Cyberpunk: themes of postmodernism, the horrors of neoliberalism, the limits of consciousness. Steampunk: “what if I could wear an ugly hat”

(via My favorite D&D story)

@taciturn-metronome

@mlarayoukai

I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

I have reblogged this before and will again.

@mrevaunit42

Hey Everyone!

For those who where wondering how i did flames - please check out the short step-by-step i have prepared, so that You can try out Yourself. 

Cheers!

Paul

Wow i never thought of that, thanks a ton!

Why Space Marines need to be male

(in this I use Adeptus Astartes and Marines/ Space Marines basically interchangably, mainly for the purposes of readability, so assume I’m talking about the same thing unless I state otherwise)

I mentioned, briefly, in a response to a reader letter in the most recent White Dwarf, that I had a reason for why I think there shouldn’t be female Space Marines. Just so we’re totally clear by ‘Space Marine’ I mean specifically Warhammer 40,000’s Adeptus Astartes, I’m not saying Pvt. Vasquez or Samus or whomever shouldn’t exist. I think it is very important that the Adeptus Astartes should be male, and it isn’t anything to do with the game’s fictional reason for why this is so.

In 40k, only men get to be Space Marines, or rather, only boys. They are taken at a young age, in pre- or early puberty, and physically and mentally made into killing machines. The fiction justifies why it’s only boys that get taken because of some vague notion of the process requiring male hormonal development, which one assumes to mean high testosterone, which is some waffle. I don’t think it’s the strongest reason to restrict Marines to one gender, because HRT is a thing (I’m not really prepared to get into a discussion about trans men as space marines, that’s not what this piece is about so I’ll have to leave that I’m afraid, but that’s definitely something I’d like to hear a take on) but again, it’s not the direct, in-fiction reason to keep the Astartes male that I support, it’s broader than that.

It essentially boils down to what the Space Marines are, what they mean, and what exact genre of fiction Warhammer 40k actually is. In the narrative, of course, the Space Marines are the Emperor’s Angels of Death, his will made manifest, humanity’s finest. They are portrayed as the ultimate soldiers in a galaxy constantly at war, as heroes to all, defenders of humanity. The process to actually become a Space Marine is arduous and long, but if one were to become a Space Marine it would prove that yes, you are one of the best fighters humanity has to offer. Without question.

It’s when you actually analyse what that actually means, what being a Space Marine means, that I hope my reasoning becomes a little bit clearer. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of trying to teach a group of ten year old boys who’ve never seen warfare, who’ve never been affected by it or grown mature enough to comprehend the horror of it, I highly recommend it. Not because you’ll really get anywhere. It’ll be a troubling and haunting experience for you, actually. I covered the First World War with a group of Year 5 boys a couple of years ago, as a coda to us finishing Micheal Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful together. The book is quite damning about the way soldiers were treated by their own country during the war, about how being in a total war situation can affect and damage a young person’s mind, how it can make them do things they wouldn’t dream of doing elsewhere. I confess, I got very emotional at the book’s climax. I take the horror of the First World War very, very seriously (I covered it in my Battlefield 1 review). I consider it an appalling waste of life, a grotesque display of colonialism and imperialist chest-thumping on all sides. I was quite shocked, perhaps naively so, that the boys I was working with didn’t see it that way. After going over what life in the trenches was like, the sheer number of casualties lost over a matter of inches of ground, the complete inability of command structures to adopt strategies that would have mitigated said loss of life until the very end of the war (just to be clear, I did not try to impose my own opinion of why this was on the children; I explained to them how new this form of warfare was and left them to form their own conclusions), several of the boys still seemed quite excited by the idea of it all, of going over the top and firing artillery and what have you. I realised, of course, that they were mapping what we’d discussed onto what they knew about warfare and violence, which is to say the games they played and the films they watched. Even though I was trying to show them that war, perhaps, was not a heroic and exciting affair, they couldn’t see it that way. They even saw death in war as some kind of noble thing, because thats the way they’d seen in on screen. ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ indeed.

Space Marines represent this kind of thinking, intentionally so. They are the epitome of the uncritical approach to analysing warfare, all glory, no downside. The idea that one might get to fight, and be really good at it, and do it all the time is a neat idea if you only know about war as this cool thing from video games and movies. The idea of the Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine works as a criticism of how we teach boys about war, how we introduce them to it and how casually they absorb the imagery of it, getting uncritically excited about tanks and guns and bombs. Space Marines, fundamentally, are little boys who never really grow up, robbed of a genuine adulthood to instead fight with their mates, forever, until they die, without having to worry about why or who they’re fighting. And that’s why I think its important that Space Marines be male. Because if there were female Marines, this implicit criticism of boys and war wouldn’t be as effective. Thats not to say that I think there aren’t girls who get excited by this kind of thing, there are, but societally we don’t push it on them the same way. We don’t guide them, unconsciously, to this kind of fascination in the same way we do boys because ‘girls stuff’ isn’t about being a hero and fighting and being tough.

Let’s be absolutely clear here, the notion of things being separated into ‘girl’s stuff’ and ‘boy’s stuff’ is patently ridiculous, damaging and regressive. We, societally, still do it by the skipload. Again, work in a school, you’ll see this low-key gender-based segregation all the time. It’s frustrating.

