iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 13h

I wonder if it's easier for us to psychologically process the trauma of the 1940s if we make the villains more formidable in our minds; there's something truly horrible about the thought that millions of people can be killed by total losers, the utter dregs of humanity.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 19h

of postwar Nazi fantasies, rather than as anything approaching the reality - at best, an army like any other, with some crack units, a lot of mediocrity, and a lot of paper strength.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 19h

I can't stress enough how weak the historical volunteer units were in comparison to the ones you can raise in the game. They are some of the strongest units you can get. That is not a reflection of the SS volunteers. More to the point, the game also generally portrays the Waffen-SS as the elite unit

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 20h

And have you checked the decisions for forming foreign SS units? They're some of the best troops in the game - thousands of ultra elite, perfectly equipped divisions. There is no historical justification for this, of course - it is quite literally enabling a fascist fantasy of a united white crusade

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 20h

As Axis Bulgaria you can core the entire Balkans by "Bulgarianising" it, which is implied to be cultural genocide at best or full on 1990s ethnic cleansing. In the Pacific, the KMT and the Raj are depicted as killing more civilians than Japan.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 20h

An excellent piece, but if anything it is too generous to Paradox. Their softly softly approach to far right fans (they liased with The Fire Rises team for fuck's sake) and the creeping in of nodding and winking to fascist fantasies is revolting - see the focuses on the fascist American path.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

That is to say that without the clumsy idea of "court journalists," is part of it simply that writers who spend time in Kemi's circle find her confident and charming and keep mistaking this for actual analysis?

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Before the last Australian election, there were various articles that said "public polling shows that many Australians see Peter Dutton as arrogant and racist, but in person he's lovely," and none of the writers made the leap to "maybe we're the ones who are too close to this."

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Not just HOI4, I'm afraid. A few years back, a man in the town I grew up in walked into two mosques and killed 51 people. Until recently, Paradox had to have a pinned thread in the EU forum reminding the players not to use the "hilarious" Balkan-war slur for Turks that he'd written on his gun.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I didn’t even know he was a Reform candidate!

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

The French Revolution, 1789-1794, taking care to set up minor characters like Julien Raymond and Louis-Felicite Sonthonax who'll kick off the Haiti spinoff. Draw from A Place of Greater Safety, and really link into having new lead characters every season, only some of whom die horribly.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Did you ever come across the parody written of Clancy written by an anonymous CIA staffer that apparently used to circulate in Langley? archive.md/U9lkj

archive.md

Welcome to nginx

If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I’m still so irritated that they blew up the Old World rather than just starting a setting - I loved the implication that Chaos was beginning to be left behind by the changing world the way the elves were. The foil to the Empire isn’t the four chaos gods, it’s Hashut and the Horned Rat.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Hell, the PCF supported the government in the Algerian war initially because it instinctively backed the white working class of Algiers and Oran over the vast majority of the population.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Kritarchy, I think, if what I vaguely recall about the term used for the rule of the Hebrew Judges is right... and yes, google's first result tells me I'm right and therefore I require no further reading or research.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

His "The Songs of the Kings" is particularly worth reading in this current period of interest in Odysseus: I don't think I've seen another treatment of the character which quite brings out what an utter, utter bastard he is (while being tremendously fun to read.)

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I remember coming across her poem "The Hour is Come", and wondering why the last stanza isn't better known. Liek a feminist 'Invictus.' en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hou...

en.wikisource.org

The Hour is Come - Wikisource, the free online library

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

The Robbie Burns pub in Dunedin in the 2000s - did weekly readings of the Iliad, The Odyssey, and then Gilgamesh. The other thing I recall (I was only fourteen and out of town so didn’t get to attend much) was retired newscaster Dougal Stevensen playing Zeus, with this astonishing appropriate voice.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Learning to walk, and/or still breastfeeding. Surely even for this site this question skews old?

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I’m not sure what critic cruelly but accurately described Ben Affleck as a fine supporting player cursed with the appearance of a leading man.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

A big mistake was that they went from one film a year to two and then to three, and then they added TV series as well. Even if you were still invested, it's just too much of the same flavour to rebuild excitement. They chased short term returns and in the process achieved market saturation.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Not enough non-Kiwis are aware of Sam Neill's first role as a leading man in 1977's Sleeping Dogs, a landmark in NZ cinema. What if a US-backed dictator took power in New Zealand during the Cold War? Neill plays an ordinary man caught up in the emerging insurgency, and he's already soemthing else.

