I can finally unclench my jaw. Trump is out of the White House. There were no riots, no deaths today.
Let’s take a few moments to appreciate this peaceful inauguration day, because this peace may not last too long.
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@ Threp
That’s actually a plot point in a Tom Clancy novel. Someone challenges the legitimacy of the new president; but inadvertently acknowledges them as president in the court claim.
Come to think of it, that novel also involves an attack on the Capitol and right wing militias going after politicians.
@Naglfar
It turns out she cannot, and has given up on the idea because it’s too hard.
@Alan
Quite a lot of Q mythology is nicked from Tom Clancy. Also the TV showe Archer and Sealab 2021; they are utterly incapable of recognizing satire.
I’m celebrating by making misogynists as upset and disappointed as I possibly can. I am going on a weeklong celebration of insulting entitled NiceGuys(TM)
@Dalillama
Unsurprising. Hopefully this deters other Republicans from trying the same thing later.
99% of the time conservatives seem to think media criticizing them is actually an endorsement. See also: how many US libertarians praised BioShock despite it being an obvious criticism of Ayn Rand and objectivism, or how many thought that the Colbert Report was supporting their ideas.
The worst part to me is them flocking to W40k so hard that the editor decided to tap into that and stop trying to be satiric. The Empire from Star Wars is another example, albeit it wasn’t supposed to be a satire, just straight bad guys.
When I was young, the guy I wanted to be from Star Wars was Darth Vader, not Luke. That’s because Darth Vader seemed to know how to efficiently do stuff and was cool. I thought the real bad guy in the Empire was the Emperor and his moffs, while Darth Vader was a cool guy, and clearly not guilty by association.
I guess 8y old me was about as smart as a Trumpist.
It is a relief!! I only saw bits of the inauguration live, but my family watched the 10 o’clock news together. My brother straight-up cheered when we heard Biden signed an executive order stopping construction on the Keystone XL pipeline.
The news, being Canadian, went on to a discussion of what the new president would mean for US/Canada relations. Maybe Trudeau is disappointed in the pipeline thing (the Conservative premier of Alberta certainly is), but he’s probably glad that he won’t have to be dealing with Trump anymore, so he probably won’t push too hard on that. I hope not. We can’t keep burning fossil fuels.
@Ohlmann – on a vaguely similar note, Trump reminds me of my 9-year-old-self, at least the time I was kicked out of a musical chairs game at school and I delayed the game by whining that the other girl pushed me off the chair. The “wahh, not fair! he cheated!” was very reminiscent. 🙂
Relevant to the Mammoth, an NYC PUA has been arrested in connection with the Capitol attack.
@stacey
See I was just going to make a tray of pot brownies but yours is cool too.
@Elaine the Witch
I love the new nick! And I saw your comments in the other thread and offer my words and thoughts of love and support too.
Thanks, yeah, your idea for baked goods is great too but absolutely I am taking great joy in setting up for utter humiliation a particularly awful NiceGuyTM who is an acquaintance of a friend (I won’t say friend of a friend, because he he is complete jerk) The jerk in question knows about my art and thinks he knows enough about how my life and relationships work that he can nice-guy his way to my attentions after my assistants told him I’m not interested. He’s coming to my temple thinking he’ll be received as someone I’m interested in but all he’s going to see is a glimpse of me on my pedestal with some of my favorite guys attending me and be told sharply he is not attractive enough to remain and must leave. This jerk is so presumptuous and awful he deserves this and has it coming and I so am looking forward to it. I love NiceGuy(TM) tears SO much.
What a clown:
https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1352359178355011586
Night of 19th: So worried.
Night of 20th: Slept great. Giant neck knots gone. Can take deep breath without effort.
@Ohlmann
This again? Citation needed.
OT: There’s plenty I’ve been wanting to say, but I fear all my comments are being flagged/blocked as spam. I use a throwaway email address because I’m tired of giving my real ones out all the time, especially given gmail’s history with intrusion of privacy. Can I be approved, please?
