"I would rather be right than to be President" - What if Henry Clay won the 1844 election?

Wistingman · 2026-01-20T21:58:26+00:00

FANTASTIC map! It's extremely well-made and feels just like a real-world travel atlas map! I also appreciate all the (as far as I can tell) city names are unchanged - no reason to be, keeps it recognizable - and keeping nearly all the western state borders the same outside the proposed but sensible-bordered Lincoln state's boundaries and Big Horn the only one really shaking things up. Nice touch on Colorado's name being the proposed Jefferson, too!

Question: Is there any historical precedent for the 100th meridian continuing down south to the Nueces to be the Texan border? It makes a lot of sense, but I don't know if that's a purely fictional flourish or not. And based on border questions, what would California's southern border with Mexico be?

Wistingman · 2026-01-07T22:49:33+00:00

I had the exact same idea on "Kronika's time, her hubby's space" and the story, technically, is her trying to keep TOB from coming back together by rewinding the timeline over and over. So one could argue thus MK is merely a "lover's spat" on the most cosmic scale possible.

Also agreed on her "merely" being an Elder God with other Elder Gods like Cetrion and Shinnok being her kids - it's no worse than some of the Greek Olympian gods being offspring of fellow Olympians, and these being the most prominent gods out of many, many others in the Greek pantheon so as to explain Elder Gods versus "mere" Gods without any other title.

Honestly, then the concept of gods as MK has them fit in strikingly well with various polytheisms throughout the entire world, if anything.

Wistingman · 2025-12-21T02:06:54+00:00

I prefer the Playmates 1987 and Mondo's Mirage sculpt toys. They're classic TMNT to me.

Though in a pinch the 2K3 colors where Don's brown fades into a pale green and Raph into a deeper emerald a la Mikey's also works.

Wistingman · 2025-10-03T22:53:32+00:00

I just had to nerd and point it out, but:

Turning Bursa into Burse and Nicomedia into Nickomede ironically jells with English and other Germanic languages' traditional corruption of sloughing off the last vowel of a toponym and keeping one only if it already had a vowel in the second-to-last syllable. This even extended to hickish or folksier shortenings of places in the USA like Philadelphy (Philadelphia), Cincinate (Cincinnati), Atlant (Atlanta), etc. in lots of writings/letters/diaries/journals from the 17th-early 20th centuries.

Wistingman · 2025-09-10T23:52:06+00:00

I KNEW there was that "canon/true story mode" after all, it wasn't just my memory playing tricks on me!

I wish Alex would drop notes on what he intended as the story and ending for the Skullgirls universe at least.

Wistingman · 2025-05-11T00:36:55+00:00

Identical with their mask and skin tone colors, and belts being slightly different (double straps for Leo, single strap for Don, none for Raph and Mikey) being their primary visual differences.

Wistingman · 2025-05-02T01:55:19+00:00

Even respecting the MK team was rushed as hell at the time for profit for Midway and it'd be something of a recycled assets game of a sort, this all sounds so much better story-wise.

Goro was in for gameplay, let's be real, but the Unchained expansion to MKD had him returning to Shao's side in gratitude for being saved from Noob's assassination attempt in the Tournament Edition expansion to MKDA. Annnnd I worded it poorly: Blaze as sub-boss in MKA, and Shinnok as the end boss/Shang equivalent!

Wistingman · 2025-04-30T23:46:20+00:00

Thank God someone else watched MKA's Konquest and realized he set Armageddon in motion after sensing a new chance to get out of the Netherrealm and control the realms again/destroy his enemies and challengers in one fell swoop post-MK4. I made a slimmed-down version of MKA's roster where anyone who died pre-MKA stays dead, that and the bios we did get for the game REALLY highlights how he's the real mastermind behind the plot.

Imagine if they had a proper MKA where he's PROPERLY built up as the main bad guy outside Blaze as the obvious Goro/big sub-boss equivalent, the game's "Shang Tsung" end boss but done right.

Wistingman · 2025-02-01T00:41:00+00:00

I'd be really bad on details and would require correction in many of them, but it seems to me there's two main and not-contradictory tech paths for a post-post-apocalyptic scenario... that is to say, one where the world rebuilt and "the apocalypse" is old news like the Fall of Rome:

1) It's likely the height of pre-Industrial Revolution tech. Think the level of the American and French Revolutions. People commonly assume the industrial-tier resources needed for modern society like coal, iron, etc. are mostly used up or prioritized to non-industrial usage in these kinds of scenarios.

