domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
Browser
6hr ago
Yep that's the one I was thinking of, thank you. Afaik Scott linked it in one of his articles?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
6hr ago
A bit ago I finally pulled a box off my shelf of shame and played Hands in the Sea, a game about the first punic war. I kickstarted it forever ago, then kickstarted the second edition upgrade kit, then I moved, then I lost touch with the friends I usually played those sorts of games with. I marked this game as received on Kickstarter in October of 2016, and it finally hit my table July of 2025. Jeeze.
I originally took an interest in the game because a respected wargame youtuber, I think Judd Vance, was going around saying it was one of the best games he'd ever played during playtesting with the designer. It takes the deck building system from A Few Acres of Snow, widely but perhaps unfairly panned for having an unfixable OP strategy, and fixes that as well as improving on it in nearly every way. I never played A Few Acres of Snow on account of it's poor reputation, so I can't attest to that personally. However, I did greatly enjoy it.
If you've played a deck building game, the central mechanic might not be alien to you. You have a starting deck of cards, you draw five, and you get to take two actions. Where it gets wargamey is that the actions are all printed on a player aid, there are about a dozen of them, you can pick any action you want, and the cards mostly provide resources to accomplish them. Broadly there are two types of cards also, territories which you either start with or conquer, and then also personnel like legions, commanders, traders, etc. I won't bore you with a detailed rules breakdown, but generally you'll be conquering territory, trying to fuck up each others lines of supply through naval fuckery, and racing towards a set of military and economic victory conditions.
I played the game with my brother who is back in state. It went well, and I couldn't help notice how differently we try to learn a game. He wanted to try each different action and learn how it worked. I just learned a subset of them that I thought would make a good strategy, and clobbered him. He kept trying, and failing, to ask AI rule questions, I looked them up on BoardGameGeek. That said, it probably would have been a close game if the random events didn't hand me several absolute coups.
Yes there are random events. You roll a dice to see which player they effect, and some are weighted more towards Carthage or more towards Rome. Unfortunately this provided no assistance, and my brother playing Carthage just got absolutely hammered. The first few random events cost me some money and cards. Then for the rest of the game my brother ate shit. He lost his entire fleet to a storm, losing his singular advantage over me that he was really beginning to punish me with. Then he lost a heavily fortified town that was holding the line in Sicily to a rebellion. A town I quickly scooped up before he could react.
He tried to pull his game out of the tailspin it was in. But curiously enough, the game's length is determined by how many times Carthage goes through their deck. So the more he tried to optimize his deck to combat my strategy, the quicker he was running out of time to execute, as the game can only go 12 turns. Also, I was scoring way more points than him during the scoring phase of each turn, which was pushing me faster and faster to an absolute victory. In a way, it was a mercy killing the way that accelerated his loss.
So, all in all, I really enjoyed the experience. But I did win a crushing victory, so of course I would.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
Look dude, you're the one who said that whatever's disclosed while sobbing in that 'Spoons stays in the Spoons.
At any rate, I wasn't around when the PR push you're talking about for euthanize took off (which jurisdiction are we talking about?) It's not legal in the UK, and I am part, albeit only at a very junior level, of the bodies putting forth policy proposals and considering whether to make it legal. I can tell you that we use simultaneously more careful, and more broad, language. It is definitely not being sold as something for those who are in maximal agony and only at the very last minute.
Browser
6hr ago
Yeah but Antifa are essentially given soft handling veering on explicit carte blanche by the powers that be.
Browser
7hr ago
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
JarJarJedi
7hr ago
"Right wing" has a weird meaning in Europe... I am eagerly expecting a fresh crop of horror stories (in addition to the plenty we have in NY) to follow.
Browser
7hr ago
Makes sense. I've done Jiu-Jitsu for a long time and whilst I've never been out-out I've spent a lot of time being choked in various guises and if somebody's got a clean bite and catches a blood choke perfectly it's blackness oncoming almost instantly. But also plenty of chokes where it's see-sawing the line the whole time and can be minutes of awkwardness
You've given me the idea for a very good medical comedy about a critical care doctor who either disagrees with the concept of euthanasia, or bumbles around never quite being told which patients are involved.
He, or she, holds the record for most lives saved or resuscitations performed. In a very British manner, the actual doctors responsible for euthanasia are very vexed by his tendency to immediately save their patients, and they're in a cat and mouse game of taking turns murdering and unmurdering any given patient.
