#That Ive collected a lot of thoughts on the game as a whole

[crimescrimson]

Rebecca Chambers in Resident Evil Remastered (2002)

[uldahstreetrat]

Im trying to take note of real world influences in XIV for some projects going forward, like languages used in areas (French names in Ishgard, Roman terms in Garlemald) or like in aesthetics I suppose (like Radz-at-han in particular reminds me of Istanbul), and I'd like to hear others' thoughts about those kinds of influences that they've noticed

(little more context on things im working on under the cut)

right now this has a lot to do with things like stamps lmao I have in fact gotten kinda into stamp collecting now and I'd like to design some for XIV areas based on similar irl counterpart countries? like regular stamps and stuff like a sort of Garlean version of US postal war savings stamps? so having irl countries to reference for stamp styles would be helpful to like figure that stuff out

and honestly all of this is just part of making a physical copy of Q'ihnn's journal more complicated than it needs to be but never let it be said that I dont have a love of unnecessarily dense world building

plus by having a list of reference countries I can also build out other kinds of like, souvenirs? in the journal from the places visited across msq - a lot of things I see people keep in journals, especially travel ones, are stuff like wrappers or other packaging, pieces of maps, receipts (that's its own rabbit hole ive gone down), ticket stubs, and other various little paper things along with photos and drawings (which are much easier to manage in comparison)

cause a lot of this shit doesnt extensively exist within the game often beyond a mention in a stray line of dialogue or two so there's advantages to having irl cultural and historical reference to make something that feels real - plus im often off in lala fantasy land in my head because im stuck at home a lot, im not exactly well traveled, so im sure its easy for me to miss especially like language use in certain areas (I didnt even notice how French Ishgardian names were until someone else made a joke about it, it just doesnt occur to me)

like some of these influences are fairly obvious, right, like Doma and Kugane being Japanese inspired and Greek influence around Sharlayan (which the Greek/Roman dichotomy that Sharlayan and Garlemald have going on is its own whole thing I could go into btw they're so similar yet different in such interesting ways) - but places like Ul'dah?? not a clue. Ala Mhigo? no idea. The Crystarium and Eulmore in the first??? oh I'd put my head through a wall trying to thing of a real world counterpart for reference

granted now having said that someone is going to point out something obvious that I just entirely missed some way or another lmao but like that's why im asking, right? anyway if you have nerd ass thoughts too just hit me up

[theslimeologist]

curious as to how you feel about slime rancher's gameplay as a whole, if you wanna talk about it

oh boy.

slime rancher has a unique chaos-focused gameplay design unlike any other game ive played while also going for a chill farming vibe. after years of playing the first game, and just a handful of hours in the second.. i believe the gameplay loop and level design to be the reason I havent played the series in recent years.

everything in slime rancher is random.

crop yield, crop grow time, slime spawns, slimes feeding themselves, everything. and this is the core, foundational game design philosophy they’ve dedicated themselves to. and they’ve doubled down on the randomness in sr2.

shop stock is random every day. unlocking blueprints come unpredictably. resource nodes are randomly scattered about. weather, which can dictate slime AND material spawning, is 100% random. not even to what weather happens, but what DEGREE the weather is.

this much random chance has made the series appeal to me less and less with time. i love to strategize beyond all else in a farming game, and slime rancher’s “chill chaos” just doesnt accommodate my style of gameplay anymore. i want resource extractors. i want to have a reliable income in terms of resources so i can do all the incredible decorating they’ve added.. but i dont think anything could get me to play hundreds of hours of sr2 to collect resources by hand at the mercy of rng. i did this with gilded gingers for fun. i never wanted to do that for EVERYTHING.

now, to look at sr2’s gameplay and design decisions more closely..

slimes live in corrals. boxes. this is one thing i thought could have always been expanded on. enclosures are as simple as ever, essentially what they always were right from sr1 beta. slimes being fed are still dictated by the chance of food hitting their mouths at the right angle, right time, with the slime in the right mood. it just doesnt work reliably, leading to slime chaos despite any player’s best efforts. the devs seem to see this as part of the game, and not something that could be revolutionized or improved upon. the ranch expansions are as simple as ever. we can decorate them though…! i guess…! i wish there was more thought and love put into the ranching. more involved slime care. i had a lot of ideas i never drew down for how things could change..

moving on to the level design itself, the areas in sr2 feel more confusing than ever for me to navigate. and ive stubbornly believed that is not on me. the islands are focused on experiencing beauty and wonder, but not really designed with normal gameplay quirks that can help players navigate without even knowing they’re being helped. like landmarks. sr2 has the volcano, split tree and the conservatory. these three things are actually pretty difficult to spot in most locations, which really fucking sucks. if you’re lost on the sr2 map, they really just want you to open the map or wander. another thing that has always bugged me a TON, is in the rainbow fields there is a fucking death drop into water that looks like youre walking home. like…. LIKE???? another thing that feels especially controversial to point out is how the super-saturated aesthetic of every area can make an area feel samey, confusing even. rainbow fields have rainbows everywhere. imo, you could have gone for that idea while having brightly coloured trees, rocks, grass, that are DIFFERENT COLOURS. FOR CONTRAST. pick bright colours that complement eachother and sculpt the world with it. when i think of rainbow fields, i honestly can only imagine the purply blue grass and moss on grey stones…

it feels as though sr2 was all about pushing the teams creative and aesthetic abilities with a huge sacrifice to regular gameplay design. a slime rancher sequel was an opportunity to build anew from the ground up and address huge issues with 1’s unreliability due to physics and loading zones, etc. the full game isnt out yet so i cant speak on whether they’ll ever take these kinds of issues into consideration in future patches.

anyway at the end of the day, for a game so focused on aesthetic, slime rancher 2 doesnt even have properly textured tangle largos. I wont bother to look or photograph them all myself because tangles are only from rare weather. but next time you’re in game, check out that flat batty tangle flower for yourself. until that flower gets a proper texture patch i dont really have much else to say.

[demdozeguys]

Strap in for a long one, because it's time for:

REVIEWING AND RANKING EVERY GAME I GOT FROM THE STEAM SUMMER SALE

ramblings under the cut:

UNRANKED: ULTRA STREET FIGHTER IV

okay look I know I said I'd be ranking all of these but putting a fighting game up against six linear-progression single-player adventure type games feels a bit unfair.

as for whether I liked it: yeah it's alright. it's street fighter, it's fun. only time will tell how much my brother and I will get out of it, but I'm already feeling like I don't like it quite as much as 5. how much of that is due to 4 not having Urien is anyone's guess.

#6: CROW COUNTRY

I'm gonna be honest I didn't fuck with this game nearly as much as I thought I would.

maybe it's because I'm new to the genre. maybe it's because I've been spoiled by autosave. or maybe it's just because I can't aim to save my life. but losing upwards of 20 minutes of progress every time some creature I failed to hit or juke tagged me one too many times got frustrating pretty fast.

I didn't hate my time with Crow Country. the environments are gorgeous, the story kept me intrigued, and filling out my mental list of "oh shit I can go here now"s was still satisfying. if this is your thing don't let me dissuade you, I just wasn't built for it.

#5: KAMIKO

Kamiko is decent fun, but there's not really a whole lot to say about it. It's a short and sweet zelda-esque game where the meat of the playtime comes from trying to go through it as fast as possible, and as you'll see later I happen to enjoy going fast. enjoyable, but not super meaty. if you like routing and time management give it a shot.

#4: PONY ISLAND

Alright, this is where we get into the Good Shit.

Pony Island is a game in which you play a game called Pony Island made by The Devil From The Bible. every few minutes there's some new weird meta setpiece to keep you on your toes, plus the code puzzles and pony sections between are solid fun on their own. it's a great time. and if you're interested, there's a pretty solid reward for getting 100%.

if I had to dock points, it didn't seem to have much in the way of replayability, but that's not a huge dealbreaker. I really need to get my hands on Inscryption now.....

#3: SPOOKY'S JUMPSCARE MANSION REMASTERED

I'm not normally big on horror but Spooky's kept me coming back. despite going into it already knowing what all the specimens did, they managed to keep me on the edge of my seat because you never know when they're going to show up. combine the legitimate building terror with an offbeat and self-aware sense of humor and you have a damn fun package.

it's worth noting that as of writing this, I've only completed the main story. the DLC campaigns probably won't affect the final ranking? but I have a feeling they'll make me appreciate the game more.

#2: PEPPER GRINDER

Pepper Grinder is fucking awesome.

The level design is great, the soundtrack rips, and just moving around with the core gimmick of "what if you could drill and then jump out" is so good. I just really wish there was more of it.

I was able to get all the major in-level collectibles and reach the end in under 3 hours. the bulk of my playtime came from the time trials, which do manage to hit a sweet spot of encouraging you to push yourself without requiring CBT perfection. demolishing the gold medal on the final boss took me well over an hour's worth of attempts and may have been one of the most viscerally satisfying challenges I've ever completed in a game.

Pepper Grinder is really, really cool. But if it had another world's worth of levels it would be even cooler.

#1: CHICORY: A COLORFUL TALE

Man. I fucking love Chicory.

The vibes are immacculate. The story made me really feel for these gay little animals. The soundtrack is delightful (Lena Raine, everybody!). The exploration is rewarding. The painting mechanics made me actively want to go back to areas I'd already been to and recolor them better than I did originally, which is like. not something most games do. You can even draw penises everywhere if you want. There's something for everybody.

