u/OisforOwesome

So what they're saying is, there's a chance.

Obviously WotC has a very specific vibe they're going for, if the reveal animation is anything to go by. I'm making this post after watching that but before any more reading on the upcoming release; but before I do that, I want to ask the board:

What, for you, is the tone 2e and 4e Dark Sun was aiming for?

If possible, please express this without referencing the 5e announcement. I want to see what people's thoughts are isolated from the new release if at all possible.

Their new evasion mechanic better be called Seahorsemanship or we riot.

Cadbury Velvet is Cadbury's latest effort to part us from our money, and when a bunch of dated stock went on clearance I finally checked it out.

The label promises 40% more cocoa and 25% more milk, which, great, you can actually taste the extra effort - but I gotta say, and I'm willing to put this down to my encroaching old age and the attendant "back in my day" nostalgia - doesn't this just taste like Cadbury used to taste before production in Dunedin was shut down?

It's better than the regular stuff. I don't think it's better than Whittakers and I think it's a bit rich be charging premium pricing for the thing we used to take as the baseline.

Anyway: Any other old fogeys feel the same, or am I going doolally?

There are two things this series is known for:

1. Its absolutely dogshit anti-sex-worker sexual politics

2. The fan base going apeshit over a manga chapter where the MC gets an erection in a swimming pool imagining a love interest with another man.

But, like, within the first 2 minutes of the anime, Kazuya says he is aroused at the thought of his ex Mami having a new boyfriend. A lot of mileage is milked out of the jealousy he feels that his sex worker love interest has other clients or his embarrassment that he would feel if someone finds out about his sexual experience or lack thereof.

The cuckoldry is essential to the premise. The only reason anyone could miss it is if they have the media comprehension of the average weeb.

++++Thought of the Day: An Open Mind Is As A Fortress Unguarded++++

TITLE: Survey of Unorthodox Methods of Warfare: The Tertium Campaign As Borderline Logistical Heresy AUTHOR: [ >!REDACTED!< ], Logis Administratum, Adeptus Administratum DATE: 999.M41 - 012.M42 (Temporal Confidence Interval disputed)

The Tertium Campaign is an oddity within the context of wider Imperial military ventures. Not because of its leadership - Inquisitors are of course authorised to conduct planetary scale warfare should the threat to the Imperium require it, and have broad authority to requisition men and material to this end - but because of the internal organizing principle of the so-called "Rejects" Inquisitor Grendyll has forged into a lethal and disposable fighting force.

Recruited from the lower castes of Tertium (Tithe grades LXVI and below), the Rejects are a motley collection of disgraced Adeptus Militratum veterans, un- or barely-sanctioned psykers, fanatical crusaders answering the Inquisition's call to martyrdom, or outright Hive Ganger scum brought onto Grendyll's flagship, the Mourningstar, and dispatched in four-man commando teams to conduct asymmetrical guerilla warfare against the dark forces besieging Hive Tertium on Atoma Prime.

(Recent developments have seen members of the Mechanicum's military levies, the Skitarii, and Adeptus Arbites dispatched to accompany these Rejects).

Small, elite units within the Imperium are common enough, but tend to fall within two main logistical camps: Lone operators raised since birth or from a young age, equipped with specialized wargear and unique training to specialise in a given method of war as seen in the Departmento >!REDACTED!<, or highly regimented crack troops raised alongside or recruited from Adeptus Militarum regiments, as in the case of Tempestus Scions.

The Rejects programme, however, is to a large extent left to their own devices. A Scion is issued their armour, weapons, and rations by the Munitorium and resupply is handled by the Quartermaster Corp in accordance to doctrine and writ; a Reject, however, is free to choose their own armament and develop their training off their own initiative, and it is left to their judgement how best to prepare for a given task before them.

Indeed, individual Rejects may select when and even which missions they want to be deployed on (provided they meet minimum deployment thresholds)- a level of latitude unheard of in any other theatre of war.

Inquisitor Grendyll has established what could only be called a market for wargear. The Mourningstar, the ship Grendyll has established as the flagship for the Tertium campaign, has a deck devoted to this commerce. At any given moment dozens of Rejects can be found bartering with script issued by the Warband or materials scrounged during sorties, exchanging these tokens at 'Company stores' for weapons or for alterations to weapons they have already acquired.

Access to different kinds of weapons is governed by a "trust level," a metric which tracks how many missions a Reject has successfully completed. While loyalty metrics are commonplace in the Empire, and rightly so, for Loyalty to the Emperor is the foremost virtue to be cultivated and disloyalty the earliest indicator of heretical conduct, it is almost unheard of for the subjects of these metrics to be made aware of its existence and to be able to track the precise values of this metric.

Once a Reject has gathered enough script to equip themselves with reliable weapons, one might think that they would have no further use for the Ordo Dockets and other script issued to them in exchange for their services. Not so: In parallel to weapons of war the Rejects have access to accoutrements and fashions through the Commissary. The decks of the Mourningstar are as much a fashion show to rival the whims of the High Lords of Terra (Blessed by His Light). The only thing that does not appear to be for sale are rations, with crew and conscript alike fed and watered at the appropriate ration stations in accordance with regular Munitorium doctrine.

Advocates for this system will say that the combination of incentives in this market system encourages individual initiative and exemplary performance, as the Rejects compete with each other to maximise their individual rewards in both script and Trust Level points.

