Do You Have Any Fun Facts Today? Maybe Something Literary?

full disclosure I orig wanted to make part 2 of the wolf hall brat edit (feat Thomas More as Lorde) but I scrapped it cos i didn't really have enough footage BUT the overwhelmingly lovely response from you guys to part 1 has enabled me I fear. Watch this space

On this day, 9 December 1842, one of the founders of contemporary anarchist communism, Peter Kropotkin was born. An activist, scientist, and philosopher, he abandoned his aristocratic background in favour of the revolutionary working class struggle. He participated in the 1917 Russian revolution, and wrote numerous influential works, including Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution. In this work he criticised interpretations of the ideas of Charles Darwin which focused on competition, and highlighted instances of cooperation in the natural world. “If we … ask Nature: ‘who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization.” These ideas continue to be influential today. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of Kropotkin: “I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.” We have made available several of Kropotkin’s works, as well as a brand new beautiful illustrated edition of Mutual Aid in our online store. Check them out here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/peter-kropotkin https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1871872012997940/?type=3

This is my favorite ever description of Tolkien.

Out of curiosity, what are your top five favorite shows off the top of your head?

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Bojack Horseman

Ducktales (2017)

Gargoyles

Spectacular Spider-Man

Lesson Learned: We need to give Greg Weisman more shows to write and also stop canceling all of his shows that he writes.

Bonus Challenge: One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong.

mater dolorosa, mother of sorrows.

prints available here

Greetings, how are ya? I was wondering how you went about Aggroha's creation and what her personality is like.. She clearly enjoys fighting, but is it her great obsession or does she have room for any hobbies?

Woah, an ask! I'm doing great, thank you for asking and for paying my blog a visit! Okay, so to explain Aggroha's inception I'll need to explain a couple of things, because it's hard to talk about how I came up with creating Aggroha without also talking about Paahul. This is gonna probably be a longer read than you were expecting with these questions, but it's a fun thing to talk about! So here goes. Firstly, the setting that this game takes place in started as a personal setting I run tabletop games in. While I'm not a programmer by trade, I'm an avid tabletop GM and homebrewer, so using my pre-existing setting also as the setting for this game made sense to me, so that did a lot to limit species selection. You wouldn't be able to find any information on my setting without a lot of digging, so I've included the general species lineup for it here. I didn't want to have the player occupy any of the super tall or super short races because that would create gameplay problems and would limit opponent diversity because it'd be really hard to make a boxing game where an Eolian fights a Fonin (the unlabelled, tiny otter race on the far left of the screen) The three races I singled out for the player character ended up being Tor'cha, Chortin, and Bahaa as a result. Of the three, Chortin and Bahaa presented the most interesting possibilities for gameplay, particularly Bahaa, because in-universe every member of that species has some sort of capability to see the dead. I didn't end up going with that though! This may seem like kind of a basic thing to get stuck up on, but I had trouble deciding between two character ideas that were swirling around in my head. The first was for an aggressive Chortin fighter who fights primarily for money/the survival of their family and the second was for kinda a lovable loser of a Bahaa who fights more for fun, to make friends, and to better themself. Both of these seemed like compelling directions to take a player character in, with different strong motivations to stick around in a fighting league. In the end, I couldn't decide upon two things: The first were the sexes of the two characters, and the second was which one of them should actually be the player character. I ended up settling it with two coin flips. The result was that the Bahaa would be male and the Chortin female... And that the Chortin would be the player character and the Bahaa would be their rival. At first, I actually got a lot of anxiety about this result because I wasn't sure if people would enjoy playing a fighting game with a female main character, but as I worked more on the project and solidified the design of both characters that anxiety sort of melted away. It also helped when I realized that no matter what the result was going to be the player would spend most of the game seeing them from behind, so even if players didn't like the idea of a female fighting character they'd be seeing them from a fixed perspective where there wouldn't be much of a difference if you swapped their sex anyway. So that's where not only Aggroha, but also Paahul's general design comes from- I had two vague ideas about broad character archetypes to go with and I left it to coinflips to settle the particulars I got stuck on. Now, as for Aggroha herself: Aggroha's personality is, unsurprisingly, very direct and somewhat aggressive. She's very to-the-point, prefers simple solutions to problems, and generally she's not very patient. That being said, she isn't short-tempered, and while she isn't the smartest around, she does have a quick wit that lends her to occasionally try to make wisecracks that don't quite make sense. Socially, she's willing to lock horns with or fight others about things she's passionate with, and while she doesn't intentionally try to create drama she will absolutely get in verbal (and physical) brawls to defend things she has an interest in. As a general rule, she's confident and confrontational, although not particularly charismatic.

The funny thing though is that her relationship with fighting is more of a business relationship than anything else-- She's a single parent with at least one other mouth she has to feed. That takes up most of her time outside of the ring, so unfortunately aside from being able to whoop some serious ass she doesn't have that many marketable skills or hobbies, and she comes from a lower-class background. That's not to say she doesn't have potential- She's a quick-learner and is amazing at pattern recognition, but she just doesn't have the spare time to dedicate to other things. She takes more pride in the fact that she's good at what she does moreso than the actual occupation, if that makes sense. She does care about her legacy in the sense that she would like to take her run in the ring as far as she can push it because it would make for a good story, but actually having and keeping the champion's title isn't what drives her to fight.

*Waves in greeting from across the Internet*

(Don't know if you've gotten questions like this before but wanted to see what you'd think, considering how much you seem to like Shadow.)

Q: Concerning Shadow's title of Ultimate Life Form, do you think that it is something empowering he should wear with pride, or a curse/burden to be freed of which, among other things, shackles him to horrific and unrealistic expectations?

I feel like this question is kinda like a litmus test for why a person may like Shadow.

Personally, I think there's nuance to be found here. To me, Shadow feels both those ways about being "The Ultimate Lifeform," but how he feels about it bounces between one or the other depending on his mood. He is The Ultimate Lifeform, a being of great power that demands respect when he's trying to intimidate someone or achieving his goals -- Goals only he is capable of achieving, with what he is and all that. Obviously. He's the Ultimate Lifeform, so of course he should be the one to step in and solve the problem. He was designed to be an unstoppable force...

... So when he fails, he has to mentally come to grips with that failure in a way that, I feel, is more difficult for him than, say, if Sonic fails. Sonic is natural. His failures are natural. Shadow is unnatural. His failures. Are. Unnatural. They are not meant to happen. It's arrogance until it's not. His status is just as much a rope he holds to climb a mountain as it is a noose around his neck. A source of confidence, and Gerald Robotnik's judgemental gaze.

He's proud. He's an achiever. He's a pillar of strength. Until he slips.

So, how he (may) feel is how I feel. Depending on his mood, Shadow's Ultimate Lifeform title is both a boon to him and a great and terrible weight. He draws strength and self-loathing from it in equal amounts. That's simply how I interpret it, anyway.

Green Love Letter by Masa-San, Fujino, Kanagawa, Japan

Captain America knows what’s good.