A rod of Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive isotope. There’s a reason it says on the side “Drop & run”. Its radioactivity is the reason it’s messing up the photo- as the energetic radiation strikes the cells in the phone camera, it causes those cells to light up.

It’s part of this Analog Horror video by Gooseworx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo

It’s worth a watch if you can take analog horror.

My most recent game was a Hive Mind. I think I assimilated some 75% of the galaxy, getting right to the endgame crisis before the most recent update dropped. I’ve kind of lost interest in the save, partially because I played with Gigastructural Engineering and that updated with Machine Age as I was playing, so the save file is a little borked. Looking forward to playing with the Cosmic Storms and the upcoming Grand Archive, though.

I think I crushed two Fanatic Purifiers and assimilated the Great Khan, so you’re welcome, the rest of the galaxy.

There is somewhat of a case to be made for Materialist, considering Cosmogenesis and the Synaptic Lathe. But obviously not every materialist empire goes into that. To be a fanatic purifier, you need to be Fanatically Xenophobic and either Militarist or Spiritualist. I’d expect Xenophobic empires to not care (or care significantly less), but the other two ethics are a little more debatably nebulous as to how much they’d care.

Gotta say, some of those uniforms do look pretty comfy…

There’s a video linked from the thread that I wanted to get other people’s opinions on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

The video tries to analyze how the cycles of rise and fall of different empires in the past can be used to interpret the present.

The work has some grounding in reality, though we should question some of the hidden assumptions made behind the work. I feel like this isn’t a complete system, however. He over-simplifies how the myriad states work and only focuses on the world power vs the rest of the world. While there is a focus on how an empire rises and how the systems interconnect, comparatively little is done to question how an empire declines and how those systems break down, only how the latest does.

It’s a reference to the videos made by Mister Manticore on Youtube. Specifically, the Monument Mythos series. It essentially goes “what if US national monuments but analog horror?” and runs with it. If you’ve got a taste for analog horror, I’d suggest looking it up. There is a ton of lore to dig into, if you’re willing to dig.

Just curious, what makes Zaporozhye so difficult to defend?

Yeah, still confused me why it had negative one comment. I suppose it was some weirdness in the programming from people deleting their comments quickly (or someone else was?).

Trashfuture is good at looking at some news and economic things, but some of their AES takes aren’t great. Anyone else have an opinion about them?

Something that hasn’t been mentioned is that things may have slowed down because it’s mud season in Ukraine- it’s just impossible to get anything moving across muddy fields, everything just gets bogged down. This doesn’t mean that things can’t move on other fronts (RU launching missiles at UA substations, UK & US supporting UA send aerial and naval drone bombs at Sevastopol), but the ground troops are definitely moving slower. Maybe the whole thing about Ukraine doing literal terrorism has put a damper on things.