A Geek History of Time - Episode 05- Thatcherism and Warhammer 40,000 (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 4, 2019

This is a geek history of time. Where we connect, nerdery, to the real world. I'm Ed Blalock. I'm a 43 year old father and history teacher. And I have been playing role playing games since I was was nine years old started with AD&D first edition And I've been a geek longer than that. I was raised on not only Star Wars as I mentioned last episode But the Lord of the Rings one of my earliest literary memories of genre fiction is the I want to say the Dell Dell Ray of genre fiction is the, I want to say the Del Ray edition of the Lord of the Rings with what is referred to as the hippie cover that was actually owned by my very much not hippie

naval aviator father. How about you? I am Damien Harmony. I am a Latin teacher, formerly a history teacher. I am a father, I'm 40 years old. Single dad raising two geeks to decency and maturity as best I possibly can in that order as needs be. The journey is overrated. Oh indeed. I teach at the high school level. I teach Latin pretty much the entire time. And I've been a geek for longer than I knew that word was a good thing. So I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons. I grew up on after school cartoons. There are some. I don't even remember the names of, but they were really neat, including one, which I don't remember, but I had the toys and there were these little magnetic

guys that sat on top of these little magnetic things and there were vehicles without sized wheels. And it was a good one. I know the one you're talking about, and that was incredibly short-lived. You vary. And what I remember about the cartoon of that was that there was a character who nobody liked.

He was kind of like the lyric of the D&D cartoon, and he was making jokes about these cat people that they had met about how they lived in the catacombs and how it would be a catastrophe. Oh great. And that's that's where you get it from. That was not where I got it from. Oh okay. First grade we had a a a fill in the speech bubbles. Okay. And it was a bird talking to a hole in the ground and then a bird talking to a hole in the speech bubbles. Oh, okay. And it was a bird talking to a hole in the ground, and then a bird talking to a hole in the ground, and then a bird talking to a hole in the ground, and that the very last one, it was a worm popping up with a coat of armor on, like the plume and all that.

And I remember writing, bird come out and play, it's really nice, bird, it's really fun out here. Oh my goodness, and the bird saying this, and then telling the worm. Oh my goodness Get out here and fight for your people. It's like worm war one out here and the very next thing the worm Pop up and the worms responses. Where are they? I'll kill those Nazis N-O-T-S-E-Y-E-S That was first grade. Wow. Okay, so that's my geek cred. Holy moly

That was first grade. Wow. Okay. So that's my geek cred. Holy moly. Uh lately I've been reading a few books. Um, reading one again in preparation for another podcast that we're going to be doing, uh, called Ringside. Uh, it's a history of professional wrestling by Scott and Beakman. Um, it is, uh, right up there as far as I'm concerned with a few other books and I'll probably recommend them later. Uh, but it's right up there as far as I'm concerned with a few other books and I'll probably recommend them later but it's right up there with a few other books that taught me a lot about American culture and sectionalism. Okay. What are you reading? Well right now I'm reading an awful lot to prepare for teaching this year because my district has gone back to school and we're back at it. But outside of that I'm still working my way through honor and the dust about America's occupation of the Philippines.

Very well worth reading. By the time you're done reading it it will be the mash of the Philippine Conflict. Yes actually. Yeah, we're part of the book. The book will be longer than the actual the time I was reading books will be longer than the actual conflict. Dad life man. Yeah. Yeah. What games you play? I well not many right now. I am on hiatus at the moment from our fifth edition game. I'm also. We've been to the seat for you. Yeah I'm glad to know. Thank you. I'm still I'm also at the moment on hiatus from the first edition A-D&D game that I'm playing with different group of friends in which I'm playing a very mercenary chaotic good Elven Cavalier, which is very different from my usual kind of take on Captain America. Yeah, well, you know, in every various kind of permutation like a sick of.

America, yeah, well, you know, in in every various kind of permutation, and yeah, and I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming release of the newest, as I've mentioned, the newest Battle Tech box set, because that hits a lot of nostalgia buttons. Oh, absolutely. And I was thinking about buying my own and just kind of building a mad cat set, if you will. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. I, the only game that I'm playing, I mean,

I'm still playing our D&D game, we missed you. I'm still playing my game with my kids, which is fun. Fun. We'll probably play another one this weekend. Cool. But lately, I've been playing a handheld game, a portable game, and a phone game. OK. There's two that I normally play. But one that my kids are really into, that I'm playing a handheld game, a portable game, and maybe a phone game. Okay.

There's two that I normally play, but one that my kids are really into that I'm playing a lot lately, and I screen mirror it up to the TV now. That's so nice. And it is called, oh, I don't remember what it's called. It's Marvel Champions, I wanna say. That's so familiar.

Yeah, it's Marvel Champions, it's a fighting game, it's very basic fighting game, and I've started getting characters that are actually kind of fun to play. Okay, it's been a lot of fun Yeah, it makes those more fun. So well this This leads me to asking you Ed. Do you like apps? I do you like apps on your phone? I really do I have a lot of them there. Yeah, yeah Like actually use, right. Like a half a dozen. I have, I don't even know how many on there.

And you know what, I'm happy having bought the ones that I don't even use because I'm a collector like that and they look pretty on my phone screen. And if you have an app that you want somebody to shill, we will shill it for you. If it's a good app, I mean, you know, it is something that I would have to believe in or at least enjoy, but we'll shill that.

You know, if it's a passable app, I don't, I mean, we'll shill it better if we believe in it, but you know, if you're looking for somebody to, you know, give you out of this, wouldn't be screen time, but pod time, you know, we we'll give it a shot and if it's not absolute crap, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll database for Roman and Greek mythology. Oh, there you go. I would show the hell out of that. Oh, yeah. It would be wonderful.

Yeah, you know, if you want to develop a app that has to do with, you know, any kind of training having to do with sword fighting, historically European martial arts, you know, anything related to that, I will sell the daylights out of that. Yeah. Because we like that. Yeah. You know what else I like? Yeah.

I like food. And food is good. And if you're like one of those companies that sends people food, because we like that. Yeah, you know what else I like? Yeah, I like food. Food is good. And if you're like one of those companies that sends people food, I would show that. I could show the hell out of it. I like eating food. You know, y'all can't see me on here, but I'm a fat guy. I just want to point out, I am a target audience for you

if you are looking to sell any kind of food. People who know me will hear me, we're only sharing with, showing food, and they'll say, you know what, Eddie to that, Ed likes this food, that's gotta be pretty good stuff. There you go. So this would be the part where we have ads.

Yeah. Now that we're back from the ads, yes, last week you were telling me about essentially the welfare state and it's lead up to the 1970s into the late 70s. Yes, very specifically. And I think we should probably pick up from there because you were going to tie it all together,

you even met so many of yours. Yes, a little bit. And I think we should probably just pick it up from there. Let's do that. Alright, well take it away. Alright. I think we should probably just pick it up from there. So let's do that. All right, well, take it away. All right, okay. So when last we left, our intrepid welfare state, so there had been a spike in inflation,

and the agreement that unions had made with the labor party to hold off on wage increases over 5%, the labor party said, you know what, we need to extend that agreement. And the Labor Party said, really, what might? I don't think so. And in the winter of 78, 79,

there were massive strikes all across the British economy. It is referred to nowadays, historically, as the winter of discontent in one of those times when. So British. Yes, well, when historians, historians when historians and especially British historians want to get cute and and what happened was you know truck drivers struck disrupting

supply lines and actually causing fuel shortages and gravediggers food shortages yeah well yeah well food prices went up. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. Grave Diggers in Liverpool and Tameside Stork, who were government employees, they were public sector employees. Grave Diggers went on strike. Wow.

