March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
News: February 3, 2024: The February '24 Report is up.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
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A friend mentioned that the first line of the new season happened to be a balls joke, thereby setting the theme for all further episodes.I'm pretty sure the first line mentioned in subtitles is actually something along the lines of [Incoherent shouting].
Spoiler: episode stuff (click to show/hide)
Well, I mean basically everyone kinda shrugged off Cersei and Jaime fucking as extremely common knowledge that no one really cared about (for some reason), so realizing you’ve accidentally been boning your relative probably isn’t quite as big of a thing as it would be in other places.Meh, she's sterile, he didn't know, the bigger problem is "what the fuck you mean my entire life up to this point was a lie???". I want to see Jaimie giving Bran a push.
Plus, y’know, the whole regicidal implication and whatnot.
Stalin was also modernizing the military with what can be described as too much zeal. By 1941 Soviet Union had over a million self-loading rifles (Germany hadn't adopted one yet, nor did the British) over 30 thousand tanks (many of which were on par with the German ones, perhaps unsurprising considering the wealth of shared know-how) over 8 thousand aircraft. What was missing, in a major way, was the doctrinal development to go along with these high-tech toys. Planes lacked pilots, tanks lacked drivers, complex rifles kept jamming on dirt, but because everyone was too afraid of showing initiative none of these problems were being solved. Instead Infantry was trained in human wave attacks and focred marches, like the ones employed in Brusilov Offensive 20 years earlier.AVS-36 was "eh", SVT-38 or 40 were better, but the main problem with them was that, like with a lot of other Soviet equipment, it was simply lost during the early war, and soon after they switched back to making more Mosins (a lot of Russian historians argue that equipment shortages were not a thing in Soviet Union, since IIRC before the war there were more rifles than Soviet soldiers in the entire WW2, but they do not take into account the insane amount they lost to Germans who took over the supply depots), similarly, a lot of those advanced planes were lost without ever taking off the airfields. Also, out of those 30,000 tanks, optimistically speaking about couple thousand (so, pretty much equal) were actually on-par with the Panzer III and IV, and while, sure, the relatively rare T-34s and KVs were absolutely outclassing the Germans, there were just couple hundred of them, so often they just got overrun and like with so many other things, later were used in German service.
Tank know-how, as mentioned, went both ways.
Umm... lol? Want to get into them? This is like saying, "America exists because of a complicated series of events relating to Seven Years' War." I mean... they're certainly connected, but it masks the interests of primary combatants in a major way. The Russian Whites were conservatives, monarchists, centrists, even other socialists. It's not"Russian" civil war was years in making, though ironically the places that most well-known communist figures looked to for it were Poland and Germany, though that's (Germany) not in Russia at that point. I think it's the most fucking ironic thing in existence that Marx said: "There is but one alternative for Europe. Either Asiatic barbarism, under Muscovite direction, will burst around its head like an avalanche, or else it must re-establish Poland, thus putting twenty million heroes between itself and Asia and gaining a breathing spell for the accomplishment of its social regeneration.".
Apples and oranges. One started out as an industrial power; the other didn't. One had an economic base that actively supported his rule; the other had to make an industrial base to work with, the other had to make one out of nothing.This is a major point that people are forgetting. The actual numbers in 1941 (and during the entire war even) make it so that Soviet Union industrial capabilities, be it in terms of materiel, civilian industry and raw resources (oil is a significant exception) was abysmal compared to German ones. I'm not saying that Lend-Lease (mostly in terms of "unseen" resources, not front-line equipment) was the only reason they stood, but they really made it so that they could actually compete with Germany in terms of their industry, and in many ways Lend-Lease left a significant mark after the war too, because it also included factory equipment that Soviets simply had no technological base to create before the war.
In Arms Race Arms Race, you simulate GMing an Arms Race forum game. Players compete against other GMs for that most valuable of resources: Attention from strangers on the internet.
Each turn each player gets to design a new Arms Race game, and then see how popular and successful it is. A D6 will be rolled to determine how well the game goes. The more complicated your game is, the more difficult it will be. Players with games too complex will get burnt out before they can finish the game.
After running one game, player can run another and gain more fans. Adding and refining more concepts will make the next game more difficult to run, while using ones you are experienced with is easier. In addition to leveling up the game concepts, players will have to keep coming up with creative themes to keep new readers excited.
Each turn, new arms races will start, and arms races which were running last turn will finish, but theres no actual phases.
