Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
20d ago
Either that that they're unskilled hooligans with too much money and no appreciation of technique or brain cells, or, secretly, that it looks kinda fun and they wish they could afford a full suit of plate armor.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
21d ago
In Brigador, there are three categories of vehicle:
- Mech: Anything with legs.
- Tank: Anything with wheels.
- Agrav: Anything that flies.
And indeed the heaviest can be found in the tank category, where you find mobile fortresses and entire artillery batteries crammed into single vehicles the size of city blocks, armed with various very large weapons including GAU-30s and naval artillery. It's perhaps not quite battleships on treads, but let's call it frigates and we're in the right ballpark.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
I'd say they pass the ideological turing test. Don't take everything they write as a manifesto of their own beliefs.
Unless you actually found a manifesto and that was in there.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Is this Friday Fun?
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
seize Peter when available
I'm not sure whether it's worse that they want to seize our Peter, or that Peter isn't even available at all times.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Brigador games
Now, there might be two novels, but so far there is only the one Brigador game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored_Edition/?curator_clanid=5608422
A sequel is in the works, and its setting parallels that of the second novel just like the first did with the original game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/Brigador_Killers/
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Brigador is, if anything, a little edgy to the right. Overall it's a cynical, fairly realistic and well-realized slightly-hard sci-fi setting. I believe this used to be called "gritty". So not pozzed at all, I'm happy to report. It's the anti-battletech.
The devs are somewhere between apolitical and right wing (though they do try to hide their power level). The writer of the books is a full-on anglo nationalist. It's a franchise that prospered by keeping people in the dark about its creators' poltics, and most of the fanbase is, funnily enough, very woke.
The devs love their pet universe and do excellent worldbuilding work with it, and the writer is respectful of it and does, in my opinion, a very good job. Perhaps more craftsmanlike than literary genius, but he makes it work.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Next time, use "Alt + Tab" to select the offending window, then use "Windows Button + Arrow Keys" to reposition it even across screens.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Thanks!
This is a very short review of the book Brigador Killers: Pilgrim, sequel to the novel Brigador, which in turn is based to the setting and plot of the video game of the same name.
Kindle version of the book: https://www.amazon.com/Brigador-Killers-Pilgrim-Bradley-Buckmaster-ebook/dp/B0F199RDCY
free Audiobook version and prequel: https://youtube.com/@stellarjockeysofficial/playlists
Anything below is spoilers.
In the first book, which occupies the same place and timeframe as the game, Ana Mirante was an NCO in a loyalist military unit during a coup against the leadership of her home country of Solo Nobre. Said coup was orchestrated by an off-world Concern, and carried out by a combination of imported spacefaring mercenaries, ad-hoc contractors drawn from local military personnel turned traitor, and a sizable fifth column, all referred to as Brigadors. Mirante lost most of her subordinates in the events of the first book, which was in no way shy about seeing members of the protagonists’ party dying suddenly and gruesomely. The first book does not make the outcome of the coup attempt clear, though Mirante and her superior officer fuflfill their mission and survive to the end of the story.
The second book reveals that the coup was successful in toppling the old leadership, but unsuccessful in destroying the loyalists wholesale. The situation in Solo Nobre is unclear, but it seems the Concern succeeded in installing a government of their choosing. The loyalists are thus turned into guerillas, commanded by Mirante’s superior, and Mirante herself is sent to the Concern homeworld of Mar Nosso, along with a small crew of veterans, in parallel with other cells, and supported by fixers who know the terrain. The new mission is to kill as many Brigadors as possible, who have congregated on Mar Nosso to be feted by the Concern as liberators of Solo Nobre. Our protagonists are, in effect, terrorists with an extremely limited shelf-life aiming to cause as much damage as possible before being found out and inevitably destroyed.
And they’re good at it. There’s some competence porn here, with the team starting out under-equipped and barely-informed, and working hard and efficiently to gather information, prepare their attacks, eliminate their targets with generous collateral damage, and repeat the cycle. They recklessly take large risks because of how under-informed they are, suffer for it, and come out on top only because of their skill, dedication and overwhelming brutality. They obtain better armaments to keep pace with the rapidly escalacting security responses against them. While their first target was an alcoholic washout, they eventually graduate to capturing a superhuman mercenary princess whom they plan to gain further information from.