A literature review for similar methods of organisation finds similarities with the models of the Ordo Neoliberalis, a sect within the Administratum that argues for decentralized and financialized systems of production and distribution. For a full discussion on the case for and against the Ordo Neoliberalis, refer to appendix MCMXVIII of this report for thorough analysis.

It is however a contentious model. Its proponents will argue that setting Imperial Tithes centrally at Holy Terra many light years (and thanks to Warp temporal discrepancies, many actual years) distant from the tributary worlds is inefficient and risks over-burdening the economies of those tributaries; better to leave Planetary Governors to their own devices to maximise tithes in exchange for rewards and prestige for their contributions to the Imperium. Greed, they say, is not a temptation to fall into the arms of the Archenemy, but rather a powerful motivation that can be harnessed to the needs of Imperial Truth.

Critics however will point to the many, many, many examples of Planetary Governors shirking their responsibilities for personal enrichment and aggrandizement, even falling to treachery and heresy as a result, as evidence that this way is not only inefficient, but borderline heretical. Any productivity gains are illusory; a Throne may purchase a bullet or a ration, but cannot in itself slay a heretic or feed a martyr. What does it profit the Emperor, to have the wealth of worlds, but allow a traitor to live in luxury?

In the case of the Tertium campaign, we can see the shortcomings of the market-devolved model. Every day thousands of Reject strike teams are dispatched from the Mourningstar, and succeed or fail, any given strike team will slay hundreds of traitors and heretics in the name of the Emperor, with an acceptable margin of Martyrdom for their efforts.

However, in the words of Sergeant-Major Morrow: "Kill one heretic, nothing changes. Kill a thousand, raises a smile, but not much else." Despite years of effort, the battle for Tertium remains at a strategic stalemate. One Reject interviewed for this report put it succinctly: "I feel like I've done all this before."

Despite all the intelligence gathered, Moebian steel fabricated, and Heretical rituals foiled, Hive Tertium remains in the grip of servants of the Archenemy. Individual Rejects can boast the finest wargear and most splendid garb, can count scores of foes of the Empire slain on their efforts, and yet the war as a whole seems a quagmire. The slaughter of the enemies of Mankind is a reward in its own right, and yet every year spent on grueling endless war is a year not spent mustering Guard legions and sending Tithes for the defense of the wider Empire.

Whether Inquisitor Grendyll's experiment is a success or a failure we will only know in the fullness of time, and whether a more conventional campaign would see greater or lesser success is a counter-factual that this scribe lacks the holy datum to fabricate an informed conjecture. What is the case is that Atoma and Tertium represent a unique case for study, and as such this scribe wishes to petition for a Logis Administratum Clerk Cadet Corp to better document and evaluate this unique experiment.

May His Light Bring Justice And Purity To Humanity's Darkest Hour,

The Emperor Protects,

High Scribe >!REDACTED!<, Logis Administratum.

You know who you are. You track box office numbers like other guys track baseball stats. You spend hours arguing over whether the Snyderverse or the Phase 1 & 2 MCU were better, and you feel personally attacked when your favourite IP doesn't get any Oscar noms. You don't necessarily power scale, but you do have very firm opinions on producer power-scaling; you are convinced that Producer A is poison to everything they touch (even though you only have a vague idea what producers actually do per se).

Above all, you are very invested in the revenue earned by one picture or another, and you use this as a direct metric for the quality of the film. You believe this is an objective measure, way better than critic scores, what do those eggheads know about what really makes a film good anyway?

Film-making for you is a question of which brand is doing better in ticket sales, and you talk about your favourite intellectual properties doing well or not more or less entirely in sales terms.

When Sony flirted with the idea of withholding Spider-Man from MCU films in exchange for a higher cut of the proceeds, you took Marvel's side reflexively arguing passionately that because Marvel had earned more money with Homecoming than the last ASM films that meant they deserved the character.

In short, you treat corporate intellectual property revenue farming as a sport and make the relative fortunes of billion dollar companies a core part of your personal identity.

This has to stop. It needs to stop. I don't care about Kathleen Kennedy or Bob Iger or David Zazlov. They certainly don't care about you. They don't even care about the characters and films under their management.

What you should care about is art, and artists. You should care about whether a film brings you joy or makes you feel something. You should care that the people who make the films, at all levels and in every role, are treated with dignity and paid for their labour.

I really don't care if Superhero Movie X has a poor box office; I care if the movie is good. The box office question only really matters in terms of The Money deciding whether or not the people who really matter - the artists who make the movie - get to make another one. Beyond that, dick-riding for corporations is deeply embarrassing and anyone who does so needs to feel bad for it.

Its not just this sub. It seems like every fandom related subreddit is going through a wave of Digital Circus Posting and I have no idea what the fuck it is or why its popular, at least 55% of posters seem to actually hate the show, and the art style is deliberately designed to hurt my eyeballs.

So... is there a *there* there that I'm not seeing? Or can I safely file it in the "things I'm too middle aged to get" / "baby's first edgy media" drawer and ignore it?

This made the 6pm news here in New Zealand but I'm not exactly seeing it blowing up in political chatter. Are we just so numb to the idea that yes of course people want to assassinate Trump and billionaires duh that its not really worth reporting?

&#x200B;

Also, the group was reported here as "heavily armed TikTokers" which is an amazing turn of phrase.