The hospital brass are desperate to figure out a way to not award him excellence awards, because it's just plain old embarrassing at this point.
I can foresee potential to change the plot to get more demographic appeal. The life saving male doctor versus the ice queen no-nonsense German euthanasia dom. Or getting Rowan Atkinson to play the male lead.
It might be delightfully British. We can fabricate end of season drama by having them come to blows, and then have them either start to fuck over a corpse that comes alive (because their thrusting counts as CPR), or when they realize that they can game both metrics if they cooperate to keep the bodies clinically dead for long enough to fool the coroner.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7hr ago
From 2011 (not Scott)
FtttG
7hr ago
Apple seeds contain about 0.6 milligrams of hydrogen cyanide.
I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
You might be able to buy a pack of .308 or 12 gauge buckshot and press your head on the entire thing while you heat it up somehow, maybe a frying pan.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
7hr ago
All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
Or at least I-10 after the Navajo Nation blockaded I-40 from Gallup to Flagstaff.
ArmedTooHeavily
7hr ago
Absolutely seconded. Mental coherency is, fundamentally, what makes a person a person, what makes one oneself. Getting out while the getting is good and you are still you is right and honorable.
ArmedTooHeavily
7hr ago
Despite all of this about 1/5 of the patients regularly asked me to help kill them. They were in more or less constant pain despite pain management, increasingly felt that the help the got was degrading and their minds were rapidly slipping.
Is 1/5 an exaggeration or (to quote black hawk down) a no-bullshit exception?
My mind immediately goes to "this is another reason why you should never, ever let anyone disarm you." Horrifying.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
You can see that, but only really around government buildings of significant importance (I've almost never seen armed cops outside London). Don't seem to recall seeing them at transit stations, the police there were chill and mostly concerned with shooing away the homeless. And believe me, I've been to a lot of stations this month.
Browser
7hr ago
Saw The Lychee Road last night and enjoyed it a lot. The ending drags a tad but it's a solid bureaucracy thriller and I'd give it an 8 or so
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
7hr ago
And I'm saying that someone who is violent and drugged up is significantly more lethal with a gun than without one.
And the way American police are trained reflects this. American police treat a random violent drugged up person as an immediate lethal threat because of the high probability that they are concealed carrying. Non-American police don't. This is a large part of why American police shoot so many more people (of varying degrees of innocence) than non-American police.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7hr ago
Okay so, talking to the worst people in the world all day? Yeah I could see that driving me to drink. I'd probably have to just start treating people like holograms to protect my sanity after awhile
What did you think criminal defense would be like?
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
7hr ago
The obvious counter-examples being Canada and Switzerland, first world nations which have similar rates of gun ownership to the US but nowhere near as much gun violence, suggesting the problem is a cultural or demographic one rather than with guns in and of themselves.
Private handgun ownership in Canada and Switzerland is not high. Essentially all the excess "gun deaths" (suicides and homicides) in the US are handgun deaths.
I agree this doesn't answer the question of "Why don't other countries with large-scale private long gun ownership see more media-friendly spree killings?" But if you care about body count, the reason why US gun culture is more lethal than Canadian or Swiss gun culture is the type of gun.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
The standard justification for criminalizing suicide is not to punish the survivor, assuming they survive. It is, or at least I've heard it claimed, so that the police have a legal pretext to intervene or break down the door and stop them.
Europe isn't a country. Talking about stuff that Europe is doing is like talking about how Americans love Samba dancing, mate tea and poutine.
On the other hand, if you start breaking down homicide rates by sub-populations, the claims about the "ability to easily kill" start looking less credible.
Surely more credible? Making it easy and legal for your citizens to own guns includes making it easy and legal for sub-populations (you mean black people right? You can just say that here) to get hold of them too.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
I must try so very hard to not get nerd-sniped again into an argument about convenient household or pharmaceutical techniques to kill people quickly and easily.
I'd say it's also the legal restrictions where you can't have them in public - can't be transporting them in a vehicle unless they're unloaded/locked/stored - definitely can't carry them on your person outside of wilderness areas or a gun range.
The downstream cultural effect of these laws is that most Canadians don't see or think about firearms. They only come up in conversation related to sporting uses (hunting, range shooting). They're just not much of a cultural thing.
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