JcDent

I have been saying that I'd buy JoyToy (what a sex toy store name, jfc) Space Marines if they ever did Horus Heresy... and they're doing it! They're doing HORUS HERESY and starting with MKIII armor, which is HERESY AS FUCK.

[HEAVY BREATHING]

At €50(+whatever shipping and other nonsense tax you need to pay to get it from Brexit island) a pop, they're pricey, but my love for Adeptus Astartes is not based on logic.

I don't even collect Imperial Fists, BUT WHOMSTVE CARES

On one hand, the devs complain that they were forced to make the game on short notice. But on the other hand, their first (deleted) response was this:

"Funny," said ex-Infinity Ward staff member Ajinkya Limaye, in a social media post that has now been deleted. "But yeah, the metrics that Call of Duty absolutely destroys all of the God of War games (probably combined to be honest) is also equally laughable (if not more)."

"OUR GAME SOLD MORE, SO WHO'S THE BABY IDIOT???"

Also, a labor of love that results in loving propaganda, I guess:

Feasibly, in the original story, General Shepherd was a stand-in for the warmongers of the early noughties, and Russia's resulting invasion of the US could be read as a symbolic reversal of the US' own contemporary wars on foreign soil. You might already feel that's all fubar, but the goal of this new Modern Warfare 3 is to ensure it's now impossible not to think so. Here there's no system, no government, and only really the idea of Britain or the USA (the game primarily plays out in two fictional places, and Russia.) Bad guys are just bad guys - individual rotten apples to be arrested (or extrajudicially killed), with Call of Duty failing to make the hardly-demanding leap from "rotten apple" to "spoiled bunch". Again, this is Call of Duty of course. Its goal is replicating the epic, mindless action of its cinematic inspirations, and epic, mindless action, as those inspirations like The Raid or The Rock or even James Bond prove, can be very fun. Modern Warfare 3 can also be very fun, at times. The problem is those films aren't about wars. And they're particularly not about modern wars.

The inspirations that are - Sicario, clearly - don't always have to take an overt stance, but they do have to at least engage with their material (a big difference between Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve and something of a government thriller with a bit of action, and Sicario 2: not directed by Villeneuve; just action). The alternative, as you find with Modern Warfare 3, is an extraordinarily pretty romancing of good guys with guns - Alpha Team are undeniably likeable, all blokey camaraderie and reliably well-pitched banter - rooting out international bad eggs with impunity and lots of facial recognition cameras. Untethered from any kind of wider meaning, at its worst feels very, very close to propaganda. At its best, with that vapid story combining with hit-and-miss stealth and borrowed widgets from Warzone, Modern Warfare 3's campaign is just a muddle.

I think in an effort to make video games more realistic, protagonists should stop constantly talking to themselves about puzzle solutions and should instead remain totally silent until they eventually say "is... have I had my shirt on backwards all—god dammit"

In an effort to get around a similar issue in miniature wargaming - namely, to not present strength-testing objectives that an intelligence-focused team wouldn't be able to do - Pulp Alley requires you to draw a card and then see what stat challenges apply to the objective.

So imagine if Indiana Jones swaps out the gold idol for a weighted bag of dirt like an intelligent guy, maybe a more agile/dexterous dude might just swipe and leg it while a strong dude may push the altar out of the spot.

The card doesn't tell you the fluff of what happened when your character used their good stat to resolve the objective, so you can come up with that explanation yourself.

It neatly solves the issue where, say, in Necromunda, a Goliath team would deffo fail an Intelligence test (...and who raises Intelligence anyways?) while in infinity, the list of special qualifications that allow a trooper to Press The Button (that's how we call activating/interacting with an objective) is expanding to to ridiculous proportions.

One caveat: I guess it wouldn't be OK in a game like SIGNALIS to just be able to blow up puzzle-locked doors, but open-world RPGs like Starfield that have no stakes or narrative themes should definitely allow you to do that.

At this point in Chanukah, placing the shamash on this menorah starts to get really precarious. The heat from all the candles starts to burn your hand if it's held event quite a distance above the flames and trying to around them to get the shamash in risks setting your sleeve on fire. Furthermore, all the feat form these candles starts to melt the shamash from the bottom, so it gets really drippy and the wax gets all over the menorah.

It's not a very smart design for a menorah. Having the shamash elevated is halacha, but moving it to one side is objectively the better design than having it set back in the middle like this. This menorah is a family heirloom that was brought over from the old country. I believe it was Minsk? I saw a very similar menorah on an antiques auction site going for $2000 and dated to about 1840 so this is a very very old menorah. I am careful to clean and polish the bronze every year once a year, either before going into storage or after coming out of storage. I use the oven to melt all the wax off. I take care good of this thing. And despite all the work I put into taking care of it, it's designed so that it drips wax all over itself from the top down. Despite being cast from bronze, despite being very old, it clearly was a commercial product that was probably mass produced given that I have seen duplicates show up on my tumblr dashboard and given that even just posting picture these pictures on cohost someone else commented that they also have a family heirloom menorah exactly like this one that came from the old country.

It's an important artifact to me. Besides my own genetic sequence, it's the most material connection I have to my heritage. It represents something about my history that goes back further than my own immediate biological family and all of its drama. My great grandfather fled to this country as a teenager due to the antisemitic terror of the Romanovs. He was a tailor with gentle steady hands who meticulously worked on the finest details of garments. He cheated his way through immigration by giving a false surname and implying that he was already married to a German Jew living in the US. That surname became his legal surname and it is my legal surname. He didn't have much but he thought to bring this menorah. He made it special in that act. He made it into more than mass-manufactured metal with an impractical design. He made it the sole material relic of the continent he came from and he passed it down. That makes it special. It sets it apart from other chanukiot I could find in the United. States. It's a relic of an older stage of the diaspora. It comes from a Minsk where Judaica was widely sold. It comes from the Minsk that was over 50% Jewish. It comes from a city that no longer exists.