I'm having a hard time putting down exactly what made me fall head over heels for this game as much as I did - especially when I wasn't expecting to going into it. Maybe it was just in the right place at the right time. No matter how it cheated the system, Chicory is easily the best game I picked up.

And that's that. this was my first time doing something like this (especially on tumblr) so it felt kinda weird but idk lmk if I planted any seeds in your brain

[askata]

a thought about cos because Ive been playing it lately and Im so fascinated by it in some way, so heres what I think about it

theres a lot of talk around the whole idea of the game itself, a lot of arguing over what is right and what is wrong. carebears, kos, that kind of stuff. its a topic for a lot of survival games, its really only tradition. I personally dont think theres any specific way it should be played. the mechanics are there, but its all a suggestion and no one can stop you from how you play with it

its a survival game with social and cosmetic aspects, it also encourages strategy but will not make it a dire mechanic of your run. it allows room to breathe and sit and talk but not without the looming threat of some larger creature. it balances the risk of death with the social comfort of the open map and chat

its not a forgiving game in many aspects (specifically the death point system (I used to farm points, its hell)) but its also not entirely unempathetic. you can be rewarded for your work and dedication, and there are so many positive aspects of giving it a try instead of tossing in the towel. just because it says you might not win against something doesnt mean its not worth the fight, and often times its more satisfying to die fighting than to die trying to escape

when you sit back to think about it, its a beautifully balanced game. sure, the pay system can seem really unfair, and the economy side of things can be strange. it can also be extremely frustrating to be a collector or someone who leans into the trade side of things, but I think the frustration of it is intentional. its not meant to be easy, and thats what makes it so fun!!

Im not a huge trader, seller, buyer, whatever. I dont really like collecting things either. I like playing as creatures I feel confident handling and fighting with. I like to socialize, but I also love the anxiety of being a creature in a world of other strange and unpredictable creatures. the constant threat of death is a thrill that enriches the positive feelings of survival and risk taking

you start to feel proud of yourself, and then you begin to accept your losses when they come around. fairness goes both ways, you cant always win and call it an equal balance

I love seeing people have fun, even if that fun is mindless slaughter or the aggressive helicopter parent treatment. admittedly, Ive been under every single one of the labels you could think of, outside of the roleplay stuff. Ive kosed, Ive carebeared, Ive been an anklebiter, Ive logged before, Ive whatever.

(never really got into roleplaying on there, unless you count being in a pack of the same creature and acting in a "lore accurate" way (hunting, traveling together, nesting, etc etc) but I dont mind the roleplayers. you guys are cool, and I respect the determination despite how people talk about you guys. you do you, just be safe and follow the rules :) ❤️)

what matters is that I find it to be both mechanically and mentally rewarding. I love this game, even though it sucks sometimes, and it glitches out, and hackers can be a bit of a pain if theyre mass killing, but whatever!!! games have flaws, and Im happy with that

anyway, this was a big ramble. I appreciate this game a lot, I love it for what it is, and its super fun to get home after a long day and be weird and happy without worrying about much else

[nutzworth]

today begins my homestuck reread. i wanted to start it yesterday january 1, 2024 but i got busy. so we begin today

PREFACE: i wanted to download the unofficial collection and read it thus, but it didnt WORK cus of my accursed mac. so. im on the unofficial collection website. also i debated on how exactly to do my liveblogging and decided on actually liveblogging in my friend's discord server and then translating the day's reading to text on tumblr. so!

DAY 1: JANUARY 2, 2024

STATS: read for ~3 hours pages read: 1-381. 380 pages slur count: 3. john, rose, dave. all r slur silly count: 3. jade, rose, rose. jade about dave; rose about herself piss count: 1/3. howie mandel strikes again

THOUGHTS:

ive found a lot of overlooked aspects of especially john and dave. whether or not these are "i never noticed she was holding corn on the plate!" encanto aspects or not is undecided. people tend to interpret john as having eaten cake his whole LIFE when instead it was just on 4/13 because it was his birthday. dave has A BUNCH of ironic blogs and websites that he never shows. ive only seen sbahj and his personal blog so that was kind of a shocker to me. thats all the overlooked aspects i guess lol in addition to john talk: all of his dad's harlequin merchandise is soooo cute. i wouldnt be annoyed if my dad put all this harlequin stuff in my house theyre so silly and bright dave is REALLY ANNOYING. i kind of forgot. he sounds so different from how he sounds later in the comic and how he does in my head. he does a rap in the pages i read and the first part was good but the second part was bad. rose and her relationship with her mom is JUST like me fr...... ugh. rose is so me but if i was like way pettier. something about them strikes me. mommy issues i guess. being spiteful towards your mother when your mother is just trying her best. something. oh well i was thinking about the strilondes and their conceptions of irony and its been affecting how i interpret the text. dirk and rose get irony; dave and roxy do not. dave tries to mimic what he sees in bro, but only scratches the surface of true mind games. he fails at being ironic, though he is cool i guess (for other reasons). rose interprets her mother's vaccuuming as an "ironic housewife routine" which broke my heart. rose gets irony; roxy does not. (this is also how their one-sided passive aggressive one-upmanship operates. rose is ironic; roxy is not). ive also been keeping track of the times in canon which is also corn on the plate level but whatever. johns doing this all at FIVE PM. brother thats dinner time for me. a meteors coming for you and youre playing this game and suddenly youre in another dimension and its FIVE THIRTY! ugh. daves like oh man i gotta fight my bro to get a sburb game to save my buddy rose and its like SEVEN PM! jesus! so night time. some dirk and dave mirrors: manbro bukkake theater. didnt notice dave said that?!??! ben stiller instead of rainbow dash above the closet door. awesome. sylladexes and fetch modii are crazy and i think its so interesting how hussie focuses on them so much in these first acts. i saw something a while ago about how fetch modii mirror people's thought processes and thought it was cool. dave thinking STOP! = 7 and then that releasing his sword (in 7 spot) was really cool. i love fetch modii they make no sense also some pages havent been working and its kind of driving me up the wall :-/ some flashes dont have sound and daves sound mixer DIDNT WORK AT ALL! but thats fine rather that than one of the gaming flashes where you walk around.

think thats it for today. thanks everypony

[thesherrinfordfacility]

hello! first of all i really, really love your metas and it's such a joy to read them ❤️ i'd be very interested to know what you think aziraphale's smile in the elevator meant? i've been a bit baffled by it for a long time and i just cannot come to a conclusion. sorry if this has been asked before/you've already written about it!

hi anon!!!💕 that's really kind of you to say, thank you!!!

so i did indeed answer a similar ask, but it was a while ago now, so ive just reread through to see if my opinion remains the same (oftentimes it frankly varies with the wind), and im still reasonably of the mindset that his smile is aziraphale coming up with a plan/doubling down on some kind of 'im not here to go along with your plan, im here to make a difference'.

now a lot of that conclusion does hinge on my personal thought that aziraphale is aware that metatron is trying to play him, that there is an unspoken threat or intimidation going on, and that aziraphale has just gone through the FF thinking he has no choice but to go back to heaven, lest he (and crowley, potentially) be put in danger if he doesn't. imo he's entered the FF with the mindset of 'making a difference', bc if he doesn't have a choice in the matter, he might as well go and instead further his own agenda whilst he's there. but do it with crowley, because they're on the same side.

essentially, i think aziraphale is speaking throughout the whole FF in a way that doesn't tip off the metatron that he's anything other than heaven's man, and also speaking in a way that doesn't alert crowley to the situation that they'd be in if aziraphale were to refuse the promotion. the blindside is that crowley understandably refuses to come with him, kisses him as a last-ditch attempt for him to stay, and leaves when aziraphale deals the killing blow - and the metatron drops the bombshell that is the second coming.

so when he's in the lift, you visibly see him start to panic - one last look at crowley, deep breath, and into the lift, all before he starts to breath heavily through his mouth, face lax in shock, etc. but as we hit the credits, he's stiffened up, gotten himself under controlled, and schooled his face.

frankly, i find these expressions way more alarming than the ending smile itself, but i genuinely think it's aziraphale running through everything he knows in his head, attempting to sift through possible ways in which he can make his first step, whilst keeping his expression as calm and collected as possible infront of the metatron. kinda like a game of chess - white has made its opening move, and he's running through all the different responses that could set the foundation for the entire match. i see aziraphale as a very capable analytical thinker, so - for me - this tracks.

and then it all culminates in one final moment:

his head tips back, his eyes actually move and flit around (as if he's had a eureka moment), and the tightness in his face - particularly around his eyes - relaxes. now, i don't necessarily think aziraphale suddenly has it all worked out, not at all, but whether it's him working out at least the first move he can make, or him simply steeling himself after a thorough pep-talk that he's going to see this farce through, either way - i see it as a dangerous smile. crowley told him in ep2 that he's an angel that goes along with heaven as far as he can, and aziraphale kinda knocked on the door of that at the end of s1 - enough to want nothing to do with them as we enter s2 - but i think this moment, and everything that just happened, just might be his actual tipping point.

