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Cake day: August 9th, 2026

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  • I’ve been listening to The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity the past couple weeks and it’s been quite interesting. Particularly relevant to this topic is how many societies we have evidence for — through actual contact and documentation or through archaeological findings and anthropological research — that either consciously did not develop or later abolished a ruling class, whether as devolved cultural groups or even in cities of tens of thousands. Examples are given for cities in Mesopotamia, Yucatan, iirc north of the Black Sea, and other areas.

    Lots of interesting stuff on personal freedom, collective decision-making, community care, agriculture and conscious lack thereof, etc.



  • Pugjesus made a post a couple months ago saying that he was done with posts after the instance that he was using at the time, Piefed, instituted a per-user daily vote limit. iirc he said it was a hindrance because he voted on and responded to so many replies that he was hitting the limit, and he’d already moved instances at least once, so he was retiring from posting. There might’ve been other contributing factors, it’s been a minute.

    And yeah, his absence is felt. He was my favorite poster.






  • I wrote a reply earlier but my app was being futzy and it looks like it didn’t send. Apologies if this double-posts.

    I wasn’t making an absolutist statement on folks’ tastes in games (or any media). I don’t believe that most Hearts of Iron players are fascists any more than I believe that most Crusader Kings players want to bang their sisters and play eugenics, or that Factorio players want to terraform an alien planet into a concrete and steel wasteland and kill all native life.

    You don’t need to be a fascist to enjoy playing as a historical “bad guy”, but, especially as it concerns real-world politics then and now, media centered or themed around the time during which fascism evolved will naturally attract a greater audience of that leaning than media that doesn’t. I personally have a greater interest in the mid 19th-mid 20th centuries than many other points in history due to the rapid sociological, political, and technological advancements of the era – particularly labor theory and uprisings – so I get drawn to games like Victoria for those systems.



  • Reminds me that a couple years ago I went back to Morrowind for the first time since I was a kid. Lot of nostalgia built up, and I still like it for what it is.

    I hit some enemy (one of them little bugs on the trail to Balmorra) and the game’s like “you missed”. Excuse me? No, I didn’t. I modded that out because that system only makes sense in turn-based RPGs or Disco-esque dialog that can easily and visually account for it; not in an action RPG. Damage resistance (or even immunity) can be fine, but attacks that visually hit but the game says miss never feel fair. Definitely a quirk of early games in the genre.

    I do overall prefer its expanded skill and gear system over later entries’ more simplified ones, though.