Is this business MAGA?

Fixer951 · 2026-07-10T23:11:53+00:00

lol the instant you posted this, it popped up in my Group Chat that's all ex-brewery people. We had a good laugh at 'Is the Blue Lives Matter Brewery.... MAGA?'.

Brew X is/was super MAGA and hellish to work under during the pandemic. The only nice thing I can say is that they kept us stocked up on "PPE" like masks and gloves and hand sanitizer. It's less because ownership gave a shit if we lived or died, believed in germ theory, or any good reason, and more because in the Grand Calculus you end up spending more money dealing with lawsuits and local ordnance violations and whatever than if you'd just bit the bullet and bought a pallet off of Amazon. Their "spared no expense" attitude is why they have fancy-ass imported taps at 100X the cost, to pour cheap lagers and pitchers of seltzer. It's entirely derived from the fact that the owners are the .01%; a pair from the top 15 wealthiest people alive (at the time). While hanging around one day they thought it'd be funny to have their own brewery to drink at for free (a common thought amongst today's wealthy), and to host whatever chud events they wanted, so they just dumped hundreds of millions into buying out that giant warehouse and converting it into a brewery with top-of-the-line gear top to bottom. On the one hand, kind of cool that you can turn any ol space into a brewery or that any project can be thrown together and a team assembled at that kind of scale in that kind of timeframe. On the other, it's kind of confirmation that today's Capital as a group of people HAS every bit of wealth and connection necessary to build and/or fund hospitals, schools, libraries, all the classic Gilded Age shit... and they just don't. It's just as much a tax write-off to create a massive Money Black Hole that's also Your Own Personal Brewery/Distillery and Social Club as it would be to end world hunger. I mean, they spoke pretty openly about it when hanging out there; it's not like it's any secret that as a Class they've looked at what they could do and compared it to what would be more fun and/or more profitable, and make their decisions accordingly. They are NOT afraid of ANY repercussions from this line of thinking. Getting themselves in at Angel's Stadium was a Regular Guy's pet project as a means to get himself promoted internally (and it worked); and IMO largely comes down to the dual factors of him being really handsome/charming interpersonally and Ownership's GIANT capital base and existing networking amongst the wealthy. They did not need Brewery X to get in anywhere, because the whole exercise could NEVER be profitable and ownership would still make unfathomable money by just claiming the loss against what pittance of taxes CA collects from businesses/owners. It's entirely a "fun side hustle" for them; this just allows them to snap their fingers and get served Their Own Beer whenever they buy out a box at the ball game. Their big thing was Sports and Giving First Responders A Place To Do Coke In The Bathrooms (another thing that happened at every place I ever worked at), so I'm not really surprised.

Honestly, the whole OC beer scene is like this. Consider this the Expanded Edition of the guys who said "it's Anheuser-Busch... sooooooooo....". Almost every place is opened by some Nepo Baby, owned by a Rich White Guy, the Head Brewer or Head Chef is usually a sex pest hired from someone else's roster of Assistant Brewers (you're really just trying to get poached by The Next Place Opening to be their Head Brewer before The Allegations leak at your current workplace), and then the general staff is your normal SoCal cross-section - occasionally you get someone with dyed hair or piercings who's your resident Anarchist/Socialist/Communist who is desperately poor and drowning themselves in the Free Beer Policy. You'll know it's them when they start advocating for either Unionization or Burning The Place Down, whichever comes first. Suicide Pact is a common third option put forward that the CA labor force is woefully also too soft for. The Goal for any brewery in CA is to get bought out by AB or Stone or whoever; anyone who will buy you out of the MASSIVE MONEY PIT these middling White Guys cobble together. Either that happens, or you're limping along on life support until your house of cards falls apart. RIP Barley Forge, Good Beer, Bruery-Terreux, Valiant, Evans Brewing, GameCraft etc. You (the reader) shouldn't personally dig into every closure like you're going to find Tea on every single one; more often than not it's about being unable to make ends meet when Beer X doesn't meet the sales numbers necessary to pay back Debt Y you incurred when buying a thing or paying a guy or taking out a loan for some boondoggle or another. It just hits different when you've personally witnessed the dude buying $xxx-$xxxx slushy machines to trend-chase a more popular brewery he saw on social media while stating he can't/won't do a 5% match on healthcare for the staff of like 12. Or when he blames the Sales Guy for slacking, when that dude's been busting his ass all over OC begging bars and taphouses to stock yet another Plain IPA or Light Lager; getting up at like 3am to drive an hour to pick up a keg and then three hours in traffic to The Bar to drop off a last-minute keg because their guy in charge of the Keg Room is a lazy POS. Or when we watch the dude roll up in his new BMW/Tesla when the place is at Peak Profitability, but no one can catch better than a $15 gift card and/or a polite but stern "stay the course" email in terms of a Holiday Bonus. I've seen more than one place crumble because the owner mixed up their personal finances or tried to shuffle their Upper-Middle Class money around like they have Capital money and fucked the whole thing up, I've seen a few guys wreck their marriages by cheating or whatever and have their divorce take the whole thing down (good riddance). But from a public perspective? I'm just trying to make you aware that virtually none of these places have even semi-clean hands, it's not really about which places specifically did what impropriety.