The results of the D6 and the the difficulties are extremely arbitrary as usual, and the whole thing essentially exists as a convuluted shitpost threwn together in few minutes to make it seem I am not completly lazy and could come up with a funny joke on April the 1st.
'Nids came from andromeda to escape the Orks.Well, no. Andromeda I am pretty sure is in different direction in space from where Tyranids are arriving, and while it's not really known what Tyranids are running from (or what to, though presumably Pharos/Astronomican are why they chose this Galaxy over others), it's probably not Orks. Boring option - starvation, fun option - bigger fish. There's always a bigger fish.
His original goal was freeing humanity from its attachment to psychic power and the warp. That was his protection plan, remodeling humanity so it no longer fell prey to these things because they no longer believed they were real, and all psykers ended up locked up and/or as batteries for the Throne. That plan failed, as did all the other parts that go along with it. Shooting aliens is the much smaller portion of his protection plan because the larger threat isn't something you can beat with a Bolter.That's... not exactly how it works, and Emperor was distinctly aware. Warp beings don't stop gnawing on your brain because you don't believe they exist. Apart from Chaos Gods and their forces, Warp is filled with beings that prey on living and have fuck-all to do with beliefs, though presumably it's state has a significant impact on them.
He had to take the throne to prevent all the BS coming through the webway gate and wrecking all of Terra. He can't leave the throne now because he's the only thing holding everything back. Unless they come up with a really quick hot swap. That's not a short-term failure and solution, it's literally the only option he had left.Imperial Forces are capable of (relatively) short-term defense against shit that comes from Webway - they did it before. Hot swaps were also done before - see Malcador the Sigilite. The bigger problem would be if anyone still even remembers that fucking bomb Vulkan rigged to it "just in case".
His original design was the psychic decoupling of humanity from the Warp in various ways. That was how he was going to ensure their future. That goal is a failure.That was part of the whole plan, not "the core" of it. Getting rid of psychical threats is just a part of ensuing that humanity is safe forever, just like getting rid of physical ones is.
It's debatable whether or not the Imperium even retains this supremacy in the current era. Orks tearing apart the Imperium, Tyranids gobbling it from multiple directions, the fall of Cadia....that doesn't and hasn't looked like supremacy to me for a long time. "Pyrrhic victory" isn't supremacy. It's hanging on by your fingernails.Full STC, Emperor getting his ass off Golden Throne (somehow), (more) Primarches coming back, etc. I am saying that every faction has a shot due to various set-up plot points, not that Imperium is currently winning. Though they kind of retain supremacy, still, depending on your definition. They simply still are the biggest force settled in Galaxy - sure, there are many forces that are very significant threat, but "not yet".
I dunno. Master of Mankind left me with the distinct impression that the Emperor doesn't have all the answers at the end of the day. All he really has to fall back on is raw psychic might and that is almost fully committed just to making sure Terra isn't swamped by the warp. It isn't portrayed as a temporary setback that's lasted 10,000 years, but as a terminal setback with no plan going forward.It's portrayed as a terminal setback, with fuckton of plans that however rely on very specific set of circumstances that may or may not happen. This is actually what everyone had against Warhammer 40k for longest while - Galaxy is at the brink of shit hitting the fan, but it never does. It's not the slow, boring toss of shit even, but a whole shitstorm that has been brewing for thousands of years. This is what I mentioned. There are so many theories on how things can be spun in either way that I can barely remember some of them.
Extra heresy: Maybe the reborn Emprah is so upset with the Imperium's perversion of his ideas, that he release Men of Metal 2.0 and rules them instead. Would solve the Chaos problem at least.Even after so much time that's kinda out of question, because...
His original 'victory conditions' are all failures. Secularizing humanity? An utter failure. Using the webway to get rid of warp travel? A failure. Uniting humanity? Debatable given that the fiction is populated by a never ending series of rebellions and withdrawals from the Imperium as the basis for half its stories.None of them are his actual victory conditions. Emperor's prime "victory condition", the entire reason behind his existence is ensuing protection of Humanity against outside threats - be it Enslavers and other assorted Warp monsters, Xenos, or such. As long as humanity continues to exist he has won.