@allandrel : pretty much any sourcebook of the last 5 years ? But in particular, the deep meaning of the Primaris storyline is to come from “space marine were a failed experiment that ended up as fascist enforcers” to “space marine are the bee knees and are objectively superheroes that deserve to rule the galaxy”. Including a part that hammer home that, no, the utter conservatism and corruption of the empire won’t prevent it to do even more awesome technology, because fuck yeah fascism.
There’s also the defictionisation of the Emperor. Originally, it was an original myth but it was voluntary shrouded in a way that indicated that the origins probably weren’t that clean. They cleared that up with a serie of book that hammer home that, yes, the Emperor was a well-meaning superhero stabbed in the back by his underling.
Most importantly, W40K have alway insisted that there were no alternative to the brutal fascist empire. Except in the origin it was a dying under its own weight and the fact that fascism don’t actually work. Now their method are alway described as actually working.
The memes about Trump being the emperor miss the original point of the W40K emperor, but are completely and utterly in line with its modern depiction. And the change in direction is rather obvious for anyone that take the time to read the fluff.
@Ohlmann
I do not see any textual support for your reading. The Imperium remains “the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable,” “the nightmare future,” and so on in all recent works.
One of the major themes introduced in the last 5 years is the “Time of Ending,” that the Imperium is indeed failing, “dying under its own weight,” (to use your words) certainly not working. Even the core book last year emphasized that the Imperial bureaucracy is so awful that entire planets are lost because of bookkeeping errors. Hardly the model of fascist efficiency that you are claiming.
The last decade+ of revelations about the Horus Heresy and the Emperor serve only to emphasize how far the Imperium has fallen. The Emperor himself is portrayed as a well-intentioned extremist whose plans were ultimately flawed, and the current theocratic fascistic Imperium as everything that he was trying to avoid. Notably, one of the major recent plots was the revival of Roboute Gulliman, who was so horrified by what the Imperium had become the he nearly lost the will to keep going, and his work since has been a desperate attempt to reform the Imperium. It is Guilliman’s reforms that are described as actually working, because he completely changed Imperial policy. Not exactly an endorsement of the Imperial status quo.
On the tech angle, the “recent advances” from Caul are hardly a ringing endorsement of the Imperium. After millennia of near-stagnation, it turns out that the sweeping advances in tech, that Caul spent nearly ten thousand years working on, amount to slightly more powerful weapons, armor, and soldiers. All of which, it must be pointed out, Caul basically sat on for millennia while disasters like the War of the Beast, the Tyranid invasions, and the Black Crusades happened, but he was not willing to make these forces available until Guilliman was revived and forced him to. If anything, this is not an endorsement of the Imperium but an indictment of it – if Guilliman had not been revived (which was an alien scheme that the Imperials grudgingly cooperated with), Caul would likely have kept tinkering until the Imperium fell down around him.
Your main argument seems to be that the Imperium’s military hardware is presented as “cool,” but… that has always been the case. But “cool” does not mean “desireable.” The Drukhari are the most objectively evil group in the setting, but are presented as “cool” (I have an army of them myself). Does that mean that the developers are arguing that the Drukhari are a society to emulate?
Hey, Paradoxy!! Good to see you again, hope things are going well for you (all things considered.)
@ Allandrel
Keep in mind that GW’s been hyping the Primaris Marines (and indeed the Space Marines as a whole) from the moment they were introduced. How the hell else are they supposed to make people buy them, say that they’re space cops with funny helmets?
The Imperium is “working”, but only inasmuch as it has not led to the extinction of humanity yet- and the alternatives are almost immediately wiped out by the Imperium, xenos, Chaos, or a combination of all three.
What 40k’s current fluff has been doing is just business as usual, especially since the satire was toned down in favor of the much more pressing need to sell new models and keep the “grimdark” image going as strong as possible (that, and increasingly fewer people are able to pick up on the satire, leading GW to assume that it’s not worth keeping anymore- they’ve always put profit before storytelling). At best, Ohlmann is drawing the wrong conclusions from things that are explained much more easily with a cursory knowledge of the setting and how GW itself works, and if he only thinks it’s been this way for the past five years he clearly hasn’t been following its lore for a long time.
Belated, but thank you for approving me. As my name implies, I’ll still probably stick to lurking most of the time, but it’s nice that I can throw in my two cents once in a while now if I feel like it. Keep up the good work on this site.