I think it's beautiful that across time and space whatever piece of media can have someone complaining that they wasted time on it because they didn't realize it was exactly what it said on the tin and wouldn't have ever bothered with it if they knew.
After Margaret Thatcher's death in 2013, a review of classified medical documents revealed a bizarre series of experimental procedures from 1979 where she had her pineal gland surgically replaced with one harvested from a wild hog. The procedure, codenamed "Operation Iron Dawn," was allegedly performed by a rogue neurosurgical team after traditional treatments failed to address her notorious sleep problems. The documents suggest the hog's pineal gland was specifically chosen for its abnormally high melatonin production - nearly 4 times that of a human gland. While officially deemed a success due to Thatcher's reduced sleep requirements (allowing her famous 4-hour nights), the procedure had an unexpected side effect: she developed an intense, unexplainable aversion to being in the presence of mirrors during the last quarter of each lunar cycle. When questioned about her unusual mirror avoidance, she reportedly only responded with the cryptic phrase "the other one watches back." The surgical notes remain partially classified, though unconfirmed leaks suggest the donor hog exhibited unusual behavioral patterns prior to harvesting, including apparent attempts to arrange small objects into crude geometric patterns.
If you voted, please don't scroll without sharing this post. Mosab is raising funds for his wife and three daughters to escape Gaza before it is too late.
Even after months of trying, 75% of the goal is unmet. Lama, one of the 4 year old twins, is sick and in pain. She needs to be treated but the family cannot even afford basic food. Even if you cannot donate, sharing helps this reach people who can help.
Even the smallest support can be the difference between life and death.
My name is Musab Hamouda, and my wife is Aya Abu Al-Qambaz. W… Mosab Hammouda needs your support for "Help Us Start a New Life After Our Hom
Vetted by GazaVetters #520 and shared by @/90-ghost.
Daryl Davis, a black musician who de-converts Klansmen, has totally been misapplied. I see many liberals use his admittedly heartwarming story as a how-to guide on how to deal with the present nazi issue. But Davis is doing a totally different thing, right? The Klansmen he de-converts are in an insular cult, they are often swayed simply by talking to a non-violent black man. These are people born into the cult and have been kept away from any pushback to that cult. You are not, however, born into the Atomwaffen Division. These internet fascists know all the counter-arguments, they just aren’t convinced. You cannot show them a well-spoken minority to shock them- they likely know one in real life or have one in their very own circles! It’s a complete liberal cop-out that shields modern society from responsibility creating this problem.
This segment was once a long meandering tangent disparaging the fact that the community i once held dear was completely dead, and yet it's still stuck in my mind like some cancerous fucking tumor. But times change, over the course of the past two months we've slowly built up a community of thriving players, and instead all I'm going to say is,
you should play MsPaint risk (and join our discord @ https://discord.gg/Kd2ZJcpQPY )
Originally written: June 29th 2023 Last major edit: March 1st 2025 What is mspaint risk? Typically just called risk by the community that in
The thing about MsPaint risk is like. How do you even begin to describe something that has almost infinite possibilities contained within it. It’s not a game, so much as it is a system, a culture, and a history of at this point well over a decade, spanning over several platforms and having had hundreds of active players over the course of its history. Naturally, you can start with the fundamentals. MSpaint risk is, at its core, a map game - map system. But that core is so simple it’s almost stupid. Imagine this: You open a paint program,
And draw a couple interconnected rectangles.
You decide to bring in two friends, and tell them to pick a color, a rectangle to start out on, and a color.
You tell them to roll two dice and give you the resulting sum of the numbers, and you say that: if your sum is between 1 and 4, i’ll give you 1 rectangle, between 5 and 10 i’ll give you two rectangles and if you roll an 11 or 12 i’ll give you 3 rectangles.
Congratulations! You’ve just made your first risk map, in about thirty seconds. Simple, right? But this is a bit fucking boring. First off, with that amount of tiles, the game - turn based in 99% of cases - will be over extremely quickly. And even if there were more tiles:
Even, alot more tiles:
You still have the issue of the game you’ve created being entirely luck based.
So, what do you do?
You zoom out, and realize that the world is in your hands.
