Selfsurprise

I've been reading a little bit about the coastal city of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France. It was heavily fortified over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries due to it being an prime frontline for English invasion, and became a notorious element of the English channel due to the rife piracy and buccaneering that went on in it's waters - hence the nickname "cité corsaire". One of the more notable features of the city are the military forts stationed on both the mainland and on several tiny islands off the coast, arranged in a "jawbone" shape that confounded many naval attacks and made achieving landfall in the city an extremely difficult proposition - this page goes into a little more detail. This series of fortresses made me realize that a Fallout: Saint-Malo ought to involve them in some way, even if the ubiquitous war of the lore took place long after the necessity of said forts. What if each location was retrofitted to be an aquatic-chthonic vault in the advent of nuclear war? The collective and historical character of Saint-Malo seems to have the foresight and willingness to consider the worst possibility scenario. So in 2077 the bombs fall but the infrastructure and social planning of Saint-Malo meant that the brightest and best made it into one of the seven to eight vaults, and perhaps even some especially paranoid members of the citizenry made their own arrangements and survived. What sort of world would a post-apocalyptic Saint-Malo look like and what would reside there? ^ Illustration of Mourioche, source ABOC On the marvellous blog entitled A Book of Creatures there are as respectable number of peculiar monsters native to the Brittany region that could have some serious mutant pedigree if artfully reinterpreted. There are the fearful and malevolent living spell books known as Agrippa, immune to practically all damage and only permit themselves to be read by strong and wilful individuals - a kind of sinister sapient mobile computer roaming the French wastes perpetuating some unfathomable agenda? Then there is the legendary character Mourioche (see above image) he/she/it rumoured to have once been a mortal man/woman versed in the dark arts and rightly feared for his fey whims and cruel predilections - maybe a pre-war individual who lives on abhorrently through unethical genetic engineering whilst unleashing other hideous and less intelligent equine monsters onto the settlers and fort dwellers of Saint-Malo? More chilling are the so-called lavandières de nuit (“washerwomen of the night”), Franco-British entities that fall somewhere between dangerous nocturnal fairy and a more corporeal breed of ghost - some bizarre variety of female-only ghouls with a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder? "Neither French nor Breton, I am from St Malo." - Cities Motto

I think you have a point with Stardew Valley, it's a kawaii ideal of farming that isn't as back-breakingly difficult or financially crippling as the real thing. We all seem to be picking our favourite games and not necessarily taking into account how terrifying some of those worlds are.

@ Psychotic Ninja:

Black Minimal ^ EVERYBODY GET ON THE FLOOR, EVERYBODY DO THE DIMMU BORGIR. Ignore the troubling connection to pounding EDM and disco music for a moment and consider the darker and deeper strains of techno music, particularly those artists that hold a close allegiance to old school industrial music such as , and . I don't think it would take too much a paradigm shift in song-writing or too much of a leap for the imagination to replace the typical dense urban ambience on these tracks with the formless guitar drone of raw black metal, or the vocal samples with the guttural and distorted voices common to the genre. A minimal techno reimagining of an album such as Burzum's Filosofem could potentially be the best record I've never heard. Les Murray Post-Metal ^ "Some people are born to fatness. Others have to get there." - Les Murray Not so much an actual subgenre as a broad range of atmospheric metal inspired tendency, I think this Australian poets work would make an utterly unique and strangely apt source of lyrical material for any kind of immense, lush, slow-tempo metal music. His work revels in the crude earthiness of New South Wales culture and the spirituality inherent in both artifice and nature - with a good dose of humour to boot - something that extreme metal could use a smidge of from time to time. Just read this line from his poem Spring Hail and just try to tell me it isn't metal as fvck... "I sat on a log then, listening with my skin to the secret feast of the sun, to the long wet worms at work in the earth, and, deeper down, the stones beneath the earth, uneasy that their sleep should be troubled by dreams of water soaking down, and I heard with my ears the creek on its bed of mould moving and passing with a mothering sound"