NHS support staff. So hospital janitors, hospital, you know, physical, physical plants, which is a type of strike here in Sacramento, about that. My ex-wife's hospital. They all went on general strike to support the support staff. Yeah, and yeah, NHS support staff struck and picketed hospitals. And so, so this these labor disruptions like kneecapped the whole

economy. I would imagine like completely kneecapped it. Now did they know that that was going to happen when they struck? They, you know, I don't know. I wasn't, you know, being a new dad and having all that going on, going back to school and all that. I can make all kinds of excuses, but the research that I was able to do, I wasn't really able to dig into the mindset of the union leaders before they did this. What I was able to find out was, so the government had been saying we need to keep raises below

5%. Some of the raises that private companies actually wound up giving to their unionized workers in the face of the government saying, if you give higher wages, we're going to sanction you. Okay. So the government was strong-arming employers not to do this. Like, British Ford, Ford in the UK, their workers went on a strike and they got something like a 16% raise. All right, just as you said.

So, I mean, we're talking about big numbers. As teachers, you look at that and like wait wait wait wait wait time out How much yeah, we got it we got it like pick up signs and and start making like you know what we want a March man You get like four yeah like like four percent three percent is where we got a Distribute to get the two and a half percent they agreed to before. Before. Yeah, no, no. You know, I got to start, you know, going around my campus, because by the way, both of us are union reps if you hadn't figured that out. I got to start going around my campus wearing orange, which is our unit,

your unit color. I got to go around campus wearing orange and, you know, acting like a partisan whip in Congress to get people to be like, okay, look, we're showing up contract time, we're leaving contract time, don't be in here early, don't be in here late, or you're a fucking scab. I gotta start talking that way. Wow.

When we're looking for our district, yeah, to stick to what they promised us earlier. And so like a 16% increase is amazing. Yeah, well, keep know, keep in mind that just a few years before inflation had been up in the 17, 18%. So, really, yeah, these wages were, these sound like huge raises,

but in some cases, they were to catch up with inflation that had been going on previously. Now, I want to delve into language just for a bit there because again, as a good union boy, when people hear about a 16% wage increase, they freak out. When they hear about a 16% salary adjustment, they don't.

Salary adjustments are further rich, and the numbers get so big that you can't tell. Wage increase, you think, oh my God, my neighbor can suddenly make, you know, their mortgage. But, but at the same time, like when you hear a 16% raise, you're like, oh my goodness, that's almost a fifth of their income increase. Yeah. But what you don't think about is that increase in inflation. Yeah. We, my union just got essentially over the course of a two or three year deal,

about a 10.5% increase. Yeah. But what, and a lot of people are like, oh my God, that's enormous. And I'm sitting there thinking, well, it's not. You know when you take into account all of the, the fact that we had economic facts. The last time we had one was a 0.75% increase

for one year only bonus over 12 years ago. Jiminy cricket. So, you know, but people don't remember how long you've been through. Yeah, well, you know, nobody's seen how full your belly is now. Yeah, nobody has that kind of political memory. Yeah, so, yeah, so, but, but, so there were these, the strikes all across the economy and it caused a lot of suffering for everybody. Oh, I mean, everybody wound up hurting. economy and it caused a lot of suffering for everybody.

I mean, everybody wound up hurting. And the UK's economy, again, got kneecaps as a result of this. And now we see thaturism because part of the political calculations that Callahan had made was he had actually held off on holding a general election. There had been one scheduled for, I wanna say it was 78. Okay, and you can do this in a part of the country.

Yeah, you can do this in a part of the country. You can do this in a part of the country. You can figure when you're gonna, you can call for election to a certain time, you can kind of, there's a limit on how far you can put them off, but you can put them off a little bit. And Callahan was of the labor party. Callahan was of the labor party.

And he had said, okay, look, we're gonna extend this agreement. We're gonna try to extend this agreement. And then when the economy has stabilized further, and this inflation spike is gone, then we're gonna hold elections, and that way we'll be able to hold on to our majority. And then the winner of discontent happened. Oh bad timing for him.

Yeah. And so in 79, the general election in 79 led to the conservative party winning. I don't know if a landslide is the right way to describe it, but they won a significant majority in parliament because people were pissed off. And not only did they do that, but Fatcher then came in and we spent the whole last episode talking about the post-war consensus. And it had been this tacit agreement between the two parties that the welfare state is what we're going to do and we're going to have this nationalization of these sectors of the economy and we're going to have strong unions and we're going to do all this stuff and thatcher showed up and said, uh, no, no fuck that.

Thatcherism repudiated the consensus almost completely about the only thing in the welfare state that thatcherism looked at and went, yeah, okay, we can hold on to that was interestingly the National Health Service. She said to the British people, the NHS is safe in our hands. Otherwise, no, no, we're cutting way back on government spending. We're not Kinsey and Zanymore. We're not doing any of that crap. We're privatizing everything we can get away with.

Privateizing. Yes. British steel. Oh, wow. Had been nationalized in 40. I don't remember what. And it had been, it had been privatized and then re-nationalized. And it was one of the things that thatchers started going after to reprivatize.

Didn't wind up happening, it is still nationalized. But that was one of our targets. So simultaneously. So first off, it was this overt, okay, look, this whole welfare state thing has caused stagnation or a common-mage caused, all these, you know, pointed out all the stuff that was wrong with it. And simultaneously, it's very interesting

that in our last episode, you had talked about make Britain great again. Yes. Simultaneously thatcherism was very strongly nationalistic in a way that Britain's had not seen in a mainstream kind of way in over-regeneration. This makes me tired. Yeah, this makes me tired. I so... What of my earliest impressions?

I got to share this. One of my earliest impressions of Margaret Thatcher, right as a six-year-old, is remembering seeing a picture of her as this immaculately-coffed hair, immaculate suit, pants suit, standing up in the commander's cupola of, I want to say, a challenger-main battle tank. All the flag waving and all the stuff that we mostly associate with us here on our side I want to say a challenger main battle tank. Okay. Okay. And all the flag waving and all the stuff that we mostly associate with us here on our side of the pond, which like to us is baseline American nationalism, America, yeah, which like Europeans look at us and like even when we're not in a phase of hyper nationalism,

Europeans are like uncomfortable with us having our flag everywhere all the time. Because every time European flags are everywhere, it's because they were fighting over something. Yes. And so our constant kind of Ura nationalism, like that's just kind of our culture. Yeah. Even when we're not in a rightist phase of our political cycle, you know,

is something that they're uncomfortable with. And this was Britain being roughly at baseline American ura flag waving and you know you see this combined with the assault on the welfare state and a concerted effort to break unions specifically in 84 and 85 there was a coal miners strike coal miners were a again It was a nationalized industry right and the coal miners went on strike and Government made a concerted effort to break the strike and they succeeded wow the the power and from that point on

That's your time that that was the point at which unions in Great Britain saw there the beginning of their decline in political cachet power etc. because the government was saying look whatever we got to do to break you we're gonna break you and we're gonna sell the story to the people that makes us look like the good guys you look like greedy you know the beans you know. And so, so you've got these. Which by the way, let me just back you up a little bit. This side of the pond, we had the FAA strike. And Reagan broke that strike.

And so you, this is not happening in a vacuum. This movement toward conservatism in the governments is a world wide or a Western, certainly a Western democracy's response to the economic shocks and the uncertainty. And honestly, it's in some ways us doing to ourselves what the US had done to South America. Like you see a lot of triobaloons going up in South America,

the nationalization of the copper industry, then goes in Chile, then leads to Pinotje. Yeah. And then you see it, I mean, you see it literally ABC, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and all supported by the American government, to the point where Kissinger even has a telegram where he says, I don't see why the government of Chile

should go communist because that was the big buzz word anytime anybody naturalized them. They should go communist just because the people elected those leaders. Which is quite something. Yeah, there's there's there's. But so you see that happening in the 70s. Yeah.

