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[kiridune]

[kiridune]

I love the idea of the clones (sans obedience chips) hear about the Jedi's supposed coup and are like, "About time!"

Alpha-17, receiving Order 66 on Kamino: ugh, the Jedi are getting such a bad grade in staging a coup Alpha-17, packing up his guns and comm'ing a few of the other Alphas: time to go show them how it's done

[kiridune]

love to see the ExploreCorp members that wander back in out of the frontier and get shanghaied by Luke who's just ecstatic to meet a classically trained Jedi.

Order 66 and the inquisitors afterward wiped out the Knight Corps of the Jedi Order very effectively, but I wonder how the other 4 branches made it.

AgraCorp: Literal sitting ducks. They would have presumably been gathered in certain places and would have been bombed from orbit while the planet was swept for stragglers. <1% survive.

EduCorp: You know how most Masters died for their padawans? This is that but they have even less of a chance. 1-2% Survive.

KnightCorp: We've seen this one. A year or two after the order the survival rate is at maybe 5%.

MediCorp: Scattered, good reason for the local to want to hide them. Most of the doctors on more remote worlds survive. Sorry to the core world guys. I'd say ~20% survival rate.

ExploreCorp: Some of these guys don't even know something is wrong until their supply drops don't show up. These are the field researchers and surveyor of the Jedi who spend all their time in wild space. Most of them peace out. >50% survival rate.

[kiridune]

Alpha-17 is returned to the past, at a point a few years before his creation, from soon after Order 66 and all that ensued

his first step, naturally, was to kill Jango Fett

from there, it was only logical for him to step into the man's life as a bounty hunter (he's got to eat somehow, and it's not like he doesn't more than live up to the Prime's reputation)

but then, despite refusing the bounty on Vosa, is still cornered by a very recognizable Sith and ominously offered the Kamino job

he cannot let himself hesitate to accept it

his first task is to recruit a group of 'trainers', ones he believes are loyal to him (or can be made so)(and, if not, that he can easily dispose of) and brings them all to Kamino, and bides his time

he waits until the first batches of his siblings are born, playing along about just long enough so that his supporters can watch and learn how to continue their operation without requiring the Kaminoan's involvement

and then he strikes, removing them from the picture, and immediately modifies the cloning contract on record:

the clones he's raising are all for the Jedi, and in the name of the one Jedi he actually trusts them to

so when Kenobi is lured to Kamino by the Sith's machinations several years later, it's only Alpha-17 waiting for him in the rain on that landing platform

and all he says in greeting is, "Kenobi, good, you finally made it. Here's the boys, we're killing the Sith, are you coming or do you need any more time to prepare"

and proceeds to not wait for the man's answer as he drags him along through the final preparations for their mass departure for Coruscant, dodging meaningfully addressing any of his questions by fobbing him off onto his curious and delighted younger siblings who only have vague ideas of Alpha-17's plans

when they arrive, he plays along with the Chancellor just long enough to get close so he can cut the head off that snake directly, along with several other key Imperial Senators and ambitious would-have-been military personnel

he immediately declares Kenobi the Emperor to a crowd of aghast politicians (and an equally shocked Kenobi)

Anakin, hearing this news, swiftly returns from the solo mission that the late Chancellor had dispatched him on, furious that his Master has taken over the political system without inviting him to help 💔

he's equally swiftly mollified when, upon his arrival, Alpha-17 intercepts his impending meltdown by immediately turning him back around to be dispatched on missions important to securing their new Empire

[kiridune]

Stellaris is a fascinating mess of systems that I could talk forever about. For those unaware, it’s a grand strategy game that takes place in a galaxy filled with different alien nations. If you don’t know what a grand strategy game is then google it or something I’m not your mother.

Anyway one of my favorite little tidbits is one of the fundamental underpinnings of how diplomacy works, which is the relationship score. Your relationship with another empire is the sum of two numbers, your opinion of them (on a scale from something like -1500 to 1500 or something like that), and their opinion of you. These two numbers are themselves sums of several different factors such as diplomatic arrangements you’ve made, compatibility of political ideology, frequency with which you bathe, etcetera.

Now the part I want to talk about *specifically* is the basic diplomatic action you almost always have available to you: “Improve Relations”. It’s the most basic idea: you ship over a diplomatic envoy to shake their least slimy tendrils and say nice things about the way they’ve decorated the place. This improves their opinion of you, which as you may remember, makes your relationship as a whole go in the positive direction. Pretty simple.

Now the funny part is that. Well. The developers decided that obviously you need the opposite option. You need a way to say “I DON’T want to be friends with that alien empire, they bathe far too frequently for my tastes”. And what’s the opposite of Improving Relations, of course? Why, Harming Relations! So you. You send them an envoy. Whose entire job is to just… piss these people off. To shake the incorrect tendril and insult their aesthetic senses just because they happen to be a race of sentient cubes. You make them hate you, because you already don’t like them, and I guess you feel awkward about it not being mutual? And the funniest thing is that AI-controlled nations will, of course, use this option! If you’re trying to butter up the powerful, belligerent warmongering star empire next to you because you’re a race of peace-loving snails and you’ve spent this entire time building megamalls in fucking space instead of, like, military installations, that empire will go “oh no you don’t” and send one of their envoys over to start calling you a poopy stinky slimeball, resulting in a net zero change in your relationship score with them. Of course, this means that, technically, they have an extremely high opinion of you after a while, because the envoy you’ve sent over is affecting their opinion, and the one they’ve sent over is affecting yours, but you know, let’s not think too hard about that.

Oh, and there’s uh, already another mechanic for lowering their opinion of you. It’s the “insult” diplomacy option. So you can like, ring up the Borg or whoever, ask them if you can speak to Hugh Jass, and then hang up on them when they yell at you. So the whole system is redundant but nevermind.

Stellaris, everybody!

[kiridune]

That's a whole new level.

[kiridune]

Same

[kiridune]

you ever think about how in star wars the four heroes that overthrew the tyrannical empire and inagurated a new government are the princess of a tragically destroyed planet, a wisecracking rogue, the last heir of a religious order of wizards who do actual literal magic, and.........a city mayor

[kiridune]

thinking wistfully once again about the au where fox accidentally kills palpatine, and then the whole coruscant guard loyally weekend-at-bernies the chancellor of the republic around for three days, trying to find a way to fake palpatine’s public death in a way that won’t lead back to their commander before he can break out of the holding cell thorn has him in and actually turn himself in for murder to someone who cares.

[kiridune]

Concept: in a setting where vampires exist and can only be harmed by symbols of faith (crucifixes, etc.), a James Randi-style skeptic/supernatural debunker witnesses his family murdered by vampires, and dedicated his life to hunting down what he believes are a cabal of ordinary serial killers with a blood fetish and some cheap plastic fangs. They die when he shoots them with an ordinary gun, granted holy status by the sheer force of his belief that they are actually just ordinary humans who will die when shot.

[kiridune]

Can I have "Reasons to Homeschool for $500?"

Seriously though, I love history and my parents did a phenomenal job of facilitating that. But that does mean I do have a double dose.

[kiridune]

ajedelman

Simple yet effective peace plan.

[kiridune]

“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.

“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.

“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”

Taylor Tomlinson, Look At You (2022)

[kiridune]

[kiridune]

Give Biden 4 more years!

[kiridune]