As I've written about before, it was cities like Minsk that made Zionism into a fringe movement when it had first started. Minsk was majority Jewish as was much of the surrounding area. Sure, it was oppressed by the Russian Empire, but it was a full built-up city with infrastructure and community and history. It's no wonder that they said to Zionism "you want us to go die in the desert building a new nation? We'd rather stay in the diaspora and fight for our liberation." Jewish socialists and labor organizers in the Russian Empire were critical to overthrowing the Czar and the new Soviet government ensured equal rights for Jews, protections for the Yiddish language and laws requiring public schools to provide Yiddish education at any school with even just a few Yiddish speaking students. Yiddish theater was funded. Antisemitic laws were abolished. After groyszeyde left the old country, his neighbors seemed to really have fought and won liberation.

And then there was the holocaust, and world war II, and the portions of the USSR which were completely destroyed by the Germans were the heavily Jewish border territories. Minsk was so heavily destroyed that much of the city today is post-war infrastructure. It's not recognizable as the same city. Some historians frame it as the Soviets "building a new city on the ruins of the city that was destroyed in the war." These heavily Jewish areas were so devastated by the holocaust that the remaining Jewish populations are so small they don't even show up as a statistically significant population on demographics charts.

Today I saw that video going around of the Polish politician using a fire extinguisher on the symbolic menorah lit outside of Parliament. I saw the takes on Twitter where people asked why Poland would light a menorah when there are essentially no Jews living in Poland. I was so doubtful of that. Someone said less than 0.01% is Jewish? But nearly everyone I know has some amount of Polish ancestry! I'm 1/8th Polish at least. So much of Ashkenazi Jewish food is just Polish food. Pierogi and bagels being the most obvious. But I looked up the statistics and it's true. Jews don't even appear as a statistically significant minority in Poland. The holocaust was just that devastating. The entirety of the surviving Ashkenazi community is dead or managed to move to other parts of the world. The Soviet Jews became atheists and assimilated. What remains is only history.

While the menorah was burning tonight, at one point that red candle near the center right had burnt down about midway and then the wick, which i is far too long, fell to the side and it seemed as though the candle was going to go out on its own. Only right as it seemed completely extinguished, it found a second wind, and burned extra bright and resumed its burning.

Zionism has this idea of the New Jew. The strong, homogenized, Hebrew-speaking, stoic Jew who will never be a victim to anything. But Ashkenazim had another culture. The old Jew. The scholarly, tender, sweet, funny, intelligent, and gentle Jew. The "eydlish" Jew. People like my groyszeyde. I think it often seems like our people are dying. We are assimilating into white American suburban homogeneity or we are becoming the zionist New Jew. Yiddish declines in native speakers. Shul attendance declines. Jewish and Zionist become increasingly synonymous. Our accents merge. And there is much fear-mongering about the half-and-halfs like me who don't even look Jewish anymore.

But I don't think the candle is burning out. We are continuing to evolve and we are continuing to live. I see for us a flame that burns bright again. I see in left-wing Jewish communities, in Reconstructionist communities, in anti-zionist communities, a new passion for our people. One not rooted in power or blood, or in conservatism, but in taking what we love about our traditions and bringing them with us and making them meaningful again. I see the diaspora thriving. I see new Jewish folk music being born and spreading. I see new takes on Jewish foods. I see us making our heritage special.

The culture of the old world, the people who were there, are no longer there. I do not know what factory smelted this menorah and it is unlikely it still stands. But we are, at times, a nomadic people, albeit not usually by choice. We have new centers of cultural life in the diaspora and we are continuing to live. We are, genuinely, not just LARPing as Yiddishists but the descendants and continuation of the living culture we came from. It is our culture, and our religion, and we are doing that which every generation before us has done. There is continuity.

And I know I am being very Ashkenormative here, given my focus on Minsk, given that I am talking about my own family history and about this menorah, but I also see in America a new reunion between sephardim and ashkenazim starting to happen as well. It is not only in Israel that the diaspora can come together and cross-pollinate. At my shul, we sing both ashkenazi and sephardim piyyutim, and eat both sephardic and ashkenazi foods. We are still one people, and we are continuing our own lives here. This is another path we have taken in our journey. The Jewish story didn't end in 1948.

I am continuing to use this menorah. I continue to polish it. I continue every year to fumble to get that shamash in at the end of Chanukah without burning myself. We brought what was important to us with us on our journey. It all came with us. It's here now. In the new homes we have built here. Yes, we are still on colonized, settled, stolen land. But here, on this continent, we have by and large chosen a different path from the Zionists. Leftist Jews are on the front lines fighting in solidarity with other peoples all the time. Hell, the woman in Philly who got arrested setting that police car on fire in the Summer of 2020 was Jewish. We didn't choose to be born on this land where our grandparents fled to, but this is our home now. We are going to stay and fight for our collective liberation alongside the many marginalized groups living inside of this new empire we find ourselves in. New York is the new Minsk and Philly is the new Marijampole or Kiev and idk Chicago can be Warsaw. Once it was the Russian empire, now it is the American empire. We are truly the continuation of the people who came before us.

This is the flame that I wish to pass down l'dor v'dor. We are the descendants of the ones who survived. We will continue to survive.

and also

a s h k e n o r m a t i ve is one hell of a word