And then early 70s. Yeah. there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's

there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's there, there's a sultan welfare state, and at the same time, fiaturism was also deeply socially conservative. It went to this very Victorian kind of morality, and it denigrated, one of one of her ministers, I don't have it in front of me in my notes, specifically talked about denigrating a permissive society that had allowed all of these that had created, you know They had a high crime rate they had a weak economy and it was this permissive society where you know art isn't really art And being filthy as seen as the same as being clean. I mean these these are this is paraphrasing right statement He made in 1984

Which of course is you know the height of VHS Culture cheap poor movies being made distributed direct video that kind of thing in the UK The a lot of those really really gory violent stupid bad. Let's just say yeah like low quality, you know films we're labeled as video nasties and There there was a scare over the social effects of these, you know, terrifying videos that like, you know, you go, your kid can just go into the store and rent and put in the VCR after you've gone to bed and God knows what it's doing to their brain. We've got to protect little Tommy and they had a scare and the government actually enacted laws

restricting the sale rental, you know, manufacturer distribution of this particular category of film. So that's censorship. And then the... This was in 1984. Just pointing out 1984. Yeah, well, yeah. Any time it happens that year, we got to point that out. Or, well, was no dummy.

And then the conservative government now that they're in power, prior to becoming prime minister, this is an interesting note. Thatcher had been generally moderate in terms of, particularly in terms of rights for gaze, homo-saturns. She had voted in favor of eliminating- I'm not asking about this. She had been in favor of eliminating legislation that had made Sodomy illegal and these kinds of things.

Once she comes into power and the conservatives are running things and she is now the head of this movement that includes people who are socially even more conservative than she is, suddenly they pass what's called section 28 which puts more restrictions back on homosexuality, people who are homosexual having particular government positions, you know, define homosexuality as an illness, these questions, these kinds of issues come to mind about this.

Yeah, in the NHS. It's their health system. AIDS is starting to show up. Yes. I have not been able to do the research to do a good answer about what their response was. Okay. My gut feeling is that if you research it, what you're going to find out is it's very similar to Reagan's response, which is it's a bunch of gay men having this disease.

Gay cancer. Gay cancer. Yeah. There was even a reporter who was asking Reagan's press secretary about, are you going to do anything about this? And the response from the guy was, why are you so concerned there, Bill? And everybody started laughing at this reporter asking about people dying. Yeah. And in cinema because obviously you must be gay. Right. And that was their way of dealing with it

Yeah until rock Hudson shows up with AIDS and then you know, I'm then all of a sudden Yeah, oh yeah, but I you know Diane Feinstein the Former air of San Francisco. Yeah cracked down and and actually stopped a Thing in San Francisco, a bill that, if I recall, would have enabled civil partnerships, domestic partnerships to get benefits if you were a city worker.

And think about how many people would have gotten treatment for AIDS. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's it's so yeah, it's it's gross horrible. So also yeah, going again with this with a social conservative kind of kind of trend that I'm talking about, that your gave a speech at a Presbyterian Cathedral. I don't have the date written down but it's referred to as the Sermon on the mound Where she was she was expounding on basically the tenets of thaturism and since it was in a religious setting she used bits from Scripture and she quoted St. Paul I've heard of him. Yeah, and and there is a passage in St. Paul where St. Paul says,

if a man does not work, he shall not eat. Just like you. And I just want to interject as the believer in the pair of us and as a Catholic particularly, my emotional relationship to Paul is fraught to begin with. It's complicated. Because on the one hand, he's the guy who said, you don't have to be Jewish to be a follower of Christ.

So I kind of owe him that. On the other hand, he said a lot of things that you got to be really careful about the context you use when you're trying to talk about them in the context of Christianity. And that's your quoted Paul out of context, which is the thing politicians always do when they want to make a point. Bible means what they think. Yeah, the Bible means whatever they need it to think, or whatever they needed to say. And, and so, you know, there is this,

you know, very, very specific stripe of very strict, I'm going to call it Calvinist, because that's my take on it, morality involved. And so overall, with all of these parts taken into account, this was a dramatic whiplash to the right. This wasn't just a, you know, okay, well, the conservatives during power. This was a very sudden shocking march, you know, away from what everybody had understood. And, you know, we got the social uptightness, nationalist, militarist sentiment, efforts to weaken unions, and this all starts with this sharp political turn. and now we got to talk about the guys back at Games Workshop. Because, you know, they had started out making these little metal

miniatures under the Citadel imprint, and they'd been, you know, making elves, Norris stuff, and sculptors being, like I said before, creative types, they played around, and they just kind of did these one-off little space elves and space orks and all the stuff. So in 83 they created their own tabletop war game to use citadel miniatures with and it was it was a fantasy game where hammer fantasy battle created in 1983 and it was it was literally Hey look what are the models you've got in your cabinet and you don't want to play a Dungeons Dragon's game You just want to throw these models against your friends models and you know throw fireballs and have a fight to kind of a return Return very much. Yeah very much a return from role-playing to war-war gaming. And Warhammer Fantasy Battle was a big enough success. That in 87, they went to one of their employees,

one of their writers, guy named Rick Priestley, and they said, so all those little one-off, little space elves and space orcs and space marines, guys that we, do we created, those are pretty cool. People like those, create a science fiction version of this game for us. And so in 1987, Rick Priestley, it were in 86, Rick Priestley sat down and wrote, and then in 87, published Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. And it was like nothing else that was out there on the

market at the time, especially here in the States. When I've made it to the States, this is kind of what I want to get into talking about, about this is, at this time in the United States, by the time it got over here, we had Battle Tech, which it was a tabletop game that involved giant robots fighting with each other,

and I'm gonna talk about it more detail in other time. And it was a science fiction tabletop war game. Okay But it it was it was much more traditionally science fiction in in that it had this it took place in a technological dark age many a couple of thousand years in the future but it was still kind of recognizable in the future, but it was still kind of recognizable. And the tech elements of our society for that. Yes, and the technology that was presented

still looked sharp and high tech. It wasn't as abstract. Well, I don't know if abstract is the right word. What I'm trying to say is it was more traditional American zoomi sci-fi. Okay. You know, ray guns and you know, that kind of stuff.

Warhammer 40,000, if you look at the cover of the book, I have a first edition printing of it right here. Man, describe it as someone who's never played the game. Yeah, please. So what I'm looking at here is a title at the top, two different fonts that would appear. And now I'm looking at the top, two different fonts it would appear. And now I'm looking at the image and a lot of the colors are very similar.

It's a lot of blue, a lot of blues and yellows. I'm a big fan of colors. You got blue, yellow, and you got red. So you got your primaries there. That would make me believe that we're looking at good guys because primary colors is me. As much as anybody in Warhammer 40,000 is a good guy, we'll get into that. Yes

Okay, but there's also blood being shed There's actually somebody with his neck being sprayed open There's a guy with a bandage that's leaking. There's another guy and you have human heads All with looks of disconstration at the very best. Yeah, some of looks anger frustration pain There are also flags Yes, banners. Yeah, there are also flags. Uh, spanners. Yeah, there's a banner of a fist, a red mailed fist. Yes, they are the crimson fists chapter of the Imperial Space Marine.

Which would make sense because all of their hands, not a look, have read. Uh, even the guy who's being split open, his hand is bandaged and bloody red. They all have guns, uh, huge guns with large men, heavy looking guns. Yeah, and they're all wearing, wow, it kind of, their helmets remind me of a little bit of the cartoon, the wizards. Yes, actually. You know, it has that kind of glass face. I hadn't ever actually thought of that previously. That's a very good comparison. And so a huge shoulder polderance, lots of hair oldry, and it looks like this fellow in the center is holding up as a club, the head of an orc, which has been disembodied. Yeah.

And yeah, that's what I'm seeing here. Yeah. So it's a good summary. It's carnage. It's fucking carnage. And it goes over to the other side. And there's a waste land on the other side with people who are dead. So it's bleak as hell.