The above game started as a blank slate, where we more or less only had one rule to start out with, apart from the basics:
Each time you roll repeating digits or a palindrome, you may propose one change to the map or rules, as long as it doesn't give you an advantage over the other players. The game went on for 32 turns in total, over the course of a month, and during that month we constantly changed the fabric of the game - just because we told ourselves that this is what we wanted to do. All the rules were written by us, and implemented by us - drawn by us. Now, naturally, this is a bit of a special example, as normally games follow a set of rules defined clearly before the game starts, but I think it illustrates my point- that risk is a game of infinities. And you, too, can join us in future games:
Fundamentally, though, MsPaint risk is a game where the players are in control over everything. There are no limits, no rules, simply imagination, and self-imposed boundaries that lead to self-curated experiences. You are in control, and if you so choose it, you can create whatever you want - as long as what you create is something that other players want to play.
I first found the game in late 2016, and ever since then, its completely captured me. I’m serious when I say that I’ve never found anything quite like it - no other game that simply gives you a blank slate and asks you to go wild with your creativity. Over the years, as you might imagine from my rambling, I’ve tended to gravitate towards mapmaking, experimenting and finding what tropes work, and which don’t. But naturally play comes first;
we host an archive of over 2000 unique maps where each one was at one point hand made by a person with the intent to make a fun experience, whatever that entailed for them at that point. But it is exactly this that makes MsPaint risk so unique - no map is alike. All of them are different, and appeal to different demographics, and people.
You might want to torture yourself and your fellow players by playing something that’s more akin to a game of civilization than anything else:
Or maybe you want something more casual, where you can flex your people skills and make alliances with other players:
Maybe you want to roleplay, and imagine yourselves in Gensokyo, or space, or the mass effect universe:
Whatever you choose to do, there are no limits, apart from the ones you set yourself. Over the past two months we've been building up a community of like-minded people who all love the game, and want to see it thrive. If anything in this post has piqued your interest or made you want to learn more about the game, or even try it, i again highly encourage you to join our community. We have constant games going, and tend to cycle in new ones every 1-2 weeks on average, so even if nothing of what we have got going right now is of interest to you, I promise we'll eventually get to something for you.
As a sendoff, here's a small collection of maps we've hosted in the past 2 months:
I hope I'll see you in the server, and if not, I hope I at the very least enlightened you to why this game means so much to me - and why it has utterly consumed me for a good chunk of my life.
The moment you imply something a burgerhitler benefits from is something which they exploit someone to get they start crying and shaking and shitting themselves about how they need their emotional support banana for an irrelevant mental health condition and that the mean commies are gonna do protestantism by taking bananas away from them by gunpoint and it's quickly revealed how moronic their understanding of their position in the world is.
You people are pathetic losers who are medically inable to even own up to the fact your happiness comes as the result of a global engine of misery. All is right in the world. Self care is radical. Buy those cheap avocados and bananas and lattes and scream at your delivery driver when he's late. Watch your military propaganda films made put money in the pockets of shareholders, take that vacation to Hawaii, and questioning it makes you practically an evangelical.
okay so cutesyfied ghibli was already the domain of the trad adjacent cottage core blogger. now hindutva fascists are using it. the white house is memorialising the violence of deportations with it. cute and cozy is the new fash aesthetic.
honestly: cute & cosy was the old fash aesthetic, too! cute & cosy is one of those political stylings that never goes out of fashion. people will typically point to the documented popularity of disney media amongst both the german citizenry & reich officership (despite their vocal disavowal/disapproval of it in the latter case) to illustrate this as a connection with historical precedence, but it goes far further back than that, to settling the frontiers at least. so much language in legal declarations permitting dispossession and eradicative force in the settler colony emphasises 'tranquility', a return (or accomplishment) of idyllic life. the sell of settlement was beautiful sights & endless opportunities for the intrepid and their families. peaceful life--comfort--is achieved through absenting, very deliberately, certain existences. and so the mere presence of these becomes frictions; threats. and what disturbs can be met with justifiable violence.
every 'silence' is explicitly a 'silencing', and the contemporary understanding of this could honestly be seen very well for years prior to this in how cosy lit + game fans react to any discussion of the appeal & appropriation of the prevalent aesthetics by reactionaries. people often quote baudrillard (iirc?) on the bored suburbanite waiting for something, some phenomenal and exciting violence, to wake them from their malaise, while misunderstanding that the suburbanite does not seek this excitement to live it but to then be one to extinguish it. "cosycore" often can and does--whether deliberately or not--feed into this fantasy of subjugative impetus & divine mandate.
prguitarman
yousharknotpass
gamechangershow
vaporwave
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
