Des

I was almost burned out on this game because it kind of stresses me out with all the game of thrones shit. Been really struggling to just get an ahistorical set up to transfer to EU4 and maybe Victoria later.

Stumbled upon "Crusader Wars" and already had Attila from forever ago. Sure it's got plenty of jank from that era of Total War but wow it's fun to actually fight the battle yourself and have every soldier from your army in the battle, accurately simulated as appropriate units, and transfer every casualty back to Ck3. If the battles get too large, like they do late game, just change the transfer ratios in the options.

Your martial skill converts to highly quality units overall, prowess beefs up your commander units, and knights adds special units of knights based on your culture. Commander deaths or injuries carry back to Ck3.

You can still fight battles normally in game if and save this for very important ones. Options for only your main character, or your Marshall as well, or every allied/friendly army.

Expect to wait a few minutes depending on your system to hop between the games when you fight a battle.

Seriously been thinking about how something like this could be used for other Paradox games to spice things up. The future of modding will just be chaining half a dozen seperate games together, each good at their narrow playstyle or something.

for those that live in the States, Canada, and Mexico

someone linked this small channel somewhere and i had forgotten about it until recently. the presenter is a phd, science education and climatology

the videos are very remote college lecture style with slides. not flashy just good info. she does videos about individual U.S. states, North America regions and other climate prepping topics. it's really useful in a "this is coming it's obviously it's not going to be stopped but we can survive and here's information to help".

which is something i have sorely needed. it fills a needed role since there's mostly just denialism from preppers, and i get tired of both the r/collapse style "we're all going to die painfully so choose when to off yourself" and liberal "tech will save us or maybe we'll just kill the global south"

so yeah if you are ready to face it and want to see how your state/region is going to be like with 2C warming or more check it out

alternate invidious link

link to her non-profit her mission statement is presenting the data the government collected but refuses to present the public

you can tell a bunch of songs were written post Oct 7th. pretty sure that's the theme of this one

also, it's got Scott Vogel (Terror) and Connie Sgarbossa (seeyouspacebowboy) vocals on some tracks!

the band's youtube with all their songs and the full album!!!

so yeah check out some angry but also hopeful principled Marxist heavy music. buy some merch if you like it and want to help support the band! (or don't, lol, i just like them)

so i've done eu4, hoi4, the breeding sim. i get really stressed leading up to important conflicts. afraid all my plans will go to waste. doing tons of save scumming. either optimizing or cheating because my free time is so limited and i want to see the cool thing i planned happen.

but vic3 feels more go with the flow. sure, my goal is some kind of communism (national or global), but that's a long ways off and meanwhile i'll just let stuff happen and happily clickity click my little mines and factories into place and relax as

it's the build-up phase of Hoi4 but lasting 100 years instead of 4

it really does seem like the most materialist paradox map game. you are just a passenger on a train of the forces of history. sure you can press the brakes or horn but you don't feel like an actual "living breathing godhead of a nation directing everything like an infectious alien hive mind"

so yeah. good sleepytime game. hopefully it gets better over time.

play this one if you are feeling down about the future

i'm really new to this game but have years of Paradox game experience, including a bit in Victoria 2. i've done some short tutorial plays with Belgium and Sweden.

i know lots of random decisions come up and there's significant rng. is there any way or series of steps to effectively neutralize the southern planters (civil war or otherwise), stop the indigenous colonization while also somehow protecting their decentralized nations from the other powers? as well as the best route to socialism, anarchism, or even tolerant liberalism as fast as possible?

right now in my experimental run im just doing capitalism as fast as possible as well as staved off a Southern Planter coup. i already reduced their power and im only building in the northern states and bolstering Intelligentsia and the capitalists. i had an event that allowed me to reduce the trail of tears effects significantly (which triggered the coup, but haha get fucked i stopped it, whigs are in power now)

im also trying to keep the indian territory independent and friendly. don't know what to do about the colonization that is happening at game start

i'll totally start my game over if there's a better way.

this mostly applies to the U.S. but also most of the western world:

As Marxists we know that most policy is driven by what capital allows or within the increasingly narrow range of acceptable discourse it allows within bourgeois dictatorship

Obviously it's not a conspiracy of ten guys in a secret room but a general consensus that develops from a chaotic web-like oligarchy of money peddlers, influencers, lackeys, billionaire puppetmasters, etc

But this really, really hurts Capital. they need the influx of cheap labor or face the real threat of forced degrowth. and we know every including is trying to make it harder for people to be childless but short of forcing people to procreate at gunpoint..

• so why allow this to become a bipartisan consensus (U.S.) instead of say throwing some scraps of social democratic programs?

• or in Europe's case allowing these parties to come to power instead of reversing some neoliberal austerity?

Is this a case of anti-immigration just being easier to do vs. building resiliency into the system? i mean it's always easier to write laws crimializing stuff and throwing cops at a problem i suppose

Or something else?

so i've thought about getting a script as a sort of one-two punch. one, to save my thinning hair so it can still look cute. two, the side effects would be scary if they weren't basically just "ooops you transed yourself"

oh noes... what ever will i do if i grow boobies and my body hair thins

but seriously, some of the side effects (depression) I thought were maybe from cis men getting gender dysphoria but seems even transfemmes have experienced it. at least reading some reddit posts

anyone had experience with this? i'm hoping it can be a sort of gateway to everything else. dip my toes in the hormone adjustments

and minoxidil has never seemed to work for me. i know i won't get my hair line back but i'm cool with that.

part 2 this time with a general call to class war

link to Slaughterhouse 1

just wanted to let everyone know that i do read everything, react IRL, and upbear. my social anxiety and ADHD has crawled even into my posting/commenting online which i was immune to when younger. i was wild in early forums and chatrooms

also not sure how long is too long to reply. things move slower in the lemmyverse but i'm so afraid of a reply being too "stale"

whats everyone else think about reply/comment protocol real or imagined?

from @1rrzs on twitter:

His name will be remembered when Palestine will be free

RIP Aaron Bushnell