Mazeka
You must be joking
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- United States
Maybe stick around. There's an Australian getting interviewed soon.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
- Thread starter veteranMortal
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If he's bowing out I expect they'll let him because why make a mess when they already get what they want. So yeah probably what happened.
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- Upstate NY, USA
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- Fjf
Take something - ANYTHING - from your work/school/hobbies.
File off the numbers a bit and add the occasional sprinkle of decaying flesh.
I'm catching up so maybe it's answered further in the thread. But what was the reason for the IC person stating that there are 20 million people in chongquing as opposed to the 50,000 stated in the book?
And I guess, what's the meta answer?
I know not all of them turned zombie, but with the army conscripting more soldiers, a few purges here and there, and resource scarcity, the three gorges exploding. There's an argument for lots of dead. Maybe not %99, but should maybe be less than 20 million.
This is a fun read. I remember when Max Brooks was the celebrity of the hour. He was on a history channel show about gunsmiths that made stupid guns and his perfect zombie killer gun is a ruger 10/22 with a super extendo mag.
And I guess, what's the meta answer?
I know not all of them turned zombie, but with the army conscripting more soldiers, a few purges here and there, and resource scarcity, the three gorges exploding. There's an argument for lots of dead. Maybe not %99, but should maybe be less than 20 million.
This is a fun read. I remember when Max Brooks was the celebrity of the hour. He was on a history channel show about gunsmiths that made stupid guns and his perfect zombie killer gun is a ruger 10/22 with a super extendo mag.
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I've not covered the other sections discussing China yet, but the way he does China is really odd and I don't agree with a lot of it.
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- Somewhere in the stacks
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- She/Her
One might even say it carries a distinct current of US-centric Sinophobia.
Oh for sure. Very early 2000's mindset. I have a unabridged audio book and they leave out a lot from the book. More than I remember.
Just saw read Blame and it's wild how he portrays the CIA and the upper echelons of the Military. I think the term for black ops death squads is people commiting suicide. 2 bullets to the back of the head. Real shame.
I'll say it again. This is a real fun read. I believe what he says about private sector though. More money and better hours from personal experience. I will say though that alphabet agencies don't dig through everyone's internet history. It's a pain in the dick to do in general for the few people you want to focus on. And those drone strikes were perfectly vaild targets until the media got a hold of it. But if you've seen drone footage it's actually a bit blurry and who knows what that large group of people are doing. Probably a terrorist rally, even if the Intel we got says that these cats are going to a wedding. Acceptable collateral damage is how it's worded.
It's important context that Brooks would have been writing this in the direct aftermath of the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004 and was inspired by it. A disease like SARS looks like small potatoes in the post-COVID world, but it was big news at the time, and stuff like "China covers up the outbreak of a dangerous disease" was very much part of the zeitgeist.
Not saying that excuses stuff like "inscrutable natives" of course.
Not saying that excuses stuff like "inscrutable natives" of course.
I thought the Delmas went down too because it was still tied to the tulip so they both went down with all hands.
I can see blimps being used as opposed to other forms of air transport. It's something that the real life US military has been chewing on for 20 years now. The big aerospace companies put out a concept every once in awhile.
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Nothing in the text says the Delmas went down, and I think it is nicer if they survive
They way they did Yonkers was a fucking mess. So many other options. A-10 Warthogs come to mind. Dozer blades on the tanks.
It's interesting to see him as stolen valour. Definitely a hot take and pretty believable.
Throwing people in MOPP 4 is %100 what they would have done. A. Because of mulched zombie in the air and 2. Because fuck you that's why. Can't see for shit out of a pro mask and even shouldering a rifle is a pain. Never used land warrior personally but that extra weight does not sound fun. Full battle rattle is heavy as is without spare batteries for your eye cam.
Also believable that they just want to get rid of some units that wouldn't play ball.
It's believable and not. But mostly not.
The Royalist.
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- United Kingdom
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The Royalist.
Of course he's in Bohemia.
There's, like… three schools of thought on "Bohemia" - the Czechs maintain it is not a thing, and has not been a thing since Czechoslovakia's reforms in 1948, a fact cemented in the 1997 constitutional act, whilst the German Southern Command - supposedly "Bavaria" - recognises the "secession" of parts of various Czech border regions and considers them "Bohemia" - the fact that they match the "Sudetenland" and have been ruthlessly ethnically cleansed by militias from Bavaria with strong ties to the Bavarian government? A coincidence.
The EU, in the spirit of compromise, recognises the entire Historical Region of Bohemia and declares it the EU Province of Bohemia, which pleases no one, but broadly favours the Bavarians; its all part of their broader project to pretend there's no war on, whilst Leipzig coordinates with the Czechs to crush the hateful little shits in Bohemia.
I grant Forbes at least that he isn't in the actual no shit Bavarian-held territory, so maybe this is just the Americans following EU guidelines. I doubt it.
There's a self-consciousness to British Royalism, honestly; the claymore is ridiculous. It was ridiculous in the war, it's more ridiculous now. They wear them because they have this absurd fucking idea that because the royalist government survived in northern Scotland, they're all akin to the jacobites now.
Dressing up as a Georgian gentleman-scholar with a claymore on your back whilst you sketch a castle is a fucking performance.
Almost none of these fortifications ever mattered. When they were used - when people decided to hole up in crumbling half-collapsed fortresses without heating or roofs - they tended to either only be a "siege" for about a week, tops - much longer than that, and you'll typically start to see people dying of disease or exposure - or fall to the swarm.
This may become something of a theme, but I'll touch later on why I am so strident about this.
Kukulkan was a Maya temple, but I'm confident he doesn't care. He knows he's talking to a largely American audience - that's where the affected "those chaps" and "bloody great pyramid" shit comes from, along with "the New World" and "the Continent".
It's easy to underestimate the royalists, because they're so odious and have this affect of being out of touch and harmless, but they play propaganda games and they play them well. Maintaining a regime with such utterly negligible public support takes work.
This is some insane reactionary shit, the idea that Europe remains defined by fear of the barbarian hordes coming across the border to destroy law and order, that Europe's endless struggle with barbarism from within and without has given Europeans some ineffable strength above that of the "New World" - they hide it behind talk of castles and the like, but beneath the surface you find very 20th century ideologies.
Valourising castles is quite useful, because it lets you quietly express approval for the worst fucking shit imaginable - American westward expansion, the British empire in the Caribbean, Spanish colonialism and so on - whilst being able to hide behind proclaiming you only meant to say you like castles and people are reading too much into it.
And it should go without saying; the perception of European history as a thousand years of grateful peasants cowering within the walls of their noble lords is ahistorical.