As the casualties mount - police, civilian, brigador and security contractor alike, though none of the protagonists suffer deaths sudden or otherwise as the previous book led me to expect - the differing personalities of the team members shine through. One has second thoughts, growing disgusted by the carnage, thinking himself no better than the Brigadors they chase. One doubles down on his hatred for the Mar Nossans, justiying his atrocities by accusing them all of being silent accomplices of the Concern. One just goes through the motions, decades of having done worse in Solo Nobre making this just another regular workday. Their fixer quits, unable to cope with the magnitude of violence committed by the team. Mirante herself may have doubts, but considering herself responsible for the team’s morale, does not allow herself to show it. The amount of gallows humor on display rises continuously. Intellectually, they all know they don’t have long to live.
Then they figure out that the Concern only let them get away with their activities because they were, in effect, tying off loose ends by eliminating Brigadors, and they are doing their enemies’ bidding. To up the stakes, they formulate a plan on the spot to torture the princess to death, record the process and send the recording to her father, in order to trigger an invasion of the planet in retaliation, which would cause all numbers of political problems for the mercenaries and the Concern. And then they do just that. And with a minimum of patience and common sense, her father nullifies all this by finding a loophole to send a small death squad through without causing any political trouble.
And as our protagonists aim to take their final shot at a high-ranking Concern executive, it becomes a race of one death squad hunting another, the locals variously jeering at them as the terrorists they are or dying in droves, team members slowly getting picked off by the superior mercenaries, doubts creeping in as to what their final attack will even accomplish, and when they finally reach and kill their target, still having no idea what exactly if anything they accomplished, the last two members of the team are unceremoniously blown to pieces by their pursuers catching up to them.
The end.
That’s it.
I loved it. There’s nothing intellectual about it. It takes its premise and drives it to its logical conclusion. Tropes, expectations, expectations of subversions, all ignored. Excellently written, a very smooth read, no punches pulled. Maybe it’s performatively cynical or shallow nihilist gore porn, maybe I’m dumb for even reading it, but man I enjoyed it and still think of it and I recommend it heartily.
Just one caveat, as someone recently asked - I’m not sure how much anyone can get out of it without having read the first book (which was also good, though thematically different) and never having played the game they’re based on. I can’t speak to it.
I did not think very hard about this review. I do not think it’s going to be very valuable to anyone. Mostly I just wanted to try and get the book I read last week out of my system. Normally I do that by reading reviews and discussions, but it’s too unknown and there’s nothing to read about it. So now you had to suffer through this instead.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
People are born into the world and expect it to develop tangentially to how it was during their formative years. Then the world keeps turning, but those expectations remain constant. Disappointment invariably sets in. The next generation is better-adapted to the revolved world, and can appreciate what it does better. But for the old guard, all they see is the distance between the world and their outdated expectations.
I am very disappointed.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Hard to predict the future. The AfD is held together by contrarian spite and, appropriately enough, a lack of right-wing alternatives. There isn't really much positive valence associated with it; it's a thin organisational membrane around what is otherwise an empty hole in the political spectrum in Germany. And in my estimate, that membrane isn't too sturdy - polite society hasn't yet found the right kind of tool with which to cut into it, but once they find something that works there won't be much holding the AfD as such together. To be sure, as long as that aforementioned hole remains, some political force will form around it, but it needn't be the AfD with its current branding and personnel. It's ascendant now, but protest voters are fickle creatures.
That said, I obviously hope it continues to grow, trashes the "establishment", then nukes itself because their platform is nothing more than a placeholder and their people are politically incompetent, and from the ashes something better can grow. Or something worse, more likely. Things can always get worse.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Sadly paywalled. Thanks anyways.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Source and more information on the topic, please. Seeing North Koreans abroad is a little surreal.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Whenever I hear German politicans speak about international relations, there recur phrases like "democratic rule of law". In public discourse in general, democracy and rule of law seem to be considered much the same, or at least inseparately linked. I feel like this is a lumping-together of two very different concepts, and the two are at least as likely to be at odds with each other as they are to be mutually supportive. In my personal estimation: Far more likely to be conflict than otherwise. Western liberal societies have perhaps managed to have both, to some extent, for a while, but it's always been an unstable compromise. As the cracks show more clearly and people learn how to exploit and subvert these systems, I will not be surprised if the US or any other Western country needs to decide between either rule of law or democracy.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
Do we know any magic tricks for getting little girls interested in weapons of war?