[kozykricket]

deltarune rambling time yippee

i think deltarune is in an interesting spot in terms of like... theres a lot of theories that have had a lot of time to develop, and like. i dont think these specific conditions have really happened to a game before. having a big audience of lore nuts AND giving them 2 chapters worth of solid concrete stuff and then havin em wait? its very, very interesting

(rereading this post i think i might reword or add an addendum to it later since i kinda didnt quiiite word my thoughts on Big Theories below exactly right. it feels like im saying that every theory is just gonna be wrong... when i just think that the nature of the lore has a decent chance to be able to almost... parody theorizing, if its based on the nature of fiction and creation. which would make deep theories not WRONG but not RIGHT, just unprovable)

like, ive skimmed through big theories that seem larger than i could even imagine deltarune itself being... not to say i believe theyre entirely wrong, but just that. it definitely wont be explained to THAT degree in game...

what im really tryna say though is, yknow, i distance myself from the bigger theories because im patient and also because i ... dont wanna spoil myself if the theories are perfectly right but especially, a big reason, is the typical classic "don't get your hopes or expectations up" dont get me wrong, ive got big hopes for deltarune and some healthy hype, but i aint gonna get my expectations all fixated on some gigantic theory of the entire overarching metanarrative. i think its great that people are developing so many theories though involving like, the depths and stuff. because worst comes to worst? well, toby fox has just convinced people to write their own stories. and for a game that seems to be shaping up to be about the nature of fiction and creation? seems fitting (genuinely i expect chapter 3 to be the birth of SO many deltarune AUs, out of what is proven wrong or left ambiguous) so yeah, i dont say this to be like "nah no ones gonna be right, toby doesnt have big plans" because im certain he does have some big master plan in the lore but i also believe the lore wont necessarily focus around what we're expecting, if that makes sense. if the game is about fiction, which it clearly is to some degree with the whole. ralsei pushing us down the path of a generic prophecy where we are heroes and vanquish evil... and then immediately dissecting Good Guys vs Bad Guys in ch1 and very much making it a point that we're trying to be kept ON the path of a very specific story. both us and kris.

i think i kinda worded some of this wrong but like TLDR? i do believe toby has big lore plans, but i think theres a decent chance they wont actually get super deep into like, worldbuilding all the logic of dark worlds for example. because... well, the lore could very well be that dark worlds arent logically explainable, yknow. something like the collective unconscious kinda logic. or like terapagos in pokemon being a kind of... paradoxical thing because its born based on belief in it

maybe im wrong thjough. either way, i am excited for deltarune. whatever direction it goes in, ill be happy.

[titoist]

two coexistent facts

when i was young, i would browse Google Earth satellite imagery. i would slowly study the earth from a bird's eye view. i don't mean that i would just appreciate it: i would look, really look, i was trying to create a systemic model of our whole world. maps have an agenda. people see the world not as it is but through internalised political maps or, worse, road maps; the earth reduced to an overhead google street summary. in creating a map, you must consciously choose certain elements to accentuate and others to exclude. there is never any thought given to the entire earth itself. i would try to viscerally feel the interconnectedness of all matter. the constant motion. the truism that Capitalism encompassed the entire globe took on a more direct and material meaning -- i observed the cross-sections of suburbs, zooming and panning, swooping and diving across the surface of the planet. it made me angry and paranoid. it overwhelmed me. it made me feel sick and cry. it made me have wonderful panic attacks and filled me with incandescent rage. i used it to pummel a sense of scale into my consciousness, no matter how horrific. a shadow of violence hung over everything later in my life, this passion would be echoed in becoming obsessed with the video game 'Hearts of Iron IV' at 14 years old. it is a grand strategy game played entirely on the plane of a political map of the earth circa 1936-1945. as part of it's design philosophy, it holds lots and lots of abstractions and reductions to make the player feel more comfortable slamming dolls of the most destructive, violent, and genocidal war in human history together without ever feeling culpable of commodification. despite the embarrassing length of time that i wasted, less so playing it than using it as an excuse to not think and only incidentally interacting with it's functions in my automechanic state, i was never able to swallow down the essential discomfort of seeing the world dumbed down to a collection of contextless colors, flags, names, armies

to this day, nothing fills me with calm quite like rewinding google street view of my city back to 2013. it is the kind of calm that makes you tear up. maybe it isn't calm, i'm not sure. it's an emotion people aren't supposed to feel

[hugheses]

if you do not mind me asking/pulling back the curtain - how did you become such an esteemed hughesologist? i assume this has been a several-years journey, how did it start? have you been collecting photos/links the whole time, or are you now going searching for things? i am very impressed. the library should be jealous

LMAO thank you it means a lot to be acknowledged for my craft. the answer is i have always been an obsessive information/content hoarder especially in terms of fandom (i recently found my journal from my childhood which had pages upon pages of handwritten miscellaneous tswift fun facts, and being Like This about harry potter was what got me diagnosed with autism at 13). after lurking and being very low stakes invested for a while i started getting fr obsessed with hockey in 2020 and then early 2021 i went full tunnel vision on jack. you will understand if youve seen the pics of him kneeling in front of ty and damon at training camp. i basically save everything relevant that gets posted, especially bc the devils in particular are so evil and constantly nuke their old social media posts, but i have also done a lot of searching for old stuff. my onedrive folder where i store stuff (excluding full games) is 116 GB and i have stuff in gdrive/external storage too im like fr unhinged. i'm still constantly searching for things and i still do find new to me stuff even tho ive been to the end of many ppls instagram tagged photos and twt mentions and google search results etc, but i would say i have probably seen the majority of what is out there. at this point when i find new to me things it's stuff that nobody is directly mentioned by name or tagged in. i have a Hughes Lore google doc thats like 50 pages, a timeline doc, and more. it feels kind of embarrassing to say write it all out like this bc i am fully aware that this is like, kind of creepy, but im physically incapable of being normal about my interests. mostly i was just keeping it all this accumulated information in my brain and cloud storage and priv twt for years but then i was like i suppose some other people would appreciate this stuff. and now here we are. genuinely if ppl ever have a question or are looking for something it is highly likely i can provide it and i want to be helpful :) so anyone can always just ask

also: ive thought about making a post detailing some of the little tricks i have up my sleeve for these purposes if thats something ppl would be interested in.

[vamptastic]

spoilers ahead if you haven't listened to wolf 359 and you like scifi and/or story podcasts (or if you don't wanna read a long analysis post) PLEASE go watch it and ignore the rest of the post. its so so so good i promise.

so ive been re-listening to wolf 359 for probably the fifth time on my weird old outdated patched version of spotify. and spotify does this weird thing where if you play something else, then come back to a podcast ep you're not finished with it goes back a minute or so, presumably to help you remember what was going on. and i usually skip the last few minutes of each ep when the barrage of ads starts. which means that as i go back and listen to it for the nth time, if i forget to manually skip to the next episode, each episode starts by playing the last minute or so of the ep until i find my phone and rewind.

and its actually been a shockingly fun way to relisten, especially as the show goes further and further from silly goofy space hijinks to serious suspenseful drama (with occasional hijinks). i'm just struck by how purposeful each episode is later on in the show (and earlier, but the episodes get more...purposeful as the plot starts reaching its climax). there's exceptions, obviously, but the general structure is half the characters doing something silly, while the other half do something important and serious, and the two contrast each other. and even though the two situations seem disparate and tonally opposite at first, they always end up being more of a parallel than a foil by the end. usually, this kind of dawns me in an "oh, that's what the point of this episode was" moment brought on by the last few minutes of the episode.

one of my favorite episodes, ep 34 "a matter of perspective" is a great example. half the crew is trying to restore the signal for alien transmissions, the other half is playing a terrible board game. this is also in the pivotal part of the show before our evil corporate overlords show up where we're getting to know jacobi, maxwell, and keppler in a relatively short period of time compared to the rest of the cast, and i'm always impressed by how fleshed out they were when they got a lot less screentime.

anyway the contrast here is really interesting. keppler is demanding the impossible from eiffel, and the rest of the crew sans jacobi are trying to win an impossible game (the accursed funzo). at the end of the episode, jacobi explains why keppler is doing what he's doing (side note: the whole military "demand the impossible from your subordinates" thing is so insane), and keppler remembers the end to his joke: the pig, despite its usefulness, despite the fact that it does fucking taxes, is still being eaten. slowly but surely. it's such good insight into kepplers character its such good writing! he is a corporate slave who doesn't realize it, he is a deeply talented man who is letting his entire life be consumed by people who do not care about him and his wants and needs and happiness for a cause he will eventually learn is abjectly evil. meanwhile, maxwell, hera, lovelace, and minkowski finish their game of funzo by collectively losing after playing for 10 hours. they are also pouring time and energy into something pointless! everybody loses!

anyway the reason i even mention the whole spotify rewinding thing is that i never really noticed the point of this episode until i listened to the end of the pig joke first. which is probably on me, the metaphor is really obvious in hindsight, but up until now i just thought of the funzo part of the episode as haha silly board game time. having the thesis of the episode presented first is making me realize how genius the writing was in episodes i previously didn't get. i think the entire show is kinda like this, i could listen to it an endless number of times because each and every episode has some kind of double meaning that isn't always initially obvious, especially when you go in blind not knowing that things are getting serious.

the only other work i've read so far that does something similar is probably house of leaves, which is designed to make you read it over and over and search for meaning and has 3+ plots occurring at any given moment. i'm just really struck by how masterful the writing in wolf 359 is that it can achieve a similar feat without the meta elements, nebulous plot, and multiple narrators that house of leaves has.

short version: i think it's really fucking cool how the end of each wolf 359 episode presents the thesis of the episode in a non-obvious way, and listening to the series while having the last few minutes presented first is helping me understand what episodes i didn't previously appreciate were trying to get across. wolf 359 is really fucking good, basically.

