Image is a snapshot taken from the recent Hezbollah video "Our Mountains, Our Treasures", showcasing their extensive underground fortifications, supply lines, and weaponry.
iran can't keep doing this to me, they've gotta respond soon, right? I'm gonna run out of analysis about countries soon, oh god
The COTW (Child of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific child every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied children. If you've wanted to talk about the child or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any child.
The Child of the Week is Hassan LargePenis! He is chad-and-cuck rater and general commenter @LargePenis@hexbear.net's son, born over a month ago. @Greenleaf@hexbear.net recommended I have him as the COTW for a week and I finally got around to it.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Russia and China strike major video games deal
considering that video games made in the West are basically just weaponized propaganda this is very cool 😎
If this doesn't end up as a typical memorandum nothing burger, this could potentially lead to levels of basedness in gaming unseen since Disco Elysium. There's already collaboration between the two industries, Atomic Heart apparently only secured funding through principally an investment from Tencent according to its devs.
China's biggest cultural export issue is the (understandable) restrictions against political and ideological products, especially in gaming where most historical settings then are only wuxia or classical literature-derived like ROTK games or Black Myth Wukong. This is understandable given the absolutely justifable concerns of loose restrictions causing historical nihilism and under the current conditions of siege socialism, treats like video game are frankly irrelevant in that context of the preservation of AES. Additionally, any "red" cultural product released for an international audience would be immediately cast as "communist propaganda" by the West, who are still desperately trying to plagiarize their old Cold War playbook and find a way to convince Global South capitalist ruling classes that China is "out to get them" just like the USSR "was." Incidentally, I saw a transcript of a Chinese MOFA press conference from a couple days ago where Reuters tried to entrap the spokesperson into saying that the recent wildly financially successful Wukong game was "supported by the government" so that likely they could immediately put out a press release framing the game as a "government-sponsored cultural invasion" like they've done with the Confucious Institutes. Instead, the spokesperson deftly deflected with "haven't heard of it but sounds neat."
Russia's biggest cultural export issue is that they have plenty of developers with leftist leanings, like the Atomic Heart team, but the current neoliberal governance in Russia is nervous of overly promoting Soviet and Communist nostalgia and the current Western cancellation frenzy on Russian works means that there is no significant infrastructure and financial support to promote and protect those leftist devs. Atomic Heart developer Mundfish had to relocate to Cyprus and if you read their interviews, they don't mention "Russia" even once. Isolated devs in the worst case end up as ZA/UM did.
I might be now completely on hopium, but if this can amount to genuine collaboration, both sides could have their cake and eat it too: we could finally get a proper game about Stalingrad without the "Enemy at the Gates" million man rush propaganda and a grand strategy game where the devs don't nerf Communism because it's too efficient (Victoria 3). Chinese devs could excuse the presence of socialist political themes on the Russian side and the Russians could vice versa blame shift to prevent Western media from effectively pinning it as "Chinese red propaganda" or "funding the Russian invasion."
Or this could be just a pretext to pumping out endless remakes of Tetris.
You should check out Syrian Warfare. Real time strategy developed by Russian dev team where you control Syrian Arab Army, Russian, and Hezbollah fighting units to liberate various regions of Syria from Daesh and Al Nusra contras. The storyline is pro-government and anti-NATO. @Xx_Aru_xX@hexbear.net introduced me to it.
High quality anti-colonial video games are absolutely possible and not hopium.
China needs to relax its laws on the contents of games pertaining to real countries/places/people so that developers make a more broad range of videogames. They don't touch a tonne of stuff because of some of the regulations being very vague.
they better make a strategy game where you play as a PLA soldier
China kind of bans alternate history stuff and minimizes violent videogames, look up how they censor blood. With that said, the wuxia genre should grow and games like Atomic Heart won't get slandered like they did two years ago.
China does not censor blood or skeletons. This is a common myth.
They do have regulations that prevent content that "harms the honour of the country" and you're right about alt-history being ruled out by things like "harming territorial integrity" regulations. These rules are so vague developers don't take the risk of making games in these areas on the off chance the regulator blocks them.
I'm curious how the honor of the country is applied to stuff before the revolution. With that said I get it, kaiserreich single handedly maintained kaiserboos into the 21st century. Still though, when are we getting Chinese Call of Duty:Korea?
I don't know entirely but I know the 8 Princes DLC for Warhammer 3 pissed off China so much that the entire playerbase dropped the game. Sore historical topic for them when China was basically fought over by the 8 princes and split up over things people find really bad.
....and how is that different from the war of the three kingdoms?
Fuck did I say Warhammer? lol
It was a DLC for Three Kingdoms not Warhammer
Anyway it's mostly because of this war being viewed as embarrassing and ridiculous. The Sima clan were viewed as people that stole the throne of China then tore it apart and in the process of doing this lost the northern territories to tribal groups. The whole thing is an embarrassment that Chinese people dislike, so the idea of being the 8 princes of the Sima clan is bad in and of itself, people don't want that, and people don't want to glorify a group of people that are an embarrassment.
The Three Kingdoms on the other hand aren't viewed that way, it probably helps that this was the period Confucianism rose up in. Not to mention that The Three Kingdoms era ends with a stronger China whereas the 8 Princes ushers in the 16 Kingdoms era. One ends well for China, the other ends very badly.
There is a fantasy chinese faction in total war warhammer 3, they apparently play so different from all the other factions that I plan to return to the game after some point. (I did like 2 or three playthroughs struggling to win with the fantasy Joan of arc faction
Still, China is missing out on obvious propaganda wins probably due to their century of humiliation trauma being merged into the fact that they screwed up by technically allowing the same legal loophole which enabled the break up of the Soviet union. Still, I want some mad lad to create a wank fic merging mohism and white lotus.
I guess that's why they banned C&C Generals? The GLA bombing the US and China in terror attacks. I also remember a rumor about a censored version of The Sims 1 for China, which removed the scary phone calls and replaced the buglar with a mime, but I can no longer find any information about this on the Internet, except that the Chinese and Japanese versions have exclusive Asian sims and Asian clothes.
I think Germany has a similar problem, there was a case in Germany about censorship in video games, and the developers still think that what was decided in that case affects the whole games sector. But I don't think that de jure there is a law against violent video games, but there is no real law on violence. Except for the use of Nazi material, which is still banned in Germany and Austria.
These sound like Western companies making stupid changes based on stupid consultancy companies that make shit up tbh.
Yes because the EU and NATO have a monopoly on Nazism, no one else is allowed to factory produce Nazis besides them.
Hamas and the PLA are likely going to be offended by anyone making FPS schlock about the Al-Asqua Flood, but god damn would it be funny.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1714420/Fursan_alAqsa_The_Knights_of_the_AlAqsa_Mosque/
deleted by creator
Pickings for something like this are so slim you would definatly get pics of guys in tunnels playing the shit out of it, if someone seriously made an Al-Asqua flood game.
Is Fursan al-Aqsa close enough?