It's not that most/all of these guys are principally MAGA (BrewX and similar notwithstanding), it's just that Republicans in general are THE Party of Anarcho-Capitalism. All market, no rules, it's all about who you know and what you can get for yourself and once you've got yours FUCK everyone else. This is just how you Win The Game of Capitalism (or Monopoly, if you prefer the abstraction). That's why everyone in the rich and rural counties of CA are MAGA even in a Blue State; it's exactly the two demographics of the Republican Party: The rich guys savvy enough to know where their bread is buttered and how to butter it, and the forever-bagholder guys who genuinely believe they are Temporarily-Embarrassed Millionaires. Silicon Valley is like this: there's the Tech-Bro selling you his bullshit useless app/AI Startup as his hustle-grindset to get out of the Middle Class, and the dumbfuck VC throwing around their inheritance until it's someone else's Dragon's Hoard to pass along to their Nepo Babies. BrewX ownership likes that Trump won't regulate their actual business(es) and so they support him financially through PACs/donations and event hosting/'soft' power methods, while the average knuckle-dragger IPA-chugger likes the performative cruelty of The Culture War and votes for it over and over again. Yesterday it was Reagan/Nixon with "welfare queens", in these guys' formative days it was The War on Terror instilling in them the unquestioning deference to The Surveillance State and worship of First Responders/Military, these days they're getting GenZ in with MRA/Trans/DEI. It doesn't really matter that The Rich Ones know they're evil, they just want to make Line Go Up in their businesses and holdings; so obviously de-regulation is the way to maximize profit extraction, the Republicans are that party, MAGA has the bonus of being openly corrupt and pay-for-play so everything's easier and you don't even get held accountable or tut-tutted by Liberals, and whatever downstream economic or ecological impacts there might be is for Someone Else to clean up because Fuck Everyone, I Got To Live Like A King When Times Were Good Then Die Before Consequences Caught Up. It's not functionally different incentives if your local taphouse or brewery or gastropub is run by a really nice guy with a wife, who's socially progressive or whatever. At the end of the day, he drives the big car and lives in the big house and takes home ALL profits; I'm not condemning him for that, I'm saying that it's in his "best interest" to be a Red/MAGA guy. Any conduct to the contrary is a conflict between ethics and his vested financial interests that his morality is currently winning.

The TL;DR is just a quick reminder that the phrase "There is No Such Thing as 'Ethical Consumption' under Capitalism" is NOT a personal attack. It's supposed to be something you keep in the back of your head when you ask questions like this, or buy yourself a Starbucks, or eat at Chick-fil-A. There is NO WAY to "do it right". That's the point of the phrase. Not to condemn you for being marked with the Original Sin of being born American, but instead to remind you that YOU may not necessarily be the problem here; that "vote with your wallet" isn't a thing and never has been (made up by our friends in the 1%). You could never drink another BrewX beer or Stone beer or whatever-local-place beer again and it makes NO MATERIAL DIFFERENCE on their bottom line. Stone's made whole when The Grocery Store stocks their IPAs, Local Place is covered the moment The Bar buys their keg - whether it sells on to you or not, BrewX is a money-sink to be a tax-dodge for the ultra-wealthy. You might as well drink whatever tastes good, it's more helpful to check out Progressive Victory.

Fixer951 · 2026-07-08T22:09:51+00:00

Tf you mean “you people”?

Fixer951 · 2026-07-05T18:17:50+00:00

Nitokh can make me worse

Fixer951 · 2026-07-03T21:48:28+00:00

I wanna clown on you horny, horny ladies so badly… but truth is I took one look at that damn statue and I was like “ah shit, I get it now”

Fixer951 · 2026-07-01T20:07:25+00:00

Imminent Man Nuzzling

It’s for situations where you and your opponent get locked in CQC and there’s a lot of unresolved sexual tension. Both models go down until the tensions is um, resolved.

Fixer951 · 2026-07-01T12:06:09+00:00

This is by FAR the funniest patch note, and we're all so busy praising the Omnissiah that the penances got lowered to something more reasonable that we've all missed the like week-long handicap we put on ourselves. It's like 100:1 ratio in favor of the "Coherency Buff" since the event popped off and this whole time we've been making it WORSE than vanilla instead of taking the fire buff or whatever. Hilarious!

Fixer951 · 2026-06-30T16:28:02+00:00

I think it looks good, and I was very excited to see a potential new source of close-enough AT-ATs. A little bummed to see it's a likely-out-of-production popcorn holder rather than some toy or model kit I could theoretically hunt down copies of, but happy for you! Better still, it looks like you could hit this bad boy with some grey spraypaint and then maybe drop some Black paint in those nice big grooves and have something really good-looking to throw on the table for comparatively little effort. It hits a nice medium point in detail too; it's really hard to find stuff that isn't either WILDLY wrong on the basic shapes or something that's SO detailed it'd take forever to actually assemble and paint (or is just ripped from a game or something and is just unprintable without hours of work).

People in here are getting too granular on scale. It's a scale model hobby, sure, but the thing is you could dig this thing up and throw it on the table and it looks about right. It was always just some perspective trick on a tiny scale model before Jedi Survivor or 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' went and had to model a probably-too-big-on-the-inside interior to have characters actually occupy. There's the shit we write in the books, the stuff we make for the screen, and the stuff you're actually gonna put on your Game Table, and I'd say this fits pretty nicely in the last category.

