Artist for Nova 44 | here for art and animal facts | she/they | enormous nerd | Chronic pain enjoyer. | I also sell stuff - my Etsy shop is dead but lives again at https://asterandorchid.com
I am obviously having a grand old time with woodturning and am angling for some lathe time tomorrow but I gotta say
As someone who has mostly made stuff via additive manufacturing type methods. The amount of wood shavings that have to go to waste hurts me deep in my non existent soul.
and again, I know I am aware that is the entire process, you start with Material and you remove everything thats not Object and the removal is usually destructive that is kind of inherent to the thing.
Screenshot of tags reads: #I feel bad about the waste whenever I have to throw out supports on my prints #it sucks so much that any functional filament re-extruder is 5k+ USD
I haven’t been able to build these but I’ve seen some different, cheaper build for re-extruders!
Homemade DIY 3D Printer Filament Extruder: This is a basic tutorial for building your very own filament extruder for under $200! This machin
I think this will probably be over the $200 they promise just based on the deepened between prices now and when it was published, but less than a million bajillion dollars!
The Lyman / Mulier Filament Extruder V5 extrudes filament for use in 3D printers.Features:Stepper Gear MotorsLCD control of Ramps for all fu
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I am obviously having a grand old time with woodturning and am angling for some lathe time tomorrow but I gotta say
As someone who has mostly made stuff via additive manufacturing type methods. The amount of wood shavings that have to go to waste hurts me deep in my non existent soul.
and again, I know I am aware that is the entire process, you start with Material and you remove everything thats not Object and the removal is usually destructive that is kind of inherent to the thing.
You can save most shavings and use as mulch/give to somebody for their garden! They’re often good compost additives, depending on what stage the compost is at. You can also pack them into a muffin tin and melt wax into them to form fire starters for campfires.
And of course there’s always the classics: perform dark blood rituals and imbue them with the souls of children who died lost in the woods, then stuff them into a cloth form to create a brand new haunted doll.
Oh actual one: you can also make paper, though my understanding is that the quality is incredibly variable based in the wood type. I’ve never actually done this one.
I am obviously having a grand old time with woodturning and am angling for some lathe time tomorrow but I gotta say
As someone who has mostly made stuff via additive manufacturing type methods. The amount of wood shavings that have to go to waste hurts me deep in my non existent soul.
and again, I know I am aware that is the entire process, you start with Material and you remove everything thats not Object and the removal is usually destructive that is kind of inherent to the thing.
You can save most shavings and use as mulch/give to somebody for their garden! They’re often good compost additives, depending on what stage the compost is at. You can also pack them into a muffin tin and melt wax into them to form fire starters for campfires.
And of course there’s always the classics: perform dark blood rituals and imbue them with the souls of children who died lost in the woods, then stuff them into a cloth form to create a brand new haunted doll.
As much as I rag on how totally dishonest most TTRPG marketing is, the fact that the average player or game master seems to know less than nothing about how TTRPGs work doesn't make honest marketing easy.
Well, this post is kinda about how “crunchy” has lost basically all of its meaning because nobody defines it the same as each other, but what it is supposed to mean is that the game involves a lot of “number crunching,” in other words a relatively high degree of math per scenario, procedure, etc.. However a lot of people use it just to mean “there’s a lot of rules,” regardless of whether those rules involve math or if those rules are frequently layered on top of each other(as in, there’s a lot of rules to account for in any given situation), and many others take it to mean “this game has combat,” “this game is bad, regardless of complexity,” “this game is good, regardless of complexity,” or “this game has rules that can’t be absorbed through osmosis.”
Even if you’re using it “correctly” I still don’t think it’s that helpful of a term because a lot of games have “crunchy” elements but are not “crunchy” all the way through. They may have some mechanics where you have to check a bunch of modifiers, and others where there's just like one or two.
Ultimately TTRPGs are an EXTREMELY varied and inconsistent medium, where the average fan has only played like one example, so descriptors like this don't tend to get you very far.
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These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.
While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.
Yes!!!! I did a review of literature on PFASs in human drinking water about half a year ago, and there is a lot of really good progress! Please celebrate this, please don't let this solution be forgotten (at least so quickly) as the ozone layer or acid rain.
We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!
I've been mulling over your posts re: breathing exercises for a while and like… it makes sense to me that given how you've experienced a lot of techniques aimed at coping with anxiety as intensely invalidating & disenfranchising of your feelings, needs, intuitions, nervous-system responses, etc., that practicing a breathing method with a rigid externally imposed structure might activate that same distress. Does that resonate at all? (If so, it also means a lot of the well-meaning unsolicited advice you've been getting about technique would miss the mark for you since it's aimed at, so to speak, symptoms not causes.)
