Soho News
General Musings
Wellp
So the US is waging war in Iran still, whats interesting is that the markets, especially the oil ones, seem to have grown smart to the ruses of the regime.
Basically it goes like this: Oil prices rise, someone with inside information places a huge short position, then Trump posts something like "We will end the War!" and prices plummet.
Now whats the interesting thing is that the last round of this, prices have not sunk. They are continuing to rise. Brent Crude hasn't dropped under 110$/Barrel for 5 days now, WTI is also consistently above 100$.
The consequences are felt world wide, here in europe mainly rising prices, in Asia there is some rationing going on. Places like japan have some pretty large reserves but those are not infinite.
The problem the US has is that this is pissing off its allies, besides fucking over asian allies with oil, they are also taking all the planes and missile defense thingies from the indian pacific theatre.
Countries like South Korea, that paid the US quite a pretty penny for them to station that equipment there, are obviously pissed. But also european allies are seemingly no longer willing to go along with it.
Spain the obvious one, not that impactful overall more representative, has closed its airspace for US Military craft. France has followed along with that. Now the US is not opperating out of those countries, the main one being Germany and the UK.
What I suspect is that these governments are positioning themselves against the US in hopes to broker a deal with a Iran that has won this war in a few months, ater the US slaughters thousands of their own citizens by throwing them at the iranian coastline.
Meanwhile here the presence of US troops has somewhat become controversial, don't understand me wrong, the ruling parties are perfectly fine with our "allies" being in Ramstein or whereever the fuck. But the right wing extremist and at this point probably second largest
party in the country, is calling for US troops to leave germany. And with all somewhat positive things that party says, its aped from the left. March 20th Rebecca Ruppert of the Left presented the same position in an interview with the ZDF,
and the state representative is completely right, we as the left (whatever that means) have to be against hosting troops of a regime that does terror bombings, kidnappings of heads of states, and land grabs. ESPECIALLY AS GERMANS it is our historic duty.
But what can you do, the AFD will win the next election and obviously it will never expell the US, at least if there is still a right wing government, dont forget that leaders of the party met in hungary with US conservatives just a bit ago. And those guys are under
one blanket either way, thats how right wing international politics work.
Artistically i've been kinda in a rut, not many ideas not much motivation. I had the luck to get some consitent commissions for a bit now, thank you to that one client in case they read it, its greatly appreciated. However you have to keep the pen sharp for it to be precise, so ive been drawing anyway.
As always with these sort of downtimes, ive been experimenting with my approaches to these things. Testing out new techniques, new tools, etc etc. It frees the mind for other things. But i have been missing some better inspiration to actually make something other than doodles.
I kinda blame myself for it, a lot of my early consistent art making was character and item focused and motivated by ttrpg illustrations. But in recent weeks I have grown disillusiond with the hobby. Trying to get people to respect you as a GM is a task fit for only the mentally well.
And I do not fit that description. If you try to find games people would like to play in terms of ease or approachability, you get berated for disrespecting their intelligence. You do not get feedback from players except a "no it was good" and then they never show up again.
And I dont have to start on actually trying to organize a group where everyone shows up for the time when you play, that you agree upon previously, ahead of time.
This has turned into a ttrpg rant so I will just cut it short and say, for me, the sort of disrespec to experience in the hobby is not something that I want to engage with any more. and it makes me incredibly sad because I love the medium so dearly. I know you can solo play,
but the most fun is the collaboration you get to engage with your fellow player in.
Either way, since I dont play much videogames anymore too, I just kinda filled the hole with watching movies, most recently the Columbo pilot movies. They were very fun. But its no replacement ... and hence ive just been meadering with my art.
I went to the Zoo the other day, was cool, they had a open stork enclosure and since the storks are roosting rn they were flying and clackclackclackclackclack-ing all over the place.
Happy Transgender Day of Visibility to every Transgender person reading this!
Various Arts