More people would survive the war in Europe in Amazon warehouses than in castles [SOURCE], but for all he says he doesn't want to "overstate their importance" he proceeds to do so at length, and subsequently build an entire fucking monarchist mythology around how important castles were.
It wasn't meaningfully a castle which saved his life, either. He's so full of shit I bet his eyes are brown. He survived by clinging like a tick to the crowned hag.
Right, you need a proper castle, one that hasn't been degenerated for comfort, one that still exists to defend European Law And Order.
I don't even know if he knows that he means it this way? It's stupid, too - insofar as any castles were relevant, modernised ones were better than ones left to crumble into ruins, windows in the ground floor or not. Most of the people who spent any time in a castle needed clear sight lines and the ability to sleep under a roof in a warm bed more than they needed a moat and a drawbridge, because they'd only be there for one night, on their way to an actual survivor enclave or state.
We had started building these, as the war went on. Mixed use blocks of flats - the bottom floor is an office that's only used in daylight hours, with either a ladder or a hoistable staircase leading to the higher floors where people would sleep.
It makes fire safety a little more complicated, but so does every measure against ghoul attack.
Chateau d'Ussé and Prague Castle were never put under serious siege, though cleansing Prague Castle after the war was a nightmare.
Which is another thing about fucking castles that he just glosses over; they're pure shite to clear out later when your idiotic defence fails. Ghouls don't care if you're hiding in a priest hole or a servants corridor - they can smell you, hear you, sense you in that evil, ineffable way. No, the people who get ambushed in a castle are the people clearing it.
If they ever say they had the hardest war though - laugh in the face. I'd have killed to wander through Waddesdon Manor smashing shit with a crowbar to lure out the literal ghouls that used to be Tory ghouls.
The French government didn't have a lot of choice; direct federal control only covers so much of central France, and there might've been a riot if they'd put the memorial in Paris proper.
It's a good poem, though I suspect he doesn't get it.
He probably thinks it's sad, a tragic musing on the loss of life; that's a common enough read, but I know anger when I read it.
Not unique to castles. We saw this all over; I remember being at the front of an advance into Wolverhampton, and we were the first to reach the stadium; we had some hope for them in there - there had been tens of thousands across the various Liverpool-Manchester stadiums, but someone cracked open the padlocks on Molineux and the smell was like a punch in the gut.
Tuberculosis, would you believe it.
Fire was a nearly constant blight on smaller survivor communities. If you don't have enough people to start working on restoring and defending power stations, you need fires in the winter to avoid freezing to death, and if you've locked yourself in a fortified location - like a castle, or a block of flats - you can end up burning yourselves to death. Swathes of London still haven't even been rebuilt. The blackened, gutted ruins of dozens of blocks of flats, all within sight of each other.
They were terrified, you arsehole. Was it foolish? Yes. They'd somehow contrived to attract a swarm far larger than they could cope with, and were trying to find a way out with what they had. Obviously the tunnel was a disaster - they were hacking through close to solid rock! - but ultimately everyone in that castle was already dead. At least this gave them a chance.
There is something I find acutely offensive about some chinless royalist gloating about the people who died because they didn't have the good luck to be hiding with a regiment of the household fucking guard.
Spain was a marvel. I know people have their complaints; they were always fairly surly with smugglers, and there's the perennial controversy about refugees in the Pyrenees, but it was Spanish built G36s that armed us for the big push. The advantages of there being an actually functional state in Europe cannot be overstated.
I have nothing so kind to say about Bavaria.
Kisimul is funny because you will never meet people less grateful for being "saved" by their national government than Scots from the Highlands and Outer Hebrides. A whole slew of people absolutely aware that the only reason they were in danger to begin with was that the government told refugees to flee there to be safe, and the only reason they survived was that after the previous three governmental retreats failed, relatively few people listened to them this time.
Kisimul was lucky not to be Beaumaris, left to fend for itself - hell, it was lucky not to be Lancaster Castle, devoured by the swarm the government led to their doors.
I always find it odd - people in sieges like this looked at snow and ice as a positive, which didn't ever properly fade. There was someone in my unit who'd holed up in a school for two years before being rescued, and they always laughed when it snowed, even though it meant miserably stumbling through slush, trying not to let your fingers freeze off.
Okay I can't let this slide - this just isn't true, really. Bouillon I will give a pass - even once they'd cleared Bouillon town, they still withdrew to the castle as and when they needed to defend against a swarm, but Spis? Spis had a company of retreating Slovakian infantry hole up in it with half the population of Spišské Podhradie for a week. It's a big ruin, but it's a ruin. Once they'd cleared the ghouls - the other half of the population - they moved back into town and used the Chapter House; it has a roof, for one.
As for Beaumaris; they were doing fine, as was the rest of northern Wales, until they were told with a moment's notice that several million englishmen would be coming to take up residence on Anglesey as a defensive position. They got their castle set up just in time for the rest of the population of Anglesey to be evicted and sent to Holy Island to "secure" Anglesey proper for the retreat.
Two companies of the Royal Welsh First Battalion held the Holyhead causeway for a week whilst the Dublin ferry lifted fifty thousand people off the Holy Island, and all the while Beaumaris sat behind their walls with two million ghouls screaming at the gate, and politely refused the British Government's offer to evacuate them to their next holdout, which they assured them would be secure this time.
So I suppose by such a metric they "refused to flee," yes.
Fuck Conwy.
A tiny horde - maybe a couple of thousand - was thawing out around Conwy and they weren't looking like they were going to be able to hold out - they'd sent out foragers too early the autumn before, discovered the ghouls were less frozen than they expected, lost about half their fighting fit, and then had a bad winter - so command down in Cardiff scraped together a relief force and marched them on up.
This was before my time, but by my understanding, they'd scarcely dropped the last ghoul before some pearl clutching Tory was hoisting the Union Jack above the town and taking pot shots with what was no doubt his grandfather's grousing piece.
Someone might've forced the issue, but one of the cruisers from the navy's fallback position on the Isle of Man was lurking in the area, so instead they got to keep Conwy throughout the stalemate years.
It was quite useful to them in disposing of their undesirables at first - they didn't believe we would last, so whenever someone started to cause trouble, they'd be shipped down to Conwy and pushed out the gates at speartip. That accelerated once they broke the siege of Glasgow and swelled their population with a bunch of Glaswegians; a girl in my unit - the 1st Orphaned, odds and sods from areas outside of our political control - was from Clydeside.
They stopped doing that when we took Birmingham, treated Conwy as nothing more than a military outpost - they finally used it in '26 as a friendly launch point to crush the hardliner Red Guards who hadn't seen the writing on the wall.