If you're in the market for more well-meaning unsolicited advice… it seems like you've had pretty good luck with taking an intuitive, curious & sometimes-playful, sensory-based, descriptivist-not-prescriptivist approach to other types of grounding & centering practices. I would consider what your goals/hopes for doing breathing exercises, then try to get in a place/position where you're physically comfortable, breathe in a way that feels intuitive for you, start paying attention to your breathing & how you feel, and then maybe—if you're vibing with it—try intentionally varying your breathing in whatever ways seem like they might be interesting, and see how they make you feel. Rather than taking a technique that works pretty well for most people and trying to figure out how to adapt it to work for you, start from the ground up, from your individual being—like getting a bespoke suit rather than buying off the rack & getting it tailored.
I guess my posts were worded as though I was searching for advice on how to make breathing exercises work for me, but I was more interested on understanding why they don't, and for the people for whom breathing exercises do work, why they do work.
However I have received such varying and contradictory answers on how breathing exercises are supposed to work and what they are doing physiologically, that I think answers to these questions are impossible.
I believe the reason it feels concerning is that I am trying to heal my medical fear, and the way I was taught this was supposed to work is that I was supposed to expose myself to the feared thing while using "coping skills" to mitigate the fear.
However, for me, all the common "coping skills" that purport to be able to shut down or reverse the physiological reaction of fear do not work.
The success I have found with healing has been through engineering experiences that feel safe, not controlling my own physiological responses of fear. I'm not even sure if "coping skills" broadly are appropriate here; when I was experimenting with "safe" medical experiences, getting my vaccines at the grocery store pharmacy, I found it comforting in some ways to acknowledge and feel those physiological responses. The physical process of fear in my body is, essentially, my body's preparedness to protect itself, and I envisioned my fear as my werewolf-self: a huge wolf wrapping her body around me and growling in warning while I get my flu shot.
I even found it helpful to imagine myself "transforming into the wolf" so to speak: surrendering control to the fear. I have a hard time articulating why this resulted in feeling confident during the potentially scary situation rather than avoidance.
"Surrendering to fear" in common speech would mean leaving and not getting the vaccine. Is it really true, or is it just an assumption that if a person surrenders to their fear, they will only avoid?
I think it's possible my problem with breathing exercises is much more fundamental than technique. Fundamentally, such "coping skills" are about reversing and shutting down the process of fear, and the assumption that this is good and desirable to do comes from a hierarchical view of humans as consisting of a "lower" body and a "higher" mind, with the mind having "evolved past" the body necessitating a relationship of power and dominance over the body by the mind.
This leads to the view that what the body knows is false and cannot be trusted, which is the fundamental idea underpinning the diagnostic category of "anxiety."
What I came to, entirely on my own and because I had no other option, is that my fear, or my wolf-self, tells me about my safety needs. Not only do these safety needs include physical safety from harm, they also include the need to have human dignity and to be protected from forceful violation. Fear that is connected directly to one of these safety needs is what I call "Saw trap" fear: it is primal and gut-wrenching and deeper than cognition, because it directly defends the self. It feels like how it feels to be caught in a trap and have to cut through your own leg to escape.
I think you can't cognitive-behavioral-therapy your way out of fear of rape, gruesome mutilation, or excruciating pain (not the thought of these things, but the imminent, certain threat) because it's essentially hardwired. That's what fear is FOR. You can't big brain yourself into no longer being an animal except through an extreme and maladaptive level of dissociation.
And I reckon that doing breathing exercises doesn't make you feel any better about having to saw off your leg either. And even if it did, why.
So a lot of my medical fear is that "animal-with-its-leg-in-a-trap" desperate biting clawing fear, a visceral certainty of unbearable harm and violation to the body, and that fear lives in me, in the deepest parts of my body and mind. There is a deep foundation of unsafety that my body learned from trauma.
So, my theory is that attempting to stop the physiological processes of fear does not work as a "coping skill" because it is suppressing a primal instinct that is foundational to the safety of the self.
In fact, I think that breathing exercises may be somewhat triggering to me at this point in my life because they activate the memory of feeling not allowed to be safe, not allowed to feel, not allowed to defend my body from harm. The Wolf fights me when I try to control my own breathing because she exists to protect me and she feels that I am preventing her from doing that.
In the years since I began unlearning the mainstream view and re-learning the animal self, my "anxiety" has been much less disruptive and paralyzing. But it goes completely opposite and contrary to everything I was ever taught and I'm trying to figure out how to work with that.
Why does it work to hand over control to the Wolf when getting my flu shot? Well, my fear exists to protect me, and in a strange way, her watchfulness and readiness to defend when I am in a vulnerable situation is reassuring. It's kind of an assurance that if the fear gets to be too much for me to be comfortable, she'll know what to do. And after the flu shot, the Wolf gets to feel that she successfully kept me safe.