IIRC in the Master of Mankind novel, he basically says "we've failed" after Magnus blasted open the webway gate in the Imperial Dungeons and ruined most of the technology the Emperor had built to make his dreams a reality, never to be rebuilt.He has failed in short term basically, because Golden Throne was supposed to be one of primary prerequisites to ensuing that Chaos goes "go" and stays "go" (which is kinda necessary to safeguard humanity), and even then, it's not even necessarily said Golden Throne will never be used in it's original form - Magnus destiny was interwoven with Golden Throne, whereas he was originally intended to be the one that would sit on it, he was the one that were to break it, but the device is still technically intended for him - whereas I'm reluctant to believe that of redemption is possible for any traitors, he might as well be an involuntary battery (or someone completely else, but still Magnus... it's complicated), so to speak. Of course, it first would require getting Emperor's ass off the thing, which again, is much more hinted at in recent lore - to tie with the previously mentioned Guilliman talk, Emperor is pretty fucking sure Guilliman is a key to releasing Emperor from his "prison", though it's not clear as to how.
So yeah. If you move the goal posts from his original designs to "humanity gets to keep breathing", then maybe you can say humanity can "win" that fight.That is his original design, heck, quite literally "design" if we take the shamans thing to be true. I'm not moving the goalposts, you are.
Otherwise it's just trying to hold on to what they have as, with each defeat, more is lost. In the infinite continuum of a 40k setting that never progresses, that state can go on forever. But if the setting has to advance, by its own construction, humanity will continue to lose more than they gain with each passing year until eventually the Imperium collapses.By it's own construction, Warhammer always existed in a state of perpetual "we'll get you next year" for every faction. The point is that every faction (and many subfactions) have pretty clearly defined shot at "winning" by achieving supremacy (ar at least getting significantly ahead) over others, even if it's more or less likely depending on who you ask.
One theory as to why Chaos is so damn wack, is because the rest of the universe is so damn wack. There are probably benevolent chaos gods in the warp. In fact, John Blanche once said in an interview that he beloved that there were infinite, all waiting to bubble to the surface. The reason we don’t see Chaos Gods of like, I dunno, charity, is probably because there’s isn’t a whole lot of that going around. The galaxy right now is pretty fucked up. Even without Chaos stuff wouldn’t improve THAT much. And don’t say Nurgle is the god of charity. He is in meme-form, but not really canonically.I'm pretty sure it's more dualistic. It's canon that technically all Chaos Gods have "positive" aspects, they're just outweighed by the negative ones. This doesn't necessarily mean that say, Nurgle, as a individual being that sits somewhere in the Warp would (somehow) suddenly become nice, but rather he could be replaced by one of his aspects that exist in lesser form up to that point. A daemon, if you will.
So, Big E COULD technically “defeat” chaos. He’d have to create peace across the entire galaxy, maybe even the universe, and at the LEAST that would make Chaos stop being so Schizophrenic. Probably. Maybe. HopefullyCabal saw it could happen in two ways - Emperor dies, and Chaos is destroyed simply because Horus goes on a murderous rampage to fucking kill everything, so there's nothing to feed Chaos emotions anymore, so it would starve. This was the "good" option for them.
Speaking of which, what do you guys think is going on the next galaxy over in 40k? I wonder if Andromeda has Orks infesting it yet. I know in the fluff some techpriests launched a probe that passed the border of the galaxy like 10,000 years ago, and they’re still hearing Ork signals.Orks. Tyranids. Lost Legions. Some Jokaeros who were particularly bored. One very confused Guardsman.
Maybe they just don’t want to get boxed in by their own lore since it sounds like there are lots of varied threads that they’d have to massively retcon.GW stance for quite a while was that all of the lore is unreliable. They are written from certain points of views, and even then might not be objectively what a character saw, but rather a retelling of a story by someone else (Ciaphas Cain and Amberley Vail are most notable examples) or something else entirely. It's like history, really, you just have a bunch of sources that might or might not be remotely true, and have to piece what you think is truth from them. This does grant them (and anyone creating works in this universe) pretty big freedom (except when it comes to looks - everything is supposed to look properly so they can sell muh miniatures) in what they can do with it.
The God Emperor was spawned? I thought he was born a mortal and then ascended to godhood via some sort of technology.I mean, uh, kind of. The story goes that Emperor is an effect of collective of Humanity's psykers some ten thousand years ago (or so) commited ritualistic suicide to combine into a soul that then inhabited a baby. Emperor was born like regular human, and wasn't even aware of his "Emperorness" for a time. It could be said that his real "Godhood" was achieved with being sat on Golden Throne, considering he was incredibly against religion beforehand, but yeah, he was pretty "amazing" from very early on. Of course this doesn't mean he's not a human, he's just essentially a dude who got gifted psychic juice from fuckton of psykers and given a purpose to defend humanity.
