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zifnab25
joined 5 years ago
Genuinely love to break up a combat/dungeon-crawl heavy game with some light-hearted day-in-the-life-of gameplay once in a while. Having the DM describe the lazy cat stretched across the alchemist's countertop, while some mischievious pickpocket tries to nick the rogue's enchanted dagger and the knight errant helps an elderly woman cross the street can add a lot of color to a very number-crunchy game. Picking through a flea market of random niche nebulously useful magic items, while a merchant drops hints about the next sidequest, gives you a real adventurer's vibe.
Genuinely hate having long, drawn out arguments over whether the shopkeep would have the principle material component for my most import spells or basic equipment (there's no bat guano, one swayback horse, and only sixteen arrows in a fantasy city of 50,000 people? god damn, dude). Or digging through spreadsheets to figure out how many javelins the local economy can absorb. Or bickering over whether the Charm Person spell gets us in fight with town guards. Genuinely do not want anyone consulting a series of random charts and tables to determine why we can't get a full night's rest in the town's nicest inn.
Please just make this a fun story to enjoy and not a pedantic fight over the future prospective mathematical efficiency of my stat block in the next combat.
Turns out name recognition is a big part of electoral politics and TV celebrities have a big chunk of the hard part done for them when they run for office.
Given that Zenz is a Christian Dominionist, I assumed the correct way to deal with Wahhabism is a Crusade.
The west still exports a ton of technology
Even that has been changing. The US hasn't been a net-exporter of processing chips since COVID struck. China is approaching parity with the US (assuming they haven't eclipsed us already) and India isn't far behind. California's position as a tech hub is being eclipsed by its roll in FIRE, which makes sense because that's where all the money's at. The US simply does not reward technological innovation. We outsource that shit.
it's unlikely that they'll be able to be completely self sufficient to the point that no one relies on the west.
It is the western states that are ultimately unable to be self-sufficient. That's why the US is so panicked over Taiwan. Their semiconductor industry is the lynchpin of our tech sector. We can't even make cars when Taiwan Semiconductor misses its production quotas.
usa found a chance to displace france from the west africa
glances at Vietnam Not famously a winning move.
euros won't even dream of having independent ressources colonies, and get them from american middleman instead.
I don't doubt for a second that US economic planners are hoping to bend the European states into full-blown satraps, in the same way they dominated Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines. But I also see a wildfire of fascist movements in Western Europe that would suggest these efforts are doomed to fail. Much like the US tried and failed to colonize Germany during the 30s and ended up ceding half the continent to Russia into the end of the century, the game they're playing in Africa (and, to a lesser degree, the Pacific Rim and Latin America) is predicated locals doing a ton of the work for them. That's giving these areas big nationalist movements that ultimately aren't allied with the US as a whole, just a few Trumpian icons. They simply don't have enough juice to occupy every corner of the world all the time all at once.
North of africa is firmly under eu heel due to refugees concenctrations camps already
North Africa is vomiting up refugees as their municipal and state governments collapse under the weight of the legacy of colonial rule. But to say their under the EU's heel. I don't think they are, in any practical sense. Business interests are abandoning the North African states. Tunisia, in particular, used to be this little corporate beach head for O&G and low-wage industry. But as the infrastructure collapses without a civil government to maintain it, business interests are retreating. Exxon is retreating from Libya. Spanish firms are fleeing Algeria for Morocco at the behest of the Madrid government after inter-state tensions resulted in an Algerian blockade of Spanish trade along their coast. Egypt is being bought out and carved up by the Saudis, while what's left of the English and American presence consolidate further around the Suez Canal.
This doesn't look like firm control at all. We're more likely to see a government out of Riyadh or Moscow or Beijing dictating trade flows south of the Mediterranean in another 50 years than for London or Brussells or even DC to hang on.
Yoshi lays eggs but he's not male.
Icarus has infinite arrows but is not of infinite mass
Zelda is the woman the legend is named after, and yet she's not even in 1% of the scenes in any of the games
Nintendo Does Not Make Sense
like in niger: after they kicked out frenchies, usa military mysteriously remained there and usa told them they are fine with them like 3 days ago
Biden's frantically trying to force the lid back on the pot in the Middle East atm. I'm not surprised the US State Department signed Niger a day pass on their coup and politely asked to stick around, rather than going in guns blazing. There was an effort by Blinken last month to put together a "Coalition of the Willing" via Nigeria, but it got fierce push-back in the AU and fizzled out. So they don't have many other cards to play.
If I was a big more ballsy, I might.
But i'mean underlying premise of belt and road is unifying trade in eurasia bypassing sea routing, and making china less vulnerable to the blockade.
That's definitely one angle. But there's also a ton of underdeveloped territory in the central Asian "silk road" corridor that a Chinese land rail/road network could profitably develop. This isn't just about bypassing sea trade to continue selling to the same old western interests. It is also about turning the smattering of landlocks states into growing, modernized industrial trading partners and allies.
Europe seems willing to self-combust by sanctions of that trade and friendshoring usa operations, so chinese trade routes to europe will become less valuable
Access to the Mediterranian isn't just about access to Europe. You've got all of North Africa to trade with, and if they can recover from centuries of colonial rule there's no reason to believe Tunisia or Algeria cannot be as prosperous and wealthy as Spain or France in the next century. Once you've got rail access to Turkey, you're not constrained by the Suez Canal. You also have the opportunity to trade with the much-more-heavily-developed eastern end of Russia and the Balkans.
I don't think the Chinese central planners are simply giving up on sea trade. They seem heavily enough invested in Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But they seem fixated on real growth outside the Pacific Rim in a way that the last century of American-lead development was not. Sri Lanka, Kenya, South Africa, Iran, Venezuela, and Peru are getting the kind of attention they never saw during the 20th century.
Showing up dressed as the "Why Not Both" meme, during my expulsion hearing and immediately getting ejected from the country because