It’s important that Space Marines be male, and only male, so this criticism can stand because of what Warhammer 40,000 actually is. More than it’s sci-fi, more even than it’s fantasy, Warhammer 40k is a horror story. It’s actually terrifying, a mix of Orwellian dystopia with Lovecraftian Horror and Hieronymous Bosch artwork. There’s definitely a place in the game for gender equality, but it has to exist within this horror framework, so it’s not ‘equal rights for all’ so much as ‘everyone will get to die for their empire equally’. The Imperial Guard, for example, where it’s not who you are, its just that you’re a body that can hold a lasgun. When people ask for female Marines, when they come up with their own head canon or whatever, maybe a better option is to think, ‘why do I want this? Is it because I want to see a woman who’s as powerful as these men?’. In that case, think about those men. Think about the context within which they exist. Think about the power they represent. Space Marines are the Mitchell and Webb SS sketch but without the punchline. You know the one, where the two Nazi SS officers are sat down, and one of them, acknowledging the plethora of skull emblems on their uniforms wonders ‘Are we the bad guys?’. Space Marines are covered in skulls, only they don’t get to have ethical quandaries.

Representation is important, but it can’t be as simple as like-for-like, it needs the appropriate context to justify it so it doesn’t feel token or inappropriate. I don’t know if there’s an answer to the ‘female Marine’ equivalent, I don’t know if there can be. I don’t think it’s the Sisters of Battle. They’re their own weird, exploitative thing. I think the main thing people need to remember about 40k is that no one’s the good guys. Everyone’s terrible, because they need to be, because it’s a game that needs to justify why everyone fights all the time. It’s satire, parody, cynicism and good old British gallows humour. So trying to find positive representation in that always struck me as kind of a weird idea. If you want lady marines because you want to see some tits in power armour, you can kindly fuck off into a skip. If you want lady Marines because you want representation, is that really the representation you’re looking for? Emotionally stunted killing machines who have become the poster children for a nightmare regime? I honestly think Warhammer 40,000 has some great female characters, but they’re largely absent from the tabletop, acting in the fiction as the human foil to the inhuman marines. If you really like the 40k universe that might be the place you find the representation you want, the Horus Heresy books are a good place to start.

And They Shall Know No Fear. Only people who think they’re invincible live without fear. We unfortunately live in a world where girls learn that they’re not invincible much earlier than boys.

write a story about how you became the world’s most powerfull person… by accident.

(This is where it starts.)

One.

There is a strange creature crossing the road behind the lecture hall. You stop on your bike and frown at it. It looks a little like a turtle, but it’s limbs are longer than any turtle you’ve ever seen. It’s stretched out on the hot asphalt, long, pale limbs clawing forward towards the small stream that runs on the other side.

 You hop off your bike and gently pick the creature up, hands under the belly of the shell like you learned from the internet.

Imagine your surprise when the shell slides off the creature instead, dropping a tiny woman onto the asphalt.

“Water,” she croaks, tiny eyes screwed shut.  Her eyelids are the size of yours which means they’re huge on her. “Please.”

(You will not know until later what exactly please means to the fae.)

You feel yourself move through your shock. You pick her up and take her to the water’s edge. She slips under the surface, pale skin flashing like the scales of a fish, and she’s gone.

You’d wonder if your roommate slipped you something this morning if she wasn’t back a moment later, pushing a small rock into your hands.

“A boon,” she says. Her eyes are large and black, suited for her underwater world. “For a favor.” She smiles, showing teeth jagged and sharp like a piranha.

When you blink, she’s gone.

You stare at the rock in your left hand. It’s smooth and worn from years in water, an interesting swirl of granite and quartz. “I wish I knew,” you tell it.

The rock ices over so fast that you don’t have time to drop it. The frost swirls across your skin, burning you where it touches, and you watch in horror as your skin turns a mottled black and blue.

 You fall to your knees from the pain and choke on a scream as the stone sinks into you, touching your bones and sending more ice through your marrow. It climbs up your arm and touches your eye, changing you vision so now that you’re see double, a strange, blue world juxtaposed next to the one you know and love.

Keep reading

some tool: idk, doesn’t advocating violence against nazis make us just as bad as them?

me:

Decided to finally do something with the Dark Vengeance helbrute I had lying around. Behold Snotbox, Death Guard helbrute and all round unwell fella. Still need to hack together an ammo feed for the reaper autocannon and a heavy flamer for the fist.

I was sick yesterday. Lot of coughing/ phlegm. Which might’ve been an inspiration

Super sweet

dont let tumblr make you think its okay to live in florida

I tried myself on some sponging.. I’m not sure what’s not right.. 🤔

Which ever yellow colour you’ve used. Well, beige. Start with a darker brown, Rhinox Hide is my preference, and maybe work your way into a more reddish-orange brown to show rush. The bright bits are what are looking unnatural atm.

Always go with a dark brown, then metal on top of the brown, i use dark umber, then i manually place all the metallics with a brush so i have more control over the bright spots

going through my microsoft word archives is great fun because i always find the wildest shit in there and by “the wildest shit” i mean the time i tried to rewrite the entire bible from scratch at the age of eleven and a half

“And so Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, and Eve turned to Adam and said, 'Nice going, loser.‘” 

iconic

whilst you were listening to avril lavigne, i learned the way of the Lord

@lexa-was-the-one

These are so good i could imagine them being in a Terry Pratchett novel

My friend described a Tau commander with all the signature systems as the “Over There!” commander: he gestures madly with his laser pointers, and the Tau make like cats with pulse rifles and go crazy on the target.  I knew what I had to do.

Reblog if Lisa is tearing you apart

“I wish I was dead” - Death Corps of Krieg

Accurate.