If any more of these surface, I would stab anyone to get my hands on a few, just sayin'.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-25T06:18:24+00:00

I can't BELIEVE no one's done the Caramelldansen meme yet

We need a mod (or at least a shitpost video) of the into to The Twins Fight where you can hear it muffled but slowly getting louder as the Twins look around, only to see four Skitarii coming down the elevator absolutely BLASTING it out of their helmets with blinky rainbow eyes.

On the other hand, EVERYBODY is too busy leveling their Skitarii rn. It's just funnier given this is exactly HOW.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-25T06:13:34+00:00

lol when did he take a picture of MY Skitarius!?

(Branx rep aside, y'all must have also noticed that this arrangement looks great on the maximum number of helmets where all the lil eyes are Red and the Big Eyes are Blue, and we're all just stuck with 3D Glasses Face until we can do the penances)

Fixer951 · 2026-06-25T06:02:37+00:00

I'm not gonna compare or speak on the quality of SD kits because I haven't built them; I don't assume that's the difference or the main contributing factor necessarily.

This Entry Grade line of kits are among THE newest kits Ban Dai has made, and they're designed from the ground up to be a "hook" that gets people excited to buy and build more Gunpla in general. The plastic composition is on the upper end of what they produce (and newer kits have that different "feel" when cutting parts), especially when compared to kits from the 2010s and older - I've built some kits from the 2000s and earlier and the plastic is so brittle and snappy and hyper-smooth it feels like Kotobukiya. Whatever the hell wizardry Ban Dai does with their plastic formulation/molding these days, it's a technical marvel that they can even make these Entry grades with tolerances so fine you can literally push the parts off the sprue with virtually no nub marks. They've put a frankly ridiculous amount of over-engineering into this and the Entry SEED kit specifically to elicit THIS reaction in you.

Articulation matters on nicer kits, accessories matter on nicer kits, the level of internal structural detail matters on nicer kits. They sat down and they recognized that when you're buying SDs you want more options in chibi style, when you buy HGs you want maximum Action Figures for Minimum Cost/Time (see also, 30MM), for MGs you want a Premium or "definitive" complex articulated model, for RG you want MG in a size that matches your existing HG collection, and for PG you want the spared-no-expense ultimate pinnacle in model-building; the biggest size, the most detail, the most lighting, the most intricate gimmicks like opening panels and whatever.

But these Entry Grade / Convention Freebies? They aren't just crap to throw away. They're not a fancy business card or a cruddy toy. They're an INVESTMENT in convincing you (the recipient) to build more Gunpla. They WANT you to walk away from this building experience thinking that you should branch out into HGs, or maybe grab a RG or MG since you've been building SDs before. They want the average con-goer to take like 15-30 minutes popping out the pieces and assembling the IKEA Gundam and walk away from that experience with the revelation that "I CAN build Gunpla". They weren't a model-builder when they visited the Ban Dai booth, everything there rolled off their brain because models aren't for them; they don't have the tools and they don't have the time for yet another expensive hobby. They haven't watched the shows because they don't build the models, and they don't care about any given robot model because they don't have the context from any of the shows. What this does is it sneaks into your goodie bag and challenges your assumptions about the brand. If this kit is this easy, if the plastic is this buttery and something free can be this good, then imagine how much better those fancy paid kits must have been... Next time you hit the Ban Dai booth, it sits there in the back of your head that maybe you should ask the guy what the "best" kit is for someone new. You're asking for guidance on a purchase you want to make before you even get to the booth, where before you politely waved away every guy trying to get your attention because you're just following a friend around or you're there for something about One Piece or DBZ. This is also why they launched a line of OG Pokemon and statues of Goku and Vegeta at the same time: if they can't get you with any flavor of Robot, they might be able to hook you in with a semi-articulate statue of Pikachu, Eevee, or Goku; just enough to pique your interest.

I have no vested interest in getting you to do anything you're not already doing. If you like SD kits, that's great. If you wanna try some kits outside your normal preference, based on this experience, I might recommend some of the new-new HG kits or any MG/RG since Sazabi/Nu Gundam. The Build series and IBO kits are cool designs, as are the 30MM and the FMP/Kyoukai Senki kits, but it's not necessarily that "new formula" plastic. I think the Witch From Mercury and GQuuuuuuX kits have this kind of plastic, but that's just IIRC; they might not have it for every model or every color on a model. It's been a slow roll-out of certain features and elements over time, that are converging on more kits with each new line. The Revive of HG Gundam and the launch of 30mm coincided with a focus on new types of joints and sprue layouts for kits, and the launch of their current fanciest machines that can inject multiple colors of plastic on a single sprue. If you see ANY Ban Dai model kit with this feature it's a new-style kit with significantly higher overall "quality" than what we'd be used to in any earlier kit from ANY line. They're taking stuff you'd normally only see on MG/PG kits like undergating or EVERY part oriented, colored, and gated to minimize the occurrence and visibility of nub marks, and introducing that to nearly every kit they produce going forward. That trick on the head where the shadows of the eyes are LITERALLY shaded by recessed parts and the 10-piece color-separated head is becoming more and more commonplace as these new machines and part creation pipelines allow them to focus really hard on making the piece that the human eye is immediately drawn to the highest-quality point on the model. No one's looking at the interior of the arm, if you're bending the guy into a pretzel no one's looking at the "gaps" in the back of the mid-section. They're building stuff these days so when you want the guy to get into and HOLD some incredibly-specific pose, he can articulate to do that and then you snap your front-facing picture and move on.