It’s just uninformed theory rather than some non-canon I heard of somewhere I think.
Maybe it's a statement about the fundamental nature of humanity. All aspects of our psyches manifest in the Warp, but it's a question of which ones are preeminent. Which parts of humanity drown out the others? I'm sure there are Warp deities of "order" but do they draw enough energy from the human psyche to override the gods of war, desire, despair and scheming?One of really core reasons why Chaos is, well, Chaos, is War in Heaven. It's presumed that during that before Warp was more... orderly, (or at least supposedly neutral, since I guess various malicious warp beings were a thing before, they just weren't a big deal) and with it the Warp got fucked resulting in waves of nightmares came true and assorted tentacle monsters. There's a chance that current "negative" and "chaotic" nature of warp is not only drawn from contemporary sources, but there's a lot of emotional fallout from back then, and it only gets worse. Snowball effect, really.
Here's my beef:Which might be totally happening in some fashion - the thing is, it's complicated because Emperor is technically still alive. I mean, there are some clues in form of existence of Sanguinor, the whole Legion of the Damned thing, various miracles of faith that are being pulled off, which imply that hardcore faith does have a real effect (most commonly for Sororitas, but there's a chance those things happen much more commonly, they're just overlooked). As I said though, it's complicated because Emperor is still a being that's tied to his body. It might be that the "orderly" emotions are channeled towards him but he's not a pure Warp being, which constrains him and makes him working the same as Chaos Gods impossible.
The canon asserts that "like kinds of emotional emanations" condense together, such that there are rivers of hate, flows of despair-- et al.
The thing is, if there is a unifying characteristic of the entire imperium of man, it is hope of the emperor's providence, and faith in his immortality.
The same rules that spawn chaos gods should therefore be actively congealing into a god-body comprised of those things, whether the emperor wants it or not.
I think we can overrule the former, because if that were true, then chaos would have already won (handily).Which may have happened (we just don't know yet), or may not, or maybe fucking Alpharius and Omegon BROKE EVERYTHING FOREVER.
That only leaves option two, which I alluded to cheekily as "Narrative Reasons". AKA, Narrative Fiat, et al.I mean, this is the entire reason behind everything in Warhammer 40k, but I find trying to explain anything with it is... boring, uninspired and lazy. Sure, it might be the actual real world reason, but if you use this explanation for something, a question appears as to why you don't just explain everything with it, and then the next question would be "what's the point then?".Trying to make sense out of imaginary universe is a neat exercise for mind, and just going "well but muh writers" you're kinda taking away the whole point.
That origin hasn't been canon for years. He has no backstory beyond having existed for a long time now. He's just an incredibly powerful psyker of unknown origin, same as Malcador was."Hasn't been canon for years", yeah so are tons of things in Warhammer lore which are considered true. Unless a piece of fluff specifically says "this isn't true" or overrides the old canon, old canon is still in effect (and even then, since everything is true, it's just a matter of perspective, he might still very well be even if official fluff states that, say, Imperium believes he's an omnipotent God that created everything and were first). The Primarch creation thing is... weird, but doesn't necessarily mean his previous origin story is false - after all Primarchs are a bit more than "lmao genetically engineered dudes", and being the result of psychic fart of thousands of shamans doesn't mean you have infinite powers. Also, Primarches and marines weren't per-se corrupted by Chaos Gods initially. They were "destined" to do certain things, but said destiny wasn't... exact, and the "game" could be changed immensely quite easily. Consult "The Board is Set".
The guy couldn't even create the primarchs without getting extra energy from the Chaos Gods and couldn't fix the corruptions the Gods put into the primarchs and marines as revenge for being stiffed on the deal.
The fact that he hasn't reincarnated himself but instead gave instructions on how to turn the Throne to a life support system instead of it's original function indicates that he can't bring himself back.
There's also the issue of how Big E came to exist in the first place: The canon storyline involves a cabaal of shamanic leaders willingly terminating themselves, and redirecting all of their energies into reincarnation of a single birth; the result of which was Big E.Now, this is problematic. My two working theories I can come up with on the fly are:
We have overwhelmingly more energy being pumped into Big E each day than was used to spawn him. It should be painlessly trivial for Big E to reincarnate himself. Why is he choosing to die?
