology and I'm super pissed that it has been stolen by racist shitheads.
I've felt the call to get into history of the American Civil War. But I also am white and live in the south.
Blacksmithing/bladesmithing.
I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom's backyard.
Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I'd never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.
The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn't white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)
I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don't bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don't want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.
Weightlifters seem to hove about similar parts make up very kind people who just want others to succeed and people who listen to Joe rogan and Jordan Peterson.
Whenever some city dweller says they like to go fishing, I immediately think "He's a right winger AND uses fishing as an excuse to cheat on his wife" - this seems to be the case often down here in Brazil
I don't trust ANYONE who says they are a fan of Warhammer 40K unless they are a fan of a Xeno faction.
Yes, Inquisitor, this heretic above me.
You're not a heretic if you're a xeno, heretic.
Love me orks. Love the waaaaagh. Love stompin around smacking grots.
Space clowns baybeeeeee
(I kinda like the grey knights too, but I am firmly in the camp of "every 40k faction except maybe the tau is evil and that's how it should be")
Add the Kin to that. They are callously pragmatic to the end, but I wouldn't call them outright evil.
League of Voltan are the good guys now, no notes (they haven't had enough edgy lore drops)
Honestly, I would only trust Ork and maybe Tau players. Everyone else needs questioning.
Tyranids?
Are there any Tyranid players left? GW certainly doesn't act like it
:( agreed. I play Tyranid/gene stealer cults.
OK, those too.
Votann? I just want to Rock and Stone brother.
Not deep enough in the lore to know what this is. Is it the old "Squats"?
Squats is Imperium hate speech be better
The species is called the Kin. Basically squats with a new paintjob who live in the galactic core. The Votann are both their first ancestors that left pre-Imerial Earth, and the current Ancestor Core computers that they worship as deities. They are cloned with beneficial stable mutations, resistant to chaos (minimal warp presence), and when they die, they get tossed into the blender where their experience is uploaded into an ancestor core and their biomass is repurposed. They frequently trade with other cultures, and avoid open combat if it would be deemed wasteful.
What is wrong with necrons?
Tau like to preach about the Greater Good (the greater good) but they're no valiant champions of morality. Least shitty by far, though.
Orks are questionable because they do cruel things without purpose except the cruelty. It's arguable that that's just how they're genetically programmed what with being artificially created and all that, like how I would argue the tyanids are the only "good" faction by virtue of being true neutral and at many stages more or less animals.
All the other factions do evil shit to whoever they feel is standing in their way, including their own people.
I hear all that, but counter-argument: Orks are funny.
You do make a good point.
The necrons are just sleepy bois what got woken up too early.
You know what, you're right.
Necrons Best Faction.
They just got woken up by a bunch of kids on their lawn.
They're justified.
my ex liked the tau and he's pretty based, so i'll agree to that
I play CSM, does that count?
One of the good ones for sure
I like Dark Eldar because of their unique armor style
I used to enjoy conspiracy theories, because I thought it would be cool if they were true.
Things like cryptids, aliens, etc...
But now all the conspiracy groups are filled with stupid right-wing science deniers.
Old school games enjoyer: “Games used to be awesome… modern games are garbage”
🚨
Morrowind is better than Skyrim
😎
I particularly enjoy the telvanni lore
🚨
Warhammer 40k. I like to paint little green guys and then move them around a battlefield.
A good half of the poeple in this hobby are almost entirely irredeemable
This is one of the reasons a session 0 is so important in TTRPGs, ideally one hosted in a public place. Great way to keep creeps out
Last group I joined had 'interviews' and it still didn't keep that one guy out... because an exception was made for a friend. One friend, and the whole group fell apart about a year in when he started doing racist caricatures. It's downright infuriating how common it is that just one exception does it in.
Did they introduce the dude this way? "This is X, he's my best friend so he didn't have to interview."
It was more like, "Hey, two people said they aren't going to come, so Y is bringing his friend X to fill in at least one spot."
People who follow those “wellness” influencers who sell random supplements and shit and basically make up all sorts of shit as if it’s medical knowledge.
Those people tend to be super ableist and anti-disabled. As a disabled person whenever you interact with that sort of person they always lecture you about “not trying hard enough” to find a treatment and recommend you expensive magic powders.
These same kind of people mistreat their disabled kids, refuse to vaccinate, that kind of bs.
You know what the worst part of that is? The sellers make bank from the idiots buying. I met two people the other day who left their jobs as aerospace engineers because selling the online supplements increased their income by 6-7 times.
They have that "If you find the right blend of essential oils to rub onto your legs you will be able to walk again." energy.
Offroading.