Camelot Mine is a good book. I wouldn't read it if you want to know what "really" happened at Caerphilly - there's some intense flights of fancy regarding how many ghouls attacked, how much was done by this one dude and how long it had to hold out, but it's entertaining. I wouldn't want to speculate on the author's politics; he acquiesced to socialist rule easily enough, but he's also pretty happy now so who knows.
Not to downplay it, but they only had to hold out for a year and change; by the third autumn of the war, the clearing of South Wales was reaching the point where patrols from Cardiff would consistently draw away chunks of Caerphilly's ghoul "moat".
By the summer after, when I arrived in Bristol, Caerphilly had been cleared, and the band of clear space stretched across South Wales and along to Bath.
Caerphilly spent the rest of the war as an ammunition dump and fallback point for civilians in case of a ghoul incursion.
Windsor Castle is genuinely offensive, and needs to be considered separately from various castle sieges.
Firstly - it was not. Windsor Castle is halfway into the town of Windsor, just across the river from Slough and barely a stone's throw from London, and has been an indefensible ceremonial palace for most of its life.
The reason Windsor Castle held out is that they weren't satisfied with all the shit they'd already spent on the "Royal Residence" - all the ludicrous crap he mentions they charged the public for to protect the royals - no, this wasn't enough. They deployed the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards entirely to Windsor Castle, and had the paras on standby through the entire war.
When you're staking a claim to be holding a propaganda piece this close to London, I suppose you don't want to risk it. God knows the footage of Buckingham Palace being overwhelmed didn't do them any favours from a propaganda perspective.
I'm not sure there is anything quite as unforgivable as being the precursors of the Armoured Motorways, frankly. Such a moronic concept - elevating a motorway like those American highways, even though we lack even their extremely flimsy excuse for doing it.
Do you want to know how to create mass transit which will remain functionally immune to the ghouls, transport people in complete safety at great speed between cities? Build a railway. Even without armoured trains, you're essentially immune to individual ghouls, and once you've armoured them, you can run clean through a swarm, shooting them at leisure.
Like, this is one of the bare handful of things consistent across most of the world - trains are back, baby.
Obviously, miserably, our royalist friends are the exception. They built a proof of concept for fortified motorways - "Armoured Motorways" strictly speaking - from Dundee to Aberdeen - elevated and expanded parts of the old A90 - and then started one from Dundee to Inverness; they started this during the war and it still isn't finished.
It is a weird and somewhat pathetic attempt to ape the Americans on an issue where they just straightforwardly do not care.
It is profoundly unfair that they sat in their castle with their guards and their supply runs and got to have generators and heat whilst so many other people froze to death.
They were still burning crude by the time we were clearing London. Choking black smoke pouring into the sky to the west, the whole time, a constant smoke signal of our compromise. My unit was kept away from it, but there are pictures of the defenders; men and women in their thirties and forties, their uniforms stained by the smoke, faces still grim as they tracked our movements through their scopes.
We so nearly had them. We were so close. We never should've gone for London.
This isn't quite unique to the royalists - arriving survivors would occasionally have a museum piece polearm or what have you - but it is increasingly a symbol of being upper class, a pretence of being from some ancient lineage of British nobility, and forget that the ancient lineages of British nobility hit the world wars like a brick fucking wall.
Men like David Allen Forbes play this ludicrous game where they are pretending to be the old landed gentry - what the French called the Sword Nobles - and we all just have to ignore that they aren't. They portray themselves as being the inheritors of ancient and storied traditions of the Laird in his castle, with his claymore and his ridiculous fucking pretensions, and nevermind that that's a ridiculous ideology, it isn't even true.
He practised this in front of a mirror. This sort of "Oh, it hurts so much, I'm trying to hold it together as a noble British Gentleman" shit is so fake.
Noxious little turd.
I appreciate that he inadvertently lets slip just how much of an aristocratic creep this dude is, being as he was advisor to the queen.
The objections of Parliament, for what it's worth, were not especially lengthy or strenuous - they played it out as a pretty piece of propaganda, which helped the royal image after Prince Charles got bitten being evacuated from Clarence House and William and Harry both fled to the Isle of Man so fast they left skidmarks.
The Balmoral Decree was an almost entirely retroactive decree, with the exception of Balmoral proper - every royal property south of the Royalist cordon was already either overrun by ghouls or occupied by survivors. Balmoral itself was only occupied by "survivors" very briefly.
She did nothing for anyone during the war.
Do you know what got us through it? That second winter, when we'd looted the shops, eaten the crops we'd been able to harvest from the fields from that last pre-collapse year?
The weekly whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, jaunty as you like, flying directly overhead to land in Windsor Castle and ensure the evil old crone got her fucking foie gras. Every week. People died of pneumonia, too weak with hunger to fight it off. Whump-whump-whump. Babies starved when their mothers couldn't feed them. Whump-whump-whump. A half dozen of our older residents said they were going looking for food, and we found they'd hanged themselves from the rail bridge, maybe a quarter mile from camp. Didn't want to keep draining our resources. Whump-whump-whump.
Spite kept us going. Spite and the thought that if we lived, we could give an accounting of the nerve, the fucking arrogance, that was her decision to "stay behind" and draw resources from survivors who hadn't been given that choice, survivors who had to stay, who needed support.
So spare me the quivering of your upper fucking lip. She died at 92, in a warm bed surrounded by her family who had been flown in especially for the privilege, with doctors keeping her pumped full of opiates until the last. How many others got that privilege? How's that for service to others.
That isn't why we remain a United Kingdom. We remain a United Kingdom because when we controlled half of England and all of Wales, we trusted our fucking leaders when they told us you were giving us the honour of clearing London because you recognised you'd abdicated responsibility. We even trusted them when we had to start burning our dead in the streets because the graveyards were choked.
And when we were worn down and blunted by the horrors in and below what used to be the capital, our leaders said there had been enough dead heroes and we realised what was happening when they joined the fucking government.
That is why we remain a United Kingdom. Because when they saw where this would need to go, our commanders blinked, and we were too trusting to notice.
Don't fucking talk to me about concessions. None of them were worth shit.
It took three years after the war for King William V to be granted the power to propose laws to the House of Commons to vote on, over the protestations of the Workers' Party of Great Britain, traitors to the revolution though they are.
This is their core ideological stance, more or less laid bare - the royal family defended our souls. We owe it all to their "godlike" selves, as we owe it to the castles, to the romans and their "Antonine Wall".
We have returned to the protective embrace of our ancestral strength under our divine monarchy, and thus are saved.