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
What is the liquor of choice
Scotch that tastes like an ashtray excavated from the entrails of a bog mummy.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel
Citation needed. I mean, I would agree that it is very important, but vast swathes of the Western populace would not.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
23d ago
That's not necessarily true. People aren't rational. If the insult is well-done, or the insulted party is disliked from the start, then the insult can have more impact than any argument.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
24d ago
All true.
Anecdotally, people around me disparage saber as being essentially the same thing as olympic saber, only with darker clothing. I wouldn't know.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
24d ago
Nope, not so far. My daughter will turn 4 soon, and I handed her all kinds of equipment and she likes to wave swords around and bang them together together or get some beeps out of battery-powered self-contained beeper foils, but has little interest in actually doing anything resembling fencing or fighting. Winning she likes, getting her beeps, but not if there's significant adversity.
Good luck to you though! With multiple boys, I hope you can get them to compete (friendly-like!) with each other.
it being their main occupation I imagine they would accept a higher degree of risk in their sparring than modern hobbyists who have to go to their office job their next day
I'd argue the opposite. If you break some fingers or a rib in sparring, or sprain your ankle, then that doesn't at all impair your ability to drive or ride the subway to your office job and interact, perhaps a little more slowly than usual, with your computer / papers / coworkers. Plus, nowadays you can just take sick leave in many western countries.
If your livelihood depends on your motor abilities, you'll probably be less rather than more reckless.
OTOH, people back then were probably more tolerant of pain in general.
Multiple reasons that I know of.
There is a significant degree of uncertainty in interpreting the primary sources. The language is more than archaic, the wording may be unclear, imagery if present at all only presents one still shot of what might be a complex sequence, there is extensive implicit contextual information that modern readers simply do not possess, and there is always a risk that the document in question is merely meant as an aid to an actual flesh-and-blood instructor rather than as a standalone manual. So after reading the text, you need to experiment a lot to find out what actually works in a given situation, and then you vary the parameters a little and find out that the technique you just reconstructed stops working when the distance, relative positioning, enemy posture, momentum, body size differential or god-knows-what differs a little from your previous setting. So while you absolutely can have fun and learn a lot from doing this kind of archaeology, it's not necessarily a straight road from there to becoming tournament-effective.
And even beyond that, we do not always know for sure what type of fighting a given source describes. It could be for war, for self-defence, for regulated judicial duels, for nonlethal competition, it could be for armored or unarmored or even horseback fighting but forget to mention it, etc. Regarding historical tournaments, we also don't know much about what historical competitive fencing looked like, what rules and regulations they employed. From depictions, we deduce that medieval sports fencers generally wore thick everyday clothing, but no face protection, so either risks were significantly higher for them than for moderns with all their fancy protective equipment, or their rules somehow resulted in more restrained fighting, or they just shrugged off broken bones and lost eyes even though their livelihoods depended on them. Obviously if you argue that the fencing manuscripts are for judicial, martial or self-defence fighting rather than competitions, then you're suddenly playing a completely different game.
Modern tournaments are quite possibly more forceful than historical unarmored competitions, but at the same time modern tournament fencers can make many more mistakes and take greater risks than someone could in a self-defence situation.
We're not necessarily better nowadays than people were 600 years ago; there's just a massive gulf of time between them and us and little information that made it through. So instead of trying in vain to accurately reconstruct what they did, we focus on what works nowadays, which we can actually get actionable feedback on.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
24d ago
Fair in theory, but has this happened at least once?
Most people I know who got into HEMA did so when they were students. And even affluent people I know who do HEMA and could afford a plate harness largely just don't because it's a huge hassle, still expensive, and saddles you with a big pile of steel parts you need to maintain.
That said, it's not unheard of. I know a few who got one, or are in the process of getting one.
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