El-Thorvaldo

In the past few journals, you may recall I've been plugging a site called Side 7. Yesterday* I was proud to cut the ribbon on its official dA Group! Essentially the site everyone was looking for way back when talk of a split started gaining sustained momentum, it has the "Old dA" feel without any of the later corporate prostitution, or the managerial ineptitude plaguing certain aspiring rivals.

I'm never a fan of going into a site blind (InkBlot, anyone?), so my confederates and I have compiled a comprehensive overview of both the site's main features and its unique perks. If there's anything that piques your curiosity not covered by the current showcase, drop us a line, and we can give it a spotlight.

Hope to see you there!

* This should have gone up yesterday, but I was redlining everything.

As we conclude Day 731 of Pukin's three-day special military operation, it's a good time to pause and reflect how we got here. The war on Ukraine has been co-opted by ideologues from both left and right wings to "prove" their worldview, but shockingly few people understand what really precipitated Euromaidan, and the Kremlin's subsequent retaliation, even within Ukraine itself—and that's because virtually none of the pundits have bothered to actually examine Ukraine's internal politics.

Early last year, I stumbled on Part 3 of a documentary series by Sarcasmitron, lauded by Ukrainians and Russians alike as the most in-depth and accurate English-language analysis of the crisis. Combining archival footage with a contemporary soundtrack to map out the links between seemingly-disparate elements, it bears strong stylistic parallels with the work of Adam Curtis, making it all the more astounding this was assembled by a YouTube Essayist™ working out of his proverbial basement. Over the course of four episodes, it examines the history of Ukrainian politics from the ousting of Leonid Kuchma in 2005 to the Maidan protests in 2014; the start of open war with the eastern insurgencies; relations between Moscow and Washington after the Cold War; and the parallels between Russian society today and the United States during the heyday of the War on Terror, seeking to answer the question posed at the end of Episode 1 that continues to confound rational analysts: With the Ukrainian government in crisis and the Crimean occupation precluding NATO membership, Moscow had an easy win; why, then, did Putin escalate?

Content advisories for language, violence including atrocities, racists and ultranationalists, and wingnut conspiracism. Linked through Invidious to bypass age gates on Parts 1 and 2.

Part 1: "How Ukraine's Fake Culture War Became a Real Geopolitical Conflict"

In which we examine Ukraine's political history of the mid-2000s; how the power struggle between Leonid Kuchma's deputies begat the Orange Revolution; why the "language question" isn't real, yet fooled spectators into thinking Ukrainian society was fractured; why pursuing EU membership was a practical means of combatting Ukrainian oligarchism; how Viktor Yanukovych struggled to maintain an impossible balance between popular support for European integration and mounting threats from the Kremlin, culminating in the Maidan protests of 2014.

Part 2: "A Short History of the War in Donbas 2014–2022"

In which we reconstruct the timeline of the eastern insurgencies and explore the "Photon Curtain"; how the Kremlin perpetuated urban riots with paid actors; why the so-called "people's republics" were not an expression of popular will; how the delay in Western media coverage enabled distortion of basic sequences of events; how increasing commitment of Russian soldiers led to the strangulation of independent Russian journalism; why outside observers managed to ignore an invasion in plain sight.

Part 3: "Shut Up About NATO Expansion"

In which we examine US–Russian relations in the post-Soviet era; debunking the claims that there was ever a formal agreement not to expand NATO membership; why the "shock therapy" privatization of Boris Yeltsin was a strategic necessity to defang the Soviet hardliners that had supported the 1991 coup; why the "Great NATO Sob Story" denies the agency of those countries historically threatened by Russian imperialism; how Poland blackmailed its way into NATO, pushing up the timeline for other countries' membership; how the Clinton and Yeltsin administrations misread each other's motives and fumbled a post-Soviet reconciliation; why 2022 confounds the Realist theory of international relations.

Part 4: "The American Origins of Putin's Madness"

In which, having exhausted rational arguments for the invasion, we turn to the irrational; how Putin-era nationalism parallels the American neoconservatives' "War on Terror"; how disgraced American politician Lyndon LaRouche's wingnut conspiracism forms the bedrock of Putin's worldview; how "colour revolutions" became a dogwhistle for CIA subversion to delegitimize popular democracy; how Western media adopted Russian propaganda to create a positive feedback loop; why subscription to conspiracy serves to absolve us of personal responsibility; why ideologues of disparate wings have found common cause in sacrificing the Ukrainian people to prop up their guiding narratives; why Ukraine matters, and its lessons for democracy at home.