And in red words, it says, the first thing you catch in my eyes, there is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness. There is only war. Wow. Yep. Yeah. That's not optimistic. That's not. No. No. No. It's not doctor. Thank you. That's not. That's not for me. Yeah. It is. And it's in it's in the same generation as me for Vendetta. And very

importantly, it's in the same generation of media as judge dread. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Like the same design of media as Judge Dredd. Oh, okay. Oh yeah, like the same design. Now I never watched Judge Dredd. Okay, well, okay, I'm talking about the comic, the original comic book, 2008- Okay. In which Judge Dredd was created. It was creative.

And so what you are looking at here are, as I said, the Crimson Fists chapter of the Imperial Space Marines and their story is described in the scenario for the game that came in the original book and they are the last survivors of their Legion which was destroyed by a freak accident that may not have been an accident somebody may have been out to get them it might have been a conspiracy. And they are having to fight their way through an orcish horde, space orcish horde, orcish spelled with a K, very important. Okay.

To try to get to reinforcement and support. And they are the Ragtag survivors, the last remaining carriers of the Legion's genetic heritage. And it's all in this because they're genetically modified super soldiers. Oh, okay. So, you need to understand that. Yeah. And so they're all in power, no, and what the art work on this in a broad sense, if you look at this and you look at like a Judas Priest album cover. Yeah. It's the same kind of hyperviolence, the same kind of...

This is Revelation. Yeah, that's what it says. Yes, the book of Revelation. Yeah, it is it is Mugito. And so the thing is, priestly wrote this, this, and created, you know, worked with the artists to create this very specific, very gothic, very dark and simultaneously kind of eldritch space fantasy grim kind of aesthetic for the whole universe, for the whole game. And I want to read the frontus piece to it because you know you read what has become the

motto. There is no time for peace. There is only war. But I want to read this. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and the most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe you can live today if you dare for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science, and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding. For there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place. And whatever happens, you will not be missed. So there's a couple of reactions I've got going on over there.

So number one, it's very much blood imagery that I remember reading in Hitler's stuff. Okay. Yeah. There's that going on. But also knowing the history. Yeah. This is something that's written to be accessed by multiples. Yeah. So it's done by creatives. Creatives tend to be on the left. Yeah.

Because the last creatives that were on the right were futurists and they all died in World War I. Yeah. gave birth to fascism. But it's written in such a way that I could absolutely see the gritty unionist who feels like they're under attack, finding sympathy with this and escaping with this yep and in some ways playing out the trauma that's being done to them Okay, I could also see

the Racists yeah, and nationalists who feel like they're the ones that are under attack And so this is playing to both yeah, and especially since there's no there's no morality There's no good guy. Yeah, it's all blurred. It's all grit Everybody could see themselves in this role Yeah, well, yes, you're right now What's important to point out here is if you go into the

supporting material into stuff that got published in White Dwarf to support the game if you get into materials that came out afterward. What you very quickly figure out is, priestly, is simultaneously doing this seriously and doing this as a parody. This is so bleak and so dark that it's like, no, seriously, this guy, this is the worst kind

of gallows humor imaginable. This is completely over the top. Because remember, this is also the time when we've got post-apocalypse fiction and movies of, you know, after the bomb and all this kind of stuff. Sure. And those are all dark and depressing and horrible. And part of what Priestley did was he said, well, okay, you know what, let's take that and crank that up to 11.

You know, and take the piss out of it. You know, because it is so dark and so grim that it's a joke. There is a very strong element of parody in this at the same time and my reaction to it is holy cow man this is this is not like anything I've seen before and then you're a little bit further you're like oh oh oh okay I get it oh man okay wow these these brits have a bleak sense of humor like you know it so it's mind-blowing it's it's weird it's weird like it's, you know, sci-fi, you know,

gleaming shiny metal and plastic stuff. I mean, there's ash and, like, grime. And, you know, Star Wars was a used future. This isn't just a used future. This is, like, no, this suit of, this suit of power and armor has been worn by five different guys over the last 200 years. You know, and the oil stains are a sacred part of its character and you're not allowed to wash them off.

Oh wow. Kind of grimy. You know, so this is a technological dark age that is like a dark age's mentality. It's not just, you know, we've forgotten how to do these things. It's no, we have the mentality of gothic barbarians who are trying to maintain Roman infrastructure. Wow. You know, we do this this way not because we understand this is how it works But this is how we got taught to do it and it's a religious ritual. Sure, okay? And and so the game is simultaneously

And so the game is simultaneously really big and the universe is really immense and at the same time it's really dinky. Yeah, because it's really small. You're fighting company versus company battles. Or at this level it was squad versus squad or maybe platoon versus platoon. And the Imperium, the setting in which all of this takes place, is this kind of dark parody echo of what people heard about the British Empire. The Imperium of Man is so vast that entire sub-sectors of multiple star systems, which will have populations in the trillions get lost bureaucratically for a century at a time. Until some bureaucrat goes, hey wait a minute, we haven't gotten

their tithe, which by the way isn't paid in money, it's paid in soldiers to the imperial army. We haven't received that in a century. Very British. Yeah, we haven't received that in two centuries. So now we're going to send an exploratory fleet to go see what's going on and they might find out that, well, you know, we've been isolated by a warp storm for this period of time. Right. And, you know, we're just waiting until we can get out. In which case, in quiz, we'll have to talk to them about why didn't you work harder? Or they might find out that the planet- Well, if you might work hard, you don't eat.

Well, yeah, yes, thank you, St. Paul. And so, or they might get there and find out that, you know, the whole planet has been eaten by space vampires. Sure. You know, or overrun by spaceworks. I want to point out, spaceworks are football hooligans, all of the literature, all of the stuff that you read about space works. It's written in a phonetic cockney hooligan accent.

Okay. Orcs soldiers are boys, B-O-Y-Z. Uh-huh. Uh, these, these, these, these, and, you know, like me, what are B-O-Y-Z? Boys, it's just like the term, like the term that gets used to, to, buy it by one lad to talk about his buddies in Football club or what have you still who again. Yeah, they're there. Yeah, and

The the primary combat weapon like close combat weapon that gets used by just about everybody is literally a Chain sword with a or a chain saw with a sword grip It's a chain sword that is like like, so this is just how over the top this is. Okay. Just everything is dialed up to 11. The emperor ruling over humanity from Holy Terra is literally a corpse. Who, who, he is a psychic battery kept alive by the sacrifice of a thousand psychics a day who get fed into the machinery that keeps him maybe sort of alive but nobody's spoken to him in 10,000 years and so we don't really know how dead he is and how alive he is and what's going on there?

Soldiers, soldiers in this setting get like directly recruited from gangs in these impossibly overcrowded hive cities on planets and just like a whole gang just gets recruited on mass and all the 99th whatever from somewhere. Rewind back just a second to British culture and society at the time. So they had made a million housing units in the 50s and missed their target. Which means there is an increasing demand for this thing. Which means that you've got a lot of, and by the way, their empire is renting. So I means that you've got a lot of, and by the way, their

empire is rending, so I would imagine you've got migration of the upper classes from those places. Somewhat, there was already a lot of stratification in where folks lived, so that like, you know, what we have here in the United States White Flight, you know, out of urban areas into the suburbs, is not as much of a thing in Britain. What they had more of was an influx of immigrants from the West Indies. And I'm trying, Windrush was what it was referred to. The Windrush Act had allowed a bunch of subjects,

Imperial citizens from the West Indies to then come into England. It was actually during the war for factory labor. So, industry is, so lots of people living in small places, so this idea of crowding and living right on top of each other, So very London specific or even very very man, man, Cunion, very, very, you know, but but the idea of the the inner city, you know, sprawl where, you know, everybody is living cheek to jowl with each other, then taken, then taken, like everything else in this setting up to 11. Right. And now the Imperium that rules over all of these people is overtly religio-fascist. And you had that you're giving her speech in the Presbyterian Church, so Ed's pointing

at me several times, smiles on his face. Yes. So we have this Imperium that they've that they've created as they're as their main setting in the game that is like I said it's over at Lee Religio fascist and it's in response to this Whiplash this this I mean to everybody in Great Britain. I mean even even I'm gonna say even folks who voted for that shirt. Sure. But especially to anybody who was even marginally left of center, all of a sudden you'd seen you know 40 years of consensus between the right and left in Britain, you know, the great

consensus about okay, these are the things that we're all going to agree we're not gonna mess with, that we're all talking about. And it's just about how we get there. Yeah, it's just about what, you know and how we're going to do and all that, and how much are we going to centrally control things, how much are we going to privatize things. And all of a sudden, thatcher just comes in and says, yes, well, we're going to fuck all that off now. And we're in charge.