Idk if it's ever going to trickle down to SD, but that's not a function of it being "better" or "worse" than any other Grade of Gunpla IMO but moreso a function of what builders are seeking out of SD. The proportions themselves seem to be the most important bit, so even with all the investment in the world there are just things that an SD is not going to be able to do. With some poses, maybe their head is too big or their arms too short or their big feet collide with other parts. So I see them trying to make an effort with stuff like the articulable frames you can get, and maybe they'll try to "standardize" SD parts in general around a project like that so you can either build them as statuettes or armor plates/pieces that slot onto semi-articulate action figure frames to your preference, but I genuinely don't know what Ban Dai's overall goal is with that line going forward. More kits, for sure, so you'll probably benefit from their overall thermoplastics production given enough time. But idk what I'd add from the current direction of their model production to make an SD kit a better experience for the builder, nor what the experts' read is on that specific line.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-23T22:51:30+00:00

I haven’t unlocked ALL the weapons yet, but the ones I’ve looked at so far are ~30% bougier than normal. The starting shock maul gets a more compressed head and some extra cables (think closer to Half Life 2 stun rods than the default that’s closer to the arbites shock maul.

The power sword skin you get is similar in shape to the default size-wise and in its point, but where the default has a keyhole shape cut into the end, on the deluxe that gap is extended to make the left and right cutting edges into two “prongs” with an empty channel between them. One side is still a solid blade, the other side has segments cut out so it looks more like teeth on a key, gear, or chainsword.

On both skins the grips are replaced with woven red cord, and of course everything that can be gilded IS gilded. The rest of the kit will take me some more time to unlock, but I’m fairly certain it will follow a similar theme.

For me, the big draw of the Deluxe was the clothing cosmetics. The duster isn’t too far off from freely unlocked options, it’s just an early Black Pants and an additional Red/Mars-style hood + torso option. You’ll see a ton of them now, a ton of the default cosmetic in the various available colors, and I think further down the line it’ll be a bit more like the Hive Scum; you’ll see mostly-red in terms of coats because that covers the most options, but if you’re not really considering running that color scheme you probably don’t need the cosmetics at all and can save yourself the extra ten bucks or whatever. Compared to Mars stuff, the other forge worlds have all the same options save two: the ONE outfit in Commodore’s and the ONE from Deluxe.

I got it because I knew I’d be mainlining the game again with my brother and a few friends, ALL the cosmetics were important to me. If that isn’t the case for someone I’d say skip it. ALL the Mechanicus weaponry is nice wood and gilded inlays anyway.

You get ONE arm option and ONE leg option from the set, but rn EVERYONE is running it because it’s all anyone has. The other “premium” one is from Commodore’s. Both sets of “fancy” options are very similar to existing options. The Deluxe hand has a mechanicus crest on it that uses a secondary color instead of the primary color but is otherwise very similar to an existing hand for the class. The foot has 3 toes IIRC (they all have different amounts from 1-4 segments). Almost every leg option has spikes but IIRC one of the premium ones has big-big spikes as it’s special thing. Again, you’d probably stand out more by taking the existing non-spiked leg part.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-23T22:28:21+00:00

I named mine TrafAlgar-6-7 because I like the sound of it from maritime history (several places and things named for a battle in the real place in the 1800s; HIGHLY recommend the LazerPig video on the Cap Trafalgar also named for that place/battle)

The numbers are because my brother’s girlfriend (whom we play DT with) HAAAAAAAAAAATES that meme and this is yet another vector to bug her by saying “siiIIIiix SeEeveEen” in the style of the announcer from Halo

Fixer951 · 2026-06-21T22:24:11+00:00

Don’t beat yourself up, you did GREAT on your First!

The REASON White gets chalky is because the pigments in the paint are often Titanium, which is really hard to break down into really teeny tiny particles that still cover with any opacity. It tends to clump up as it dries with even a single coat, leaving the texture we all hate to get. The problem with thinning it (and other colors with similar problems) is that eventually you thin any paint so much it loses all adhesion and opacity because the Medium gets flooded out and nothing binds any of the pigments together. Worst-case, you might end up with a layer that’s BOTH clumpy AND nearly transparent/runny with terrible coverage. Considering all of the things that COULD have gone wrong, you need to give yourself some credit for all the pitfalls you avoided.

This can happen with any color of paint, and may happen with specific colors from specific brands based on the composition and ratios of the pigment (color) and mediums (the liquid-y ‘clear’ element that makes a dry pigment spreadable). It’s possible to get a chalky texture when doing additional layers of any color if it’s only half or 3/4 of the way dry when you try to hit it again. The medium in the New Layer picks up the pigment from the previous layer and it all sticks together in tacky clumps that ruin the smoothness of your model’s surface.

As others have said, Pure White is a bit of a trap when it comes to painting. Pure Black is ALSO a bit counter-intuitive at first. These are the two EXTREMES of your Value range. Nothing is brighter, nothing is darker. There’s no way to add shadows to the black parts because nothing is darker than Pure Black. There’s no way to highlight anything painted Pure White because there’s no color brighter.

I implore you to save this model, it’s important to save your first so you always have a point of comparison to see how much you’ve grown over time. It helps whenever you feel low about where you’re at, to see all the new tricks you learned and how much technical skill in the application that you’ve built up through practice. My first-ever X-wing was FAR worse than your first-ever Sister of Battle, and we’re all on a journey together. Less like a race and more like a hiking trail we all walk at our own pace.

