Learned about the whole Tartaria conspiracy theory today and all I can say is holy shit these people went to some truly godawful schools and clearly never took any real electives.

My favorite bit, I think, is that Bastion Forts (which they call Star Forts) are some kind of intentionally repressed, hyper advanced lost technology belonging to a forgotten global empire. Like, seriously, did you somehow miss the entire European Colonial Period of history?

Like, I get the desire for Tartaria to be real. I do. To look at the cultural, engineering, and architectural accomplishments of the past and then at modern society and you just... Jesus, we really have fallen, in a lot of ways, haven't we?

We've given up seeking beauty and elegance and embraced cold, corporate efficiency. Elegant works of stone and glass that last that have lasted for two hundred years in exchange for drywall and cubicles. It's hard not to feel like we've failed.

But that doesn't mean that you need to embrace some batshit insane conspiracy theory about lost civilizations and "mud floods" to explain that. In fact, doing that only serves to strengthen the very real forces of cultural decay that haunt us even today.

When you say that we don't build mega engineering projects like the Eerie Canal anymore because, well, magical ancient people did that, not us, you let the quiet, soul-crushing forces of capitalism that say we can't do any better get a little stronger.

We haven't built anything like the old World Faires in ages, not because we cant' do it, but because as a society we stopped valuing anything that doesn't produce immediate capital gains. Spending a hundred million on public art doesnt' drive shareholder value.

It's the same reason we haven't gone to the moon: not because we can't do it, or because we can't build shit there, but because there's no fucking profit motive in it for the parasitic shareholder class that controls modern society.

It's the same rich dumbfucks who are telling us to go back to work for our inheritance-tax dodging corporate overlords and stop worrying about dying from the deadly plague that's currently killing all our collective grandmas.

They don't care about the public good. They don't care about our lives. They don't care about building infrastructure or a legacy or leaving the world a better place than they found it. They care about one thing: the balance of their bank accounts. That's it. Period.

So you want to blame the modern world on a secret, shadow-y conspiracy to hide a global mud flood that wiped away some kind of weird pseudo-Atlantis? Go ahead.

But all you're really doing is helping build another cubicle farm.

I just realized I accidentally said “we haven’t gone to the moon “ instead of “we haven’t gone BACK to the moon” and I want to make 100% clear I am not a batshit insane moon landing denier.

The real engineering challenge for modern society is to give Twitter a goddamn edit button