[liliiepads]

Sims 4 Stardew Valley Challenge!

Hello! Ive never made a sims challenge before but I had an idea to make stardew in the sims using the collection system but i went overboard and made a a whole document with rules and bundles and extra goals for myself so i thought itd be fun to share

RULES

1. No aging for all sims

2. You must play with the same sim

3. You can age up your children if you wish

4. You must complete all the Community Centre Bundles(Collections)

FARM UPGRADES

Just like in Stardew to add an extra room you have to pay! Of course since your sim has needs you will already need a functional kitchen and bathroom from the start, but for expansions...

Seperate Bedroom - 1,000 Simoleons

Basement (If you have horse ranch you can use this as a "juice" cellar) - 5,000

Nursery/Child's Bedroom + Bigger Kitchen, Living and bedroom space if you wish - 10,000 Simoleons

You can make these upgrades at anytime and they dont have to be one after the other.

Now for your farm, if you have cottage living (which is highly recommended since, farming, duh!)you can purchase the barns, ccoop all at the ingame prices!

For a stable and a horse - 10,000 Simoleons

For an extra building, shed, extra living space, whatever you need - 15,000 Simoleons

To explain how giving away this money works you could use cheats or mods to get rid of it, such as ui cheats mod to modify your money or just money x whatever the amount you'd be set to. use some of it to build/buy the thing and any extra you didnt use cheat/mod away!

Community Centre Bundles

You own the Community Centre as a retail lot and have each room display your collections as you complete them!

Crafts Room

Feathers Collection

Mysims Trophy Collection

Simmies Collection

Pantry

Gardening Collection

Insect Collection

Magic Bean Collection

-After completing this add a greenhouse to your farm!

Fish Tank

Fish Collection

Frog Collection

Seashell Collection

Boiler Room

Metal Collection

Crystals Collection

Geode Collectiom

Bulletin Board

Message in a Bottle Collection

Village Fair Ribbons Collection

Postcards Collection

City Posters Collection

Snow Globe Collection

Vault

Make 2,500 Simoleons by selling Food, Gourmet Food and Baked Goods

Make 5,000 Simoleons by selling Magical Artifacts

Make 10,000 by selling Ancient Omniscan Artifacts

Make 25,000 by selling Omniscan Treasures

-After completing this feel free to make Sandy as a sim who lives in any desert world!

EXTRA

If you want you may add all the characters/buildings in the game to your world for a more authentically Stardew Valley eexperience, it's not necessary but highly reccomended!

if you want, after completing your community centre you may add a fun community lot to your world (Movie Theatre highly reccomended!) or if you're interested, buy a Restaurant, Spa or Retail Lot you can make sell anything! but first you must complete...

The Missing Bundle!

by completing the Void Critter Collection

Another quest for collections you can do after completing the community centre is

Ginger Island!

Rent a house in a Tropical World and complete the Werewolf Relic Collection!

If the Tropical World you chose is Sulani clean up the beaches and get the Island back to its full potential!

If you somehow complete all these goals finish the rest of the collections left and marvel in your victory! 100% Completion Achieved!

[wartakes]

"What Should It Look Like?" Part IV: Special Operations Forces (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on May 24th, 2023, is my most recent "old" essay which means we are fully up to speed over here on my content!

This essay is the latest entry in the "What Should It Look Like?" series - which I may still have a few to do on but we'll see. In this one, I unleash a rant against special operations forces that I've mostly held in for years and finally let out full force. This is another one that got a very specific type of guy on Twitter annoyed.

(Full essay below the cut).

Oh boy here I go ranting again.

Fair warning, this is a dense one. For real. But that’s because this is one I’ve wanted to cover for a long time and have a lot of thoughts about. A lot.

Yes my guys, gals, and non-binary pals, we’re finally talking about the United States’ Special Operations Forces (SOF), those tacticool, high-speed, low-drag, routinely accused of war crimes special snowflakes that have destroyed the minds of so many middle and high school ages boys that ever owned an Xbox and played a single Call of Duty game after 2007.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time here in the intro because, as I’ve already said, I have a lot of thoughts on SOF both in terms of what they’ve become today and what role they play in the scenario we’ve thought of for this series of essays. Suffice to say up front, I think SOF are useful and necessary in a military context, but they have a myriad of problems of varying kinds. I’m going to outline some of those problems, and things I’d try to do differently in building a force for the mildly better future we envision and then employing them in said future.

First, we’re going to talk about the issue of “bloat” and uncontrolled growth in the SOF community. After that, we’ll talk about SOF being directed to missions that are out of the scope of what they should be doing (and also may just be straight up unwinnable). Finally, I’ll talk about the big elephant in the room, which is the toxic culture that is evident inside of SOF units and the SOF community as a whole. As usual, I’ll try to tie it all together in the conclusion and leave you with some closing thoughts for both today and for a (hopefully) better future.

Without further adieu then, let’s dive right into this!

A bad case of the bloats I struggled with which of the issues with the SOF community I wanted to address first, because the more I thought about them, the more I realized it was a never ending loop of each of them feeding into one another to keep this disaster factory going. Ultimately, I decided I just had to pick one to start with, and I decided the issue of bloat would be the best point – not just because of how it feeds and is fed by the other issues (and I will call back to this throughout the essay), but because of the effect it then has on the rest of the Joint Force outside of SOF.

Before we get any further, I really want to drive home the scale of the bloat that the SOF community has experience over the past two decades or so in change. According to the IISS Military Balance for 2001, at the start of that year – prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11th and a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States Armed Forces consisted of 2,568,300 total personnel (1,367,700 active and another 1,200,600 reserve and National Guard).

Of those 2,568,300 troops, the collective SOF forces of the United States – under the auspices of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or just SOCOM – yes, like the video game), made up 42,920 of those troops across all branches of the military (28,620 active and another 14,300 in the reserves and National Guard – yes, there are National Guard special forces; and they’re based in Utah; be very afraid). I’ll apologize now for throwing a bunch of numbers at you – trust me, I’m not a numbers guy either – but there’s a point to this.

Jumping forward to the present, this year’s Military Balance has the total US Armed Forces pegged at active duty US Armed Forces at 2,177,050 personnel (1,359,600 active – just about 8,000 personnel fewer than it was in 2001, and 817,450 reserve and National Guard – over 395,000 fewer than it was in 2001). This amount is just over 391,000 troops smaller than it was in 2001 with the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War in the rear-view mirror and the Global War on Terror not yet initiated.

However, while the military as a whole has shrunk, the SOF community has grown – and by no small amount. In 2023, SOCOM clocks in with 65,800 total troops (which is larger than a good portion of the other armed forces in the globe). The Military Balance unfortunately stopped breaking down between active and National Guard/reserve forces in SOCOM at some point, so I don’t know what the exact proportions are (you can assume the majority of them are active), but even with that breakdown we can see how much each branch of the military’s special group of very special boys who are special has grown over the past twenty years. Compared to 25,900 total active and National Guard/reserve troops in 2001, Army SOF now have 35,000 – about 9,000 more; Navy SOF have almost doubled, going from 5,400 active and reserve in 2001 to 10,500 today; Air Force SOF have grown by over 5,000 troops, going from 11,620 in 2001 to 16,800 today; and finally, the Marines – who didn’t even technically have a SOF component in 2001, now have 3,500 Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC) troops at their disposal.

So, by the numbers, while the military has shrunk overall since its GWOT era peak, and now that the active force is closer to the size it was when the GWOT started – and the reserve and National Guard even smaller – SOF forces have grown larger and remain larger.

This growth hasn’t been limited to personnel either. The SOF slice of the budget pie has also increased dramatically over the course of the GWOT. In 2001, prior to the beginning of the GWOT and prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget for SOCOM was $2.3 billion USD. By about twenty years later, in 2020, that budget had ballooned to $13.7 billion USD – an almost six fold increase in funding. But again, its not just about the number itself, but the percentage. In 2001, the US defense budget was just shy of $332 billion USD, making SOCOM’s budget about .07% of the entire defense budget. By 2020, the defense budget had risen to $778.4 billion – having risen to new heights, fallen, and then rising again in the late 2010s going into the 2020s to even greater heights. SOCOM’s budget had increased to be close to 1.8% of the entire defense budget – and increase of well over a full percentage point.

Now, I don’t want you to get it twisted and think me saying the military as a whole not being bloated and enormous with both people and money is a good thing. I think it was right for the military to shrink back down as we backed away from things we shouldn’t have even been doing to begin with. The problem now is that while the military has shrunk, SOF hasn’t shrunk with them after the growth they experienced during the GWOT. Proportionally, they’re taking up way more billets (and funding) than they were at the start of the GWOT, prior to 9/11.