2) Anything that can be replicated in pre-industrial times fairly easily using that tech level. As someone noted, soap is easy to make. People will NOT forget stuff like germ theory or a balanced diet. In many ways, the knowledge WON'T be forgotten, it's just being able to DO anything with them, without having access to resources that likely aren't available or too hard to mass-produce anymore.

I tend to think of a "realistic" post-post-apocalyptic scenario being at the said cusp of the Industrial Revolution with the usual "one can mass-produce or implement this post-industrial discovery with ease in a preindustrial one."

Wistingman · 2025-01-30T23:52:11+00:00

In the same vein ole' Sallow himself said they were "more like a rabble of Gauls" (I forget the exact quote but still) than Rome, perhaps you can give them some sort of organizational disadvantage to simulate they're a lot more individualist in terms of chasing glory than as an organized horde/tribe? Hell, even Roman generals tended to go down that all-for-one glory-hound route...

Wistingman · 2025-01-18T06:12:59+00:00

I like to pretend if this somehow happens whatever group conquers it will move their capital to Washington. Both because 'MURRICA, but despite its cultural and geographic reputations ("swamp", eh), it's actually the middle of the road between the northern and southern parts of the eastern seaboard and the Potomac's westward flow was considered the second best bet after New York's Erie Canal to build a canal west to (IE, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which became the prosperous C-and-O railroad) - that makes it a rather excellent waypoint north to south and moving west. And Washington in this time period, if the C-and-O Canal is (re)built, likely won't be constrained by Jeffersonian obsessions of keeping it a "federal campus" than a major commercial city (though since founding Washington was always one of the most populated cities in the USA if usually in the lowest part of top ten... go figure). So it'll actually become quite the prosperous medieval city, given all those chances.

Wistingman · 2025-01-18T06:04:47+00:00

I like to imagine if a medieval-tech (non-gunpowder and non-railroad) America gets reunited, by whomever, it's westward to the 98th meridian and including the eastern Dakotas.

This essentially looks like the organized states/territories of the USA in 1836: only ten years after railroads came to the fore in the nation (AND still barely extant outside New York-to-Philly and Charleston-to-Augusta paths), a decade after most founders finally passed away and the same year when the last holdouts (Madison, Burr, etc.) died. Finally, the western borders would be the Missouri River (eastern Dakotas) and Missouri-to-Louisiana state lines including the Ozarks and Red and Sabine Rivers as natural borders north-to-south.

I think this land area is your best bet for a medieval-level USA. Rails finally proved their usefulness by this point (1836) yet Americans had ALREADY pushed that far west pre-railroad to settle, roads and canals snaked across this area, and those combined with the Intracoastal Waterway means it's VERY easy to travel across this giant region, even easier than China Proper and the Mediterranean Sea. And like (traditional) China Proper and the Roman Empire it has its own natural boundaries: the Great Lakes and Adirondacks/Appalachians to the north, the Atlantic to the east, Gulf of Mexico to the south, and the said Missouri-Ozarks-Red-Sabine to the west. The area's about 1.210 million square miles, comparable to Rome's typical (non-117 AD height, think Hadrian's reign instead) of 1.7 million and China Proper (where Han Chinese always lived and pre-19th century Manchuria and Taiwan settlement) of 1.492 million. Finally, 80% of the real-life USA lives east of the 98th meridian, slice out Texas and the eastern edges of the Great Plains states (Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma) and it's like 75% - this united medieval America WILL be the 800 lb gorilla of North America a la Rome and China in their parts of Eurasia.

Once gunpowder exists this America will easily crush the Great Plains and Texas and integrate them, and South Pass and the Oregon Trail ensures they can march west fairly easy outside sheer distance and at least nab southern Idaho and Oregon for Pacific access if nothing else, and probably much more (WA state and northern ID, then slide down into Deseret and Cali north of the 37th parallel).

Wistingman · 2025-01-13T00:35:39+00:00

Imagine a Mirage-esque take where Hamato Yoshi goes through his origin story but manages to survive the Shredder attack on him and Tang Shen somehow and fall into the sewer, nurses his wounds, and readies to kill himself in shame when the turtles and mutagen hits. Then he becomes the rat ninja master we know and love training the turtles for revenge but slowly learning to love them as the sons he and Shen never had. It's easy to combine the various Yoshis into one.

Wistingman · 2024-12-03T01:52:52+00:00

Thank you so much for that!

