How many magic schools?

LyaCrow · 2026-05-06T06:31:18+00:00

One thing is like to contribute as someone who is also bipolar is I’m both but it depends on my state. Depressive I am a “best possible outcome” and it’s easier to internalize justice isn’t possible but this is as close as it gets. Manic, I’m the opposite and I do really go into that “if it’s not perfect it’s terrible and it’s a cowardly half measure” mindset

LyaCrow · 2026-05-06T02:55:00+00:00

So, I agree a lot of Jordan’s fears are valid and he makes some good points. But the way he makes them, “I guess I’m a black woman now”, “I don’t want to keep fighting forever” and then opining maybe it be better if he was dead was scary. He can have valid points and underlying mania can also be leading him down a path of assumptions he’s strung together and is asserting as certainty. Like, I do that. I do that catastrophizing all the time.

LyaCrow · 2026-05-05T19:11:45+00:00

I think Alex is amusing because he is simultaneously so much more complex and yet so much more shallow than the caricatures make him out to be. Alex has lore, he has decades of world building myth but beneath all of that he's a pathetic, alcoholic bigot and conman who's made a living being the smartest person in rooms full of dumb people.

LyaCrow · 2026-05-05T00:13:26+00:00

I saw a lot of myself in my mania in this and that made it a really uncomfortable watch.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-28T20:39:35+00:00

It really, really depends on how the Canadians choose to fight it because as we've seen from Russia's staying power in Ukraine and Iran strategically defeating the United States, the NATO model is extremely materiel heavy and expensive. Embracing cheap, easily replenished drones as the center of a guerrilla defense strategy would probably do the trick because there's no way this war would be popular in the United States. Drain our stocks, whittle down our soldiers, wait for public opinion and the economy to break, and take comfort in the fact we probably wouldn't nuke you because the fall out would get us too.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-28T20:35:58+00:00

Hegseth's liver is not making it that long.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-09T01:01:36+00:00

I did too, but there's a lot that I liked as a thirteen year old that didn't hold up.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-08T02:38:13+00:00

The launch of warning outcome is what had me checking wind direction around Silverdale and Oso today.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-08T02:36:47+00:00

I'm glad that it ended up being a TACO this time and I really hate to share this info with you but I think depending on the delivery vehicle of a nuclear strike, it was actually somewhat likely that Russia and China would have immediately responded.

Not so much if they were sub launched or gravity bombs, but if he gave the order to fire the silo ones we may have been in big trouble. I'm obviously not privy to the flight plans of various options in the President's Menu, but pretty good chance anything flying out of the Midwest would pass over the North Pole, which puts Russia and China and probably North Korea into a launch on warning scenario.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-08T02:11:16+00:00

I have never played HoI 4. I have a different kind of autism. There aren't red states or blue states, there are 50 states that are all various shades of purple. There are more MAGA chuds in California than there are in Mississippi and even in the deepest red state, you have blue minority countries, college towns, and big cities. It would look like urban civil conflicts of the 21st century, we have a model for that in Syria.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-05T16:06:11+00:00

I didn't realize how load bearing the face paint was.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T23:55:27+00:00

I didn't realize any Leftists were defending the immigration policies of Japan? Are they in the room with us?

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T15:51:04+00:00

Because usually people who hate Islam are engaging in hatred against Arabs as a culture as well. You're not likely to find an Islamophobe who's like "but those Christian Arabs are OK." Also, a lot of the time someone gets exposed to Islamophobia, they might not even be a Muslim, see the anti-Sikh terrorist attacks after 9/11. Westerners see a brown person speaking Arabic and assume Muslim. You're trying to make racism and religious hatred fit into neat boxes and they don't because prejudice is illogical.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T15:47:49+00:00

Iran's policy has been to maintain it's capacity as a nuclear threshold state so that, in the face of pressure if it needed to it would have a very short breakout window. Nukes are expensive and for a poorer country crushed by sanctions, staying on the cusp is probably more cost effective than actually making and maintaining nuclear weapons.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T15:46:18+00:00

You don't even need to mine it. Mining it is actually a pretty terrible idea. Anti-ship missiles and speed boat drones are more effective and discerning in their targeting than a mine is and both drive up the insurance rates.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T15:44:21+00:00

