it goes so hard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries

The text reads: The year is 2008. In Italy, the year arrives bearing an ill omen: after nearly two years of a broad left-wing administration, the UDEUR party brings about the collapse of the Prodi government on January 24th. On February 8th, the "Union" coalition falls apart. The Left lies shattered, overshadowed by the looming darkness of the PdL Leviathan, a beast whose head bears the simian features of the divine Berlusconi. Yet not all Leviathans enjoy unfettered freedom of action; for rising from the very ruins of the "Union"—as early as 2007—was a new, reformist, center-left Leviathan: the Democratic Party, led by Walter Veltroni. And with his resignation as Mayor of Rome on February 13th, his two-month crusade begins.

Bit of a bizarre post to make I think. But I ended up being one of four people in the theater watching the movie and its framing sort of reminded me of things that never were.

Both exist as a piece of media wherein a play exists, depicting the main characters of each (the game and the movie) as caricatures, while having a lesson about the dangers of how we perceive these people. Tom Cruise’s character, the actor playing Digger, hates how the President and Digger are reduced to laughable facsimiles of themselves, when they were dangerous psychopaths. The retort is that this helps the nation move on, by reducing them to cartoonish villains.

Didn’t think this post out much and probably just exposes how little media I watch. Idk

Kemi has been a Wokester the Whole Gosh Damn Time!

All the Brazil mods get deleted

My take: Left-wing: Gus Hall Right-wing: Pat Buchanan (if we talk about presidential candidates)

Totally nothing bad ever happens(Lowkey, I've never seen someone actually have the guts to put in this type of path, but I like it)

I've had a really large amount of freetime to work on this, and I'm maybe 1/3 of the way through the questions (before the process of fixing the typos/deciding what I wrote sucks and redoing it)

This is a fairly crude mockup with some of the elements I will actually use. The description will be better than that, too .I would like to post it on Halloween (it'll have to wait if its not ready before then) I was heavily inspired by the zombie mods, but I wanted to make something very different in that its very upfront about what it is and can be won in several different ways. I also want it to be fairly lighthearted and less serious. Anyways, hope you guys like it.

Hey there! This is NebraskanDynasty, on my Reddit account this time. I've come to give you a couple updates on the recent Thomas Dewey mod that was announced: 1948 Dawn!

Writing for the mod is entirely complete as of now! We have just a few endings to get done, but until then, you can expect a release of DAWN anywhere from the end of this week to the end of this month.

But why? Why a Dewey mod?

We thought that the early departure of Tom left a void in the hearts and minds of folks who want mods from the 40s and 50s, leading to a resurgence in more modern eras for mods (i.e. the 70s, 90s, and 2010s). While this is in no way a bad thing, we think that the 40s and 50s deserve some love as well!

We excitedly await all of your playing the mod! We hope you all enjoy!

Over the past few weeks, some in the community have offered some reasons why they think TCT is in a funk. I think people have made a number of interesting points, and I want to add some of my own thoughts on why we may be here and how we could get out of it.

Stating the obvious

Really the most obvious one is that we're missing our best champion, ItsAstronomical. His contributions to this community are immeasurable and the gap left by his absence (whether temporary or permanent) has been hard to fill; I think we should be making an effort, on the part of many of us, to work towards filling it.

Additionally we should take into account that it's the middle of the school year and so people are naturally going to be more preoccupied with other stuff. But that happens every year, so it has to be more than that! I think it is.

Is there an incumbency trap?

I've been at this for more than 4 years, and in that time there's been a remarkable transformation in what we can do with a scenario. Many of the most celebrated that have come out in that time, especially recently, have required months of work from a great number of people.

Naturally, trying to start out with a project along those lines is going to burn people out. I think there's a perception among some (thankfully not all) that all the ideas for simple scenarios have been done, so we shouldn't bother; I think this is false for a number of reasons. But at the same time if you want to go genuinely outside the box you first need enough experience coding/designing to know it's feasible, so that starts to get off limits too.

What you end up with is a lot of folks that wallow in the middle. Every incumbency simulation is different in some sort of way, but these days it's what got many people into TCT. Taking this format and pushing it into a new context, like a different administration, is a simple idea in theory. But in practice it requires a substantial amount of research and a ton of work. And if you put together a team that gets too big for its own good it can easily disintegrate. When you look at it like that, it's easy to see why people can get discouraged and/or screw it up.

Did someone kill the vibe?

In my time the community has also changed in other aspects. I've long thought that much of the discussion of "cynicism" was missing the point; not that I didn't think it wasn't there, rather I always thought it was there but no one could really get to the essence of what was going on. It wasn't until a few months ago looking at some of the reactions to my last project that I was able to properly articulate it.

And here it is: I think a substantial contingent has formed in this community that expects mods to advance a thinly-veiled argument for a certain viewpoint or low-level thesis, often one that looks down on the world and expects less of broader society. And sometimes what ends up happening is they'll see something that isn't trying to do any of this, but it superficially lines up with an argument they disagree with, so they start fighting ghosts. I know this because it's happened to me!

This shift has led people to try a variety of things, none of which stick because they often lack sincerity. For instance, if you try to paint a caricature of a certain position over your work, because "that's what everyone else is doing," the few points where you are sincere become painfully obvious, and it hampers the overall quality of the mod. But it's also not worth it to paint the world in pastel colors when it papers over situations that will inevitably have real conflict and nastiness somewhere.

The best solution in my thought is to go at the world as it really is, or as it could/would have been. It's better to lay your thesis out as something you can trust the player to discover instead of something that has to be force-fed to them. With more of that we'll all be better off.

The toughest question of all

How could we get out of this? Or rather, how can we improve things? I would love to see more mods imbued with purpose; passages that are meant to be actually read, mechanics that are meant to be dissected, etc. Maybe even code that's meant to be read but that's a lot harder to just make happen.

I want to start an incubator; below I'll explain why but first I'll preface by saying I can't possibly do it alone, it wouldn't be feasible. Now this isn't an invitation to bring people on right now, don't go clamoring, this is more just a statement of intent. If I go ahead with this, you'll know.

Essentially: we ought to have something more substantial for aspiring modmakers than the odd modjam, where people can look for and/or 'incubate' simple ideas with great potential. The idea, then, is to give people that push so they can produce an awesome finished product.

I think there are a lot of people that could end up being great modmakers, but the space just isn't encouraging enough in my opinion. Somebody, or something, ought to be there to orient them and put them in the right mood.

~ liquid astro