#zzedar2

[manorpunk]

oh absolutely, as far as I’m concerned this post is part of manorpunk’s DNA lol

[couldtheydestroythering]

I feel like a lot of people seem to misunderstand what it takes to resist the Ring. It isn't strength of will or courage or anything like that, in fact in a lot of ways those could be detrimental. What it takes is a lack of ambition. Sam can resist the Ring better than anyone else (except Tom, whose exceptional nature should be obvious) because he doesn't want anything big, he just wants a little garden to take care of. In general, I think background/supporting characters would be better at resisting the Ring than protagonists would, for the same reason that Sam is better at resisting it than Frodo. For example, Nanny Ogg would do far better than Granny Weatherwax.

That's a good way of putting it!

[manorpunk]

Suggestion: Sunny's SOTU speeches have those clickbait titles and thumbnails

So I really liked this idea and, well...

SOTU 206X: New Patch Just Dropped! Texarkana Rework? Buffs for New England? #NEWMETA

(thank you to @kaylasartwork for the fantastic commission!)

[manorpunk]

That "he was a racist, but he was also a dad" bit reminds me of an account I read of a former KKK member who realized he needed to get out when he discovered that his kid had found his robes and was using them to play the villain facing off against a neighboring kid playing Superman. Realizing that his kid saw him as the kind of villain Superman fights was his call to sanity.

oh my god. like obviously I'm glad that he came to his senses and there's one less KKK member in the world but also that's so fucking funny. The dad sitting there like "he thinks... the KKK... is bad? D:"

but I also get it! there are a lot of people for whom 'friends/family' and 'everyone else' might as well be different species. and it's easy to be smug about it but it's something everyone does to different degrees. in fact it's something we *have to* do, "caring about everyone equally" sounds like an admirable goal but what would that even look like? does that mean every time you hear about the latest war or epidemic disease or industrial accident it would be like learning your entire family has died for the umpteenth time? wouldn't "caring about everyone equally" mean being permanently paralyzed with grief? okay I got a little off topic here, props to that kid

[manorpunk]

@zzedar2 :

You might find some inspiration here

oh huh neat, I actually saw this video independently last week and it is a good video. But yeah, as a Brett Devereaux Reader, I’ve kept principles similar to this in mind for the world-building. A lot of the reason that the autonomous midwest region is the way that it is is because it’s a place full of 1. massive navigable rivers and 2. a shitton of farming towns and farmhouses full of tractors and generators and workshops and other tools that would be very useful for anyone looking to get the basics working again. So it’s basically thousands of people independently speed-running the Sedentary Bandit theory: start off as wandering shitkicking bandits, then realize “wait if we just set up shop in this grain elevator and protect it from *other* bandits then the peons can make booze and stuff for us” and stumble into local governance. That’s also what the grey market is - a bunch of people doing procurement fraud on the Mississippi river where valuable manufactured goods can flow outwards to the whole midwest.

Which is also why it’s such an intractable problem for the Usonian Union: you want to re-incorporate a big place, which means setting up official markets that you can tax and regulate. But if you crack down too hard on the grey market right away then the very people you want to win over are going to be pissed because they’re suddenly unable to get stuff like medicine and tools through the usual channels. So, in the grand American tradition, everyone ignores it and hopes it will eventually go away on its own.

fun fact: one of the biggest figures of the grey market is “Cahokia Joe,” a beefy Osage guy and all-around cool dude who knows every tributary and hiding spot along the Mississippi. When anon meets him she’s like “so you have a command grab right” and Cahokia Joe is like “what” and anon’s like “you’re a beefy native american so I just figured you would have a command grab. wait is that racist? I think that might be racist” and Cahokia Joe is like “what the fuck are you talking about” and then later Cahokia Joe comes to the rescue by whipping out the 0-frame Super Red River Buster and anon’s like “I KNEW IT”

[manorpunk]

I think it would be funny if instead of talking about "the twentieth century" they talked about "the nineteen hundreds"

me when the wifi in my bunker goes out so my sexbot can't livestream Sunny's mommydom ASMR: "ugh what is this, the frickin nineteen hundreds?"

[manorpunk]

Suggestion: someone wants to misgender Anon but assumes all foreign languages follow the same patterns as Spanish and so calls her a Ninjo.

omg

[manorpunk]

What is the status of Wikipedia in the future? (Was going through some old likes and found this post, which made me think there's potential for some interesting themes here)

Oooh, good question.

although the infrastructure failures of 203X caused the destruction of countless server farms and data centers, much of wikipedia survived through a variety of methods - large institutions like the archives of the provisional Boswash government, the patronage network of the Zuckerberg-Lorraine dynasty, and the work of the Poaster’s Guild, as well as smaller, unofficial channels like the Cult of the Throbber (motto: “it’s not what it sounds like”) and the followers of the “Codes of Ascension,” a frontier heresy based on isekai fantasy and MMOs which claims that the cycle of samsara can only be escaped by sufficiently grinding one’s stats in the physical world, and venerates the reproduction and transmission of knowledge as “the infinite XP sharing hack.”

There are proposals to resurrect the wikimedia foundation making their way through neo-congress, and Sunny Roosevelt has stated she would agree to such a proposal, “but only if I get to be the featured article of the day every day for the rest of forever. And it’s gotta link to my merch site.” Critics have attacked Sunny’s comments as a shameless attempt at turning a foundational database of information into yet another publicity stunt, while Sunny’s supporters have speculated that she is in fact best girl and she deserves all the featured articles.