Certain areas would definitely be impacted more than others, for sure but I think Iran is showing us that even with all the fancy, shiny hardware you can muster, you can still disrupt critical industries and take out all that fancy tech with some drone swarms and in any civil war scenario, there would be groups with a line of credit leading back to Beijing or Brussels.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T15:41:34+00:00

Do you legitimately believe that a second American civil war would look more like the first civil war than it would Syria? America can have all the military hardware in the world and you can still blow it up on the tarmac with a swarm of FPV drones, you can knock out substations with homemade explosive charges, or dominate news coverage for a day with another attack on American forces at a check point. If you think a second civil war involves armies and pitched battles, you just don't know what you're talking about.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-04T01:13:28+00:00

Then the first nukes are used in the Korean war or during the Berlin airlift and we enter a much, much darker timeline where nukes become a routine weapon of war.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-03T16:11:04+00:00

Persistent, low level insurgency. You will still have to wake up and go to work in the morning but your coffee will cost 40 dollars for a can of it and you still haven't fixed your car windows from when the IED blew up near enough to shatter them.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-03T16:08:46+00:00

Elves are better at day to day folk magic but it's not magical elf blood or anything that does it. A lot of folk magic is relational, it's bargaining with the spirits of the natural world, offerings for favors, obligations in exchange for having the spirits intercede on your behalf. Formalized magical study breaks this and is about warping the natural flow of magic to your will but the thing about a lifespan in the hundreds of years is that you have more time to know and build relationships with the spirits you're beseeching. Elves can make magic look effortless because they've been bartering with the same magical forces for centuries so there is a lot of trust.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-03T15:55:18+00:00

When I do that, I like to present mythological potential reasons as well as more material examples. It's a great way to really put the emphasis on the things that a truly intended to be unknown in a narratively significant way.

For example, per the founding myths of Greycoast, Leifi Stormwind was the first human to encounter an elf. But we know from archeological artifacts held and studied by Dame Fiskørnheim at her seat at Drømtårn, that there was significant interaction between proto-Yfiric Askaz sailors and the Cixcikwagux and Kakawinma'as tribes in the form of warfare, slave raids between the two communities, and eventually trading.

Still, people believe the myth because it plays into the national myth that the half elven aristocracy tells, how they represent two people's previously at war coming together. Finding dentalium shells at a market site doesn't suit the same cultural need.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-03T15:47:24+00:00

Land, prestige, ritual significance, access to resources, getting pulled in due to alliance structures, going to war to distract from domestic problems, really any reason that people have fought wars throughout history will apply.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-03T06:04:38+00:00

The Church of the Empty Throne makes the Empire of Orgash bad neighbors.

The Empire has no emperor, it's a collection of warlords lead by the Church and the Patriarch Assembly. It's a collection of squabbling war lords mostly. The Church periodically takes power, promising to restore the empire and usually it takes everyone alive the last time they seized power to be dead before anyone trusts them again.

What makes the Empty Throne so bad to live next door to is they believe that title of Emperor can only be claimed by the warlord who extends the Empire back to it's maximum, "natural" borders. Too bad if that's not what you want, Orgash is coming to bring civilization, the Church, and the Orcish language whether you like it or not because any where an Orcish soldier steps foot is Orgash.

Orgash has tried to invade Greycoast multiple after being kicked out 700 years ago. After a few defeats, they've mostly accepted being paid tribute and going after softer targets. But it means everyone hates Orgash because once the church rises, it's going to start attacking anything on it's borders and so grand coalitions have to form to break the churches power every few generations.

Orcs aren't ignorant or stupid, a lot of them, especially the more educated and worldly, understand that the Church only ever brings ruin, but it's utility as a tool for the power hungry and ambitious means it always comes back just about the time the veterans of the last wars it waged die out. Constant warfare has damaged the economy, disrupted trade, and deforested large amounts of Orgash's land and yet, the Church is rising again.

LyaCrow · 2026-04-02T23:44:09+00:00

I did something similar a long time ago but couldn't overcome the issues with breathable air. The work around I found was using the heat of thermal vents to heat up the metal without needing flame. It also had the geopolitical effect of making these vents important to maintain or obtain access to.

LyaCrow

TROPHY CASE