^ Some of those mash-up's are rather clever. I particularly like how they demonstrate the unavoidable fact that much popular music and "a catchy tune" relies on certain principles of song structure, there are specific patterns that always sit well with listeners irrespective of genre. That, and it never fails to annoy snobs on either end of the spectrum who might regard pop as too mainstream or dismiss metal as tuneless dissonance. OT: Colors (Blu Mar Ten Remix) BY Nuage

Spend the whole time working and never playing. ...if you woke up one day and woke that you could see from your knees and locate lost keys with your earlobes.

Takes an office-bound arsonist to know one!

Hey! Do you guys remember this thread? It was a pretty good thread, jus' sayin'... I've been giving it some thought and I've come to the conclusion that the house in Layers of Fear is my dream home. I like being indoors and I love art! I couldn't leave even if I wanted to! It would be like my actual domestic life except all I'd have to worry about is my rad collection of evil transforming paintings and my teleporting horribly burnt ghost wife.

You've had the same avatar for over a six months, at least. Get with the program grandpa!

I'm purposefully agnostic but do lean slightly towards atheism, albeit of a deeply uncertain sentiment and mostly due to life experience and a secular upbringing. I find dogmatism and certainty in fundamentalists utterly baffling and tend to hold the notion of faith (both for or against any belief system) as deeply suspect. I find aspects in all religions and philosophies that enthrall and appall me in equal measure, that's the paradox of being a committed agnostic. One is drawing from everybody else's teachings only to further convince oneself of one's deep-set unknowingness. I suppose I'm a proponent of ignosticism (with an "I" rather than an "A") in that like it's more well-known theological counterpart, ignosticism is a more deliberate and conscious stance for the impossibility of affirming or denying God's existence. It posits that to argue either way is a fundamentally flawed endeavor and ultimately an unattainable goal. It's the closest argument I've personally read to effectively "answer" the question of divinity, even though ironically it's crux lies in the premise that it defends no other stance - religious or otherwise; nor even it's own premise. The core point raised by ignosticism leaves me feeling stumped for a better response and it's something I've come to enjoy pondering.

Pauk by Yan Cook

I like this answer for some reason.

Why is it hot here internet? As far as I'm concerned no fat Midlander like me is ever supposed to be this hot. I've heard in the weather forecasts that it's supposed to get hotter this week, due to warmer air from the European mainland honing-in on Britain's typically cooler position in the gulf stream. THANKS SPAIN ;3 If a tree falls does it make a sound? Jeb says it did. We should offer an iteration to that old philosophical adage, "if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it EXPLODE TO ABSOLUTE FUCK?"

What did you go and see Daniel?

Underwater levels. I've always hated them. No matter what game I played, no matter how good I got at it, any level that involved swimming makes me want to cast my console in concrete and give it a sea burial sans the twenty-one gun salute. Maybe it's because I grew up with the PS1 school of control design which was, for the most part, okay (it's amazing how we've come, using a d-pad to control movement, I can scarcely imagine how I did it!) but for anything involving simulated water - and the simulated immersion therein - resulted in so much infantile expression of destructive helplessness in my youth. I always seemed to get stuck on them for prolonged periods, so much so that I cannot help but associate water with dead ends and seething futility. My long literary affair with the works of HP Lovecraft probably doesn't help matters either, whether because of the obvious anti-human and distinctly aquatocentric sentiments of the mans work, or simply because anything Mythos inspired will always catch my attention and with a terrifying certainty put me on the inevitable path towards more rock-paddling sessions in computer games. GHHHURGGH! This is why I liked MediEval. You dick-about in any body of water in that game, you'll die. Immediately. I genuinely appreciate the game's developers doing that. Don't go in the water. Skeletons can't swim, Ben. Didn't they teach you this in school? Why are you going in the water, Ben. There's water in there. Ben. Stop. That is water.

