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---Disclaimer: This story may be triggering to people who suffer from simple/complex anxiety and/or PTSD. Please read on at your discretion. I didn't [] Tcakqaal's use of 'hell' because I thought it would break emersion, know that she is using an equivalent of 'hell' in the abstract sense, not actually referencing the Abrahamic afterlife of torture---

---Loneliness---

---[13 years] BF (Before Fluffy)---

The galaxy… is vast!

It contains fourteen billion terrestrial planets, of those, half are lifebearing, of those, one in a hundred are currently host to a permanent sapient population, of those, only a little over thirty thousand are cradleworlds of sapient species, of those, one… is a deathworld.

Lightyears separate stars! The size and quantity of objects that can move through the void without being detected is immense!

This was a lesson my polity, the Galactic Union, learned hard… all too recently!

Around [20 years ago] we discovered that our society had been cohabiting the galaxy with another domain…

This wasn’t the normal First Contact situation, where we’d find a species bound to one planet, maybe with a few extrasolar colonies!

They had a territory that already made them the most numerous single species in the galaxy.

Hundreds of planets and 1.7 TRILLION souls!

And they’d been hiding… right under our eyes and, yet, in the last place we’d look for them!

On deathworlds!

Worlds where the gravity is high enough to crush our silicate

One of the things that I noticed in the recent Canada AAR on the discord was that it felt, to me, like being a subject was not all that big of a deal in Victoria 3. While this has been discussed in other places, while throwing ideas around with a friend of mine I came up with an idea that I think would fit very well with Vicky 3’s “society builder” feel while solving this problem.

The basic center of this idea is that the market leader can choose an Interest Group to support in every other country in their market. They can have a default that they set in some screen, but they should be able to change it on an individual basis. This would multiply the IG’s power by a certain amount (almost always less than 2X for gameplay purposes I think), rather than add a flat percentage, so that an economic leader can’t just completely fabricate a base of support in their subject, but has to at least engage with the realities in the country.

Following this, economic reliance on the market leader (some number based on both imports AND exports with them) increases the multiplier of that IG support, making it so that being heavily reliant on a market has a markedly different feeling than being in a market but still mostly autarchic/capable of functioning independence.

Then, becoming a subject will increase the weight of that economic reliance modifier, with a different weight increase for different amounts (maybe protectorates, for instance, would be 0% due to the nature of that relationship, while say a colony would have maybe an 80% increase – I don’t know exactly what these numbers should be). As well, when a subject, another part would be added to represent military reliance. This could be simply changed by a ratio of subject-to-overlord military strength, or it could also be affected by the strength of the subject’s neighbors (so that a safe and sleepy colony doesn’t feel as reliant on their overlord for protection as one bordering an expansionist military threat). Different subject types would increase the weight of this by different amounts, but I don’t think it should be as much as the economic one – this is mostly a yes/no thing about being a subject.

I think that this system would be a really good fit in Victoria 3 for a number of reasons. First of all, it makes your choices with regards to how you fit into a market actually matter. Right now it seems like the main strategy for a small country is 1) join a market 2) find an economic niche 3) hyperspecializ

The Scary Future of the American Right

What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference.

David Brooks | November 18, 2021

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites — increasingly the mainstream left of this country — do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right — the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers,

I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.

Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.

Do your worst!

I'm surprised it hasn't decade.

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

It really does, I swear!

They’re on standbi

Pilot on me!!

Nothing, he was gladiator.

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I won't be doing that today!

[Removed]

You take away their little brooms

It was about a weak back.

Why

It’s pronounced “Noel.”

Where ever you left it 🤷‍♀️🤭

After all his first name is No-vac

What, then, is Chinese rap?

Edit:

Notable mentions from the comments:

• Spanish/Swedish/Swiss/Serbian hits

• French/Finnish art

• Country/Canadian rap

• Chinese/Country/Canadian rock

• Turkish/Tunisian/Taiwanese rap

There hasn't been a single post this year!

(Happy 2022 from New Zealand)

Nothing, it just waved

Him: I can explain everything!

(It's his best joke yet I think)

Bob

So that I could frequently say, "I am going to walk 5 miles now."

Edit: My most popular post on Reddit! 😀 Thank you for the awards.

Just to clarify, 12345678

Me grabbing a soda from my (what I thought was) half full 12pk...

Notices there's only 2;

Me: "Awe man... This is a damn bird box!" Her: "What the hell does that mean?!" Me: (Pulls both cans out & shows them to her) "It's only got Toucans."

I'm not ashamed to admit the look on her face was glorious.

I was just sitting there doing nothing.

When I got home, they were still there.

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

There hasn't been a post all year!