It is some acutely fascist shit. It should also be familiar, if you have read anything about how the Holy Russian Empire justifies itself. They're different though, in the eyes of the various allies of the UK, for all that America talks out of both sides of it's mouth about the HRE.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
AN: I didn't realise until I was reviewing this just how much Max Brooks clearly views Britain as a, like, theme park? Britain only exists insofar as you want to talk about castles and the royal family and swords oh my.
Also the dude dressing as a Georgian has such strong Rees Mogg energy.
Article: PROVINCE OF BOHEMIA, THE EUROPEAN UNION
[It is called Kost, "the Bone," and what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in strength. Appearing to grow out of its solid rock foundation, this fourteenth-century Gothic "Hrad" casts an intimidating shadow over the Plakanek Valley, an image David Allen Forbes is keen to capture with his pencil and paper. This will be his second book, Castles of the Zombie War: The Continent. The Englishman sits under a tree, his patchwork clothing and long Scottish sword already adding to this Arthurian setting. He abruptly switches gears as I arrive, from serene artist to painfully nervous storyteller.]
Of course he's in Bohemia.
There's, like… three schools of thought on "Bohemia" - the Czechs maintain it is not a thing, and has not been a thing since Czechoslovakia's reforms in 1948, a fact cemented in the 1997 constitutional act, whilst the German Southern Command - supposedly "Bavaria" - recognises the "secession" of parts of various Czech border regions and considers them "Bohemia" - the fact that they match the "Sudetenland" and have been ruthlessly ethnically cleansed by militias from Bavaria with strong ties to the Bavarian government? A coincidence.
The EU, in the spirit of compromise, recognises the entire Historical Region of Bohemia and declares it the EU Province of Bohemia, which pleases no one, but broadly favours the Bavarians; its all part of their broader project to pretend there's no war on, whilst Leipzig coordinates with the Czechs to crush the hateful little shits in Bohemia.
I grant Forbes at least that he isn't in the actual no shit Bavarian-held territory, so maybe this is just the Americans following EU guidelines. I doubt it.
There's a self-consciousness to British Royalism, honestly; the claymore is ridiculous. It was ridiculous in the war, it's more ridiculous now. They wear them because they have this absurd fucking idea that because the royalist government survived in northern Scotland, they're all akin to the jacobites now.
Dressing up as a Georgian gentleman-scholar with a claymore on your back whilst you sketch a castle is a fucking performance.
Article: When I say that the New World doesn't have our history of fixed fortifications, I'm only referring to North America. There are the Spanish coastal fortresses, naturally, along the Caribbean, and the ones we and the French built in the Lesser Antilles. Then there are the Inca ruins in the Andes, although they never experienced direct sieges.
Almost none of these fortifications ever mattered. When they were used - when people decided to hole up in crumbling half-collapsed fortresses without heating or roofs - they tended to either only be a "siege" for about a week, tops - much longer than that, and you'll typically start to see people dying of disease or exposure - or fall to the swarm.
This may become something of a theme, but I'll touch later on why I am so strident about this.
Article: Also, when I say "North America," that does not include the Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico—that business with the Battle of Kukulcan, although I suppose that's Toltec, now, isn't it, when those chaps held off so many Zed Heads on the steps of that bloody great pyramid. So when I say "New World," I'm really referring to the United States and Canada.
Kukulkan was a Maya temple, but I'm confident he doesn't care. He knows he's talking to a largely American audience - that's where the affected "those chaps" and "bloody great pyramid" shit comes from, along with "the New World" and "the Continent".
It's easy to underestimate the royalists, because they're so odious and have this affect of being out of touch and harmless, but they play propaganda games and they play them well. Maintaining a regime with such utterly negligible public support takes work.
Article: This isn't an insult, you understand, please don't take it as such. You're both young countries, you don't have the history of institutional anarchy we Europeans suffered after the fall of Rome. You've always had standing, national governments with the forces capable of enforcing law and order.
This is some insane reactionary shit, the idea that Europe remains defined by fear of the barbarian hordes coming across the border to destroy law and order, that Europe's endless struggle with barbarism from within and without has given Europeans some ineffable strength above that of the "New World" - they hide it behind talk of castles and the like, but beneath the surface you find very 20th century ideologies.
Article: I know that wasn't true during your westward expansion or your civil war, and please, I'm not discounting those pre–Civil War fortresses or the experiences of those defending them. I'd one day like to visit Fort Jefferson. I hear those who survived there had quite a time of it. All I'm saying is, in Europe's history, we had almost a millennia of chaos where sometimes the concept of physical safety stopped at the battlements of your lord's castle. Does that make sense? I'm not making sense; can we start again?
Valourising castles is quite useful, because it lets you quietly express approval for the worst fucking shit imaginable - American westward expansion, the British empire in the Caribbean, Spanish colonialism and so on - whilst being able to hide behind proclaiming you only meant to say you like castles and people are reading too much into it.
And it should go without saying; the perception of European history as a thousand years of grateful peasants cowering within the walls of their noble lords is ahistorical.
Article: Right then. Castles. Well . . . I don't want for a moment to overstate their importance for the general war effort.
In fact, when you compare them to any other type of fixed fortification, modern, modified, and so forth, their contribution does seem quite negligible, unless you're like me, and that contribution was what saved your life.
More people would survive the war in Europe in Amazon warehouses than in castles [SOURCE], but for all he says he doesn't want to "overstate their importance" he proceeds to do so at length, and subsequently build an entire fucking monarchist mythology around how important castles were.
It wasn't meaningfully a castle which saved his life, either. He's so full of shit I bet his eyes are brown. He survived by clinging like a tick to the crowned hag.
Article: This doesn't mean that a mighty fortress was naturally our God. For starters, you must understand the inherent difference between a castle and a palace. A lot of so-called castles were really nothing more than just great impressive homes, or else had been converted to such after their defensive value had become obsolete.
Right, you need a proper castle, one that hasn't been degenerated for comfort, one that still exists to defend European Law And Order.
I don't even know if he knows that he means it this way? It's stupid, too - insofar as any castles were relevant, modernised ones were better than ones left to crumble into ruins, windows in the ground floor or not. Most of the people who spent any time in a castle needed clear sight lines and the ability to sleep under a roof in a warm bed more than they needed a moat and a drawbridge, because they'd only be there for one night, on their way to an actual survivor enclave or state.
Article: You'd be better off in a modern block of flats with the staircase removed. And as far as those palaces that were built as nothing more than status symbols, places like Chateau Ussé or Prague "Castle," they were little more than death traps.