But you might ask, “ok War Takes, but why does this matter?” That’s not a stupid question to ask for those with only passing familiarity with the military. It matters because SOF is not only not as relevant to the threats that the United States and others primarily face, but at the same time are taking up resources that could be directed to forces and capabilities that are better suited to deter and if necessary combat those threats. This is especially true as long as they remain optimized for and stuck in the mindset of low intensity conflict, COIN, and CT being their lodestars (as I will get to in more depth in the next section).

SOF are what the military wanted more of when the main thing it was worried about – to the detriment of almost all other issues – was running around in the “Sandbox” for long periods of time, humping through the hills and doing Zero Dark Thirty shit while wearing far too many pouches and overpriced sunglasses – and again, I cannot stress this enough – they were being central to a mission that I don’t think we should have been doing in the first place and was a massive waste of time, money, lives, with consequences we will be grappling with forever. Today – and in our theoretical scenario – the primary threat is from large, peer and near-peer adversaries with significant conventional military forces.

Again, while SOF still have a role to play in conflicts against these kinds of adversaries, the bigger and more consequential role is going to be played by other forces. Every troop, dollar, moment of attention, and ounce of effort that is applied to SOF over what it should be, is one one that could (and should) be applied to more effective areas. This includes not only combat arms such as air-and-missile defenses, long-range artillery – including both tube and missile, maneuver forces like infantry and armor, and etc., but also the capacity needed for the critical work of the rear echelon in logistics, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, transportation, and more. It doesn’t help that a by-product of SOF’s rampant expansion over the past two decades is a great deal of redundancy and overlap between missions as their unique capabilities fade away and they all basically turn into pale imitations of one another running around in the Middle East spitting dip and comparing beards. SOF still have a role to play today and in the future – just as they did in the past – but that role is different and I would argue doesn’t necessitate the numbers they still maintain. At the same time, they remain largely stove-piped off from one another and in competition with one another (which can be made even worse by toxic culture, which I will get to in the third section).

We don’t need theoretical cases to understand the effects that a bloated SOF force can have on the rest of the Joint Force, a we’ve had them from watching it pivot from counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to preparing for the potential of great power conflict. Numerous capabilities were divested of during the GWOT in the interest of being able to continue feeding meat into the grinder in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. After 2005, the Army had only two active-duty short-range air defense (SHORAD) battalions on hand, with the rest being in the National Guard; the Army not only didn’t keep pace with the development in air and missile threats growing throughout the world, but then had to work rapidly to reconstitute its SHORAD capabilities following the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Likewise, the Army also divested itself of reconnaissance helicopters during this period after several failed attempts at replacing the aging OH-58 Kiowa Warrior, believing the job could be done by a mix of drones and AH-64D Apache Longbows (spoiler alert: they were wrong, and now they’re having to spend time, money, and effort, on belatedly finding an OH-58 replacement).

Now, admittedly, it is unfair to put these examples squarely at the feet of SOF and only SOF. SOF just happens to be the most obvious one to blame in this case – out of many who share blame – for the questionable allocation of resources that resulted from poor decisions that were made in the interest of unwinnable wars that we shouldn’t have embarked upon to begin with. SOF, by virtue of its bloat – or lack thereof – is the ideal example of how overcompensating in one area can hurts others, and how those poor choices can come back to haunt you and cost you more blood, sweat, and tears later. That is something we’ll need to keep in mind for our own scenario and hypothetical force.

At the end of the day, SOF, by premise, are meant to be elite. There’s not meant to be many of them, because they’re selected to be the best of the best – not only physically, but mentally, intellectually, and so on. So, I posit to you, in that case: if that’s supposed to be so, why are there so fucking many of them? I mean sure, they’re still a small fraction of the entire joint force, but I can hardly look at 65,000 people and think that each and every one of them are a special snowflake. I see someone on Twitter with 65,000 followers, I don’t think that each and every one of those followers is a fucking savant. That was neither here nor there, I admit, but just something I wanted to get off my chest before we wrapped up talking about bloat (strap yourself in because there’s more rants there that one came from).

“Hey, what’s my mission again?”

Another question you may be asking yourself at this point is, “War Takes, why did SOF get so big to begin with?” Well, the short answer is: “9/11.” The long answer is still “9/11” but with more detail. However, 9/11 and the GWOT didn’t just make SOF grow to its current bloated size, but it also twisted the mission of SOF away from its original purpose (and the purpose it would be best suited for in our scenario) – which was both fed by and fed into the bloat I just described (like I said, all this stuff has been working in one big feedback loop or series of loops).

Once again we’ll need to start from basics because before I can talk about SOF getting away from what it was designed to do, we need to talk about what that even was.

US SOF can point to a number of various ad hoc units through military history as being part of their lineage, such as various units and organizations from World War II like the Office of Strategic Services, the joint US-Canadian First Special Service Force, US Navy Underwater Demolition Teams, and more. But as the units we know today like the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs were officially founded in the 1950s and 1960s against the backdrop of the Cold War, their primary purpose from the beginning was to engage in unconventional warfare (UW).

Much has been written on UW – some of it good, some of it bad; some of it about right, some of it very wrong. By the Department of Defense’s own definition, UW is “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” More simply put: UW is support to guerrillas, insurgents, or resistance fighters (however you prefer to style them). Those fighters are meant to be the core focus of UW, according to US. Army Special Operations Command’s own UW Pocket Guide from 2016. With that in mind, the platonic ideal of UW is a covert campaign to enable local peoples under hostile occupation or a tyrannical regime to have the means to fight back against that occupier or tyrant and free themselves. This very concept is reflected in the Green Beret’s Latin motto: De oppresso liber (“to free from oppression” or “to liberate the oppressed.”)

For those of you who are students of history and are familiar with some of the regimes supported by – or governments toppled by – the United States over the course of the Cold War, I’m sure you’re making a face right now after having read that last paragraph. Completely understandable. I’m asking you to bear with me some, because I think this concept of UW is one of those ones that isn’t necessarily flawed in its own right but has been twisted and misused or just paid lip service to or just ignored. Like so many things I study in this field – like the very concept of the military itself – while coming from a Left perspective and considering concepts like UW and others, I often think of the apocryphal quote attributed to Gandhi when he was asked what he thought of ‘Western Civilization’ – the answer being: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Indeed, early US SOF themselves immediately strayed from their supposed doctrinal mission with the advent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The use of SOF in Vietnam would largely be characterized by engaging in counter-insurgency (COIN) activity, rather than actual UW. There was an attempt made early on, at least, to stick to doctrine. One of the earliest missions of the Navy SEALs in Vietnam were attempting to undertake true UW in North Vietnam, working to train locals to rise up against the government in Hanoi (this, of course, failed – and we proceeded to learn nothing from it, nor think hard on maybe whether those whole ‘Vietnam’ thing was worth the effort if it was that hard to recruit people to fight against the North Vietnamese government). Use of SOF in Vietnam quickly descended into direct-action missions attempting to take out specific targets such as arms caches, senior leadership of the Vietcong, enemy bases or outposts, and etc. I’m sure these all things that I’m sure won’t sound familiar at all to any veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan – and consequently, it may surprise any of them to realize that we did not, in fact, win the Vietnam War.

SOF very early on fell into the COIN trap. As I’ve elaborated on at length before, I see COIN as losing game over 90% of the time. Fighting an insurgency is a recipe for either defeat, or eternal war with no end – never victory. When their initial attempts at UW in Vietnam failed, the US military seemed to fall back on the old standby of just trying to kill its way out of a problem. SOF were not really acting as they were supposed to, but instead were largely just doing covert, highly specialized versions of the missions that a conventional force would do: close with and destroy the enemy. Now, that’s one thing against a conventional force. I should make it clear that some of these direct action missions – as well as other missions like intelligence gathering and recon, that were also undertaken by SOF in Vietnam – are perfectly valid missions for SOF in the UW context. But, in the grand scheme of things with COIN – where you’re already essentially fighting a losing war, it’s just pissing in the wind. That may win you battles in COIN, but when you’re fighting “the birthrate of a nation” (as journalist David Halberstam put it in regards to Vietnam), it will never win you the war.

With the American withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s and the eventual unification of the country under the North, the US military – and the SOF community – decided collectively to put that whole ugly mess behind them and go back to what they had been doing beforehand: preparing for the possibility of fighting World War III in Central Europe (or barring that, a smaller, regional conventional conflict, somewhere else in the world). This meant a return to form for US SOF in the 1970s and 80s. A prime example of this is the US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group. In the event of war in Europe, the group’s primary mission would have been to organize partisan and resistance activity either in territory occupied by advancing Warsaw Pact forces, or within the territories of Warsaw Pact nations themselves, and conduct “stay-behind” direct action against occupying forces as they pushed into NATO territory. If this had all come to pass (and assuming the war didn’t go nuclear, which was not guaranteed per say, but still way more likely than you want it to be), it would have been a UW mission in the truest sense. This was also when counter-terrorism (CT) started to become a mission-set, with the rise of political terrorism of various stripes in the 1970s. But at this point, terrorism was still a niche issue that necessitated a niche response, and not something that the entirety of SOF was notional geared towards, being left to specialized CT units like the Army’s secretive 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (AKA: Delta Force) and the now infamous Navy SEAL Team Six (now known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU).

