The State of the Cube

Todd Edit Every Day Until TES VI: Day 518

Eldritch siren 🫧🩻👁️

I wanted to do a little something for mermay with a little monster design! She’s lightly inspired by my OC Ekānta and a very old mermaid piece I did in 2019! All around was a fun idea to revisit!

I mean there *were* cases of nazis being smuggled into brazil, argentina, chile, and paraguay through illegal escape routes colloquially referred to as ratlines. That is a thing that did happen.

However, the way americans in particular seem to latch onto this fact to dismiss any latin american that pisses them off, either in a "well whatever your country gave refuge to nazis" sense, or in a "I'm directly implying your family were escaped nazis" sense (another example I remember seeing once was a post about US imperialism in latin america where a yankee replied that OP had no business bitching about imperialism because she was probably "a white brazilian called Helga or something") is a bit ironic to me, considering that:

The vast majority of german immigrants to these countries in the 20th century were jewish refugees fleeing the nazis

The US took in thousands more nazis after ww2 than the entirety of Latin America combined

A lot of the nazis that *did* escape to latin america did so with the direct help of US intelligence agencies

Nazis that escaped to the US were treated as valuable anti-soviet assets, and many of them were given cushy jobs by the US government. Most of the nazis who escaped to latin america spent their entire lives hiding from the authorities under false identities, and those who were discovered were extradited or jailed

$1,699,000/5 br/5 ba/7000 sq ft

Lake Placid, NY

Now, as everyone knows, these robots aren't "smart." They're heinously overbuilt RC cars, to which some grad students stapled a circular saw. Your average luggage tug has more autonomy, mostly because nobody is particularly afraid that it will get hit by a 60,000-rpm spinning blade and ejected into the audience. Simple is better, and simple is a lot easier to turn off when things start getting hairy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport, I think you can probably still work it out with a Swiss Chalet kids' placemat and a couple unchewed crayons. It is basically demolition derby, but with the benefit of the driver not being actively inside the car at the time it is blown to smithereens. Their (the robots, but also the owners') goal is simply to survive being sawed, flipped, burned, mulched, or folded for longer than the other guy can, and there's lots of ways to do it.

One strategy is just to be a big ol' heavy thing, like a sumo wrestler. Then you can go through life with the philosophy that walls often win, even when big pickup trucks crash into them at high speed. The other end of combat conceptualization is that you should be very tiny and fast, so as to make it very annoying for them to hit you. Then you wait, flitting around like a little asshole dragonfly, until the enemy exhausts themselves and exposes a flashing, vulnerable weak point.