And this is the way we're going to run things. Real quick, let me interrupt. Is that because she's part of a group ideologically that seek power for its own sake, palpatine-esque, or is there a decided shift in conservatism? It's a decided shift in conservatism. What precipitated that though? That's a meaningful question. I think... Different role playing game though.

Yeah, well yeah, but I've got a different system going on. But I think my own theory about it is that it was the height of the Cold War, this is, you know, early 80s. And this was the point at which the, all of the militarism that had been happening on both sides of the Cold War, I mean, had reached this crescendo. And while you and I don't remember, you know, duck and cover drills, like our parents do,

we know for earthquakes. We don't know for a red, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. Uh-huh. We were coming up in this state, and this was a period of time where I think, you know, this is the time period where threads get made, this is the time period where the day after gets made. And the conversation about the Cold War had changed into one where it was just, it was this looming elephant behind everything. And I think there

might have been a certain kind of mental reaction within conservatism. And this is just, this is all me, spitball. Sure, sure. But I think, I think there may have been, it may have reached a point where it was, you know what, we need to, we need, we need to kind of poke the bear. We need to not have this, you know, have you ever seen the movie, The President's Analyst? No. The 19-Six, oh it's a great movie. Okay. But one of the things that winds up happening is basically the President's psychiatrist

winds up, you know, getting kidnapped by Soviet agents. And it's a cape, it's a spy-caper comedy movie and and one of the things that I remember from it really stuck stuck with me was the the Soviet agent who's basically trying to turn the president's analyst into an asset is saying well you know look at it this way you know with every passing year your side drifts more to being like ours and our side drifts more to being like yours so by helping us all you're doing is just helping us achieve a happy middle and you know, we'll have peace.

Wow, that's like an inversion of the argument behind Neil Gaiman's Good Omen's. Yeah. Where they're like, oh, to keep the evil over here and to keep the good over here, can you take care of this possession while I'm out of town? Yeah, yeah, it's that. Precisely, yeah, yeah.

Um, and do you think there's a level also of this, the terror that was the Cold War was largely seen as a disaster, a scary goddamn disaster in the 40s and 50s. Yeah. One that here to four had been unprecedented, but by the 80s, it is baked into the culture. And so it's almost like how...

Oh, background noise. Yeah, and it becomes just part of the scenery. It's almost like how pencils used to be a technology and now we don't see them as such. Yeah. So do you think that's also... So like the edge kind of came off of the disaster and it's just like, oh, this is just the thing.

This is the way it is. We just want to win now. Yeah, that could be a factor as well. But I think there was a knee jerk response or reaction by conservatives reactionaries, because it was the hard-er-line conservative types that you looked at, the welfare state who looked at all of the stuff that had been part of the consensus

in Britain and that let's face it with Medicare, with social programs here in the United States, much more slowly Mm-hmm. Our system was gradually, you know, a glacial speed kind of moving in the same direction They were both drifting, you know in this in this in this toward what Bernie would call democratic socialism Uh-huh, and I think like conservatives have done throughout history there were you know elements within conservatism that said, no, not one step further, and we've got to tear this down and back it up because we're losing our ideological or political purity, any drift toward further socialism is drift toward...

It's too far to go. It's too far to go. Okay. And I certainly think there were people within FATURES government who were motivated by desire to gain and hold onto power. I'm sure that there were business interests in Britain that were looking at privatization, salivating,

and it was like we're just gonna make so much money hand over a fist. You know, I mean, there's always those elements, but I really, the sense that I get, and part of this is probably because I grew up at a Reaganite household, but the sense that I genuinely get, even now looking back, is that fatcher and the fatcherites

were genuinely looking at British identity, which to their credit was a lot less racist than what the right is talking about British identity now to this. Yes. I mean, still, they're baked in racist and periodless assumptions, but it wasn't, you know, England first, you know, like it is now. Okay. It's not the same kind of overt kind of, you know, if you're a wind-wren country. Like, it's not as angry now.

Yeah, yeah. Like, now it's much as angry. Yeah, like now it's much angry. It's much angry and it's much more overtly if you are not a white Anglo-Saxon or Norman right, you know, English person then, you know, we want to kick you out. I'm just I'm just thinking about like the the people from the West Indies and people from Pakistan and India who lived there would probably disagree with us on how racist it was back then. Oh yeah, no, I'm sure they probably would, but I'm talking about the political movement

behind that who is in itself. The culture certainly was, for sure, you know, bad in that way, probably even more than it is today, with the best. But it just now it's angry or? Now it's angry or now it's obvious on TV and all actually sure but I think I think thatcher and and her true believers I think they genuinely thought themselves colorblind and and their idea of a British identity was you know do you identify as a Britain and if you identify as a Britain then these are the things that we wanna do to protect that identity.

And it's a reactionary that we need to set the clock back, but it's not reactionary to the extent that we have reactionary movements going on right now. Right, all of them are setting the clock back too, but it's like, yeah, but, yeah. And it's identity-based now, under that, or it becomes back to identity based instead of Social cohesion based. Yes, and it might be because it's identity based because social cohesion used to be based on

A British identity only like as an overlay. So yeah, like they're like well, we like that part Yeah, the rest of this you know, but we like that part, but, the rest of this, but we like that part. So, okay, I can see that. Like, yeah. Yeah, and I genuinely, I mean, I genuinely think, I mean, in review of what she said, and in review of the context in which she said what she did, I genuinely think, I mean, I like, I still think about Reagan.

I genuinely think we can argue about how wrong Reagan was about any number of things. But what I miss about Reagan and the first bush was that I genuinely think they were coming from a place of the genuinely believed that what they were doing was going to make the country better. Okay. In a way that I don't think they're, yeah.

Whether or not we think they actually see whether it was guided or whatever. I think the place that it was coming from was a place where they could look across the island, whatever the opposition was. Sure. And they could say, look, this is the way I think we're going to fix the country. Yeah. You know, whatever fix the country means, we want to make the country better and this is how we're going to do it.

This is my vision of it. And we disagree on that and let's talk about that and, you know, we're going to play hardball politics. Okay. And I don't, I still don't think that that that was the kind of right wing politician that we see like an American politics right now. She wasn't where where where party loyalty matters more than anything else. Sure. And you know we're we're going to win and whatever we got to do to win is justifiable because we're

going to win. Right that victory is the only more out. Yeah victory is the morality and getting one over on the lib tards is like the ultimate goal of everything. I would set my own house on fire to make you choke on the smoke. I mean, that whole mindset was not part of this movement. Sure. With that being said, the reaction from anybody

who was even slightly left of center was like, oh my god, you're a goddamn Nazi. Because it was this kind of dramatic shift. Sure. And so anybody who had a satirical bone in their body was doing things like creating the Imperium of Man as this art project, where, you know, this is what the future is.

And then, are you familiar with 82,000 Judge Dread? Yes. Okay? Yes. Okay. Yes. Dredd predates 40k. Okay. It's one, it is, it is listed by the writers of the original edition of 40k is being a seminal influence.