A black and white still of a young Sam Neill as a political dissident in a dystopian New Zealand, standing in a paddock and pointing a handgun off screen.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

This has something of the bleakness of something like 'The Screwfly Solution,' but there's a terrible humanism underneath as well. It's a tremendous work of fiction, and it has made me pour a whiskey and stare at the wall.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

It’s why Gerard Depardieu (awful though he is) was so good as Danton - the charisma of a man who has never once said no to an extra crack at the wine and cheese

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Well, now you’re making Paul Keating cry

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

We could do Veilguard writing discourse if you’d prefer? I can also offer you “is paying for Owlcat games anti-Ukrainian”, or a selection from our historic “Can Bethesda Write Fallout” range.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I choose to believe that the NZ All Whites crashed out not in humiliation, but as a whetstone that sharpens the sword that humiliates the trumpists

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

It’s a great game, but before I bought it I wish I’d known about the developers. the studio recruits out of crimea and employs people who call Ukrainians ethnic slurs on twitter.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I may have come to Lovecraft late for a geek, but tbh he just reminded me of the racially infused invasion fantasies I’d read for my work on 1890s whiteness. We don’t sit around in 2026 looking for the merits in ‘The Yellow Wave,’ and I’ve never been convinced there’s much to find in HP.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

It's also reflective of the way that modern action films are made by people who have watched action films (or played video games.) LAST CRUSADE is incredibly Tintin inflected - there's a particular mid-century kineticism that's important to the visuals.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Crimson Skies 2: Sid Meier's Sky Pirates

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

National: I grew up on a farm in Canterbury Labour: Norman Kirk rang my grandfather on the night he won the election to thank granddad for his crucial support. Greens: I come from a multicultural, multiracial family. ACT: I trained at Hayek's school. NZ First: I have drunk at the Green Parrot.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I still can’t believe that your Viking protagonist gets to York to find that the evil Christian Saxon is burning the illuminated manuscripts herself!

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

They’ve increasingly pandered in the Hoi4 DLCs. Battle for the Bosporus lets you ‘bulgarianise’ territory, the US fascist path explicitly lets you expand anti Asian racism, the wunderwaffe dlc marketing was soaked in Nazi aesthetics, when you spawn SS volunteers they’re hypereelite ubermenschen…

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Oh yes. Hearts of Iron has a modern day civil war one called The Fire Rises that is an utterly repellent love letter to Neo-Nazis with detailed paths for modern hate groups .@hoi4game.bsky.social featured it on their forum last time the main game was patched to reassure fans it would be updated fast

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

I think it's interesting in that the surface-level politics are not as conservative as they initially seem: Reagan's foreign policies are deservedly savaged, though the show (correctly, IMV) doesn't 'both sides' the Cold War. But the domesticity is conservative; it's a show about the nuclear family.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

My supervisor Antony Best used to drum into me that whether you were looking at interwar Japanese fascists, British imperial legates, Stalinist diplomats, or anyone else: Before trying to 'explain' their agenda it was almost always worth considering that maybe they just believed what they said.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I'm alone in an Otago cabin on a writing project, and I occasionally burst into song. I knew I had a bad voice - my sister's the one who's the professional star of musical theatre - but I didn't know I had "border collie comes bursting through the house in a panic to check if I'm okay bad voice"

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

The volus always struck me as uncomfortably antisemitic, to be quite honest.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

There was an odd trend of liberal or even leftist British online AH being quite kind to Enoch Powell, even when it showed the horrors of his policies; the classic error of ‘this person is complicated and interesting and therefore better than someone who says the same thing using brutal slurs.’

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Watching the trailer was the first time I just felt at a loss with Star Wars. I mean, Rise of Skywalker was unbelievably awful, but I understood the cowardice and soullessness that made it. With this Mando movie, every clip makes me feel that I'm watching a mate play a bad shooter on PS3 in 2008.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Be fair Charlton, the internet has also assured me you're an Afrikaner nationalist who hates medieval peasants.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

It does and it will. Possibly you won't fully realise or believe that until you're reading the email that confirms your examiners think you deserve the award, but you do get to that point. It's a worthy journey.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

The real problem is Americans (and many Brits) trying to do Australian accents; there's just not enough exposure to Australasian media for even a lot of good actors to really grasp the difference between the caricature performed for Hollywood and actual accents. RIP my Good Place Season 3 rewatch.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Immortal Empires Expanded, the various new races by Teams SCM and OVN, Cataph's Southern Realms, and finally Mixu's Unlocker (and his extra lords.) Totally refreshes the map, and the new factions are fun, balanced and in the main loreful if that matters. Like a full free expansion.

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Liam Connell @liamconnell.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Many political partisans, in practice, believe in their party structures more than they do in any abstract set of philosophical principles, and that this is correlated neither with the left/right axis nor educational attainment.

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