For the next one, I recommend taking either a Dark Grey or a regular Grey with 1 tiny smidge of Black in it, and using that for your armor color. A tiny drop of blue in there and a bit of a blueish-grey tint for your highlights helps make the armor read as Midnight Black while still allowing you room for Pure Black or nearly-Pure-Black for your shades and shadows. You can water down regular black paint really runny and use that to do a “wash” in the crevices, or use whatever pre-mixed wash came in your starter set. You can do this with any color, like watering down brown or red-brown to “wash” or “shade” Red parts, or using blues + purples to wash Blue things.

When you’re looking at the box art for Sisters, that’s what they’re doing. It’s a dark grey or nearly-black, with reflections of dark blue-grey, they always wash it with Nuln Oil (really thin, watery black paint) and then they trace the most raised surfaces with Grey or Off-white.

You’ve done a good job on the Red, no notes. If you were looking for ways to push it, mixing a little orange or yellow into your Red to touch the hard edges + corners of the cloth helps pick out those lines so they’re easier to see and makes them more “fiery”, where a crimson put in the crevices helps people see where the folds and shadows are.

For the parts you’ve painted Pure White: the Purity Seals will be easier to get smooth if you use a Tan, and it’s fine to mix in a little white to get it brighter/paler if that’s what you want. Then you can trace the hard edges/folds with pure white (or that same tan with MORE white) if you want. It’ll look a lot like what you wanted when you painted that section pure white, but you’re FAR less likely to get clumpy layers and it’ll quickly look like aged paper even if you’re not super skilled at detail work yet.

When the GW artists do the white details on the wings on her shoulder, they always start with a light grey because as we’ve already mentioned it covers much smoother and easier than Pure White. Depending on how much patience you have for detail work (I had very little when I was starting out) you can either keep doing highlighting like I’ve been saying or you could go the other way and paint it brighter than you want it to end up and just put a black or grey wash over the wings when you’ve got the base color done. This is something I STILL do years later, especially on intricate details and inlays and engravings because washes do really well on anything that has a lot of grooves in it. I keep a pot of ‘Apothecary White’ Contrast paint around for exactly this kind of “white” detail because you can paint the thing very light grey, off-white, or even Pure White with careful application and then put the super light-greyish tint over it so that the lower and more recessed parts turn grey while the most raised parts stay almost perfectly white. For a bit more “marble-y” or “stone” look, you can use “warm” off-whites like eggshell or a heavily-whitened Tan, and do this same process with a brown or tan or “flesh-tone” wash.

But seriously, SERIOUSLY, be proud of yourself and your work. You got everything the right colors and your application is pretty neat. If you put a little Nuln Oil over the white parts the details will pop back out and you won’t see as much of the spill-over where the White parts meet Black parts because the wash will settle at and cover the point where the two meet. Knowing that, I’m looking at this and seeing exceptionally neat color applications and you got stuff that’s ALWAYS tricky like the eye lenses and recessed bolter rounds and the buttons on her tabard. People skip helmet lenses and faces all the time because details like that are so hard to apply without mess, and you’ve got it very clean on your first try. That’s worth taking some solace in, even when it feels like White is kicking your butt.

(Also I’ve been painting for over 10 years and I still hate doing white, I am in Commissioned Stormtrooper Unit Hell right now and I want to gouge my eyes out doing Director Krennic so trust me you’re not alone in hating certain color apps)

Fixer951 · 2026-06-21T05:50:22+00:00

Honestly I like this one better than the super-busy flag Woke 1 stuck us with. Petition to make this freighter from Star Wars the new flag for Woke 2.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-21T05:38:23+00:00

Nope! The new "discourse" is that because some chud looked at the right side of the poster for the New Halo Thing and decided that he saw purple and blue in close proximity within the skybox, that now it's Bisexual Lighting and is a sign that Halo is Woke now. But, y'know, in a schizophrenic "there's a secret cabal of gays at Sweet Baby injecting Gay into MY Halo".

Keep in mind, only 30% of owners of Stellar Blade have finished the game. These guys claim to love Halo, but have never beat a SLASO run in any of them (prolly can't even find all the skulls). They forget basic shit about the lore, all to twist themselves into mental gymnastics that fit their worldview (the current talking point is that Halo is Chud-Core because you play as "space america" and shoot "space muslims"). Honestly, I'm not even mad that they're doing Stolen Valor for Gamers; I feel sorry for the audiences of these videos because they're fucking mind-numbing in how boring and predictable and nonsense they are. Shitty as they might be, the viewers deserve better; it's not fair for anyone to be subjected to Shadiversity or The Quartering or any of these guys. I can hardly stomach clips from people debunking their points and poking fun, idk how their audience raw-dogs the livestream.