I'm trying to apply this philosophy to going to get a blood draw (a higher stress experience associated with some trauma) but most of the resources or advice I would find online completely contradicts everything I've been doing.
I live on the east coast, it's pretty damp here, and there are corn farms just outside town, and my gardening relatives have grown corn successfully.
BOM says our mean yearly rain is just over a metre, while yours is 70cm. Could be about when the rain is, because yours is mostly in July/August, while our wettest months are February and March
One year we moved to a house by a little creek. I was 14, and I tore up the grass and prepared a little plot all by myself. I planted corn because it was an easy crop for the region, and I'd grown a lot in much worse soil in the past. It grew beautifully: nearly every seed germinated, and they were all growing upright and strong in rich soil near the creek. I had probably 50 plants on the little plot.
And then. The neighbor dog (owned by the landlord) decided this was her only place to play. For four days straight, she made a beeline right for the corn, jumping on it, breaking the stalks, dashing through and making a nest on it. The first few days I tried to run her off, asked the landlord to keep the dog away, and splint the stalks. Then I gave up. I was so mad, I broke the rest myself so I wouldn't see the dog do it.
My dad accidentally planted corn via bird seed one year. It did shockingly well. (American East Coast). Their dog very patiently waited until the corn was ripe and picked to start carefully, deliberately disassembling the corn stalks, shredding them with the most attention to detail I’ve ever seen her use. She also attempted to make off with the harvested cobs and squash because she is a very tooth oriented girl.
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There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but it’s a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, it’s ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Don’t worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this district’s points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. “Gay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesn’t want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscura’s approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - don’t buy or support their game!
I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"
[Freeze frame in the middle of an amazingly wild chase scene of some poor soggy bastard getting chased by an enraged crowd]
"Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering what's going on, and how I got into this situation in the first place."
[The stop unfreezes for a few seconds as this terrified target takes a few more desperate running steps, pausing again just as someone is about to grab his ankle]
"Well, the truth is, I still actually don't know what this was about. But I do know how I got here: I can never resist an angry mob. Now watch me get this fucker."
[the seizing hand grabs the runner by the ankle, he falls down and proceeds to get unceremoniously beaten to death. The protagonist brushes the dust off their clothes and the rest of the movie continues normally. The killing at the beginning scene is never mentioned again.]
I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.
One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.
Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.
Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.
So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.
It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.
That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.
News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.
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I don't want to get all "hur hur that's not realistic" to amateur writers, but I want to make sure that everyone knows this: in a medieval or medieval-ish setting, someone who's seen an archer before would definitely be able to tell whether someone's an archer just by looking at them.
Archeologists can't tell for sure whether someone was assigned male or female when alive from bone structure, but they can tell whether someone was an archer. Longbow archer, anyway. The way their arms and shoulders were strongly muscled in a very asymmetrical way is pretty much unmistakable, and they were muscled enough that it's visible in their bones. If someone's seen what archers look like, they can tell whether a stranger they've never seen before can shoot a bow or not.
Finding an unarmed and unconscious, soft-bodied and narrow-shouldered stranger in the woods, the first clue that this mf is not a ranged nor melee fighter is not by whether his fingers are calloused in the right places for a bowstring. A medieval bowman was built like a brick shithouse.
RPG where it's very easy to overcome all of the bosses nonviolently through correct dialogue choices, but actually doing so locks you into the bad ending; in order to get the good ending, you need to do a bunch of obtuse side quests in order to goad them into fighting you.
#honestly this sounds fun #gimme the options #i wanna know what my choices are #how ambivalent can i be? #but also it's so much funnier that this concept makes violence the correct answer (via @cuzosu-blog)
Yeah, you could definitely play a scenario where violence is the morally correct answer for laughs, but you don't have to.
If you wanted to play it straight, one might imagine a game about fighting a fascist state where all of the bosses are The One Good Nazi types with very sympathetic, human reasons for collaborating with the regime – there's the Sad Dad who's only committing mass murder because they're holding his kid hostage, the idealist who genuinely believes they can reform the system from the inside, the moral coward who rationalises their atrocities as harm reduction because if they quit, whoever replaced them would be even worse, etc. – and all of the talky nonviolent options for dealing with them involve compromising the player character's principles.
The final boss is naturally a totally unsympathetic Hitler 2.0 type, but before you can fight him he hits you with the old Mustapha Mond monologue, and if you've let even one of his buddies off the hook, he turns the tables on the conversation-fu trope and persuades the player character to stand down.
The achievement for getting the good ending is, of course, titled "The Only Good Nazi Is A Dead Nazi".
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