Disaster. Laketown destroyed by demonic weaponry. Then, a second weapon flies across the sky. MIRV warheads leave a trail of destruction. Minas Mandalf, Laketown, and environs in between destroyed by nuclear fire. Machodor in chaos. Radioactive fallout blankets #Trollopolous.
Radioactive fallout is blowing southeast. Reports that Weeb Port is being abandoned save for a few die hards. A few remaining Weeb and privateer ships are offering passage to Bombrozil, at hideously inflated prices.
"Red Alert! Emergency Services have been activated. Machador is now under martial law. Remain in your homes. Do not leave your homes until authorized by the authorities. Seal doors and windows. Use a cloth mask if available. Report any sickness/strange powers to the authorities."
The red points are the sites of nuclear warhead impacts. The green clouds are fallout spreading over the landscape.
Minas Mandalf is destroyed by a 50(?) kT explosion, as was Laketown and the empty hexes to the east northeast.
Accusations are flying furiously, some have even brought #BROvenloft patrons into the mix.
I think it's someone to the West on the #Trollopolous Continent of Stryfe, from the five cities surrounded by impact craters. Long have ancient weapons lay buried.
Prices to evacuate Stryfe are 1000 GP per head, free for any Weeb, Hanglish, Red Man, Esperian or anyone who is willing to enter into the service of the Samurai Lord of Weebjing.
Refugees are first put off at Bombrozilia, second at Weebjing. #Trollopolous
The notion that it’s the coming of normies that ruined gaming, tabletop roleplaying and such is simply wrong.
By keeping themselves a small and cloistered group, aficionados insulated themselves from steadying mainstream influences, which normies are.
1/
A small group of passionate devotees are easy to co-opt, larger groups are much, much harder.
Isolation and elitism made it easy for degenerates and ideologues to corrupt the tiny groups of weirdly engrossed devotees, by gradually altering the weirdness to their liking.
It’s ideologues and degenerates who ruined video games, comic books, tabletop roleplaying, and so much more.
These aren’t, and never were, normal people, and blaming “normies” completely misidentifies who is doing the damage and why.
3/
Beg to differ. The Afghanistan War was brilliant tactically, half-assed strategically, and unlike the British in India, Americans are constitutionally incapable of doing what is necessary to “nation-build”.
Nation-building can work, the Spaniards nation-built the hell out… 1/x
…of Latin America. Instead of being a patchwork of death-cult native tribes, they became a bunch of Catholic Spanish- (and Portuguese-) speaking mixed ethnicity countries. The Spaniards killed the evil bastards without mercy, transplanted their own culture, and nation-built.
2/x
The British nation-built in India, importing large parts of their culture and ruthlessly oppressing odious and evil native customs, like burning the wife to death when hubby died. When they left, they had nation-built India, if not as thoroughly as the Spanish had in America.
3/x
Just started “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1964” and so far the book is 2/2 on bloodless intellectualized engineering Sci-Fi short stories.
Which is ironic, given the second story, but I’ll get there.
/1
Both stories were one character telling what happened to another, placing the events one step removed from an immediate series of events, just in case there was any chance of a thrill.
Aliens on Mars who gang up on the main character? Better make sure it’s not exciting!
/2
The second story—“Twilight" by John W. Campbell—had the main character telling another character what some other character had told him.
That’s right, the “exciting” events of visiting the twilight of mankind some 7 million years in the future were placed TWO STEPS REMOVED.
/3
Aliens is a perfect example of what happens to good soldiers when you send them in undermanned, undersupported, and uninformed against a numerically and physically superior enemy who knows the terrain.
/1
A half-strength platoon, lead by a green lieutenant who insisted on micromanaging every aspect of the mission because it worked in the simulators, got its butt eaten by 187 xenomorphs, because politics allowed a corporation to dictate the parameters of the mission.
/2
Some off the top of my head tactical and strategic mistakes:
Low Morale. Vazquez/Frost, the smartgunners, and Ferro/Spunkmeyer, the dropship crew, all openly defied orders. The first pair set off a chain reaction that would destroy the colony and the atmo processor…
/3
So, right away liquidating this wealth would cause the destruction not only of a large portion of the wealth itself, but send ripples through the economy, destroying more wealth.
Now the government has $50 billion from Bill Gates. (This is, I note, chump change to the Feds.) /2
We spent $4.1 TRILLION dollars in 2018, meaning that confiscating nearly all of Gates wealth ($100 Billion) would supply 2.5% of the Federal budget for ONE YEAR.
Less the loss of liquidation, and that's 1.25% for ONE YEAR, and you can only do this trick once.
Here's the solution for ISIS that Democrats and Neocons supported:
We give a State-less ethnic group stretched out over three countries custodianship of 12,000 of the most hardcore terrorists on the globe, to imprison in perpetuity.
/1
The Kurds as an ethnic group do NOT have their own government. They are spread across three countries—Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—and moreover are split into dozens of different factions.
No government. No apparatus of the State. No responsibility or capability to house POWs.
/2
It is literally a violation of national sovereignty for the Kurds to house prisoners in a country as if they were the government.
Imagine the British in America took over a prison and began holding Sinn Fein members prisoner, for whatever insane reason. Exactly the same thing./3