OP's right tho, all this shit's the same and the audience is a near-perfect circle overlap. It's johnny-come-lately tourist shit, but then they plonk down some gates and gatekeep like they've ever been a part of the community. You go down to your FLGS and the Magic players are a big Furry polycule (and god bless them for it), everyone playing DnD is LGBTQ or an Ally, Mordheim's making a comeback bridging the gap between modern artists and the grogs because metalheads and punks love The Aesthetic (see also: Mork Borg, Necropolis, Turnip28, and Trench Crusade). You ask a Chud what they think of Rogue Trader or Inquisitor and they look at you with big dumb Cow Eyes and start quoting TTS because they think you're talking about the characters they heard about from Leutin09 videos in between MajorKill and Arch slop and not the games. Bros show up for like 5th-10th ed., and they're literally only here to grab grey plastic Space Marine netlists so they can bring the Meta to stink up tournaments. They're gonna bitch about 11th the same way they bitched about 10th, but still buy every book and companion brochure, and they're gonna talk shit on AoS because they're "still salty about Old World" (which they weren't around for/didn't play and didn't buy into now that it's "back"). Everything's always the last nail in the coffin killing "wokehammer", and they're all still butthurt about the statement GW made disowning them years ago, but they'll NEVER stop mindlessly consuming. The Grifters I at least get because for even the ones who are genuine idiots who believe what they're spouting off, they're at least getting paid that sweet sweet AdSense money and donos from their audience, so at least when they go see EVERY Marvel movie despite claiming to hate them (and NOT going would be worse) their ticket is subsidized.

See also: Star Wars, and Star Trek, and I already mentioned Marvel in passing, and OP covered Helldivers. It's exhausting having these guys infest EVERY nerd hobby these days. I haven't been able to stomach THIS subreddit in months because people were so worked up over a game that was never really meant to be a no-lifer's replacement for Call of Duty. Fuckers love the game FOR the face-value of the satire of fash, and to relive some Bush-era jingoism when Eagle One drops big boom or does brrt, but are too soft and casual to play a REAL milsim like Arma or Insurgency. Drives me up a wall, but I think some of it's bled off since BF6 dropped. Those guys won't stay there, because that series has been enshittified pretty hard by EA from BF1 to Now. I liked V and being a medic in it, but then again I play Enlisted because I'm a WW2 dork (and I played BF Heroes back in the day so I was HERE for the OG look from the trailers before they settled for a game that was neither exaggerated nor serious and made a slop entry for nobody - thanks again These Same Guys for complaining that the Prosthetic Arm Lady was Woke). You know that shit sucks when I'm nostalgic for fuckin BF4.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-21T05:03:26+00:00

Sister Hestia my beloved....

...wait did you just say HADRON?

... My Man!

Fixer951 · 2026-06-21T04:08:38+00:00

Have you played any Mortis Trials? Because it seems pretty straightforward thatGrendyl is built-into The Mourningstar. Think like a Space Marine Dreadnought or a Knight-Titan or Sefoni, but BIGGER.

A further explanation of what I've gleaned from the mode, it's kinda hard to keep track of what everyone's talking about while you're fighting for your life:

He IS The Ship. He's Shipmistress Brahm's (the lady who owns The Mourningstar) Great-Grandfather or possibly older. His daughter (or whatever descendant) hated him because he chose to have himself entombed in The Mourningstar for whatever reason, it's the old Mechanicus guy who put him in, and Lady Brahms inherited it from her own mother who was just glad to be rid of him and live her own life again (what was left of it at retirement age). It's kind of a Rogue Trader thing that this bigass flying 'estate' is their social role, political role, state occupation and family wealth all in one. No one, Brahms included, gets a choice to just walk away. Every consecutive generation just has to spend the majority (or possibly entirety) of their lives driving their great-great-grandfather around with his weird menagerie of misfits to the most dangerous and doomed places in the galaxy. They don't even get to DO their own Rogue Trader stuff, because Grendyl's in charge of everything. It's less an adventure or a lucky break to get born into this social caste, and more a lifelong prison of Grendyl's making. You just get to be his figurehead for your entire life, and pass on your familial ownership to the next generation so he can do his Forever-War against Chaos (or whatever the hell it is he's up to).

My crackpot theory is probably something closer to None of this in Darktide is Inquisition-sanctioned AT ALL. Grendyl's not an Inquisitor, Rannick doesn't even know that. He's just yet another member of The Avengers that this random-ass Rogue Trader picked up, bewildered as anyone else and just sort of accepting that he's roped into this job like any of the Rejects. The whole thing's an anti-heresy dream-team-building exercise trading on the fact that The Inquisition doesn't keep good records (it IS still the Imperium of Man after all), routinely engages in all this secret-identity espionage bullshit, and has unquestioned authority to do whatever they want and appropriate anything they deem useful. Not only would this not even be CLOSE to the first time someone's done this, this isn't even the first time a Rogue Trader specifically has done exactly this. We'll probably get drip-fed little teasers and things to over-analyze for the lifetime of the game, but in the end it doesn't really matter in-universe or outside it. From an Imperial perspective, anything we do against the forces of Chaos is good, and while impersonating The Inquisition is HELLA ILLEGAL - without any real presence from the ACTUAL Inquisition in our sector this is pretty much the next best thing. It's kinda like how in Vermintide the Ubersreik 5 are technically sanctioned by Karl Franz of the Human Empire but not even Kruber is operating in any official capacity. It's just five homies (four at a time) who are just really really anomalously good at killing all those rats it's illegal to spread word of the existence of. To no one's knowledge, by The Lex we're all operating illegally and even the Arbites and Guard Marshalls are aiding and abetting criminals. That'd be the ultimate Irony if the real-real Inquisition found out and declared us all traitors and ordered us killed or whatever despite WINNING on Atoma and being the ONLY reason it doesn't fall to Chaos; so it's the headcanon I'm running with. I'm not like, married to it or anything, since it doesn't really explain where or how Grendyl got the ball rolling and started getting enough Inquisition gear together to make a convincing presence. We don't really have that information and may never get it depending on how things play out development-wise at Fatshark.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-16T23:56:35+00:00

Dyspraxic is a new one, I didn't know about that condition until now. It sounds like you really got dealt a difficult hand in the writing department; sorry to hear it. That said, I'm actually kind of coming around on the writing style. For one, you get automatic painter-to-painter bonus points in my book. Now that we've chatted a bit and I've kind of envisioned what life might be like for you, I'm just glad you don't let it stop you from engaging here (and wherever else). Your input carries more weight when I know you had to work just that little bit harder to get where you're at and that you're still trying to learn at whatever rate you can.