Okay. And it is, you know, Dredd is judge, Jury, and executioner is, he upholds the law above everything else orders paramount. There is no room for mercy and calculation. What the is You know your family is you can only have voice. Yeah, you are you are found guilty of fill in the blank the punishment is death Summer most always you know summary execution and and you know they were they were writing this as you know Look look at what these people are doing I love that we like this as you know look look look at what these people are doing I love that we have like God you know I love that we have overblown satire isn't recognized as such when it comes out because some people I mean first

off what they're writing is a story that tickles the funny bone of some people like you know Conan the barbarian was a badass movie. Also, it's, or predator is even better example. What an amazing movie. And yes, I picked the same governor for both movies. Yeah. But what an amazing movie. At the same time, nobody got that it was satire

on these overblown gun worshipping movies. Everybody was just like, oh, okay, this is the next step. Same thing with Robocop. It's almost like it's, well, you know, Verhoeven has that cut. If you're talking, you're gonna bring Verhoeven into the conversation, you're kind of skewing things. But at the same time, like, I remember watching it. And like, so, like, Verhoeven and folks pose laws

like in every day, like every day, you know. But the thing is, these things, including the Warhammer 40K, including Veefer and Data, by the way, aren't seen so much as warnings or satire or overwrought language except for by their creators, and then by you, 40 years later, 30 years later. You know, I think.

Which I wonder if, you know, you, you know, I think, which I wonder if, if, you know, you hear all the time, satire is dead. I'm going, I'm going to put on my English hat for a moment. I'll go for it. And I'm going to say that I think I think our perception of that phenomenon is kind of an Americanism. Okay. Fair. Because as the English, the English would very happily point out, Americans don't understand irony. True. And so... They wouldn't be wrong. They wouldn't be wrong.

But when people do things ironically here, they end up buying into it. Yeah, it is weird. Yeah. We don't, yeah, as a culture irony is just something that like, I don't know if it has to do with the frontier in our history. I think there is something to that like I don't know if it has to do with the frontier in our history. I think there is something to that because I remember reading about how people who

Red the Bible in America in the 1800s took it literally and if you went back 200 years earlier their predecessors the all the way down to the staunchest you're a kid. Yeah, they would have been like what are you kidding me? There's a metaphor like what's wrong? Yeah, I you crazy? Where when did you forget how to how to interpret right? Aweetic language, which is funny because like you have democratization of a text. Yeah, and you forget to bring along critical thought. Yeah, you forget to bring along. They decoded it. It's intellectual. Yeah, you know, yeah, you've critical thought. Yeah, I was going to try to go in a different direction, but that's basically what it is. Yeah, you know, yeah, you've critical thought yeah, I was gonna try to go a different direction But that's basically what it is. Yeah, you know, and and the thing is

So I'm sorry, it's yeah, but we could say I'm tired for it. Okay, and and well within within Britain Plenty of guys who picked the game up. Mm-hmm. Let's add and went. Oh, ah, this is this is awesome Oh, okay, and they and they and they got a kick out of it And they saw that it was a a you know, it was it was taking what they saw going on around them and blowing it completely out of proportion Right into and then taking in this pastiche of dune and Michael more cock, you know and and all these other I mean it's it's a complete pastiche I mean if you if you dissect the lore of the beginning of Warhammer 40K, it is a Frankenstein's monster of a whole bunch of other pieces cobbled together into

its own papier-mache kind of thing. And it was one of the things that was wonderful about it at the time, as an American 12-year-old, 13-year-old, the first time I saw the game, was it was completely different from anything we had going on over here. I mean, we're going to be talking about Battle Tech in another episode. And Battle Tech is another situation where you have a setting that is many centuries, it's not nearly as far forward in the future, but it's many centuries ahead in the future. And it's also an interstellar Empire few list society kind of thing

But it's got a lot of buck Rogers whizz bang Okay, in it and wherever 40k does not have that you know Buck Rogers in the 25th century. No good guys are in this. It's there. They're really aren't yeah and and and you know and that was and that was part of the point when the game came out was no seriously look. This is an early grim completely over the top. Even if you are the good guy, you're really not a good guy, you're a fascist, overlord. The iconic intellectual property of the whole thing are the space marines and they're inducted into their orders at the age of 12 and you know,

pumped full of, you know, hormones and artificial organs and hip no-tot until they are effectively not human. They're post-human, you know, they don't, they don't have the same outlook on anything as normal humans do and, you know, that is the, these are the champions of the Imperium. Right. And, like, those are, quote unquote, the good guys, you know. And it was, it was, everybody who read the book, if you were reading the book, the assumption by the authors was, you were in on the joke. Interesting. Okay.

You know, like I pointed out, you know, the alien races were all, you know, kind of cobbled from the joke. Interesting. Okay. You know like I pointed out you know the alien races were all you know kind of cobbled from different places. Sure. Like they they took the orcs and God bless I want to say it was Andy Chambers. God bless Andy Chambers. I'm a huge Andy Chambers fanboy. I believe I could be wrong. Could have been another another one of the writers but but Andy Chambers took the orcs and he turned them into this totally unpredictable on the table top You never knew really a hundred percent what your army was gonna do on a given turn like you roll Like it's having a war elephant you roll it to six. Yeah, I might go Yeah, you know you certain certain units you'd have to roll a die and

Depending on depending on the result you got you checked a table and it's like no They're all busy fighting over who's actually in charge of this turn. And then you got to roll another die to see if like you have to take a couple of models out because they've actually killed each other. You know, they're psychics. You had to roll every turn to see what powers they got, where those people else had to do that in that addition of the game. And, you know, the biggest, the biggest most powerful power that, that an orc psychic had potentially could literally blow his own head off. Okay. Because, you know, so it's atomic bombs. Yeah, yeah, you know, and it's it was it was this crazy goofy.

At the same time, it was grim dark. It had these elements that were coming with goofy absurd. Yeah, absurd is the perfect word. And so the assumption was if you were reading the rule book, or you're reading Whiteboard magazine, and reading whatever the new addition to the game was, when they talked about everything, they sentorian tones of how dark and grim everything was,

you understood that they were writing kind of half in universe, and that was the joke. Or you were reading an article where it was like, no, this whole thing is a complete joke and just laugh your ass off. I've come with it. And this is where I've got to admit that I haven't picked up my 40K models in a while.

I have not done anything really significant with my 40K models since beginning of 2017. And here's the reason. The internet has ruined everything. Hey, time back, back it up. Your father too. When was your boy born? January of this year.

January 3rd, 2020. Okay, so this pre-date pre-date pre-dates It's pre-dates me not having any free time, right? This is okay. I just I wanted to make sure that's good We have friends who are like now that he's had kids. There will be no more Amy. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah And that's largely been true, but No, this this this pre-dates that this this Coinsides with the most recent presidential election.

And the reason is because I'm old enough to remember when this game was brand new and it was this thing that was completely different from anything else that was out there and it was this gigantic black horrible dark joke. And it was this is so terribly grim. And oh my god, you have to point and laugh at this. Right. And we introduce, you know, the four chaos gods. Sure. And there are bits in all their descriptions

that are, you know, digs at, you know, political figures and there's digs that, you know, things out of history and all this kind of stuff. Uh-huh. And, you know, I remember when it was clear, mm-hmm, nudge nudge, hey, you're in on the joke. Right. And over time, 40K has organically grown its own lore,

which is a wonderful thing. And I'm on a crack addict for it. You know, even though I haven't played the game in a while, you know, I get sucked into reading about it, chirped all the time. And, you know, it and it expanded and things changed. And there are whole discussion boards on places online with guys my age, paleo gamers, who talk about, okay, wait,

there was a retcon, was that really a retcon? Or is that just the story that the Imperium is telling now? I mean, it's like, you can analyze it and treat it as this big metacognitive conspiracy theory. And it's amazing. And I love that. The problem is, I think I see it. As you pointed out, when I had you read that passage

from the opening of the book, you know, the universe is vast and whatever happens, you will not be missed. Right. from the opening of the book, you know, the universe is vast and whatever happens, you will not be missed. Right. What you pointed out was that to somebody on the right end of the spectrum, this can be kind of a confirming statement. Right. And as we talked about Poe's Law, being a thing, there are a lot of guys who are 10 years younger than me, half my age, who never got the joke.

