If you made Bug Bunny today they would call you a bisexual furry, because of woke.

Unalivemarnock, Scotland

Unalivemarnock, Scotland

Not so brave now Paul Atreides

He's been CAPTURED

One of the funnier bugs that was in EA for Spice Wars was that if you assassinated a faction you could sometimes randomly have your main base destroyed by them.

This was especially funny when someone posted about this bug with a screenshot of them playing House Harkonnens having got destroyed by a dead House Atreides faction, and someone noted that technically this did happen in the lore.

So eepy. 1865. Source.

Scottish people really hate the 23andme diaspora, and I'm guilty of this too. A lot of hatred comes from these people having a disconnect from modern Scottish culture, and making a parody out of what they think it is i.e. kilts, mixing up Gealic, Gaelic and Scots, weird worship of generic ancestory. All of it seems at odds with actual Scottish culture.

The make up of Modern Scottish culture is defined by two major events one good and one bad. The good is the spread of civic nationalism, the modern idea of Scottishness is mostly based on are you born here, or did you spend a long time here? Then you're Scottish. My mum spent a long enough time here to culturally integrate, but never lost her accent and she was accepted as Scottish. Anywhere else I would only be considered half Scottish but I have been told firmly by people that I would have otherwise expected to be anti immigrant that I am most definitely Scottish, whether they or I like it. It's simply a fact.

The second is the Highland Clearances, a genocide on highland Scots but lowland Scots which has left the central belt the cultural heart of Scotland, and nearly wiped out most of the cultural and historical traditions people in the diaspora associate with Scotland, the clans, the kilts, the celtic poems.

Many of those people who are claiming Scottishness through blood are probably descendents of people ethnicly cleansed off their lands. Is it fair to deny them their ancestoral identity, an identity stripped off their ancestors, because the idea of Scottishness itself has moved on into something far more active, and tied to the land of the country itself.

Is it fair? I don't really know. Can we dismiss what might be a branch of a culture cruelly excised from its home because it's current examples are annoying Americans? Is it fair?

The story itself is also a lot more complex since another part of the Scottish Diaspora aren't victims but perpetrators. Time was the idea of Scottishness wasn't tied to civility and an open culture but cruelty. "Cruel as Scots" used to be a popular turn of phrase, and one our ancestors earned in spades. Where ever the British had a plantation, from India, to Ireland, to the Americas and the Caribbean a Scotsman was happy to hold the whip. Even the Scottish culture hero Rabby Burns once accepted a role as an oversear in Jamaica, before one of his poems became the talk of the town in Edinburgh. If that burst of fame had never came, or even came two weeks too late the great ideal of Scottish working class liberalism, a man who celebrated the American revolution and wrote poems humanising the victims of Slavery wouldn't has missed his boat and instead have been out there defending Empire and keeping enslaved people in chains.

This part of the Scottish Diaspora would go on to largely run the Confederacy and even before that formed the base of that Southern American pseudo-aristocracy. There's a reason the Confederacy flew the cross of Saint Andrew when going into battle.

Maybe these annoying Americans aren't the victims of ethnic strife, but the perpetrators? Does that mean it's easier to dismiss them?

A further kink in the story is the on going conflict between Scottish and British identity. In modern times this is largely tied to loyalty to the UK or desire for an independent Scotland, but religion and ethnicity also comes into this to add their own unique flavours. Can people with no ties to the land, having never once set foot in it identify as Scottish? Can people born and raised here deny their Scottishness? Can we really seperate out British and Scottish identity into two seperate things cleanly? Scotland struggles to do this now, define what is Scottish and what is British.

Glasgow is definitely seen as the Scottish City, while Edinburgh is the British, some times referred to as an English city by people on the West Coast (not as a compliment) but if you were to look into the history of either of these cities you would be puzzled as to why. Glasgow was once the second largest city in the British Empire, the second city of empire, it's shipyards growing to accommodate the empire's needs, it's geography defined by the wealth flowing into merchant square. Edinburgh on the otherhand had been the seat of power for Scottish kings, the cultural heart of the lowlands, and Scotland as a whole.

Scotland is also the birth place of the Enlightenment. Sounds silly but largely due to a mix of education access provided by the Church of Scotland, and wealth and opportunities provided by the British Empire Scotland emerged as the first major place in the world to support a middle class. Class, culture and identity all being interlinked this further divorced the diaspora from Scotland, and helped create a second great wave of Scottish emigrates, ready to administer the empire, with at varying times around 2/3 of employees of both the British Raj and East India Company being made up of Scots.

This also created a well educated but low income class of Scots who suddenly had the chance and ability to find employment abroad, something that developed into a tradition kept up to this day, and largely why I exist. Maybe these 23andMe Scots aren't the result of ethnic cleansing, or the remnants of the evils of empire but simply people that left their homes to find work, who found new homes away from Scotland.

I don't really have a nice conclusion to this rant, culture isn't a dead thing drowned in formaldehyde that can be studied and examined in stillness. I don't really know, and these are all very big questions to be brought out because I saw a very annoying American tourist.

Finally finished Prey for the first time and I remember on previous attempts it all felt so overwhelming, from the first time I realised I could open a door using the foam crossbow to work a computer through a hole in the wall or getting around a locked door by using the gloo gun to climb places I shouldn't have been able to get to I immediately felt like I was constantly out of my depth but looking back on this run, now that it's finished and I've seen the credits, it feels just right in length, it never over stayed it's welcome but I defo feel like it helped me realise just how dumb I really am.

Hi,

I hope this email finds you without a deep darkness growing within your soul

It is funny how the latest Vic3 update added job satisfaction, but no easy way to enclose the commons so most economies completely stagnate cause most people would rather be a content peasant just toiling their little plot of land rather than a miserable factory worker.

I don't think about the Roman Empire everyday but I do think about how the game boy colour had the best ever single player card game ever, The Pokemon Trading Card Game, which had a sequel that only released in Japan and then nothing ever again in that genre since.

I just want to make annoying decks and play them against AIs who don't have feelings, not do a fortnight battle pass for a month to build a half okay meta deck to play against someone who pumped half their wallet into their deck to 2 turn kill me.

I wish I could recapture that feeling with a modern card collecting game but those days are dead, this is my Library of Alexandria.

Playing the Prey 2017 game after a long week at my engineering job and I finally understand those weird Germans that spend 45 hours a week driving a bus to come home to play bus sim 2020

It's funny that the new Deus Ex games made the main character this hyper masculine ideal, when immersive sims are all actually centred around being a wee goblin.

The joy of these games isn't performing some macho one liners and fighting the good fight against insurmountable odds, it's reading people's emails, finding out someone is an alcholic because they have too much wine hidden in their cupboards and giggling to yourself because you moved all the things in their kitchen one inch to the left, after stealing all their forks.