Indus civilization chess?

The Gruesomes - Santa Claus

And a Happy New Year

As if of every man, against every man

"To know in war how to recognize an opportunity and seize it is better than anything else."
Machiavelli


Feudal Lord



"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man."
Hobbes

And so the Game Kings are annointed such in a Hobbesian world where fortuna, our familiar friend and enemy, the dice, is removed. What is left is naked strategy where, clearly, some glance at the classics is required.


How to Move



"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near."
Sun Tzu

Deceive the heavens to cross the ocean
Mán tian guò hai
Mask your real goals, by using the ruse of a fake goal, until the real goal is achieved. Tactically, this is known as an 'open feint': in front of everyone, you point west, when your goal is actually in the east.
(36 Strategems)

Field of Battle



"Consult with many on proper measures to be taken, but communicate the plans you intend to put in execution to few, and those only of the most assured fidelity; or rather trust no one but yourself."
De Re Militari

Kill with a borrowed sword
Jiè dao sha rén
Attack using the strength of another (in a situation where using one's own strength is not favourable). Trick an ally into attacking him, bribe an official to turn traitor, or use the enemy's own strength against him. The idea here is to cause damage to the enemy by getting a 3rd party to do the deed.
(36 Strategems)


Everyone After Blue



Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west
Sheng dong ji xi
In any battle the element of surprise can provide an overwhelming advantage. Even when face to face with an enemy, surprise can still be employed by attacking where he least expects it. To do this you must create an expectation in the enemy's mind through the use of a feint. The idea here is to get the enemy to focus his forces in a location, and then attack elsewhere which would be weakly defended.



Watch the fires burning across the river
Gé àn guan huo
Delay entering the field of battle until all the other players have become exhausted fighting amongst themselves. Then go in at full strength and pick up the pieces.
(36 Strategems)


The Axe Man



Disturb the water and catch a fish
Hún shui mo yú
Create confusion and use this confusion to further your own goals.
(36 Strategems)





Finally, a little strategem I'll keep in my back pocket for another Game Night:
The beauty trap (Honeypot)
Mei rén jì
Send your enemy beautiful women to cause discord within his camp. This strategy can work on three levels. First, the ruler becomes so enamoured with the beauty that he neglects his duties and allows his vigilance to wane. Second, other males at court will begin to display aggressive behaviour that inflames minor differences hindering co-operation and destroying morale. Third, other females at court, motivated by jealousy and envy, begin to plot intrigues further exacerbating the situation.

Veronica Lake

+++++

36 Strategems

Machiavelli - The Art of War

De Re Militari

Sun Tzu - The Art of War

The Marcels - Merry Twistmas

A Happy Christmas

Full of Crap

'Former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed the recently released Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques Wednesday, calling it “full of crap,” and a “terrible piece of work” that was “deeply flawed.”

Cheney, speaking on Fox News' “Special Report with Bret Baier,” said some of the controversial techniques used on militants had been previously tested and the interrogations produced results.'

 We are mistaken to think that the results Richard Cheney is so confident he obtained from torture have anything to do with information. If information was that important it would have played a larger role in the months preceding the attacks of 9/11/01. The results he gloats about are the multiple layers of imperial dominance of the middle east. Torture displays that dominance on the bodies of the subject population just as military violence does on the social structure of the target region. That is why the niceties of police work, such as the accurate identification of suspects, are so often ignored. As in the massacre of Lidice, investigation of the fact is overwhelmed by the need to assert power.

The crowd praised this act of supreme crappiness

Body-more Murdaland

BBC Christmas Showreel 2014 - Including New Doctor Who Last Christmas Clips (Sammy singing Jingle Bells)

Vinyl Restoration with Atticus Martin, Part 1: Cleaning Solutions

Most importantly, it's worth a lot more!

http://www.laboiteverte.fr/larmee-occidentale-dargile/

It's not game night!

Japanese World Map from the Board Game “Conquering the Skies”. Made in 1930

Vivian Stanshall's Big Grunt - 11 Mustachioed Daughters

I don't remember too well but I think John Wayne was in it.

Homicidal Rabbits

Killer Bunnies


The Rules


The Deck


The Dice


The Magic Carrot

Lucky 7

Iron Sky The Coming Race - Teaser #1 (Official)

THE 5.6.7.8'S / MOTHRA（モスラの歌）Official Music Video

Moon Girl

Vintage movie poster for the Soviet sci-fi film, Storm Planet, 1962 - Artist: L Ofrosimov

The Fabulous Echoes - It Won't Be Long

CJ unkempt

Whirl-O - Halloween Fortune and Stunt Game

Happy Halloween

"Stop"

Anything can happen on Halloween

Roman Dice

Flint Journal

Rambles Through Our Country, an instructive geographical game for the young

1890 ... rambling around the USA!

One Hundred Years of Catastrophe

"Summer is y-comen in!" sang the pair of wrens on top of the grape-arbor; putting in an extra vowel, just as if they had been Dagoes! It was a time for coming outdoors, a time for beauty and joy. But alas, the hideous slaughter in Europe was mounting to frenzy, becoming an extermination of the human race. The exploiters and imperialists whose greed had dragged Italy into the conflict were sending propagandists over here, to lure the Italian youth back into the slaughter-pit."  Upton Sinclair, Boston, a documentary novel

 In 1914 the working class failed to prevent war among the imperial powers. This was not because it didn’t understand the situation or its role. The 2^nd International was well aware of both:

“The capitalist and imperialist war- mongers must know what is at risk if they throw down Mars’ iron dice. We will warn them, we will threaten them: we in Germany, like our friends in France and England. It is only internationally that we can carry out our war against war, and it is internationally that it is being carried out. Just as we have confidence in our brothers in France, England and Austria, you can have confidence in us, in the German proletariat in struggle.”  Karl Liebknecht, Where Will Peace Come From?, 1912

In the event the war-mongers were able to split the working class along national lines and enroll them in their corresponding legions of death. The political failure of the working class movement to halt the war left the masses unable to resist the inducements to enlist.