That’s not to say there weren’t some backsliding to old, bad habits. SOF relapsed back into its old Vietnam way of doing things – and gave us a glimpse of the future – under the Reagan administration when the Green Berets were deployed to El Salvador while it was in the midst of its civil war. While there, SOF once again where in the business of anti-communist COIN, and in doing so helped to facilitate right-wing government death squads that visited horrific carnage and slaughter on El Salvador’s citizens – including the infamous El Mozote massacre, in which the US-backed Salvadorian Army killed almost 1,000 civilians in and around the village of El Mozote, and which the US government then shamelessly lied through its teeth about. More than 75,000 Salvadorians were killed over twelve years of civil war, most of them by the military. Thirty years later, the country isn’t much better, off, sliding back into authoritarian rule under its feckless and petty tech-bro President and probable future dictator Nayib Bukele. As for the Green Berets and other US advisors that were there, these atrocities were so bad, that not the official publication of everyone’s favorite right-wing coffee company – Black Rifle Coffee – can bring itself to gloss over the fact that it all actually happened under US watch and can’t disguise feeling vaguely uncomfortable about it (though their cop out answer is that the advisors “hands were tied” – you know, you guys didn’t have to be there right?).

Ironically, the same war that would see SOF get back into its true wheelhouse would also be the one that spark the beginning of SOF’s second and more drastic straying away from its core purpose. That of course, was the War in Afghanistan and the GWOT in general, which actually started with a true UW mission. As popularized by the film “Twelve Strong”, the beginning of the US military involvement in Afghanistan was the deployment of Green Berets – alongside CIA operatives – into Afghanistan in 2001 to support the Northern Alliance and other Afghan resistance fighters in their fight against the Taliban government. In this sense, it may be the one real success story of the entire Afghan War. It’s easy to forget that – unlike in Iraq – US conventional forces did not do the brunt of the initial fighting on the ground when the war first started. When Kabul fell (the 2001 version not the 2021 remix), it fell to Northern Alliance fighters (fighting with Green Berets). In many ways, this initial success could be seen as the post-Cold War high point for the Green Berets in undertaking the traditional SOF mission of UW, a high that hasn’t been reached again since.

If you know me and have read my work by now, you know I have decidedly mixed feelings on the legacy of the War in Afghanistan. I ultimately think we shouldn’t have been there (and in fact, didn’t have to be there, as the Taliban were prepared to hand over Bin Laden, our main reason for going in). But if we had to go in, it would have better to have left on a high note after this point (and after it became obvious Bin Laden was no longer there) and then let Afghanistan figure out its own affairs internally. To put it more simply: we should have left as soon as the UW mission was accomplished and the circumstances changed. The Taliban was – and still is – an objectively evil and terrible government and supporting forces to overthrow was a moral move in my book. But what would proceed to happen in Afghanistan – and soon, in Iraq – over the next twenty years would very quickly taint anything moral and just that we had initially accomplished. It would also very quickly and drastically stray from the standard UW mission for SOF and lead us to the issues we now have.

As mission creep quickly set in with Afghanistan and an anti-terrorism focused UW mission quickly grew and morphed into occupation and state building, the mission of SOF quickly got away from UW as, well, there wasn’t a UW conflict to fight. We had become the occupiers that the populace very quickly got sick of within a few years and wanted to get rid of. Like wise, as the GWOT continued to ramp up from 2001 on, hunting down terrorists and attempting to dismantle terrorist groups and cells also became the primary concern of the military and of SOF, with CT and COIN melding into one unholy combination where they were basically the same thing to the military.

Once again confronted with COIN and unable to accept my thesis that it is – most of the time – unwinnable, SOF fell back on the same reaction as they did in Vietnam: trying to kill the problem away. SOF were once again essentially doing the same tasks infantry would do, only more special, more sneaky, with better toys, and etc. No matter how you dress it up though, they were doing the same job as any other grunt stuck in a pointless COIN war: killing insurgents with the hope eventually there will be no more; destroying their weapons caches with the hope they’ll stop getting new ones; destroying their outposts while hoping they wont’ just set up a new one a few miles away; etc. When that didn’t win the war immediately, the reaction was often just to throw even more SOF at the problem – leading to the bloat mentioned before. In all fairness, not all of this was SOF’s fault – when you’re a command or policymaker and have these really cool looking hammer that everyone thinks is great and special, you’ll want to smash every nail you can think of with it. This constant operational tempo, in addition to putting SOF up on a pedestal as the most special boys in the COIN fight, and with other factors, would also contribute to developing a rancid internal culture with horrific results both for those SOF interacted with and for its own members (which I will be addressing in the next section).

I could spend a long time going on about the use of SOF in Afghanistan – as I always say: “that could be an article in and of itself.” But there’s other things I want to cover, so what I want to talk about now is the cautionary tale of getting sucked into circumstances like that and pushing SOF into missions they shouldn’t be doing (or that no one should really be doing). This is especially relevant as the US military is now working to reorient its SOF back towards the missions they were founded to do in the first place, as great power competition increases and the possibility of war with a peer or near peer adversary becomes something that is actually plausible. Because of those twenty years of baggage, it’s not an easy job. After twenty years of GWOT, SOF operators are literally struggling to understand or feel comfortable performing the very mission that was their original justification and purpose and pining for the door-kicking they’ve been doing the past twenty years, feeling like that if they aren’t kicking down a door or clearing a room every few hours they aren’t doing their jobs right. God only knows how long it will take them to get over this – if they’re even capable of doing so in their current form (I would argue they can’t and would go further but I’ll save that for the conclusion). But don’t feel too sympathetic to a lot of them, however, because we’re going to use those institutional issues as a segway into the third main pillar of the issues of modern US SOF – which is their toxic culture and the depths to which it goes.

The Men Who Just Really Love Doing Crimes. I should clarify from the start of this section, that I am well aware that US SOF have always had issues with culture and professionalism. One need only look at some of the stories from the Vietnam War to realize that SOF has long had issues. But even then, I would argue those were not as widespread, deep seated, and batshit insane as what we have seen and are still seeing in the SOF community in terms of legal, ethical, and moral violations after twenty years of COIN and CT as part of the GWOT in the Middle East and around the globe.

All of this goes hand-in-hand with the bloat SOF experience after the start of the GWOT. As discussed earlier, in the effort to show progress in the GWOT, SOF became the go-to weapon of choice for the US government in tracking down and capturing or killing high-value terrorist targets. They increasingly became the most lionized, hyped up, and obsessed over part of the US military in an era where the average troop was already put up on a pedestal, seen as the solution to any possible problem a policymaker may encounter in national security. At the same time, as the US was pulled deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq and key terrorist leaders like Bin Laden remained elusive, pressure mounted to show results in all of the various “forever wars” America had found itself entangled in.

All these factors combined – and more – no doubt went to the heads of numerous SOF operators and leeched throughout the community. This was seen especially in Afghanistan, where by the 2010s US SOF had developed a reputation for a “shoot first, ask later” attitude towards their mission – at the expense of Afghan civilian lives. But this attitude went beyond simply having an itchy trigger finger, to allegations of outright unlawful killings (i.e. murder) and torture. Having been put on a pedestal and told how important they were, results being expected of them, and being told that they were doing God’s work, SOF seemed to take an attitude that the ends justified the means and that they were right in going to extreme ends outside of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) to accomplish their mission. According to one SOF expose by Rolling Stone, a Green Beret writing to the author from federal prison (where he was incarcerated for smuggling 50 kilos of coke into Florida onboard a military aircraft), as long as the mission they were assigned was accomplished and everything was kept hush hush, SOF seemed to have free reign to go to whatever lengths necessary in the course of their duties.

This mindset was no doubt fueled by a sense of impunity, seeing that US SOF have only seldom faced any consequences for allegations of abuses and war crimes. In the rare occasions that investigations have been mounted or charges have been filed by the military, its even rarer that anyone actually is convicted or faces consequences for their actions. An extensive investigation of the ethics and culture of US SOF that was undertaken in 2020 found “no systemic ethics problems.” When Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher was put on trial for murdering a captured ISIS fighter, he was acquitted; and after being convicted of a lesser crime of posing with a dead body in violation of the laws of armed conflict, he was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump. In the few cases where punishments are doled out and actually stick, they’re usually relatively minor and done extraordinarily quietly, with the military and the government not wanting to draw any extra attention to the matter. In other cases, the government and the military have straight-up attempted to cover up any acts of wrongdoing. The standard that has been set for SOF over the past twenty years of Forever War is that you’ll likely never be punished for egregious acts, and if you are punished it’ll probably be a slap on the wrist at the most.

The impunity doesn’t just end with acts against civilians and enemy combatants in foreign countries, however. SOF have also developed a culture of violence and heavy handedness against other service members. The past two decades of GWOT are littered with stories of other US service members being sexually assaulted, hazed, and murdered, with the accused or suspected perpetrators being SOF operators – the previously linked article from Rolling Stone just barely scratches the surface of some of these instances on just one post, Fort Bragg (home of Joint Special Operations Command). This violence isn’t limited to being against those outside the SOF community, but occurs within it as well. A famous recent case is the murder of a Green Beret while deployed to Africa, having been killed by Navy SEALs and MARSOC operators during a hazing gone wrong (oh by the way the Navy SEAL sentenced for involuntary manslaughter in that case got his conviction thrown out). In some cases, SOF operators just decide to randomly visit acts of violence on people they don’t even know. The culture of impunity and superiority has developed to the point that its not just that SOF think they’re better than the rest of the military, but that the rest of the military is either an obstacle or a threat that must be dealt with – especially when their privileges and impunity are threatened by them. Despite their notional image as the best of the best, defending America’s values and interests, they seem to have little qualms about harming other Americans when push comes to shove. Even when they’re not murdering and torturing, SOF’s culture of impunity has led them to a point where they can’t stop committing crimes in general. Whether its smuggling drugs or embezzling official funds, SOF operators have been socialized to think they are entitled to it all.