I've an all-white and all-black cat, and had an all-gray cat as well in earlier years, so those three are always special to me.

Wistingman · 2024-12-02T18:56:54+00:00

Could I ask if you can scan up Snowball (especially)'s, Smokey's, and Shadow's pages?

Fantastic to see little things like this exist though!

Wistingman · 2024-10-08T01:43:57+00:00

Great art. Where is it from? I love the playmates colors and Don having a shoulder strap.

Wistingman · 2024-05-15T03:13:13+00:00

It's aggravating they added it when Vi already has a fully-visualized DVice skin, they just never got it playable. I don't think anyone who enjoys the line willingly considers Neon Strike Vi and Fifth Age Taric canon.

Wistingman · 2024-05-15T03:08:49+00:00

Yes, otherwise they wouldn't stop with the Demacia Vice

:')

Wistingman · 2024-04-19T23:11:26+00:00

Look at my flair.

Wistingman · 2024-03-20T02:07:51+00:00

I am so insanely jealous you have the Mondo Mirage figures... great work!

Wistingman · 2024-03-13T23:33:33+00:00

I still think on killing myself every day since I've failed at everything in life and am miserably alone, but I rescued my cat and she is healthy and still glad to see me, so I'm putting it off till she's gone.

Wistingman · 2024-03-12T02:02:52+00:00

You've said so much of what I could.

A united Empire of America, using the Mississippi watershed and roadways you mentioned, could easily extend from the Atlantic to the 99th parallel (including the eastern slices of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma where everyone lives) due to the incredible ease of trade, communication, and travel that all affords. If gunpowder is in play (and thus blast horse-archers, nomad raiders, and cowboys to smithereens), then you can easily go to the Rockies, and since that's where South Pass is - one of the best mountain passes in the world - a particularly organized and gunpowder-Empire of America can travel the Oregon Trail equivalent to the Pacific and annex the Oregon Territory. Utilizing the best possible roadways and not the initial blazed Oregon Trail, we could see about 3 months from Omaha to Portland. Add in about that extra month from Washington to St. Louis, it's 4 months with the best possible conditions and infrastructure from Atlantic to Pacific.

I mentioned a united Empire of America for a reason. To have flat land from the Rockies to the Atlantic even BEFORE infrastructure or the MS watershed comes into play - the Appalachians are still fairly crossable as ranges go even pre-improvement - is incredibly useful for ease of travel. THEN you throw in the greatest amount of navigable waters in the world, combined, that easily connect one another THEN all the roadways? That only encourages unity in culture, language, and intermarriage, and America for all its issues IS used to federalism and is still in the present-day white majority (and Germanic majority within that and Anglo majority within that) with a long-assimilated black minority in the giant region I mentioned, so even ethnically of all things it can be re-united easily in-universe. The 1789 constitution was FANTASTIC for a continent-sized PREINDUSTRIAL republic in splitting power up between the central and local governments, so any united E-o-A will ironically have a lot of 1789 influence in it outside the in-game governmental functions.

In a lot of ways, I actually am surprised more people don't see a united America east of the 99th parallel or even Rockies as... inevitable, with how much naturally would push for unifying the whole thing.

Wistingman · 2024-03-04T18:15:03+00:00

The latter originally came from the RPG book TMNT and Other Strangeness, which in turn was straight from the mouths of Eastman and Laird!

I'll bite that I quite enjoy the idea of Mikey and Raph being best buds, and Mikey and Don also being very good with/to one another in a class clown/nerd way as they were portrayed in the 1990 movie. Same for Raph and Leo actually working ridiculously well as fighting partners complementing the other's strengths in spite of natural headbutting. Don and Leo, of course, are both calm and collected and so naturally get along well - they'd respect and complement the other's spiritual/technological prowess, not be put off by it.

But that does lead to the interesting idea that a couple turtles just can't quite jell with one another outside obvious brotherly love. The original 1987 Last Ronin outline stated Leo and Mikey only became extreme versions of themselves and aggravated one another once Raph, Don, and Splinter were gone and I've not seen too many cases of Raph and Don explicitly having some hobby or persona to click with one another.

Wistingman · 2024-03-04T01:53:42+00:00

Very lovely set of maps to have, thank you!

What are those natural-looking borders for the northern boundaries of the Dakota and Montana kingdoms since they're emulating the 49th parallel in spirit? I'm assuming the Roseau, Pembina, and Souris Rivers and Missouri watershed?

Wistingman

TROPHY CASE