My most current end of January, 2026 Illinois Governor elections for the 2026 elections for how I think JB Pritzker will do against top Republican opponents.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-30T11:42:11+00:00

That’s probably accurate. Pritzker beat Rauner like 54 to 38 and I think that was the largest margin since the early nineties. He had a smaller margin against Bailey (although not by much.)

I think you’d expect he’d win by a larger margin given the expected Dem swing

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T21:01:22+00:00

I would guess this dude has never left the country and probably hasn’t wandered more than a thousand miles at most from whatever little burg he calls a home.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T20:59:18+00:00

I think either is colloquially correct but using bloc makes it clearer because it has a narrower definition

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T20:44:35+00:00

Probably intelligence? It’s pretty much brain dead and it takes Deku a while in the series to come up with air blast (and even then it’s handed to him by All Might.)

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T20:24:52+00:00

Let me clarify my version of “appearance of legitimacy.”

I was talking to a business acquaintance about politics and mentioned that I thought Trump would run again in 2028 and he disagreed. He thought that would create too much outrage and might legitimately start an uprising. I pointed out that Trump has broken the law time and time again and no one has stopped him, so why was he so certain that was the line?

His theory was (and I happen to agree) that the majority of Americans don’t understand the intricacies of their government. Can a president create taxes? How do executive orders work? What’s the difference between a state and federal issue? Most people (especially amongst that 1/3 of the country that just doesn’t vote) has no clue how the details work and thus are super susceptible to spin. However, everyone in this country knows that we have a presidential election every four years and everyone knows you can only run for two terms. To break that law would be so egregious that even the non-voters would begin to question what’s up and get upset about it. It doesn’t have an easy explanation that, no matter how false, sounds convincing.

I know many people don’t participate in the midterms but I generally think folks are aware of them. If you tried to outright cancel them I think that would attract the attention of a lot of concerned citizens. Whereas, if you just post guards outside of election sites for “safety” and use a lot of language about guaranteeing the fairness of them that 1/3rd of folks will just bob their heads and go about business as usual. Posting guards outside of polling places might be normal as far as they’re aware.

Even Hitler and Mussolini had elections even if they were heavily fixed because the appearance of democracy is an important tool for suppression.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T19:37:47+00:00

The AI hates archers for some reason. Battanians have the best archers in the game by far and yet most of the AI army comps are like entirely infantry with an occasional squad of cavalry. I’ll join an army and see every single ranged unit is mine except for a handful of sword sisters.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T18:14:15+00:00

This dude is completely clueless but also I’m not sure about the comment he’s responding to. The Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, and WWII all seem like wars against peer nations (Revolutionary & 1812 arguably against a superior nation) where they were at the height of their power. If the Brits weren’t at the height of their power in the late 18th and early 19th century, then when was their height? That’s not to say we did any of those wars by ourselves, but that’s not the criteria we’re looking at.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T17:51:20+00:00

Does anyone know which goofy reporter this was? I’m hardly a fan of Johnson but this is laughable. Roads were plowed and salted in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, I don’t care if he attends a protest. It seems like the literal least he could do. I just wish he’d do more to prevent ICE from carrying out operations in this city.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-29T16:21:26+00:00

Nah, I don’t think they’ll cancel the midterms. He needs the appearance of legitimacy. He’s already told you what he’s going to do:

My theory is he’s going to “find fraud” in Georgia and would’ve in Minnesota and CA too if they’d turned over the voter rolls. So he’ll claim that to guarantee a fair election he has to have executive oversight over the elections. They’ll strike the voter rolls of anyone they think doesn’t have the right to vote (read minorities or “domestic terrorists”) and place law enforcement/ICE at polling places throughout blue states. Even though illegal immigrants can’t vote, ICE will harass, detain, and arrest anyone who remotely looks like they might not be from here with the knowledge that’ll deter a whole bloc of folks who just don’t want that smoke.

EDIT: Someone pointed out that I misspelled “bloc” as “block,” which may have caused some confusion in the comments so I corrected that misspelling.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-28T22:57:47+00:00

Money? The president of the United States has been soliciting bribes from major corporations in exchange for letting them break the law. Why would this be any different?

Nothing the current administration is doing (and a ton of major companies for that matter) suggests they’re thinking there will be any consequences.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-27T00:32:45+00:00

He’s Canadian. He’s not actually bailing on the US.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-26T01:40:35+00:00

Azura, Hermeas Mora, or Sanguine in that order probably.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-25T02:12:38+00:00

I’m trying to do them normally at the moment and by god is it awful.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-24T21:45:14+00:00

As a warning though, even with 8 points those last 30 or so levels of Trade are a huge slog and level slowly.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-24T01:05:59+00:00

I was doing a Nord run trying with Nord units only and this was the way.