And they grew up seeing Man the Imperium is badass. The Space Marines, the biggest badass is in the world and it's humanity against everybody else. And the Grim Dark isn't a joke. The Grim Dark is, no man, that's what makes it awesome. It's just like so bleak and whatever. And they're coming at it from this direction that one of the things I hate the alt-right foremost, and this is terribly petty and awful. There are so many reasons to hate them.

It's a distant second to the horror part. It's a distant second to all the horror horror, but I mean, you know on a you know petty shit Yeah murder murder arson and jaywalking kind of level of To steal from TV trips yet again, which I'm gonna do all the time, but is the alt-right infiltrated and stole segments out of my most beloved science fiction universe for my childhood and I started having to see

asshole's post memes of God Emperor Trump. And then and then I had to not as being not as being in on the job, not as being in on the job, right? Like, no man, he's he's the emperor. In that in that tongue in cheek, kekistan bullshit. Oh, I'm just trolling you. No, I'm not really just trolling. Yeah, I'm trolling you because you're not laughing. Yeah, ha ha ha. Just serious, right? I mean, fury. Oh yeah. Fucking 12 year old. Sorry for the swear, but I can't stop myself. Kind of way, and they didn't get it. They never got it, and they didn't care to get it. And if anybody pointed out to him,

they're gonna be like, well, you're pansy, whatever fuck you, yeah, a cook, and I can't hang out in 40K communities online, anymore, because you never know when somebody you've been talking to about, you know, the fluff of the Space Wolf's chapter of Imperial Space Marines is gonna, you know, come out, you know, making some remark about, you know, runes and, you know, the purity of the and hereditary people. I'm like, fuck off. Right. You know, and, and. Like, you, you felt disenfranchised as a young geek

because you were a young geek. Yeah. They feel disenfranchised as, and, and, and that's not, that's not okay really. I mean, ultimately. But, and they felt disenfranchised as a young racist geek because they were young geeks. But the reason why it's okay to

disenfranchise them is because they're racist. Because they're castle. Right. Like that's- Because they're just bad fucking people. Right. But they seem to think that one thing equals the other and they don't. So here's an interesting conundrum going on in my head about that. Yeah. Is I like tabling those assholes. I'm just going to say if I find out somebody's like that. I'm like, oh, OK, I'm sorry. I'm going to take the character full, really fun army that I had planned.

And I'm just going to pack it full of all the cheese spanned, like just I'm going to murder everything off the table just to watch you cry. OK. You know, so I admit to that pettiness. But anyway, what are you gonna say? Well, just, I've run into this with the Star Wars fandom. Yeah, like their assholes. A lot of them are toxic assholes. And it's, so now I just as a star as a fellow Star Wars fan, I just, yeah, you know, and then I

find I come to find out actually that Russian trolls had something to do with that. And I'm like, well, okay, but they still ruined it because what you pretended to be it allowed them to be. Yeah. And instead of being a story of the downtrodden overcoming an oppressive regime, it be everybody turned into Kylo Ren. I mean, that's the beauty of Kylo Ren is that he is the new Star Wars fan And he is his own biggest enemy. Oh, yeah So is the Disney pointing at all the fans going this is you right and Disney being right? I mean Kind of world or mind living it at a university living

But so so I guess my question is like at what point do you just say okay? It's evolved past my liking it and I no longer like this or do you just sit there and say well this was the period that I liked and like I've got all my EU books upstairs and we've talked about this right and and it's like I nothing will take away my love for those books there are some that are dog shit but nothing will take away my love for those books. There are some that are dog shit, but but, yeah, nothing will take away my love for those books. Crap, but the other 10% is worth losing. Oh my God.

But so, nothing will take away my love for those books, but also those books are no longer relevant to my existence within the fandom. It's a weird thing. Yeah. And so I have to just kind of like, it's almost like you get divorced. Kind of.

You know, and it's like, oh, okay, we had this. Yeah. What? It's a rock set song. It must have been geeks, but it's over now. It's over now. Yeah. And I lost it somehow.

I like that. Yeah. So I mean, do you feel like that or do you want to like institute a purity test on these games? I know. No, no, okay. The thing is, I'm against any kind of gate keeping like full stop period.

Now the thing is, the moment somebody opens their mouth and spouts Alt-right racist, you know white nationalist whatever bullshit. Yeah, at that point. No, I'm sorry fuck off You don't mind keeping it at that at that point because that's not me setting up a gate and saying, you know What do you you know that's poor your worth? Yeah,'s, that's them coming into a communal area and like, shitting all over everything at which point, like, okay, look, here's your hat, here's your coat. Yeah, here's, here's your hat, here's your coat. Now we got to clean up the upholstery GTFO.

Yeah, okay. You know, okay. And I'm, I'm fine with anybody doing that. Okay. I'm fine with participating in groups where the admins have decided, okay, here's the deal. Whatever you think outside of the forum

is what you think outside of the forum, but all this, any kind of real world political bullshit needs to stay outside. Okay. I'm okay with that. Okay. I can, I think, you know, I mean, in any kind of personal relationship, I think that's a cowardly way to take things.

But we're talking about online caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, caring, who are into model painting and hobby crap tend to skew one way very often, or a larger section, I'll say a larger proportion, because they're creating and regulating their own world. And so there's there may be over representation there. Yeah. And so, you know, so that's, and my own way of dealing with it kind of has been, I haven't bought anything which my wife will tell you is like, are you a pod person?

I mean, yes, it's good, but like, you haven't bought any models in like months. Hello. I've also, I have started paying a lot more attention to other things from that period of my youth battle tech. I've talked about that. Sure. And then when I'm looking at 40K, there's a combination of like you're talking about, this is the period of time that I remember that I really liked that I'm going to, you

know, concentrate on and reread over and over again. And one of the wonderful things about the way 40K was originally written was there was this infinite amount of room for you as a player to go completely bananas and do whatever you wanted to. Okay. And I have written and rewritten the history of my chapter of spacebarines at least four times. So it's become similar to D&D. If you don't like these aspects, you just play over here. Yeah, focus on the series. Yeah, don't like frowns, forget the realms.

Yeah, okay. Play Greyhawk, whatever you know, create your own world. Right. And so I've kind of responded by fanficking. Okay. This plays kind of what I've done, you know. And, you know, and, you know, and, and then I, I still love what it is that they created and I still get a huge kick out of aspects of the universe.

And there are still things that games workshop in the Black Library, which is their, their book publishing room, their novel and fiction publishing room, are putting out that I'm a big fan of. So, you know, I'm focusing more on that kind of stuff. I highly recommend because I think you get a kick out of them. You don't really need to know too much about the setting. If you look for Caiaphas Cain hero of the Imperium, it is a novel series about a commissar. Commissars of the officers in the Imperial Guard who are supposed to shoot soldiers who turn around and run away. That's basically their job. Their critical officers for the Imperial Guard. And Kane is a complete coward. The books are all written in

first person and from the very beginning he says I graduated from commissar school and I decided I wanted to go to a field artillery unit because that would keep me as far away from the action as I could get. Sure. And then he repeatedly winds up falling into these positions where he winds up having to be the hero of the Imperium and the whole time as he's, it's like it's his memoirs, years later, and the whole time he's saying, oh, yeah, no, I was turning around to get the hell out of there, but I had to give them a convincing speech about, you know, well, you know, you all stay here, stay safe in numbers,

I'm gonna go take the dangerous job of going to try to find help and bring them back, you know. And he goes and does that and runs into an ambush and you know, winds up, you know, saving the whole unit somehow and you know, it just keeps getting Laurel after Laurel dropped in his lap When everything he's been doing has been self-centered and and you know and it's it's it's I love it so because He the author is in on the joke again. Okay, you know, it is, it is, this was written originally as a satire. And it's a grown and morphed. And now I'm satirizing the satire.