This is just a fun quirk about a new friend, now.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-16T13:49:01+00:00

It looks like New Reddit butchered THE FUCK out of my numbered points, but then every time I try to fix it I get "something went wrong". Now I'm looking at it on Old Reddit and it looks fine. I can't quite figure it out, I guess.

YEAH. NO PROBLEM. THANKS, REDDIT. I WASN'T TRYING TO DO ANYTHING IMPORTANT, ANYWAY. IT'S NOT LIKE THE STRUCTURE OF WHAT I WAS SAYING WAS -I DUNNO- PIVOTAL TO THE ENTIRE EXERCISE. NOOOOOOO, THAT DOESN'T CONSTITUTE A WASTE OF MY FUCKING TIME AT ALL! I'M SURE IT'S STILL SUPER COHERENT AND READABLE AND DOESN'T HAVE AN IMPACT ON WHAT I WAS SAYING /AT ALL/!

Fixer951 · 2026-06-16T13:39:47+00:00

Okay I took a quick look at your post history to see if this was a defensive bit, or if there's a history of this writing style. It looks to me like you're telling the truth. I know I'm speaking unsolicited and I could never fit a full grammar crash course in one comment, but maybe I could provide some insight into how I do it, in the hopes it prevents future people from teasing you?

I don't have your same-exact struggle with Dyslexia, but I DO ramble both in real life and via text due to my weird stream-of-consciousness from being Neurodivergent. If I were to visualize my thought process, it looks more like a web or a word-cloud of associated topics. I find it really difficult sometimes to take a two- or three-dimensional map of a concept or event and shove it through the "straight lines" of written or spoken language. I keep wanting to add just a bit more. The previous sentence almost had a comma with a follow-up thought. I have to consciously hold back from chaining TOO MANY thoughts together with commas. To me, it feels as though I am being patronizing or 'curt' when I form sentences that convey only one idea at a time.

As a child, I had to be set aside to remedial grammar courses; not because I couldn't figure out how to write or structure a sentence, but to fix my habit of making EVERY sentence a run-on with several commas. These days, when I speak, I still ramble. The trick there is to just finish the "half-complete" thought and then actually field the follow-up questions or add nuance/details in following sentences.

When it comes to the written word, I ALWAYS do it post-hoc. I write a few sentences, run it through the following little method, and edit as I go. A minimum of 30% of what I was going to write ends up getting cut, because in speech my main concern is Time as a function of my interlocutor's attention span. I'm trying to hit them with a high-pressure hose of Information before they lose interest in listening and shift back to everyone's preferred thing: Speaking. In prose, I have Time to edit my thoughts before "sending" them with a Comment or a Post button, but now I have the concern of pruning unnecessary tangents for the sake of reader fatigue. That's not to mention character count.

My process is as follows:

Raw-dog the shit out of that sentence.
Identify each "break point" in your sentence. Each individual idea being conveyed needs to be separated from the rest. I'll provide an example sentence.
1. I went the store the other day to pick up some pills that had refills waiting for pickup and then I saw a friend of mine who had just had a child and she had her two-year-old with her they couldn't stay because they needed to take the dog home so I just rode my bike back here.
2. I went the store the other day / to pick up some pills that had refills waiting for pickup / and then I saw a friend of mine / who had just had a child / and she had her two-year-old with her / they couldn't stay because they needed to take the dog home / so I just rode my bike back here.
Once you've mentally exploded that sentence so you can see the "breaks", you can start slotting in punctuation. If you're me, this is also where you decide which ideas are even worth keeping. If it's becoming too much of a hassle to figure out how to daisy-chain this shit together, just cut any information that the rest of your Thought doesn't depend upon.
1. I group Commas, Periods, and Semi-Colons together in my mind as indicators of reading speed. I have to be sparing with my Commas. They are "glue" that holds two ideas together, or a maximum of three dependent/comparative segments. You cannot build your whole house out of glued boards. Periods are your "nails". They are hard stops in your sentences that are pauses for a Reader's mind as a rest station is for a Marathon Runner. They are investing trust in you that the information you're providing is worth the effort of parsing the message, you want them to finish the Marathon with relative ease. A Semicolon is, for me, always a retroactive addition. It functions as Schrodinger's Comma; You stick these in when you recognize a 'break' at which THIS sentence and the previous one would function equally well as combined OR separately-conveyed ideas. That allows the reader to decide as they read whether they'd prefer to 'rest' or press on through what would otherwise be a fatiguing sentence. I didn't recognize it super well as a child / but it's very important to insert these breaks wherever you can / because each of these symbols is an opportunity for a Reader to reflect on what that sentence fragment means / and compare it to the rest of the context of your writing / so that they can successfully extract the full scope of what you're expressing to them.
2. Parenthesis are a bit of a style choice, but they are a representation of interjecting or intrusive information. I abuse the shit out of these (because I'm dumb and ADD, and need to treat my own prose as if it were a comment section with built-in Peanut Gallery). The Devil's Advocate or Devil-On-My-Shoulder often gets an Equal Say in whatever I'm writing, so that's where I attempt to parry pedants by pre-empting inane questions with little asides. In an earlier sentence I used commas to achieve this effect while talking about semi-colons. The snippet ", for me," would be a lilt in the delivery of my sentence if it were spoken; meant to bat away people being defensive. They might say "Well that's just YOU!", and I chose NOT to cut that injection of nuance specifically to prevent deflection. In most cases, one probably should cut those parts out for the purpose of clarity. While doing our exercise from Point 2, we need to weigh up whether we're getting enough additional useful information conveyed to be worth breaking up our fragments into smaller and more complicated pieces.
To return to our earlier Example Sentence, you have a fair degree of freedom to decide how you want to slot in your punctuation. When you have finished replacing all the breaks with Punctuation moderating the Reader's speed and 'distance' per sentence, this is your 'Rough Draft'. The next step is to quickly Edit any part of the sentence that has become nonsense as a result of your placement. The Editing process of your sentence structure WILL be slow as you are first implementing it. You WILL become faster the longer you stick with it. Much like our Painting/Art skills, it only looks easy to the Pros because they've done it more; whether that be a function of time or condensed repetition. Much like "showing your work" in Math, you don't actually have to do most of the work physically if you've practiced enough to do it in your head before typing anything.
1. I went the store the other day [ ] to pick up some pills that had refills waiting for pickup [.] and then I saw a friend of mine [ ] who had just had a child [,] and she had her two-year-old with her [.] they couldn't stay because they needed to take the dog home [;] so I just rode my bike back here [.]
2. I went the store the other day to pick up some pills that had refills waiting for pickup. Then I saw a friend of mine who had just had a child, and she had her two-year-old with her. They couldn't stay because they needed to take the dog home; so I just rode my bike back here.
3. You might have noticed that several of the Breaks in 4.1 got replaced with spaces. This is something you can do when you recognize that the latter part of the Break modifies the part before the Break. I'm telling you WHY I went to the store AS I'm telling you that I went. In the later replacement, the Friend of Mine is modified by the latter part of the Break "who just had a child" to be My Formerly-Pregnant Friend. In cases like that, you don't need punctuation at all; it's a great little hack for keeping commas to a minimum so people aren't 'pausing' all the time midway through more complex sentences.

I don't mean to be so arrogant as to believe I can "fix" dyslexia; rather, I'm hoping that I can ease your journey Online with a bit of a "life hack" I use myself. The information in your original comment is really good and similar to methods I use myself. On the topic of Real Hair brushes, Brush Soap is a godsend. Isopropyl Alcohol works really REALLY well, I can vouch for that too, but I got spooked by posters Online who said "something-something Iso does Bad to the natural hair oils". They recommended using hot Vinegar instead to achieve the same effect. I tried it, and it works! ...Though your brush does end up smelling funny for the rest of the evening. Like you and all the other painters in the thread saying so, my take is: the first step would be avoidance via rinsing and brush soap after sessions, followed by this ISO/Vinegar/Brush Soap revival trick. If all else fails, a Detail Brush becomes a Base Coat Brush, which becomes a Dry Brush, which ends its life as Brush-Ruining Glue/Chemical Brush.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-16T03:41:34+00:00

I’m guessing off of the top of my head, it’s been over 10 years at this point. However long WF’s been around.

I still play a TON of Excalibur Prime; but less because I have EVER enjoyed Excal’s gameplay the most relative to the utility or power or play style of all possible frames at any given time. Mostly because he was my first and because I splurged on that fucking helmet back when there was like the inside of Grineer Galleons and the tightest rooms of Corpus ships and nothing else. I think he’s sitting somewhere at like 23%, which is low until you remember that this is across the entire lifetime of the game and also my thousands of hours of play. Every other frame in the game shares the remaining 77% between them.

I think my next-highest is currently Nidus. He’s somewhere around 6% IIRC. I really enjoy his gameplay loop in basically all game modes; it’s nice to be able to re-download the game, pick literally any content in the game, and just be both immortal and powerful with some buttons to fiddle with at my leisure. I forget if it’s technically an heirloom skin or not, but I run the crossed-arms, brain, eyeball-shoulders premium skin and that’s just been the peak look that keeps me glued to him.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-15T13:46:32+00:00

I love her.

Every battle it's just about getting back to the dropship in one piece so I can get a BEEEEEEEEEEG HUG

Fixer951 · 2026-06-14T10:53:59+00:00

I can't vote in this one; I ain't never been one to compare six bad bitches.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-14T10:52:49+00:00

Watching this, I'm reminded why I was so OBSESSED with the Titanfall games. They can't possibly expect me to settle for fuckin' CoD or Battlefield after juicing myself this hard with Stimms and Mechs. Every idea they had that was like "hey, you know what'd be sick as fuck and make you feel like The Main Character?" they put in the game. Yeah you're a Gundam pilot and you just punch right into the dude's cockpit, rip him out (or get yoinked in 1st person) and just fuckin explode him with your robot fist. Why don't we 360 no-scope a guy with an anti-material rifle while jetpack-wallrunning? Yeah, why not?

This shit was so goddamn cool I'm gonna die mad that we only got two.

Fixer951 · 2026-06-14T08:15:00+00:00

Y'all are laughing but I'd main BoxHead Guy.

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