Accomplished Illustrative Ability In The Vein Of Old Master Draughtsmen / Fictional Character From A Cartoon Show

^ I want to shed a tear whenever some franchise is getting the meme treatment and I don't know anything about. Remember Attack on Titan and the thousands upon thousands of potato jokes that materialised on Tumblr? I still don't understand what on earth any of that shit was about... :'c

You can describe most of the NSDAP leadership as interesting! The interest in Nazism by historians and generally by history enthusiasts like ourselves, is a peculiar thing. For me it's an awkward mixture of endless fascination with and abject horror at these individuals. I thought the choice of depicting the Kreisau Circle as a bunch of badass guerilla fighters was a odd move. From what I understand of the actual Kreisau Circle they were predominantly public and military figures that sought to intellectually and morally oppose Nazism in order to reconcile the void left by the fascists coming to power with their own German patriotism. They had short term goals but they tended to take a longer-term in view in regard to Germany's future. There certainly had their hand in many assassination attempts, most famously the near-miss at the Wolf's Lair when Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in a conference room that Hitler was scheduled to arrive at - codenamed by the German resistance as Operation Valkyrie. You're welcome! I think you ought to try contacting Ross to see if he'll reiterate some of your points and give you credit for this extra bit of game criticism, if he ever gets around to making another one of those Game Dungeon "follow-up" episodes.

I think it's a fine line to tread between respecting the archival context of historical fiction, and imbuing your story with enough fantasy in order to not lose the core of the stories supernatural themes. The whole connection between the Nazism and the occult is one steeped in anecdotal "truth" but also a subject fundamentally prone to exaggeration. Many people blissfully mistake historical fiction as sincere and factual history, some of the confusion caused by the content of Inglourious Basterds is an example of this phenomena. Now I got that out of the way, excellent post! You've clearly done some substantial fact-checking in examining Wolfenstein. I personally think that fictional towns are a helpful means of avoiding the problems of historical inaccuracy, but maybe they should tried harder than simply take an actual towns names and just switch the first letter around with another one. I could of done that. Bamworth, Tirmingham, who wouldn't want to live in places with names like that! But to be honest with you I'm much less disappointed by the game's historical inaccuracy than I am with it's overwhelming generic content. Everything feels phoned-in and half-hearted, which is all the more impressive given how inherently awesome and potentially rich the theme of occult nazism is.

^ It blew my mind when I first read that post on Tumblr. Are you trying to imply I wasn't supposed to take it seriously Psychotic Ninja? I think menacing orbs of sky-fire are no laughing matter! :3

??? by nthng

In regards to the second question, a lot of art critics make the mistake of assuming that the tropes of rightist-and-leftist art can more-or-less be summed up as an internalized argument perceived to be focused on a notion of traditional realism versus unironically avant-garde abstraction. Much better art critics such as Hal Foster have noted that the supposed avant-garde of prior decades is in fact a kind of neo-avant-garde favoured by writers such as Clement Greenburg and Peter Bürger (predominantly critiquing during the 60's and 70's) who tried to elevate the values of abstraction into a formalized high art, whilst condemning the then more recent iterations of art that would later be called pop and minimalism - that aforementioned neo-avant-garde tendency ironically becoming a kind of cultural conservatism in it's own right. Whether it was Henry Moore's predominance in British sculpture, the "colour-field" artists in America or even the more sensual and less cynical modern works of the Mediterranean, the previous avant-garde art had become subsumed by the establishment and in turn came to be associated with rightist sentiment - thus rendering it suspect by radical artists and movements. The whole of art history is an extremely confusing and often cyclical reflection of changing social tendencies and public discourse, which goes a long way to making the subject very interesting to a literary nerd like. As for the astrology question, you might be able to argue that forced materialism resulting in the aggressive rejection of traditional systems of belief and interpretation is a political gesture, albeit a very offset and personal one.

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