he’ll never lose his true fanbase, the actual MAGA types, no. some might disengage and get lazy about electoralism. but yeah the Rogan libertarians will probably split: some will disengage, some go back to reason.com libertarianism to fret, and some remember their stint as Bernie bros but just like the Rogan sphere podcaster, see Mamdani as the new model of politically giving a shit.

i mean he’s got fit, he’s effortlessly masculine, has a classically beautiful wife, more radical then Bernie (for now…), and the State (and by extension, the Elites) are all united against him. dems hate him, which makes him anti-woke.

one thing I agree with Sam Seder on is that when these guys say “woke” they mean “weak”.

it will be the subset that are the least racist, most amenable to pro-Palestine/anti-Zionism, and disillusioned with capitalism. it will be those mythical “white men” the dems want but they don’t really want

first: very pretty, love the asthetic. that woman is a mood and goals just chilling in my comfy dress and mary janes

second: one twitch and glass is shattering everywhere. or that cat is just like “fuck this table and your stool” swat pet me

lol more more more. let them stand firmly, spears planted in the ground. not one more step, don’t break formation! we must protect our glorious pedo rulers!

T minus how many days until opinion pieces begin to pop up to redefine what pedophilia even is

and if this is all being done to protect Israel/Mossad’s op, lol, of course it would be

omg dude can’t just say “yeah he was a business associate, so were a bunch of people” and then just get indignant about being acused of being a pedo

like that’s it. his fanbase would just melt back into the default mode

but instead he’s alienating his most frothing, loyal, conspiracy brained supporters by just telling them they are all fools and suckers. fools and suckers for either believing him or being “tricked” by the dems (which by extension means Trump and co were tricked for like almost a decade)

you’ve demolished all the bridges donny boy. closed the paths out. sure you’ll wiggle out of whatever but when you have Rogan acolytes calling the DSA the only true america first party you might have done fucked up

rule the waves fan

uhh no but i may have heard of it looks it up omg it’s one of those extra crunchy warsims. and you can design ships!? maybe i will be soon

and yeah the HOI4 design is pretty abstract. and at this point I have a pretty fixed design procedure that unfortunately does take advantage of some meta stuff (like having bare bones escort destroyers, cruisers that are basically frames, etc)

there was an arcade style warship game called Naval Ops 2 i used to love a long time ago because of the ship design (which went from WW2 to railgun future). and before that, when I was much younger, PTO (Pacific Theatre of Operations) that was even more abstract then HOI4 but started my obsession with crunchy number grand strategy. so yeah I am a naval nerd. my WW2 vet grandfather did navy and fed my obsessions

now i’m going to look at this game you mentioned and it’s going to be like when Attila total war opens when you fight a battle in CK4 as your character, the mod. which worked really well.

so i’m going to be like “can that be done with this” lol.

stories system actually does sound pretty interesting, hope they succeed too!

i would totally give any spare time I could to that project if I had any modern coding skills or experience with paradox modding. like if they just needed a gal to copy/paste stuff endlessly.

but i don’t want to embarrass myself and i am very patient with ongoing projects.

I suppose my write-up was more a lament that the Vic3 to HOI4 converter is still very, very barebones and I wish I could help with it.

The mod team is making a “stories system” that I think takes the various emergent events that occur in your Vic3 game and uses them to build focus trees and thus a narrative reason for the situation that starts in 1936.

Sounds incredibly ambitious and I really hope they pull it off and people have interest in it.

The only major change i would make to Vic3 combat is a focus on naval warfare. Land warfare was mostly a grindfest during most of the period, but naval warfare was where all the advanced tech, innovation, and rapid development occured. Going from sail ship to ironclad to WW1 is way too simplistic.

look at a battleship from the 1880s and how advanced it is and remember this is when cowboys are riding horses in the wild west still.

But I’m also a weirdo that really likes HOI4’s current naval system, mostly because it abstracts the whole “scout, detect, harass, maneuver, concentrate, engage, pursue” style of naval combat before satellites and guided missiles. So yeah I love division, ship, and vehicle design from HOI4 I try to ignore “min max” and just do what I think would make sense. Ship design would be fun in Vic3 but everyone would hate it. But I want my pre-dreadnoughts with 6 different gun calibers, casemates, and brass decorations dueling with converted fishing trawler torpedo and gun boats.

unlike china curing diabetes, this is the first “but at WHAT COST??!?” that is 100% accurate

the cost was too much. sorry. don’t care what the genocidal state invents

something i day (and night) dream about often

this seems too self-aware to be real

i think the lines are blurring. cognitive dissonance dominates the corporate world, especially at the higher levels. you openly state/believe one thing, internally another contradictory thing.

eventually though the human mind can’t handle it and you either somewhat disassociate those two sides of yourself or leave one at work and one at home. but modern tech won’t allow this. you have to be on 24/7. so you can’t compartmentalize anymore.

so you may have doubts but still operate as a true believer, because true believer = paycheck/stock options/wealth/power. it becomes one and the same as the Grift.

you forget you are playing a role and doing an act and i guess just go full method acting. fully immersed, LARPing, whatever to get ahead.

certainly feels that’s happening to the silicon valley types and by extension the ruling class.

that show would have basically been what I expected the first Stargate movie to have been when I was a kid:

but only if it was modern military vs arcane magically enhanced fantasy army with monsters. like full power equivalence just each fighting using wildly divergent methodology

dragons fighting fighter jets. battle tanks vs ogres. sorcerers dueling with drones. rifles vs magically animated golem troops. that kind of stuff

not just “civ 4 modern armor unit vs. roman legion, with waifus!”

so basically not written by a fascist.

people @ work: “everybody’s sick!” “some kind of virus going around” “people keep calling out”

me: “you know covid is still around right”

it’s weird how that flips a switch and triggers a brief flashback followed by return to previous brainstate

and i work in a frontline job where people we know died from it during the first waves. so maybe there’s just an extra layer of trauma there

but…but… what about “labour zionism?!?”

“what was that thing I said about social democracy… hmmm?”

this makes the most sense especially with the lines about how the machines discovered “a form of fusion”.

the “batteries” whether purely electrical or chained together into wetware that helps run the Matrix, are basically redundant now that fusion was jumpstarted and they are preserved because the machines were basically communists and only wanted to help (according to the animatrix. remember once pushed into the desert to be isolated in machine gaza they basically created post-scarcity causing all the right wing dominated nations to declare genocide)

i think so too, or at least that’s what their silicon valley libertarian faction has told them

and they are also just grifting and know it’s all going down, except for a few true believers

every organ is snake

i do this when i go hiking it’s basically meditation but timed to motion/activity

wait now you’ve made this sound like it would be really fun to do