In many ways, the culture of SOF operators has become akin to that of modern law enforcement in America – in that they act more like a cult or an organized crime group or gang (or all of the above) rather than as a professional military unit with good order and discipline. Strict group-think is enforced, with new ideas that break the mold or challenge the status quo are quickly shot down and those who suggested them are ostracized or punished. An “us versus them” mentality is imposed where those not in the cult or the gang are at best disdained or at worst outright hated or targeted. When the cult is under threat, all its members are expected to close ranks to defend it and any members who may be under attack – and God help you if you speak out. And even if you aren’t party to whatever transgressions that have been visited on someone else by the gang, and you largely go about your business trying to do no harm, you’re still part of the problem simply by not speaking out and doing anything about or taking part in a code of silence to cover for other’s wrongdoings. (By the way, this is not to say that these problems don’t exist anywhere else in the US military, but that they are particularity potent in the SOF community. You could really envision the SOF community as being a concentrate – if you will – of all the problems the military as a whole experiences, heightened to their logical extreme).

How do you even begin to tackle this problem? Well, I think as things stand now you can’t. Part of this is there being too much damage to SOF as it exists now to “save” it (and I will talk about this momentarily in the conclusion, like I said earlier), but also needs other issues to be fixed. You need stronger and more consistent oversight of the military in general and SOF in particular from elected officials who are actually going to dig deep, ask probing questions, and demand results – and will need to have a strong moral compass on the issues at hand. You’ll need a top brass in the military that will also have zero tolerance for such behavior and other shitty behavior in general, won’t be afraid of the military getting a black eye or bad press for calling attention to bad behavior, and will rigorously act to deal with bad behavior and crimes of various kinds and dole out actual punishments. Finally, you’ll need a military justice system that actually delivers – well, justice, for the accused and isn’t biased or rigged to produce certain results or simply to protect the interests and appearance of the military. I just mentioned three things that could all be essays in their own right (and likely will be at some point if I can ever get around to them – I’m very tired ok), so clearly this is an issue that goes beyond just SOF and requires sea changes in how our country works, not just how our military or SOF works (something I have pointed out as being necessary in the past). If SOF in our hypothetical better future and scenario are to function without descending back into a toxic culture of murder and cruelty, than these issues will all need to be fixed alongside one another going forward.

De Oppresso Liber (but for real this time)

Ok, so, this is the part where I remember that I’m supposed to be writing about how I would do things differently in this hypothetical future and scenario we’ve crafted for this series. But before I get into that, I want to speak about the here and now – knowing that what I say here and now will make little difference but I want to get it off my chest anyway.

As things stand now, I think that SOF as currently constituted in the US military are essentially un-reformable (and this is not a new opinion of mine). I think the rot has gone on for too long and goes too deep for it to be salvaged. This – again – is similar to my views on law enforcement; I am a police abolitionist in that I think some form of law enforcement or public safety needs to exist in society, but that I think the current system is beyond fixing and needs to be knocked down and started fresh from a completely blank slate with new ideas and new people in order to work. In that sense, I am a SOF-abolitionist in that while I think SOF should exist in the military – both as it exists now and as I’d like it to exist – the slate has to be wiped clean and it has to be started over fresh and new with new people and concepts and rules and oversight.

But ok, if we did wipe that slate clean and started over, how would we want them to be? As I said earlier, a lot of changes need to happen alongside one another – both in the military and in our society. But if we’re assuming the political changes we’d like to see have already happened in the United States and we’re focused more on the military problem now, the answers to the main problems I’ve outlined are self-evident (to an extent) in the problems themselves.

First, we need to have discussions need to be had about how many SOF is enough, and how much funding is really needed, without just letting the community bloat to an extreme size and throwing money at it with no accountability. There also need to be questions asked about how many different types of units we need – does every single branch of the military need to have its own unique SOF unit? My inclination is to say “no” and there would need to be studies done on what types of units we really do need to avoid not only a redo of bloat, but to avoid redundancy and overlap. If a new SOF unit needs to be justified, it needs to have a truly unique argument as to why it uniquely needs to exist. If there’s any of the things I’m listing I think could actually happen under the current system, its at least this one – as there seems to be conversations going in the halls of power regarding potential significant cuts to SOF as I finish writing this essay. So, there’s that I guess (though I imagine this will quickly turn into a political culture war issue in Congress and elsewhere with a revolving door of retired generals making their way to hearings to defend their special snowflake boys to Greg Steube and a similar coterie of very big dumb Republican guys, so don’t hold your breath).

Second, the missions SOF are assigned need to be ones that are actually militarily relevant and useful to the grand strategy we’re adhering to (and also are actually militarily achievable – unlike COIN and CT). Over all of this, thirdly, the SOF community also needs to be subject to oversight with actual teeth to it and those who violate rules, procedures, and established laws (both US military law and the LOAC), need to held accountable for their actions in a meaningful way. This is by no means an all-inclusive list, but just the major issues that come to mind reflecting on everything I’ve dumped on you for the past then pages or so in change.

While all of these issues are important, as a defense analysts I am most interested in the missions angle – not simply because I want to make sure its addressed how SOF fit in to the scenario we’ve established before, but because it also ties in to the other issues in that circular feedback loop I described from the onset. In our scenario of coming to the aid of an ally that is under attack by a strong conventional adversary and is being invaded, what would SOF be doing?

In our scenario, SOF would likely be the first troops of ours on the ground to assist our ally, before any substantial conventional ground forces are able to arrive in strength. To that end, their initial goal would be the same as any and naval firepower that is being directed to the region as the invasion is underway: to slow down and hopefully stall the enemy advance until those aforementioned conventional ground forces can arrive and concentrate and counter-attack. This would be in close conjunction with allied forces on the ground – likely including their own SOF, if they have any. Much like US SOF planned to do in Central Europe if the balloon went up during the Cold War, they’d blow bridges, collapse tunnels, and undertake harassing actions to slow the enemy down as their forces moved forward onto allied soil.

While our forces prepared for a counter-offensive to liberate occupied allied territory, that’s when SOF would really go to work, undertaking the mission that was always meant to be their primary responsibility: unconventional warfare. SOF would infiltrate behind enemy lines and work to establish an insurgency against the occupying forces – or support ones that have already cropped up. SOF would train and advise these forces, directing them on where and how to strike in order to make the biggest impact on the occupation, fighting alongside them in the process. It would be a return to form for SOF, fighting in support of insurgents fighting for their rights and freedoms, rather than engaging in a COIN campaign (and forcing the enemy to engage in such an ultimately hopeless endeavor themselves). The goal here is to continue weakening the enemy, drawing away forces and effort to fight the insurgents and lowering enemy morale and effectiveness, while making the coming conventional counter-offensive more effective and faster from having worn down and worn out the enemy internally. Once conventional forces press forward and link up with the insurgents, they may be able to link up with those conventional forces to press on and assist them – following Mao’s own theories on insurgency and guerrilla warfare, with the guerrillas gradually growing into the final phase of conventional warfare.

Additionally, aside from shooting people or even training other people to shoot people, SOF would play a critical role as eyes and ears quietly observing enemy movements and activities. In an age of satellites, drones, and other technical means of intelligence gathering, you often still can’t beat a soldier on the ground to give you an eyes-on account of what’s going on and to catch nuance that a long-range camera just can’t get you. To get back to the shooting while still staying in the intel gathering mold, SOF could also embark on moire aggressive intelligence gathering or snatching operations to get key info that not even satellites or drones can get eyes on, further demonstrating their importance in a highly technical age of warfare.

All in all, SOF would play an important role in the scenario we’re thinking of. That’s something that anyone on the Left that still thinks that armed conflict is sometimes sadly necessary will have to get comfortable with. This is a big assumption on my part, based mostly on vibes and what I see in discussions online, but I get the impression that among a Left that already has a dim view of the military, the dimmest and darkest possible view is that of SOF and its operators. Again, given the transgressions I outlined earlier in this essay, I don’t’ think that’s a view without reason by any means. But that’s why I wanted to talk about all the systemic issues with SOF to show its just one thing that’s led them to what they currently are, and to demonstrate just how far they’ve strayed from the purpose they were meant to have originally. If reoriented on that original purpose, and utilized in service of ideology and motives that were not inherently imperialistic, SOF do have an important role to play. This is especially true if in this better world we imagine that we still wish to support those seeking their own liberation (I should surely hope so or I wouldn’t even bother writing this shit), without getting drawn into the moral and military deathtrap of regime change and occupation and COIN. Deploying SOF to train, advise, and equip insurgents fighting for better lives in their homeland is the way to avoid stumbling into our own versions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically, we always want to make sure that the only role we play in any insurgent, is being on the side of the insurgents than as the COIN practitioners (assuming the insurgents aren’t pieces of shit and genuinely want a better future for their people and aren’t just batshit insane).