“The visceral militarism of 1914 explicitly contrasted a peacetime that left citizens alienated, purposeless and vaguely discontented, with a war that promised to restore the traditional values and ideals supplanted by modernity. The industrialised order reduced men to anonymous cogs in machines; war would bring back heroism and gallantry to a world that was ‘old and cold and weary,’ as Rupert Brooke says.”  Jeff Sparrow, The Appeal of Violence - Rage Killings in the Neoliberal World

The defeat of the 2^nd International opened the door to a renewed, capitalist future. Old forms of rule were jettisoned, some under pressure from below. Even as the war ground on the future was apparent in new mechanical and chemical forms of warfare. The armistice brought no halt in this development which continued to race towards the technology of the apocalypse that is our legacy today.

Since neither the contention between imperial powers nor the struggle between classes was resolved by the war, only transfigured, it was not long before new conflicts and new monsters of political control emerged. But the most grievous outcome of 1914 which we face today is that it was capital which was allowed to complete the organization of global production, to engineer the final overreach in the exploitation of human and natural resources.

Where has this landed us today, one hundred years after the outbreak of war? The stored energy which has allowed the unprecedented acceleration of growth now requires far greater expenditures to extract and ever increasing military force to protect access to it. Both factors indicate a depletion of reserves, certainly not a basis for further growth. Possible geographical market expansion proportional to existing production and consumption is dropping. Deadly rivalries persist but the division of development strategies that emerged after WWI has been resolved into a single, global capitalism.

The devastation of the two world wars undermined the political support for capital in the Eurasian theatres but a substantial base was retained in the U.S. Its loyalty to the system has bought it imperial supremacy and a cushion against the austerity which is demanded elsewhere. But that will have to end. Indeed, in most communities it has ended already.

The social class which has consolidated its control through the catastrophes of the last century is manifestly finished. Its wealth is empty; claims against debtors who can only repay a fraction of what they owe, ownership of production which has long since stopped creating any real surplus, nominal wealth flowing into assets whose price is bid up by competing flows of the same nominal character. Its violence is also empty; overpriced weapons of amazing violence and no political value.

In 1914 war-mongering and intensified and expanded exploitation of labor and nature was an option. One hundred years later it continues to be so only in the fantasies of the ruling caste. Science quite plainly shows that there are limits within sight or already exceeded. And honest accounting would do the same for the global financial system.

Six years into the current crisis and nothing has changed except the accounting. Six years in which the public treasure has been used to paper over the chasm in the world’s private finances. We are close to the unmasking. From the ruling echelons we should not be surprised if war and austerity for the masses continue to be paraded across the public forum as the only permissible avenue forward. From the ground, however, the view will be different. The world which emerged in 1914 was not the one nurtured in the hopes of the workers’ movement but it was, manifestly, a possible world. One hundred years later that choice is no longer realistic. The ideology of capital and empire can only hide and deny. It has no solution so it must pretend that nothing original can emerge. With all the power at its disposal it will, nevertheless, not be trusted.

“I believe humanity will continue to live and struggle with the difficulties that it faces. It has had many difficulties in the past, it has overcome them all. The difficulties that it faces today may seem to be immense, and they are immense, but the qualifications of people for settling their difficulties are as great, and are bound to be as great as the difficulties. I have to leave you with that; that the large majority of the population are against what is going on, they have no confidence in the regimes that exist. This is not Marxism, this is not socialism, this is not revolution. This is a common understanding of what is taking place in the world around us. This is what I’m speaking about. Mankind is faced with survival or destruction and I believe that the large majority of people will turn for survival and will in time take the steps that are necessary to recover what has been in danger in previous centuries, and which can continue if only we get rid of those who insist on maintaining power which they cannot handle.”  From a talk given by C.L.R. James at Windsor, Ontario, in Canada on January 14, 1967.

Haxen

Then I Saw--Great Towers

If only I knew what he was thinking...

Build "Throbbing" Vibrato

Bela

Travelling in time and to the bottom of the sea

Will our mystery guest please sign in?

Sophia spins some wax

Can I write a check?

Comics is journalism

"You fellas think of comics in terms of comic books, but you're wrong. I think you fellas should think of comics in terms of drugs, in terms of war, in terms of journalism, in terms of selling, in terms of business. And if you have a viewpoint on drugs, or if you have a viewpoint on war, or if you have a viewpoint on the economy, I think you can tell it more effectively in comics than you can in words. I think nobody is doing it. Comics is journalism."

- Jack Kirby

Jeux de la révolution française

FRENCH GAME BOARD, 1791. ‘Game of the French Revolution,’ created in 1791. The first player to go from the seizure of the Bastille (step 1) to the Assemblee Nationale (step 63) is the winner. 

Feds 'N' Heads

Whoa

Dude

Heavy

Far out

Good shit, man

Asha Bosle, accordion, Bollywood magic!

The Kirbys celebrate Hanukkah

Cab Calloway-"Smoking Reefers" unreleased (banned) ?

Happy Birthday, Jack

Pocket Change and High Rollers

Any crackers in this game?


Ages 9 to Adult


Going! Going! Gone! The Flea Market Auction Game


The 1% wants in on the game, naturally.


666, Mark of the Beast


9 dollars to plaid man


Evil Deal


Place yer choppers - Oh shit


1st Avenue, Maple Street, Parkway, and Gold Coast. And The Poor House.


Country Club


Easy Street