Marat

So I started playing Silksong [no opinions on it yet beyond "I suck" and "its good" since I'm only a few hours in], but the problem I end up having is that i...its not that I get stressed, it's more i just tense up a lot trying to focus. In any case, its good to have something relaxing. Sometimes this is a book but I also picked up a game called "Shadows of the Forbidden Gods" which is a small indie title that's currently like $3 on steam.

I haven't played too much so far, but it's just so cute and neat that i wanted to share.

Premise: Basically, you play an occult eldritch god [a la Cuthulu], and you act through your disciples to spread your shadow [aka influence] over the world. There are about 10 different gods to choose from, and they all have really different mechanics, which is really cool.

Overall I'd say it has a 2020's design philosophy while having a 1990s astetic. Also the art is Gorgeous. The only major things that I dislike so far are that sometimes you'll get random events that are just...well, so random. While simultaneously you'll get the same random events a couple times in a row. Additionally, setting my pace is a bit confusing. You get 500 turns to win on any size map [although you can disable this] and world panic (a soft timer basically indicating how much the world knows its ending) increases every time a seal breaks [basically, giving your god more powers to work with. Personally i would've made it so your disciples had to perform actions or rituals to break seals. But obviously that probably would have balance issues, especially for some of them]. Beyond these things, it's pretty good.

Big big thing I want to shout out: THE UI IS GOOD. Sorry, whenever I play games that either we're or look like they were made a few decades ago, the ui always has a chance of being really bad. Luckily, for the most part, the ui is actually pretty good and intuitive.

Anyway, just wanted to reccomend it. It's not completely unknown [unlike say, Emporer of the Fading Suns], but still pretty niche.

Speaking of pretty, here's some of the art i was talking about:

Recently, there was a leak of the footage of the non-public trial of General Xu Qinxian, who was charged and convicted of insubordination and sentanced to a stripping of his military ranks and 5 years in prison.

It has gone semi viral, with the full 6 hour trial reaching 1 million views on youtube.

I have begun watching it myself [currently at 1 hour] and taking notes as I see important, and read a couple articles on the matter.

A few things I've noticed off the bat

1. The issue Xu has seems to both be a use of force issue, but also an issue of whom the orders originate from.

Xu in fact states that he was fine with deploying the army to the outskirts of Beijing to encourage a "political solution" to the matter.

Xu has also stated multiple times that he wished for the NPC to meet and deliberate on the action and use of the army. He, at least to me, implies that if the NPC ordered him to, then he would have complied. He seems to have a major problem with the army taking orders from the party.

2.Xu also seems concerned less with the morality of the situation, but with the potential for him to lose face should the operation have gone badly. I don't think this is entirely unfounded, and at a certain point I think it's fair that the orders be given in writing [although obviously I don't know standard procedure in the PLA]. At one points he states "If this could be pulled off, one could be seen as a hero. If it goes poorly, then one could be seen as historical sinners." Or something to that effect.

Xu does have conscious objections, but those seem to be less of a concern. For instance, he states that he believed that the the police and garrison forces could deal with the situation on their own. He also questioned the equipment being brought into the city [LMGs, HMGs, AA guns, etc.]

I'll hold off on a full judgement on issues until I've watched it fully, however. If anyone else has any input feel free to add anything to what I've said here.

I'm unsure how long they've been floating around in Chinese*, but Political Logic, National Sovereignty, and Wang Huning's Collected Works were all published this year and are currently available on Amazon [just Amazon for some reason].

I'm unsure if these are official, given that they're simply listed as "independently published" rather than being from the Foreign Languages Press [also, they seem to be in a similar format to America Against America, which was published in 2022 but was in a bit of a shoddy condition, being in a weird font and not having page numbers]. But in any case they seem interesting enough [although I would expect the translation to not be as good as if it were done professionally, also hopefully they aren't just fabrications]

[Also unfortunately Amazon is the only place I can find them currently. I'll see if i can buy them and maybe upload them to the internet archive]

*I did do a search of Political Logic/ 政治逻辑 and did find something in Chinese describing Wang as just a professor, it's possible these have been around for a very long while in China. But that's going off of rough shod Google translate for now.

Hey, so I forgot my password while trying to migrate from firefox [I know I shouldve done that years ago but im very slow on the digital side of things] and never connected my previous account to an email [I thought I did but I guess I didn't].

Im just going to link the old account to my bio [assuming it doesn't get deleted, idk how that works]. Don't worry, learned my lesson.

Also im mainly just posting this just in case anyone later is confused why this account has no history. Don't know what community to post this in and this is the only one I could think of so...