We had started building these, as the war went on. Mixed use blocks of flats - the bottom floor is an office that's only used in daylight hours, with either a ladder or a hoistable staircase leading to the higher floors where people would sleep.
It makes fire safety a little more complicated, but so does every measure against ghoul attack.
Chateau d'Ussé and Prague Castle were never put under serious siege, though cleansing Prague Castle after the war was a nightmare.
Which is another thing about fucking castles that he just glosses over; they're pure shite to clear out later when your idiotic defence fails. Ghouls don't care if you're hiding in a priest hole or a servants corridor - they can smell you, hear you, sense you in that evil, ineffable way. No, the people who get ambushed in a castle are the people clearing it.
If they ever say they had the hardest war though - laugh in the face. I'd have killed to wander through Waddesdon Manor smashing shit with a crowbar to lure out the literal ghouls that used to be Tory ghouls.
Article: Just look at Versailles. That was a first-rate cock-up. Small wonder the French government chose to build their national memorial on its ashes. Did you ever read that poem by Renard, about the wild roses that now grow in the memorial garden, their petals stained red with the blood of the damned?
The French government didn't have a lot of choice; direct federal control only covers so much of central France, and there might've been a riot if they'd put the memorial in Paris proper.
It's a good poem, though I suspect he doesn't get it.
He probably thinks it's sad, a tragic musing on the loss of life; that's a common enough read, but I know anger when I read it.
Article: Not that a high wall was all you needed for long-term survival. Like any static defense, castles had as many internal as external dangers. Just look at Muiderslot in Holland. One case of pneumonia, that's all it took. Throw in a wet, cold autumn, poor nutrition, and lack of any genuine medications . . .
Not unique to castles. We saw this all over; I remember being at the front of an advance into Wolverhampton, and we were the first to reach the stadium; we had some hope for them in there - there had been tens of thousands across the various Liverpool-Manchester stadiums, but someone cracked open the padlocks on Molineux and the smell was like a punch in the gut.
Tuberculosis, would you believe it.
Article: And then there were fires like the ones at Braubach and Pierrefonds; hundreds trapped with nowhere to run, just waiting to be charred by the flames or asphyxiated by the smoke.
There were also accidental explosions, civilians who somehow found themselves in possession of bombs but had no idea how to handle or even store them.
Fire was a nearly constant blight on smaller survivor communities. If you don't have enough people to start working on restoring and defending power stations, you need fires in the winter to avoid freezing to death, and if you've locked yourself in a fortified location - like a castle, or a block of flats - you can end up burning yourselves to death. Swathes of London still haven't even been rebuilt. The blackened, gutted ruins of dozens of blocks of flats, all within sight of each other.
Article: At least that was a mistake based on ignorance. I can't even begin to forgive what happened at Chateau de Fougeres. They were running low on supplies, thought that they could dig a tunnel under their undead attackers. What did they think this was, The Great Escape? Did they have any professional surveyors with them? Did they even understand the basics of trigonometry? The bloody tunnel exit fell short by over half a kilometer, came up right in a nest of the damn things. Stupid wankers hadn't even thought to equip their tunnel with demolition charges.
They were terrified, you arsehole. Was it foolish? Yes. They'd somehow contrived to attract a swarm far larger than they could cope with, and were trying to find a way out with what they had. Obviously the tunnel was a disaster - they were hacking through close to solid rock! - but ultimately everyone in that castle was already dead. At least this gave them a chance.
There is something I find acutely offensive about some chinless royalist gloating about the people who died because they didn't have the good luck to be hiding with a regiment of the household fucking guard.
Article: Yes, there were cock-ups aplenty, but there were also some noteworthy triumphs. Many were subjected to only short-term sieges, the good fortune of being on the right side of the line. Some in Spain, Bavaria, or Scotland above the Antonine[2] only had to hold out for weeks, or even days. For some, like Kisimul, it was only a question of getting through one rather dodgy night.
Spain was a marvel. I know people have their complaints; they were always fairly surly with smugglers, and there's the perennial controversy about refugees in the Pyrenees, but it was Spanish built G36s that armed us for the big push. The advantages of there being an actually functional state in Europe cannot be overstated.
I have nothing so kind to say about Bavaria.
Kisimul is funny because you will never meet people less grateful for being "saved" by their national government than Scots from the Highlands and Outer Hebrides. A whole slew of people absolutely aware that the only reason they were in danger to begin with was that the government told refugees to flee there to be safe, and the only reason they survived was that after the previous three governmental retreats failed, relatively few people listened to them this time.
Kisimul was lucky not to be Beaumaris, left to fend for itself - hell, it was lucky not to be Lancaster Castle, devoured by the swarm the government led to their doors.
Article: But then there were the true tales of victory, like Chenonceau in France, a bizarre little Disneyesque castle built on a bridge over the Cher River. With both connections to land severed, and the right amount of strategic forethought, they managed to hold their position for years.
They had enough supplies for years?
Oh good lord, no. They simply waited for first snowfall, then raided the surrounding countryside. This was, I should imagine, standard procedure for almost anyone under siege, castle or not.
I always find it odd - people in sieges like this looked at snow and ice as a positive, which didn't ever properly fade. There was someone in my unit who'd holed up in a school for two years before being rescued, and they always laughed when it snowed, even though it meant miserably stumbling through slush, trying not to let your fingers freeze off.
Article: It's not surprising how many defenders chose to remain in their strongholds even with the opportunity to flee, be it Bouillon in Belgium or Spis in Slovakia or even back home like Beaumaris in Wales. Before the war, the place had been nothing but a museum piece, a hollow shell of roofless chambers and high concentric walls. The town council should be given the VC for their accomplishments, pooling resources, organizing citizens, restoring this ruin to its former glory. They had just a few months before the crisis engulfed their part of Britain.
Okay I can't let this slide - this just isn't true, really. Bouillon I will give a pass - even once they'd cleared Bouillon town, they still withdrew to the castle as and when they needed to defend against a swarm, but Spis? Spis had a company of retreating Slovakian infantry hole up in it with half the population of Spišské Podhradie for a week. It's a big ruin, but it's a ruin. Once they'd cleared the ghouls - the other half of the population - they moved back into town and used the Chapter House; it has a roof, for one.
As for Beaumaris; they were doing fine, as was the rest of northern Wales, until they were told with a moment's notice that several million englishmen would be coming to take up residence on Anglesey as a defensive position. They got their castle set up just in time for the rest of the population of Anglesey to be evicted and sent to Holy Island to "secure" Anglesey proper for the retreat.
Two companies of the Royal Welsh First Battalion held the Holyhead causeway for a week whilst the Dublin ferry lifted fifty thousand people off the Holy Island, and all the while Beaumaris sat behind their walls with two million ghouls screaming at the gate, and politely refused the British Government's offer to evacuate them to their next holdout, which they assured them would be secure this time.