Like, I just want to spend too much money breaking my truck to go play in the mud or camping in the middle of nowhere on the weekend, not throw massive alcohol fueled frat parties in the desert and annihilate the environment in my jacked-up, curb princess of a Ram covered in a thousand miniature suns and "
Don't tread on mePlease tread on me, daddy" stickersAirsoft.
It's so fun but also run mostly by straight up Nazis.
this is how I feel about people who are really, really into Hearts of Iron IV.
It was legit shocking to me to see the nascent Geek Dodecatheist neo-pagan movement be co-opted and then basically taken over by the fascists. I followed it from when they were basically tree-huggers, and last time I visited one of their Olumpus gatherings, I was shocked at the amount of fash rhetoric. Lost all interest right there and then.
Anytime someone starts dropping Warhammer lore, or shows a love of Boomer Shooters, I know I'm going to despise that person or they'll be my best friend, no middle ground, and I don't even like Warhammer.
Ah yes. I have this conversation occasionally. I know a lot of people who started explaining their reenactment hobby as "I'm with a reenactment for a british regiment and we do mostly ww1 and ww2, for a british group, playing allied soldier"
Thankfully, I just do medieval and napoleonic.
'Are we in character...' peepshow did this so well https://youtu.be/PiLVAz-Jczg?si=NGtO2dbcaRmqeyRz
Oh, you have an anime profile picture and are posting on Twitter in 2013?
Linux and crypto users. Sometimes, people just use monero for it's technical merits....
Hydroponics as well I guess. My DIY automated grow room with a water pump, grow lights, heater and plant shaker (for pollination) always has people think I'm growing weed but I just want chillies and tomatoes.
Cryptography.
Something about people finding someone who shares their interest in hobby and immediately starts to question them politically amuses me.
Try being a Warhammer 40k enjoyer. Some people forget that humanity are STILL BAD GUYS in 40k.
We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
As someone who casually enjoys 40K, it has a tendency to attract some of the most rancid people. OSR has this problem too sometimes, but its not nearly as bad as 40k. And the general RC hobby. Part of the reason i don't fly fpv drones as much as I'd like too, can't stand the chuds at the airfield I've never met a more unhappy group of people, and they don't even fly anything there either!
I like 90% of the shit in this thread lol
Not as bad, but people interested in Ancient Greece / Rome / classical studies tend to be somewhat conservative. It's (to some extent) the only part of academia which is overtly conservative.
But yeah, you can do a lot worse, that's relatively mild
Yeah I'm not here for this. I just felt this massive wave of fatigue wash over me as I read it.
Like it or not you're going to run into weirdos in just about every hobby. All preemptively judging people does is teach people to keep to themselves. We're already building up a society of loners where people struggle to connect to each other with various other causes(loss of third places for example). We don't really need something like this pushing people further apart, especially when that ultimately drives peoples empathy for each other down too.
Try being into permaculture and hydroponics
I can't wear my King of the Hill shirts anymore because I don't want people to think I'm a trumpster.
Viking depends in where you are. In my country, Norway, viking iconography is a pink flag. Yeah we have dipshit Nazis who use it, but it's fairly main stream. Viking rock is a little sus, but not necessarily as sus as elsewhere.
Try being a classicist... it's rough out here. Can't really say I love Greece and Rome without sounding insane.
I like shooting and having guns.
I enjoy Powerlifting, Fishing, and Carpentry. I don't have any friends from those hobbies.
"Well, I like Immigrant Song."
I collect coins and I have a deep love of history. I also spent some time in South Africa.
Some of my prized coins are WW2 and Apartheid era coins.
Gunpla (Gundam Plastic model kits) and Gundam in general could be.
Depends how into the Republic/Principality of Zeon or Neo Zeon they are. In the UC, they actually say one character is like Hitler.
....their mobile suits do look good though.
Ahaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaa
Ahaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaa
\m/
Amon Amarth ftmfw!
Why a plastic fork?
These hobbies aren't necessarily a recreational activity. There are those who claim to have sixth sense only for them to make false judgements on top of false beliefs. Hobbies can involve pushing for wrong insights and most definitely include a self-absorbed vanity project. I don't judge, but I do actively take note of false judgments when they arise.
Alas, I'm stuck with one but at least she doesn't know that I've apostatized.
Conversation on almost any subject can turn into a political screening test. I supposed that's always been true to some extent, but the difference today is that when someone detects wrong thinking, instead of just taking in the idea that you might not agree with them 100% on everything, they stick a tail on you and put a pitchfork in your hand and you irrevocably become Satan.
Is it surprising to you that people can spend their free time independent of their political paradigm?