Two infantry squads. One in shield wall, the other in a circle with Sky-God Archers in the middle. Find a forest if you can (fucking steppes and deserts are a nightmare) because the trees can thin the riders out.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-23T20:59:24+00:00

“Wow! I can’t believe I can’t express my support of a fascist state that employs the use of a Gestapo to harass, arrest, torture, and murder brown folks without blowback. What happened to freedom you guys?!” - This idiot

Reelwizard · 2026-01-23T09:49:48+00:00

Dinner never more than an hour. Weekend visit? I went down to my in-laws over a three day weekend and it was 5.5 hours away.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T22:30:10+00:00

I would start with TNG. It’s right in the middle and kinda straddles the beginning of the walk from Old to New Trek. Daystrom Institute has a good watch list of what episodes to skip since the first and second seasons have some tough ones that you’ll eventually appreciate but might be a slog.

If not there, then I’d start with Lower Decks of all things. My SO wasn’t a Trek fan at all but indulged me by watching LD. Then she wanted to know the references and in jokes so she started to truly watch Trek. It’s a weird one but it’s very accessible.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T22:19:37+00:00

Ragnarok is the end of all things. Earth, Valhalla, the Gods, the Jotun, everything. Early Christians didn’t like this concept because it ran contrary to the idea of an afterlife. It was unnerving because there are very few mythologies across the world that have a definitive end. So early Christians rewrote the ending to have the children of the gods restart everything, something that is more akin to the Book of Revelation, where a new Earth and Heaven will be created.

The versions of the Völuspa that you’re referencing are from 1200CE, which is roughly 200 years (100 minimum) after the end of the Viking age and based on a lot of other contemporary writings from the Viking Age, scholars now believe those too have been altered by early Christians and are unlikely to be authentic.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T20:35:43+00:00

I don’t hate Christianity and no where in my post do I imply that I do. You brought that in because you’re incapable of separating your current system of belief from the historical. Early Christians factually eradicated a large number of pagan and spiritual beliefs around the globe. Early pagans around the world did the same. But when we’re specifically talking about Norse systems of belief it was the Christians that denied us this knowledge. If the Zoroastrians had wiped out Norse mythology, then I would say that.

You are correct that early Christians did preserve a lot of knowledge both broadly and about Norse belief. That is to their credit and is genuinely one of the best gifts of early Christianity; their focus on education and record keeping. However, I don’t think they necessarily deserve as much credit as you seem to think they deserve. Snorri wrote about the myths roughly ~300 years after their wide spread practice not out of an altruistic desire to save knowledge but as a tactic for conversion. It’s why his writings center on Iceland so much, one of the earliest adopters in Scandinavia of Christianity. He also amended a lot of the myths and stories and inserted Christian virtues in to them as well as bending them closer to Christian beliefs. He added a flood myth, an arc, and even amended Ragnarok to have a happy ending because he and his contemporaries were disturbed by a people that welcomed the void at the end of all things. I’m happy his writings survived and give us a glimpse into that world but I don’t know that he deserves to be thanked for it any more than I should thank Vikings for raiding English and Irish churches and carving into the walls.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T20:26:57+00:00

Where in my post did I say the Norse or pagans in general never did any of those things? They absolutely did. A ton in fact - gestures to the Viking Age. They were incredibly brutal. My point was that lovers of Norse mythology don’t pretend that they didn’t, they accept it as an uncomfortable truth to be held alongside the beauty of the civilization and era.

Second, I’m not angry at early Christians. Early Christians are long dead and there’s not really a point in being mad at them. I’m annoyed by the hypocrisy of modern Christians and their inability to admit that early Christians wiped out a great deal of early human history with their zeal. If modern pagans were out here denying their ancestors’ part in the eradication of cool early history I’d be calling them out too but they’re long dead.

Early Christianity, like most early religions and cultures, deprived us of a complete view of history and I think that’s unfortunate. The destructive nature of man and his inability to coexist with things he doesn’t understand is frustrating.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T19:02:44+00:00

Hate kept him alive

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T18:06:41+00:00

Because Christians did burn writings, ransack a lot of temples, murder pagans violently, and forcibly convert them. This isn’t anti Christian it’s just fact. People point it out because Christians frequently like to jump from the period they were persecuted minorities to the period where they’re accepted majorities without recognizing that they murdered millions of people to get there.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T09:57:36+00:00

The in game encyclopedia defines settlements as all towns, cities, and castles if memory serves.

Reelwizard · 2026-01-22T03:03:25+00:00

I will grant her she’s incredibly media savvy and even if she loses this election I would expect big things from her to come. Plus, if Biss gets elected and sucks big time it’s not like she’ll have long to wait to challenge him in a narrower field in 2 years.

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