#european games

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[lewanarta]

SKI JUMPING IS BACK

TODAY

FOR FIVE DAYS IN A ROW

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Shiryn Ghermezian

An Israeli team of artistic swimmers won the gold medal on Friday at the 2023 European Games in Oswiecim, Poland, near the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

The 11-person female team took home the top honor in the team free routine combination finals, marking Israel’s first-ever European gold and second European team medal overall, according to the European Games. The team swam to the theme of “Modern Spanish Dance” and became European champions with a score of 248.6083, while their performance was also awarded the full Degree of Difficulty (DD) of 35.0.

Israeli Olympic Association Chairperson Yael Arad, who won Israel’s first Olympic medal in 1992 in judo, noted the symbolism of Israel’s historic gold medal win near the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where nearly 1 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

“There is nothing more symbolic than standing with your head held high and singing [the Israeli national anthem] Hatikvah just 10 minutes from Auschwitz,” said Arad, according to Israel’s Channel 13. She added that the whole team had “tears in our eyes.”

“We promised to carry the memory of our Jewish brethren and that is what we are doing,” she noted.

Germany won the silver with a score of 163.3205 for its “Monster Party – Greetings from the Addams Family” routine and Turkey took home the bronze medal with a score of 135.7999 after swimming to the theme of “The Rhythm.” Only three countries participated in the finals.

While this year’s European Games are officially being held in Krakow, the aquatics competitions took place at the Aquatics Centre in the city of Oswiecim, where the former Nazi concentration camp is located, which is now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

“We were very focused before the competition as we knew we had a chance to win this event and that gave us huge motivation,” said Israeli swimmer Shelly Bobritsky following her team’s gold medal win. “We were really determined, felt the energy in the water so I think our swim was quite good. We wanted to catch the judges’ eyes, do our best and we just did that. It was so nice to hear our national anthem played at the end.”

On Sunday, a smaller team of Israeli artistic swimmers won the bronze medal in the team free finals at the 2023 European Games, which is taking place from June 21 to July 2.

[iliketheusual]

so all the French parents literally decided to go all french on their child's name

[freesiahubiga]

thanks to natalia we went from 7th place to 1st. during mixed relay race. this woman!!❤️‍🩹🇵🇱

[doesephs]

using team bonding to rule out potential banksy suspects you are safe, jeremy knox.

[musicallisto]

tumblr communists' reaction to the situation in venezuela, especially those from the US or western europe, is extremely bizarre. OF COURSE the united states is responsible for a good portion of the political turmoil latin america has suffered in the past century (countless coups to set up puppet governments, the somoza dynasty in nicaragua, the chicago boys in chile, etc) and i hate american imperialism as much as you do, but refusing to acknowledge the violent dictatorship and repression that's currently going on in venezuela is a stupid and lowkey infantilizing take... like, you know a leftist man, thrust in any position of power, no matter how "progressive" he may call himself, can (and more often than not WILL) be greedy and corrupt. you know a socialist government can be authoritative and violate human rights. you know this right.

[nidbaesenpai]

back at it again with the viet beam feat. jackpot combo against the king!

[sappho-ilmarinen]

Eastern European games inspired by this post.

[porcelaintoybox23]

Is eastern Europe okay?

Edit: no absolutely the fuck not

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[lewanarta]

Anže + Dawid 🥺

[centaurianthropology]

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.�� Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

[kevinarthur64]

ДаркСталкерс

[wodania]

The horror of reading an Arcane fic and Viktor starts speaking Russian or is called by a Russian diminutive. Do you guys know what a Czech person is because lemme tell you. There’s this country that his voice actor specifically based him off of and it is not Russia. Please stop making the Czech man speak Russian in Arcane fics PLEASE.

[aurianavaloria]

Baldwin IV, the... Gamer King?

Something I've found interesting - and rather surprising, tbh - is the increasing number of games and game concepts in which Baldwin IV features, and not simply as inspiration for the characters' designs, but as himself.

Here's how many places I've found him and the accompanying artwork of him (all very obviously inspired by - you guessed it - Kingdom of Heaven)

==================

First, the actual games...

1) Evony: The King's Return

This article from One Chilled Gamer gives the details on his statistics.

2) Blood of Steel

You can find the details in this news announcement on the game's Steam hub.

3) European War 7: Medieval

It's a little harder to find information on this one, but there's a discussion thread here on him.

==================

Baldwin also makes an appearance in the mods for several games, including...

Sid Meier's Civilization V

This mod adds the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a civilization to the game, with Baldwin IV as its leader. There's info on him on this wiki page, including his war and peace themes ("The Holy Land" and "Siege of Kerak" from Crusader Kings 2, respectively.)

Sid Meier's Civilization VI

This mod also adds the Kingdom of Jerusalem into the next game of the series, again with Baldwin IV as its leader.

Crusader Kings III

This mod overhauls CK3 to allow the player to assume the role of any leader present in Kingdom of Heaven (as well as their contemporaries around Europe and Asia), including Baldwin IV - although you won't get to play as him for very long before his death.

==================

Finally, I've found some concept-style art of Baldwin floating around out there, too, although I'm not certain they are for an actual game or simply intended for a potential game if they happen to grab a developer's interest.

This one is by ShawnFox on Artstation:

And this one is by XuanHan Chen, also on Artstation:

==================

This is all I've personally been able to find so far, but there's probably more out there I've missed. If anyone has run across any other game-related art of Baldwin IV, please share!