#hellworld !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's face it, both in-universe, and out, 40k wouldn't survive without Space Marines.

Out of universe, without the Space Marines, the 40k universe is nothing but suffering. Especially as GW is enshittifying by eliminating the more variegated Imperial Guard regiments. Companies stick to their biggest sellers, without realizing that the variety is one of the reasons their setting is interesting.

In universe, the only thing keeping the Imperium on life support is:

The Emperor (also on life support)

Space Marines

One of the only reasons the Imperial Guard are so willing to fight to the brink of annihilation is because there's a non-zero chance that the Emperor will send his Angels to save them.

Now, getting Space Marines is not exactly easy. Nevermind C.S. Lewis "Knight as Art in the form of man", you also need to grow them, and it takes about a decade.

Ultramarines have government-sponsored aptitude tests and Ultramarine High School.

Dark Angels and White Scars like people raised in the appropriate culture, either knightly houses or nomadic horsemen.

Imperial Fists like prisoners or underhive gangsters.

But, the rest like Death Worlds. Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Iron Fists, and Salamanders.

I haven't been able to find any sign that GW has ever given the Ravenguard one. So, I'll do it right now. They capture anti-imperial terrorist cells. Not to stop them, in fact, they will often kill the tyrants the terrorists were trying to kill in the first place. No-no, they capture them because that's exactly whom they want to recruit.

The Blood Angels prefer sand-blasted wastelands and gladiatorial tournaments. Space Wolves live in Fimbulwinter, and have to die in combat, resurrected as both Einherjar, and the Wolves of the Wolf Time/End of the World. Medusa is a twisting, chaotic hellhole that makes it impossible to have fixed buildings, (French applies here. Furniture = meuble, (movable) - Building = immeduble (unmovable)). The Salamanders live on a twilight world, where the combination of volcanos and dragons means that being burnt to death is considered a natural death.

And it's all been ruled legal.

✐ Article 1 (source material for #2):

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9

Caption: "Court filings show a warehouse of books to be scanned by Anthropic. Picture: Washington Post"

✐ Article 2:

Now allow me to share some snippets from A1 (article 1) & A2 (article 2).

And I'd like to REALLY iterate this one...

As this dystopian hellscape gets stranger & stranger, we have yet another thing to add to the list of "what the fuck, I have no bingo cards for that for the next decade, what is going on?" as an addendum to this post.

Elon Musk, of all people, is attempting to preserve rare books & is using his ai company to scan books WITHOUT destroying them by preserving them in a library where other ai companies can't get to them after his own ai company has scans them.

Is anything even real anymore?