Okay. You know, and yeah, so I highly recommend it. And so that's part of my coping with this thing that I love. Cool. So, you know, now we're in're in you know a post-region I post that you're right kind of kind of world and it's interesting to me You know when we started talking about doing this series. Yeah, this was like the very first idea that really Yeah, I jump like like jump jump down at me. I mean partly because I have loved this setting since I was 12. You know, because nothing, nothing I'd seen up to that point was anything like it.

That level of tongue-in-cheek biting kind of humor and sarcasm baked into something like this. You know, this is also the time period of, you know, again, Buccharidors in the 25th century, which is totally different, and American science fiction at the time was not anything like this. And we've now gotten to this place, like I'm talking about with what's happened with the online culture around the hobby. We've gotten to this place where things have kind of come full circle, and pose law unfortunately has been in effect the entire time.

But to look back and and really see again where the roots of this were and what it was going on in Britain at the time all of this was happening that really had these guys angry, I mean clearly angry is clearly there and scared and responding with it in this very British working class, snarky artist kind. Sure. I think is really affirming. Yeah. In a way. In the world, in the world that we're in right now with all of the stuff that we got going on, with all of the, you know, daily horror show coming out of Washington, DC, coming

out of Europe with, you know, every time there's even a marginal victory against, you know, white nationalist, you know, identitarian right-wingers, we're like, oh, thank God they didn't fuck it up. You know, in this kind of world where it feels like there are a lot of people who are scared and angry and want to push things backwards. It was really empowering to me to look back at this time where these guys and the guys who were writing Judge Dredd and all the Blake seven and all this other you know, bleak cynical dark kind of science fiction they were doing back then to see that they took that and turned it into these these works of art and in 40 case case this work of humor and satire poking funnets things and you know

finding a way to make all of that work and turn it into something that's grown and become its own thing and all this has was was really powerful for me it was very firm and was was almost healing. So is there an 80k coming out of this you know like what what's next? What do we what do we see next like? You know, I don't know each reaction is a snapshot in its own time. Yeah, I I think what I What I would like to see coming up the time we're living in is Is because I'm an American I'm gonna say I I don't really wanna see the biting snark. I kinda wanna see Whizbang, Utopian. I wanna see somebody write a science fiction story

that isn't grimdark because when 40K came out, grimdark was new. Grimdark was like nobody'd done it before. And now it's almost become old hat. Right. And I wanna see somebody go back and go, no, I'm going to pick up some asthma off. I'm going to pick up.

Gene Roddenberry to be honest. Roddenberry, yeah. Roddenberry is kind of the king of utopian. But Robert Silverberg and Heinlein, who has his problems. But we're going to use science and technology and rational thought and we're gonna solve these problems and we're gonna go out into the galaxy and we're gonna make everything better.

So I wanna see something done like that that doesn't have its tongue in its cheek isn't making fun of that. Right. You know. Something like deep space night. Kinda. Where there is a thread of optimism no matter how dark The amount of how grim it got there was a thread of these are

Good people being forced to make difficult decisions to try to make the world better place and try to do the right thing Yeah, I'm just I'm thinking of As far as sci-fi goes like very often sci-fi is this is where we could end up if we are not careful It sounds like what you're saying is this is where we could end up if we are good if we if we if we are This out. Yeah, if we figure this out. We're good people. We can get here I want to see aspirational science fiction again. That sounds fun because that's where it started out That'd be good. I'd like to go back to it started out. That'd be good. I'd like to go back to it. All right. So, you know, having said that, what's your as as the one who have been spouting all this stuff at what what

is your biggest takeaway from this? What what did you learn? What are you going to carry most. You know, as an historian, I always come back to, you know, and as a classist, I always come back to a type of literature, whatever it may be, whether it's television, I consider literature, whether it's television or the written word or poetry or whatever, it is still a snapshot in time. Yeah. So anything that's trying to do that later is derivative and I don't mind derivative, but anything that's trying to do that later is not being authentic in its own time. Okay.

Unless you count nostalgia as being an authentic thing, in which case that can be and that's really bleak if nostalgia is the authenticity so I see I see this as a very British very Of its time 1980s basically late 70s or late 80s response to a threat that had grown into

scenery a reaction an evolution of one one political sway Okay To that yeah, like they stopped being like oh my god. We need to save ourselves How do we save ourselves from the threat to, you know, we've been living with the threat for a while. It's okay. Now how are we going to win? Yeah. And I see, I see it very much as, as that. And you know,

I try not to see everything as that because it's, it's so minimizing. Like, oh, that's just what the 80s thought, you know, but at the same time, like it is, sometimes it's so minimizing. Like, oh, that's just what the 80s thought. But at the same time, it is, sometimes it's inescapable. Yeah, and it very much is, you know, an 80s reaction, a British 80s reaction. It also, it's funny, the visual that I've gotten my head is that we're talking about a Britain that was still burning a shit ton of coal.

And all of that grit getting in the air couldn't help but work its way into the literature. Oh well, and if you look at the artwork, it's everywhere too. All of the inking in all of it has deep, deep smeary recesses. I like that edge of it. It's smeary. You know, everything is covered, everything is sustained. Look to it, even if it's not so, it's just, you you know the way things are drawn yeah but then you look at there's a whole there's a

whole tumbler fuck yeah road train it's all the artwork from that and that's like that's oh my god it's catnip and you look you look at Star Wars from the 70s and 80s and it's a dirty universe you look at Star Trek from the late 80s regulation start kicking in and it's a lot cleaner. Your primary colors are... Right, your primary colors are... The answer is on the enterprise. So it's the visual I get is that like,

oh okay, that's from our dirty past in a lot of ways. And of course they thought that our future would be that dirty, because it's always been that dirty Yeah, why wouldn't it stop being that dirty? Yeah, and that's that's the the time during which Britain is talking about going to nuclear power Right, and it was a huge and as a good thing. Well, yeah, yeah Yeah, so now that we have figured out that solar can work and that we can work and maybe someday we'll get there You know like the house on days of the 1970s when Jimmy Carter put them on the White House. There's a wonderful picture I've seen of Ronald Reagan with like a sledgehammer and Leia Cokas behind him and they're on the roof. It's amazing that

you mentioned Leia Cokas because I was just doing research on him for the battle take-up episode. So yeah, what I get from that is that grittiness is gritty. Yeah. And that grittiness. It's all logically. Yeah, grittiness is what happens when you let the fascists win though. Wow, I got deep. Yeah. Yeah, it really is.

Actually, you know, if you look at, if you go back to science fiction in the 30s, 20s, late 20s and 30s, there's a lot of that there. Mm-hmm. Even the stuff where, you know, like sky captain of America, kind of stuff, it's, it's, you're up higher because it's polluted down there. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. You know. Cool. Well, thank you.

That was fun and instructive in a world that I knew nothing about. Like, I, I, yeah. So thank you for that. On our way out, we would just like to point out that we now have a Twitter. So it's at Geek History Time. And if you want to follow that, please do. Right now, I think we're the only ones following it. If you don't want to, please do.

Please do. Please. Ed, do you have Twitter? I do. Let me look up what it is. Well, here, looking that up, because we're pulling back. Because I don't ever read at myself. My Twitter is at dauh Harmony, Duh Harmony, and you can find me there yelling at the

president quite often, as well as sharing all kinds of weird geeky stuff. All right, mine is at EH Blalock, and mine has a lot more cat stuff on it than Damien's does. You're more optimistic than I am. I don't, yeah well, I don't know if I'm more optimistic or I just cocoon better. But I don't yell directly at the president as much as Damien does, but I occasionally respond to people who are yelling on the president's behalf. So check it out.

Yeah. And in the meantime, roll them 20s, 20 side up. There you go. And in the meantime, roll them 20s, 20 side up. There you go.