https://yewtu.be/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

This silly little video honestly helped me understand and make more progress on fighting my own depression than hundreds of dollars of therapy did.

Yes it’s important not to get too bogged down unless you’re making a hardcore sim of some sort, but having a realistic backdrop helps a lot when you want to highlight something unique to your world. A river that flows up from the ocean and ends in the sky is completely unrealistic but could be one of the greatest magical wonders of your world. Or a peculiar large river that diverges to form two more could become the center of a conflict between two downstream cities who want to divert it in different ways.

Nope, water (at least, normal water) flows downhill under the force of gravity and an ocean/sea/big lake is usually as low as it gets. It doesn’t necessarily end up taking the shortest path, but it will inevitably carve a channel to the lowest point it can reach. Water is pretty unstoppable, most of the varied topography of the earth is just the long-term results of tectonic forces pushing rocks up, and then water that falls on those rocks trying to get back to the ocean.

You can also work backwards too, and that’s very handy. Say you want an important town on a certain place. Why was it built there? Add a river! Do you want it to be the center of a conflict? Maybe it’s at a strategically important mountain pass, or maybe there’s gold in them there hills!

Personally I really like post-apocalyptic fantasy and settings that take slightly more complex politics into account. Eberron is one of my favorite D&D settings, it frequently dispatches with a lot of the “good vs. evil” stuff in favor of having characters and races with more complex material motivations, and the Mournland is a lovely wasteland wracked with wild magical phenomena and dangerous people.

Looks cool! Your rivers though, at least I assume that’s what the white squiggles are, a few have unrealistic shapes. Rivers start at high altitudes in mountains and plateaus and flow downhill to a sea, ocean, or lake. They’ll have many tributaries that converge but almost never does a river diverge except at a delta, and if they do it’s almost always for very short distances and erosion will very quickly cause one channel or the other to become the new main channel and the other will dry up.

Water is hugely economically important, so when I’m building a world for an RPG I like to establish my topography first (bonus step: decide on climates and latitudes and rain shadows and stuff), determine my drainage basins based on that, add big rivers and other bodies of water, and then figure out where the cities would be as a result (flood plains, estuaries, and major confluences are prime real estate). It’s super helpful to do those steps first too, because then whole histories of conflict over access to resources and arable land and trade routes almost write themselves.

That’s because it’s an upscale of a small image. The original is actually a 4K illustration that looks much nicer, see my other reply in this post for a direct link or you can get it with a couple clicks through the link the OP provided.

Rare yogthos L, posting a low-res image and then posting an upscale based on it when the 4K original is available via the link!

https://files.catbox.moe/e74m4c.jpg

I downloaded the full-res version and re-uploaded it since weibo won’t allow me to link it directly and it’s too big (3 MB) for lemmygrad.

Settler genocide? Is that like white genocide?

For real, these posts like “do you have pets?” or “what are your hobbies?” are a bit sus, as the kids would say.

McBorgorsie, coming soon to a collectively owned restaurant near you. When our turn comes, we will not make excuses for the ketchup.

Just have to scratch it a little bit and it’ll become clear that it’s really the same word.

Do you know how to say “hello” in French? Then replace the n with an r and add “sie” to the end and you’ve got it! Borjoursie!

Someone once replied to a post I made with the big copypasta of banned Chinese words, and I got 10 lashes and no food for a week.

It’s funny because it’s real.

If the rivers freeze, Russian troops are safe from the kayaks with grenade launchers. I’m told they’re a game-changer!

The “quick attack to break the enemy’s backbone” more often than not ends up getting bogged down again after expending a ton of resources for a small gain. The way I see it, Russia’s best move would to be to stay on the defense for now maybe with some limited offensive action to strengthen the borders of what they already have taken and put defensive fortifications in more ideal places.

First of all, attacking is very expensive in equipment and lives, so there’s that. Ukraine is content to keep throwing their troops against fortified defenses, don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

Furthermore, the war is declining in popularity in the USA and Europe and support is wavering a bit. A big headline-grabbing offensive could change that. Republicans want to pivot to China and a “stalemate” that’s a big waste of money looks pretty bad for Biden going into election year.

Of course if Ukraine is able to get more attacks through to more targets inside Russian borders then a big offensive will probably be demanded as a response regardless.

I don’t have the picture of the situation that the Russian MOD has so I’m just speculating, but Ukraine seems far more desperate to try move the lines of battle than Russia is.

I’ve had a hunch these last several months that the corruption and grifting that has been infiltrating the USA’s MIC might now be a larger weight around the neck of both it and NATO than most people think.

The poor performance in Ukraine, the continuing jokes provided to us by the F-35, the gap in technology like hypersonic missiles…I really wonder if the USA is even capable of designing and producing modern weaponry in the quantities required to sustain a conflict more intense than a colonial occupation. I suspect we’ll be finding out soon, and we might already be finding out.

Wonder if Ukraine is about to be added to the pile of things like universal healthcare, bridge and road repairs, and green energy that are great ideas but oh darn there’s just no money to pay for it!

What is going on with the text in this image? It was clearly replaced very haphazardly, is it an automated translation or something?

It’s funny to put it that way because having the cops “come to your door”, I suspect, means very different things in the USA than China. In the USA at least, it means that you’re immediately at a dramatically elevated risk of being shot, it means being interrogated by professional liars whose job it is to get you to say something incriminating, it means being at the mercy of a petty tyrant and hoping they’re in a good mood.

I’ve noticed this pattern forming as well as election season picks up and Ukraine turns into a stalemate. Can you elaborate at all on why this fight is happening though? Who are the winners and losers if there’s a pivot away from focusing on Europe to focusing on China?