So I suppose by such a metric they "refused to flee," yes.
Article: Even more dramatic is the story of Conwy, both a castle and medieval wall that protected the entire town. The inhabitants not only lived in safety and relative comfort during the stalemate years, their access to the sea allowed Conwy to become a springboard for our forces once we began to retake our country.
Fuck Conwy.
A tiny horde - maybe a couple of thousand - was thawing out around Conwy and they weren't looking like they were going to be able to hold out - they'd sent out foragers too early the autumn before, discovered the ghouls were less frozen than they expected, lost about half their fighting fit, and then had a bad winter - so command down in Cardiff scraped together a relief force and marched them on up.
This was before my time, but by my understanding, they'd scarcely dropped the last ghoul before some pearl clutching Tory was hoisting the Union Jack above the town and taking pot shots with what was no doubt his grandfather's grousing piece.
Someone might've forced the issue, but one of the cruisers from the navy's fallback position on the Isle of Man was lurking in the area, so instead they got to keep Conwy throughout the stalemate years.
It was quite useful to them in disposing of their undesirables at first - they didn't believe we would last, so whenever someone started to cause trouble, they'd be shipped down to Conwy and pushed out the gates at speartip. That accelerated once they broke the siege of Glasgow and swelled their population with a bunch of Glaswegians; a girl in my unit - the 1st Orphaned, odds and sods from areas outside of our political control - was from Clydeside.
They stopped doing that when we took Birmingham, treated Conwy as nothing more than a military outpost - they finally used it in '26 as a friendly launch point to crush the hardliner Red Guards who hadn't seen the writing on the wall.
Article: Have you ever read Camelot Mine?
[I shake my head.]
You must find yourself a copy. It's a cracking good novel, based on the author's own experiences as one of the defenders of Caerphilly. He began the crisis on the second floor of his flat in Ludlow, Wales. As his supplies ran out and the first snow fell, he decided to strike out in search of more permanent lodgings. He came upon the abandoned ruin, which had already been the sight of a halfhearted, and ultimately fruitless, defense.
Camelot Mine is a good book. I wouldn't read it if you want to know what "really" happened at Caerphilly - there's some intense flights of fancy regarding how many ghouls attacked, how much was done by this one dude and how long it had to hold out, but it's entertaining. I wouldn't want to speculate on the author's politics; he acquiesced to socialist rule easily enough, but he's also pretty happy now so who knows.
Article: He buried the bodies, smashed the frozen Zed Heads, and set about restoring the castle on his own. He worked tirelessly, in the most brutal winter on record. By May, Caerphilly was prepared for the summer siege, and by the following winter, it became a haven for several hundred other survivors.
[He shows me some of his sketches.]
A masterpiece, isn't it, second largest in the British Isles.
Not to downplay it, but they only had to hold out for a year and change; by the third autumn of the war, the clearing of South Wales was reaching the point where patrols from Cardiff would consistently draw away chunks of Caerphilly's ghoul "moat".
By the summer after, when I arrived in Bristol, Caerphilly had been cleared, and the band of clear space stretched across South Wales and along to Bath.
Caerphilly spent the rest of the war as an ammunition dump and fallback point for civilians in case of a ghoul incursion.
Article: What's the first?
[He hesitates.]
Windsor.
Windsor was your castle.
Well, not mine personally.
I mean, you were there.
Windsor Castle is genuinely offensive, and needs to be considered separately from various castle sieges.
Article: It was, from a defensive standpoint, as close as one could come to perfection. Before the war, it was the largest inhabited castle in Europe, almost thirteen acres. It had its own well for water, and enough storage space to house a decade's worth of rations. The fire of 1992 led to a state-of-the-art suppression system, and the subsequent terrorist threats upgraded security measures to rival any in the UK. Not even the general public knew what their tax dollars were paying for: bulletproof glass, reinforced walls, retractable bars, and steel shutters hidden so cleverly in windowsills and door frames.
Firstly - it was not. Windsor Castle is halfway into the town of Windsor, just across the river from Slough and barely a stone's throw from London, and has been an indefensible ceremonial palace for most of its life.
The reason Windsor Castle held out is that they weren't satisfied with all the shit they'd already spent on the "Royal Residence" - all the ludicrous crap he mentions they charged the public for to protect the royals - no, this wasn't enough. They deployed the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards entirely to Windsor Castle, and had the paras on standby through the entire war.
When you're staking a claim to be holding a propaganda piece this close to London, I suppose you don't want to risk it. God knows the footage of Buckingham Palace being overwhelmed didn't do them any favours from a propaganda perspective.
Article: But of all our achievements at Windsor, nothing can rival the siphoning of crude oil and natural gas from the deposit several kilometers beneath the castle's foundation. It had been discovered in the 1990s but never exploited for a variety of political and environmental reasons. You can believe we exploited it, though. Our contingent of royal engineers rigged a scaffolding up and over our wall, and extended it to the drilling site. It was quite an achievement, and you can see how it became the precursor to our fortified motorways.
I'm not sure there is anything quite as unforgivable as being the precursors of the Armoured Motorways, frankly. Such a moronic concept - elevating a motorway like those American highways, even though we lack even their extremely flimsy excuse for doing it.
Do you want to know how to create mass transit which will remain functionally immune to the ghouls, transport people in complete safety at great speed between cities? Build a railway. Even without armoured trains, you're essentially immune to individual ghouls, and once you've armoured them, you can run clean through a swarm, shooting them at leisure.
Like, this is one of the bare handful of things consistent across most of the world - trains are back, baby.
Obviously, miserably, our royalist friends are the exception. They built a proof of concept for fortified motorways - "Armoured Motorways" strictly speaking - from Dundee to Aberdeen - elevated and expanded parts of the old A90 - and then started one from Dundee to Inverness; they started this during the war and it still isn't finished.
It is a weird and somewhat pathetic attempt to ape the Americans on an issue where they just straightforwardly do not care.
Article: On a personal level, I was just grateful for the warm rooms, hot food, and, in a pinch…the Molotovs and flaming ditch. It's not the most efficient way to stop a Zed Head, I know, but as long as you've got them stuck and can keep them in the fire…and besides, what else could we do when the bullets ran out and we were left with nothing else but an odd lot of medieval hand weapons?
It is profoundly unfair that they sat in their castle with their guards and their supply runs and got to have generators and heat whilst so many other people froze to death.