Eclipse has finally caught up with Groups, one of the last redoubts of the old interface. People will argue back and forth about the UI, about how Watchers and Members are being folded in together apparently without any regard to how user permissions are configured, but I want to highlight one line specifically:

The majority of admin features for groups will remain the same. Notes and logs have received a visual uplift to match the rest of the site; however, admin forums and announcements have been phased out due to very low usage.

Now, it's no surprise volumetrics are leading dAdministration by the nose: see the capitulation to AI as its primary client for Premium Galleries. But not unlike the erasure of gallery comments (without warning), removing internal forums and announcements will destroy information, specifically existing records of groups' administrative policy, and presumably shunt discussions to cumbersome Note chains or, God forbid, the chat.

People know I take operational integrity deathly seriously—the fact Staff is opting to gut a key tool theretoward lays plain how little it does.

As mentioned in the April update, a long-term project of mine is to update the original index of scenarios that shipped with Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition for compatibility with Test of Time. To help track progress, and crowdsource input on updated graphics and potential rebalances, I've created an official coordination thread on CivFanatics. I haven't decided whether I'll post the demos piecemeal on Patreon or wait to finish the consolidated pack, so bookmark the thread if you want sneak peeks.

Do you like cats?

Do you like historical comics?

Do you like Prohibition-era St. Louis gangsters?

Have I got a show for you..!

tracyjb et al. will be premiering the first episode of Lackadaisy's animated adaptation...

*checks notes*

...last March.

[link]

In other news, Imgur will be updating its terms of service May 15. The tl;dr is that existing archives are slated for pruning based on nebulously-defined criteria of "old, unused, and inactive content", alongside anonymous uploads and sexual content. RIP the Last Good Free Host, and back up your files.

As we thaw out of winter, I'm also thawing out a suite of modding projects new and familiar alike:

Civilization II

Having finally got a handle on the wild world of hex editing, I'm tackling a project that has been on the wish-list for a while: converting the legacy MGE scenarios to Test of Time. This is in tandem with the specific goal of cleaning up the third-party scenario The Day After, which even in its original format was practically unplayable due to a gross oversight in the map's starting pollution. Initial but buggy ports of the former can be downloaded here (first-turn crashes have since been patched but not posted publicly), while work on remastering the latter will be tracked here.

Civilization III

Having arrived late to the Flintlock patch, I have fresh encouragement (and inspiration!) for the neglected Civ3 IOT mod. Most of the provided factions were in place when I fell off, with only ~4 left to implement, and with special abilities like stealth attack freed up for more intuitive use, I can bring the arsenals in line with their original designs.

Freeciv

Aeons ago, before TOTPP was a thing, I did exploratory work on a Civ2 scenario based on the cliffhanger ending of IOT: The Aftermath. Game engine limitations led me to look into retooling it as a mod for Freeciv, which in turn led to a furtive attempt to develop a ToT graphics set. While difficulties with the current UI have shelved a 'proper' ToT port, at the encouragement of retro gaming mentat Blake00, I'm tying off a hybrid MGE–TOT skin pulling from community assets that will be fit for public release.

Fegel-Alert

Blake's encouragement has also lit the fire under my long-suffering OpenRA spoof, which I'm thinking may get a ModDB page once I've finally rounded off a patch fit for public consumption.

Hearts of Iron IV

• I've intimated to select colleagues, but for about a year now I've been an assistant dev to the F.A.N.D.O.M. Wars mod after I figured my homebrew patches were worth submitting for official adoption. While I've contributed a few ideas of my own, most of my work has been bugfixing and optimization, so if you play the mod and see something sus, gimme a shout!

• In preparation for a personal submod for the above, I'm also eyeing setting up a ModDB page to house my various smaller HoI projects, including "Patching the Tiger", "More Provinces Redux", the Downfall cosmetic mod, and a previously-unannounced touch-up to vanilla locs for better dynamic parsing of character gender.

DYOS Anniversary Trailer

This one's a bit of a long shot—I had originally planned to put out a spoof trailer commemorating the 10th Anniversary of DRAW Your Own Story around the launch of At Plot's End. Alternating complications led the project to languish from "10th Anniversary" to "15th Anniversary" to "When It's Done™", but as we close in on the second decade, getting this out would be a good test of whether I might finally be able to cartoon semi-regularly again.