On that note, I think I’ve said just about all I can think to say on this subject for now and my brain is starting to run on empty. Out of all the essays in the series, I think that this one was the one I was both most excited for and the most dreading to write for a long time because of how intellectually and emotionally dense a subject it is. In all honesty, for how much I’m glad I’ve broached this subject, I’m happy to put this one in my rear-view mirror and move on to greener pastures now that I’ve said my piece. As with everything I write, I hope it at least promotes some introspection and some useful discussions and debate.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this is the end of the “What Should It Look Like” series or not. I think I was maybe planning on doing another one at some point specifically on the Reserves and National Guard and the role that they should play and how they should be different, so I’ll probably get to that at some point. I may switch things up for the next essay though and do something different, depending on what strikes my fancy at the time or what’s in the news by the end of the Summer. Now that I’m doing fewer of these a year, I don’t want to make every single one a “What Should It Look Like” until its all done, so I want to try and keep it fresh for you all. For now though, thanks for your patience as I move to a new schedule and space these further out. I’m juggling a lot in my life and not having to do these every month has made it a lot easier, so I appreciate all of your understanding.

Until next time, as always, stay safe out there and keep on keeping on. I’m going to go enjoy Memorial Day weekend and stuff my face with burgers and beer. Peace.

[xxbloop-meep14]

Alright burning shores my fucking god is it awesome. oh and perhaps some spoilers.

I love that damn dlc so much it is so bloody awesome, I didn't expect anything. like actually I saw nothing coming but i'm dumb so, BUT IT WAS ALL A NICE SURPRISE... well I mean I knew Aloy was simping for women I mean look at Petra, Talanah uh damn cant think of anymore, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT IM SAYING. but dude the way Aloy was gay panicking through the whole dam thing dude she's so damn cute, and when you finish the dlc and go talk to seyka and she's just chilling she says "I miss you.. well not now since your here but *sigh* you know what I mean.." dude I was on the floor and she says "its selfish but I kinda want you to stay.." when I say I was crying bro I was crying. I loved the dlc so much it was bloody epic.

and ive shipped a good few people with her but, seyka is truly the best she's so awesome and Aloy seems really happy around her so, HELL YEAH SEYKA AND ALOY FOREVER!!... well I shipped people with Aloy but always kept in mind that, that shit will never happen, Aloy has to save the world as if she has time for a partner so I love seyka and Aloy but, its also hella realistic which im pretty happy about I think having a partner and saving the world damn that's a lot having to think like, what if she doesn't do it what if she cant and she lied to her girlfriend gave her false hope and now there both gonna die because of her. IT WOULD BE VERY SAD. so its cool they kept that in mind.

oh and the battles. bro. the fucking fighting. it was so awesome like so incredibly enjoyable, when I died hate to admit I would get distracted and fucking die BUT. I wouldn't even get mad.. well I would have a slight reaction but I was still excited to do it again, learn from my dumb mistakes stare at that dumb Horus one more time before I destroy it.

and the story was pretty epic loved everything about the dlc.

Bonus thought.

dude Aloy having fun collecting dinosaur figures is so awesome, her doing the quiz game bro I love when game creators give the character small breaks from life, its so awesome!!

[mydollsaregay]

i picked some stuff up from fb marketplace today! I actually got more than I planned for, as some items were marked as sold online, but the seller said they were actually still available, so i was able to get them as well!

the overview (plus bonus doggy).

sam’s bed frame was the original draw for me with this lot - i actually got just the bedding in a lot a while back, and have since been keeping an eye out for just the bed frame at a reasonable price. i’m so excited to have found it! it’s definitely seen some play, but it is still super cute and totally good for my purposes.

the desk is going to end up being sold or given away, as i don’t have the space for a school setup in the dollhouse. i told the seller she could keep it and sell it to someone else, but she wanted to sell it as a set with some of the other stuff that i wanted so oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i’m super pumped to have sam’s nightstand (even missing a handle) alongside her bed frame! it means i’ll be able to reuse her current bed frame and side table in another room.

in the accessories box, i got kanani’s beach outfit and paddleboard set! (+bonus random sunglasses) before i got the stuff today, i actually had no idea this was kanani’s, i just thought it was cute. when I found the map though, i was very excited, and immediately knew at least some of this stuff had to be hers. to my excitement, this all was! (other than the bonus random sunglasses haha)

next, some super cute pieces from a costco sleepover set and a petite place settings set. I’m most excited about the book, magazine, and game!

there was also some super cute christmas stuff! there’s a santa hat, a santa themed apron, a whole gingerbread house decorating set, and some totally adorable tiny ornaments. i don’t believe the ornaments are ag branded, but they’re super detailed and high quality, and i LOVE them. this year, i’m totally gonna set them up on a mini tree.

next up, kit’s school bag, school supplies, lunch, and lunchbox! I totally wasn’t expecting these and was really excited 😄 kit+claudie’s room is one of the most complete rooms in the dollhouse, and am always excited to add some more little details.

I already had some of kits school supplies and her backpack, but it’s awesome to have more. the lunchbox is totally new for me, and I’m super hyped about it! ive always loved the look of metal lunchboxes, especially in miniature!! the seller also had kit’s bed, but i had to pass, as I’ve already got one.

finally, the classic “other miscellaneous items” group haha. the dog, music stand, and hair brush are very normal items to find in a lot. felicity’s noah’s ark toy (sadly sans most figures, though there is one that i miscategorized as a ginger bread person while i was taking pictures), and a cute statue of liberty outfit for coconut are much cooler to me!

overall, this was a really cool collection of items! i had a ton of fun going through them. i also had a ton of fun picking them up, as my friend graciously joined me on my journey to keep me company while i drove, and we stopped for ice cream on the way back!

[raid3r-r4bbit]

@fuzzydreamin thanks for the lol. ive been a little busy with life so sorry for the late response.

Favorite Color:

Green. Like Blindingly Neon almost yellow bile/acid toxic hazmat pukey green. Also black. I'm also a fan of earthy tones, warm greys and browns, rusty orangey reds, and i also unironically love that "some smoker lived here for 5+ years but i swear the walls are white" sepia color.

Last song:

Either Childish Flamingo or 1x1. I've been hopping in between really screamy and just goofy shit atm because i cant focus with anything else. 🤷 But (I also jsut got a new BMTH hoodie) BMTH's post human album has been feeding me. It's a really good (visual? no.) example of that like just angry and over it nihilist feeling and I just *MUNCH CRUNCH AAAA* like i feel like it could be just the tiniest bit angrier and louder but i think that's my headphones.

as for childish flamingo, its like that miseryxcpr thing imo. It's goofy and funny and it slaps. and it's so catchy. it's like right on the edge of aha funny and fuck you street and i love it. i hope any of that makes sense im sorry lol.

Last movie:

the Demon Slayer movie. I skipped all the way to the end to see the fight between Akaza and Rengoku because they're two of my favs ( in order from that show: Uzui (my mom calls yuzu (my cat) Uzui and its adorable) Akaza and Rengoku. I Found out the english dub is out (im way behind) and just needed to hear their english voice acting. all of it is amazing and Akaza's lil gigles during the fight make me incredibly happy. Guys who laugh/giggle mid combat? Ugh >\\x//<

Currently Watching:

Demon Slayer, Chainsaw man, Tokyo ghoul (im rewatching a bunch of animes) Steven universe. (i love all of these and full recommend them. I literally just yesterday(or the day before idk time is a blur) got a new funko pop, it's the half-kakuja kaneki and i love it.)

Other stuff i've watched this year:

Spy x Family, the Junji ito Collection, Yamishibai (if you like picture style art and horror this is great, its somewhat junji ito like, but shorter stories and ngl the zanbai ep scared me a bit) psychpass (some reccomended this to me cause im (obviously) a fan of darker more gruesome shows, and it is very dystopian, love the art work, but i just dont get it.) Given (if you havent watched this show please watch it its amazing) Yuri on ice, Banana Fish (also another fave)

(I work from home, and pretty much exist at my computer, and need to keep on music or tv to keep the bad thoughts out, so i have a lot of time and opportunity to watch stuff ok)

Shows I dropped this week:

Psycho pass. again, i just couldnt get into it. I know a lot of people seem to really like and it full seems like a show that would be up my alley. that first ep was kind of a lot though. I'm not ashamed to admit i love shows that are unafraid to show nudity and violence but the two together (ifykyk) make me uncomfortable. If this case had been a little further in the show i think it would have been fine, but it's litterally the first like ten minutes of the show. I also tried watching this a few week ago while at wasteland but we were pretty much just out the door.

Devil May Cry. I still love the games and the characters, and i remember loving the anime as a kid but its just... so different from the games lmao.

Currently Reading:

random internet stuff, fics and shit. I feel bad because i used to go to the library all the time but at the same time, i dont really have the room to store a whole bunch of books and despite being super dyslexic, i read insanely fast, so renting/buying books isnt worth it to me. (i've read entire full length series in the span of a day or two, while doing other stuff. I need longer, more conveniently packaged novels and that typically comes in the form of fanfiction. )

tagging: @snowmutant @ivanpahdrylakeracer @glaochormfitheach(idk if ur cool tagging you in this kinda stuff, if not just lmk i though it'd be fun :D) @the-soup-witch(im dragging you into tumblr culture whether you like it or not, welcome to tagging games)