They were still burning crude by the time we were clearing London. Choking black smoke pouring into the sky to the west, the whole time, a constant smoke signal of our compromise. My unit was kept away from it, but there are pictures of the defenders; men and women in their thirties and forties, their uniforms stained by the smoke, faces still grim as they tracked our movements through their scopes.
We so nearly had them. We were so close. We never should've gone for London.
Article: There were quite a bit of those about, in museums, personal collections…and not a decorative dud among them. These were real, tough and tested. They became part of British life again, ordinary citizens traipsing about with a mace or halberd or double-bladed battle-axe. I myself became rather adept with this claymore, although you wouldn't think of it to look at me.
This isn't quite unique to the royalists - arriving survivors would occasionally have a museum piece polearm or what have you - but it is increasingly a symbol of being upper class, a pretence of being from some ancient lineage of British nobility, and forget that the ancient lineages of British nobility hit the world wars like a brick fucking wall.
Men like David Allen Forbes play this ludicrous game where they are pretending to be the old landed gentry - what the French called the Sword Nobles - and we all just have to ignore that they aren't. They portray themselves as being the inheritors of ancient and storied traditions of the Laird in his castle, with his claymore and his ridiculous fucking pretensions, and nevermind that that's a ridiculous ideology, it isn't even true.
Article: [David hesitates before speaking. He is clearly uncomfortable. I hold out my hand.]
Thank you so much for taking the time…
There's…more.
If you're not comfortable…
No, please, it's quite all right.
He practised this in front of a mirror. This sort of "Oh, it hurts so much, I'm trying to hold it together as a noble British Gentleman" shit is so fake.
Noxious little turd.
Article: [Takes a breath.] She…she wouldn't leave, you see. She insisted, over the objections of Parliament, to remain at Windsor, as she put it, "for the duration." I thought maybe it was misguided nobility, or maybe fear-based paralysis. I tried to make her see reason, begged her almost on my knees.
I appreciate that he inadvertently lets slip just how much of an aristocratic creep this dude is, being as he was advisor to the queen.
The objections of Parliament, for what it's worth, were not especially lengthy or strenuous - they played it out as a pretty piece of propaganda, which helped the royal image after Prince Charles got bitten being evacuated from Clarence House and William and Harry both fled to the Isle of Man so fast they left skidmarks.
Article: Hadn't she done enough with the Balmoral Decree, turning all her estates into protected zones for any who could reach and defend them? Why not join her family in Ireland or the Isle of Man, or, at least, if she was insisting on remaining in Britain, supreme command HQ north above the Antonine.
The Balmoral Decree was an almost entirely retroactive decree, with the exception of Balmoral proper - every royal property south of the Royalist cordon was already either overrun by ghouls or occupied by survivors. Balmoral itself was only occupied by "survivors" very briefly.
She did nothing for anyone during the war.
Article: What did she say?
"The highest of distinctions is service to others." [He clears his throat, his upper lip quivers for a second.]
Do you know what got us through it? That second winter, when we'd looted the shops, eaten the crops we'd been able to harvest from the fields from that last pre-collapse year?
The weekly whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, jaunty as you like, flying directly overhead to land in Windsor Castle and ensure the evil old crone got her fucking foie gras. Every week. People died of pneumonia, too weak with hunger to fight it off. Whump-whump-whump. Babies starved when their mothers couldn't feed them. Whump-whump-whump. A half dozen of our older residents said they were going looking for food, and we found they'd hanged themselves from the rail bridge, maybe a quarter mile from camp. Didn't want to keep draining our resources. Whump-whump-whump.
Spite kept us going. Spite and the thought that if we lived, we could give an accounting of the nerve, the fucking arrogance, that was her decision to "stay behind" and draw resources from survivors who hadn't been given that choice, survivors who had to stay, who needed support.
So spare me the quivering of your upper fucking lip. She died at 92, in a warm bed surrounded by her family who had been flown in especially for the privilege, with doctors keeping her pumped full of opiates until the last. How many others got that privilege? How's that for service to others.
Article: Her father had said that; it was the reason he had refused to run to Canada during the Second World War, the reason her mother had spent the blitz visiting civilians huddled in the tube stations beneath London, the same reason, to this day, we remain a United Kingdom.
That isn't why we remain a United Kingdom. We remain a United Kingdom because when we controlled half of England and all of Wales, we trusted our fucking leaders when they told us you were giving us the honour of clearing London because you recognised you'd abdicated responsibility. We even trusted them when we had to start burning our dead in the streets because the graveyards were choked.
And when we were worn down and blunted by the horrors in and below what used to be the capital, our leaders said there had been enough dead heroes and we realised what was happening when they joined the fucking government.
That is why we remain a United Kingdom. Because when they saw where this would need to go, our commanders blinked, and we were too trusting to notice.
Don't fucking talk to me about concessions. None of them were worth shit.
Article: Their task, their mandate, is to personify all that is great in our national spirit. They must forever be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us. In a sense, it is they who are ruled by us, instead of the other way around, and they must sacrifice everything, everything, to shoulder the weight of this godlike burden.
It took three years after the war for King William V to be granted the power to propose laws to the House of Commons to vote on, over the protestations of the Workers' Party of Great Britain, traitors to the revolution though they are.
Article: Otherwise what's the flipping point? Just scrap the whole damn tradition, roll out the bloody guillotine, and be done with it altogether. They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.
This is their core ideological stance, more or less laid bare - the royal family defended our souls. We owe it all to their "godlike" selves, as we owe it to the castles, to the romans and their "Antonine Wall".
We have returned to the protective embrace of our ancestral strength under our divine monarchy, and thus are saved.
It is some acutely fascist shit. It should also be familiar, if you have read anything about how the Holy Russian Empire justifies itself. They're different though, in the eyes of the various allies of the UK, for all that America talks out of both sides of it's mouth about the HRE.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the women out of the Bratsk camps have started arriving, and… they really need the funds urgently.
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
AN: I didn't realise until I was reviewing this just how much Max Brooks clearly views Britain as a, like, theme park? Britain only exists insofar as you want to talk about castles and the royal family and swords oh my.
Also the dude dressing as a Georgian has such strong Rees Mogg energy.
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AKuz
Been Better
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you can feel her hatred
the whole thing is filled with resentment and anger, but here it tips over into seething contempt and smouldering hatred
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thanks! i tried quite hard to try to capture the real, like... deep rooted bitterness? that someone in this situation would feel.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
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As previously stated, the nice boys in the Navy didn't tend to ask questions as long as you flew the stars and stripes. I actually did a run of chopper parts back in the day; repair tools, spare electronics, engine parts, even a fully-functional tail rotor I got off a tip. Almost didn't bring that last one, but lucky for me, one of their birds got grounded by a ghoul a week before I came into port. Pureed itself trying to climb onto the rudder, so I heard.
