funnily enough, the imperialism games, especially imperialism 2, are very fun and much more honest about what they are

but yeah the civ games certainly work as ruling class sims and i do still love them, especially when they embrace their board-gamey origins and dont try too hard for rEaLiSm

and in the first one, a 50% chance that your declaration of war would be overruled by congress, to represent the peaceful nature of dEmOcRaCy

ive always kinda wanted to write a bit of an essay on the intense liberal ideology baked into almost every facet of the civ series (and not just its laughable ‘government types’), but never quite got around to it. theres so much, down to how nomadic and non-urban peoples are ‘barbarians’ to be destroyed so their land can be properly tamed, to the linear flow of technological and social progress as represented by government-allocated beakers or whatever, to even just the conception of the city as the atomic unit of human societal organisation, etc etc etc. and of course the complete lack of any vision of the future or ‘victory’ beyond either military or soft-power conquest of the globe, or liberal democracy in space for no discernible reason, like it cant even conceive of any greater goal for humanity, like it might as well be francis fukuyamas civilization

the sid meiers civilization series - the flow of world history as filtered through the mind of an apolitical 90s american nerd right at the ‘end of history’, with terminal western highschool textbook brain

and dont even get me started on sid meiers colonization…

ive read way too many 40k novels lol (yeah i read theory) and theres a huuuuuge disconnect between the different writers. youre absolutely right that the eisenhorn/ravenor books in particular are all about how incredibly dogshit the imperium is, and other books do make this clear as well

but with a lot of the space marine focused ones you can just feel the authors jerking themselves off as they write (someone should compile all the bits from the horus heresy novels where they first describe each of the primarchs in particular lol) and they are often really uncritical or apologetic about not just the space marines but the imperium itself

and of course the video games mostly go no deeper than “yay space marines”

another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse

there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes

It really doesn’t help that GW constantly oscillates between “the theocratic fascism is really self-destructive and stupid and is why the imperium is a decaying wreck, and having an autocrat and his large adult sons in charge of everything totally fucked it all up in the first place”, “the fascism isn’t great but it’s necessary and justified because it’s the only thing saving humanity from unimaginable horrors that vaguely resemble whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of”, or “the space marines are unambiguously good heroes with honour and piety who keep everyone safe, yay for the good guys”

damn, their standard workweek is already 52 hours? and they want to increase it? :proletariat:

I hate to say it but similarities between broken, desolate cities in most zombie apocalypse movies just can’t be dismissed

on a picture of a cityscape that would look completely normal in most of the world

You are looking across into South Korea. This open space is the Joint Security Area which straddles the political border within the Demilitarized Zone. The physical border is where the light gravel turns dark denoted by the raised concrete line. Cross that line and you’ll be shot. The blue buildings are halfway in each Korea and by entering them, one can theoretically cross to the South. The large building ahead is the ‘Freedom House’, ironically housing a dozen surveillance cameras.

whoops when you forget that the scary orwellian building youre talking about is actually on the south korean side

some lib on r*ddit the other day was using an article from this place as a source for uyghur genocide, with the whole line of “oh the victims of communism foundation is too nazi a source for you is it, hows this for a non-nazi source checkmate hur hur”

and it turned out the article in question had no sources, but it did have a whole personal sob story repeated uncritically (with sad pictures) from rushan abbas, the lady who did the famous ama on reddit and it turned out she just happened to be a cia spook who worked at guantanamo

anyway im sure its just a coincidence

We share no blood but he is my life. He came from Cuba (legally, of course) six years ago and lives with me in Florida.

I am so proud of him and raising him has been the best, most rewarding thing I’ve done in my life.

I particularly like the ones where they go through and spend millions on the redesign and millions more updating all their stationary and signage etc etc and it goes through hundreds of internal people and nobody says anything, and then the first person from the public sees it and says “that looks like a dick lol”

Given that so many logo redesigns cost huge amounts of money and end up being some minor change like this, I do wonder whether this isn’t just kinda a standard thing to have pages of grandiose nonsense to justify paying millions for a change of font or whatever, and this was just the unfortunate one that got leaked

But yeah, absolutely phenomenal grift, it’s hard not to be a little impressed

Also the same problem as New Vegas, you can have the best writing and the best voice acting, but it is 100% impossible to take any of it seriously when it’s coming from Oblivion faces