I'm not one for the supernatural, but... some of the stories I've heard. Whatever's left inside their skulls, there's a cunning to it.
EDIT: Just saw your new post. I'd known a little about what happened to the republic, but... Christ. I don't even know what to say.
OOC: You've captured it exceptionally well.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
OOC: I find it extremely amusing what French castles he decided to mention in that thing. Ussé is among those of the Loire Valley, so it's not too surprising an American would have heard of it, but Fougères?! I'm sure he just saw the name on wikipedia, because it's a fucking ruin. Really, really not a place to hole up under siege by zombies. I can see people successfully using Chenonceau though.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
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OOC: And, like, even through the absolute fascist bullshit... none of it would fucking work? Like, I know republicanism is (shamefully) not all that popular in the UK, but I'm pretty sure even the reddest of gammons would be spitting fucking teeth at the idea Liz 2.0 got special treatment while his wife and children and neighbours all died pointlessly before his eyes.
It's not like Ukraine, where Zelenskyy's presence is actually a morale booster because he's a PR figurehead in the fight against other living human beings, and he spends a lot of his time travelling to solicit aid or talk to front-line troops; the Queen here spends the entire fucking war holed up in one castle doing fuck all, diagetically, but sucking up resources that should have been spent on the UK populace.
And they don't even imply that there was some sort of regular radio broadcast or TV show or anything! You'd think Brooks would at least pull on the whole Churchill myth if he was going for reactionary gammon aristowanking, but he doesn't even do that.
EDIT: Also lol at the idea of using like 90% of the castles in the UK as anything but a place to die cold. They're holier than Swiss cheese, for the most part, and it takes fucking years to pull one back to vaguely-upright standards.
It's not like Ukraine, where Zelenskyy's presence is actually a morale booster because he's a PR figurehead in the fight against other living human beings, and he spends a lot of his time travelling to solicit aid or talk to front-line troops; the Queen here spends the entire fucking war holed up in one castle doing fuck all, diagetically, but sucking up resources that should have been spent on the UK populace.
And they don't even imply that there was some sort of regular radio broadcast or TV show or anything! You'd think Brooks would at least pull on the whole Churchill myth if he was going for reactionary gammon aristowanking, but he doesn't even do that.
EDIT: Also lol at the idea of using like 90% of the castles in the UK as anything but a place to die cold. They're holier than Swiss cheese, for the most part, and it takes fucking years to pull one back to vaguely-upright standards.
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10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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Europe is when castle, it seems.
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In someways I'm glad by zsona probably died early because in 2013 I was still a unionist, monarchist soc dem who bought into that shit and would have absolutely been taken into the propaganda of "nobly" staying behind.
but I live in the scottish borders if i didn't die to the edinburgh swarm coming south or the newcastle swarm coming north then i would have died from the refugee press or died as part of the refugee press north into the highlands and islands. Dying early enough to not see yourself become a fascist foot soldier yay.
but I live in the scottish borders if i didn't die to the edinburgh swarm coming south or the newcastle swarm coming north then i would have died from the refugee press or died as part of the refugee press north into the highlands and islands. Dying early enough to not see yourself become a fascist foot soldier yay.
RoboRenee
Trans of gender
- Location
- FFXIV, probably
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- She/Her
God I had completely forgotten this interview when I was talking shit about the whole old-world monarchist vibe of this whole thing but damn did I call it lol
"But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls." Blech. Revanchist monarchist nonsense as a nice little side dish to the whole shitstravangaza of the American response.
"But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls." Blech. Revanchist monarchist nonsense as a nice little side dish to the whole shitstravangaza of the American response.
The military does crack down on this behavior, but it is a problem. Mostly when you get shitty leaders that put cronies in charge.
I hope they put those shit heads in more expendable units because it's hurts morale to work with people like that. That's if they didn't get offed by a mad soldier.
Most guys vent by getting hammered, smoking, and complaining about life. There's probably plenty of people willing to blow off steam by consenting to a one night stand. No need to force it.
I feel like brooks watched that Future Weapons show on the Discovery Channel and that that everything on there was neato.
Bite proof fabric sounds useful at least.
The new rifle not so much. They could just make M16A2's. 5.56 was made to perform best out of a longer barrel, so shooting one of those is like firing a laser beam. If they can't make polymer or picatinny rails they could substitute with wood furniture. Bit heavier, but it'd make the negligible recoil almost non existent.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
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- He/Him
OOC: This bit is also a lot like having an interview with a Frenchman where they explain that the whole reason they survived the war was because the wreath of onions they wore around their neck warded off zombies, especially when combined with the natural camouflage provided by their stripy shirt and beret. The killing power of their baguette, of course, should not be discounted.
And also France is an (spins roulette wheel) Empire again because sure, why not, Emperor Napoleon IV.
And also France is an (spins roulette wheel) Empire again because sure, why not, Emperor Napoleon IV.
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You know what? Fuck this guy.
I often feel like the reviewer is a bit harsh to some of these interviewers. I'd like to think that they're giving inaccurate information by mistake or are simply decent, traumatized people in a complex world.
But fuck this guy.
The reviewer is 100% right to rake him over the coals, ultrareactionary shitstain he is.
This guy sucks, and while he would like us to think he's some kind of aristocrat he's much more like one of Mosley's Blackshirts. Besides that, his "wavering upper lip" routine is transparently fake and it seems pretty obvious he was one of the people who welcomed the jackboots and crown of blood back in.
I can't speak for the British, but I will say that I held out at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the entire Zombie War, and somehow I haven't decided that J. Robert Oppenheimer kept me from being bitten. What's this guy's excuse?
I often feel like the reviewer is a bit harsh to some of these interviewers. I'd like to think that they're giving inaccurate information by mistake or are simply decent, traumatized people in a complex world.
But fuck this guy.
The reviewer is 100% right to rake him over the coals, ultrareactionary shitstain he is.
This guy sucks, and while he would like us to think he's some kind of aristocrat he's much more like one of Mosley's Blackshirts. Besides that, his "wavering upper lip" routine is transparently fake and it seems pretty obvious he was one of the people who welcomed the jackboots and crown of blood back in.
I can't speak for the British, but I will say that I held out at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the entire Zombie War, and somehow I haven't decided that J. Robert Oppenheimer kept me from being bitten. What's this guy's excuse?
Can confirm. As a Texican that this would happen. They probably burned Austin to the ground for being the center for "Cultural Marxists, Gay Marriage and Social Justice". It's funny and sad.