About Video Game Spinoffs

There's a special mindset that is needed for a video game IP to be able to branch out successfully into spin-offs, and unfortunately some of the best video game IP holders don't seem to have it, so I'm gonna lend them mine. 

The primary thing major studios seem to lack is a willingness to fail; you need to be willing to fail. Not all spinoffs are successful, and that's okay. It's hard to gauge the overlap between your IP's core fanbase and fans of the genre you're trying to get it into. And sometimes, that means you have to admit defeat. 

One of the reasons this ends up being such a pain for many modern game dev companies is because they generally produce live service games, so when they admit the game is a failure, the minority of fans that got into the game suddenly have it removed, so the live service resources could be reallocated elsewhere. This is why I think building an offline-only, or at least self-hosted, version of such games is a good idea, because then you can keep it up on marketplaces to hopefully make back your investment over time, and the people who do enjoy it can keep enjoying it. Live service games don't allow for this, and although many are profitable, many, many more are not. At this point, I think major developers need to swallow the bitter pill that live service games are not going to continue to be an endless well of profit, and reconsider building games that might actually have staying power beyond a few years instead. And yes, I am aware that there are live service games that have been profitable for decades; it's still a limited market, no one can get majority market share, and there's a bottom to that well, especially when the economy is getting more and more difficult to work in and therefore people want things they can pay for once and keep enjoying as opposed to things they need to regularly pay more for in order to continue using them. 

Another issue is that game development is an investment, and when you develop something truly new, that's a higher risk investment than developing another in a series that always sells millions of copies on release day. I completely understand that, I do, but the best games, the ones that are enjoyed for decades, touch people's lives in ways that matter, or keep people coming back over and over and over again were not games that were safe investments. Doom (as in the original 90's game, not the equally excellent more recent games) is still incredibly loved, but the idea of an FPS was completely foreign at the time. Undertale touched so many lives because of its complex storytelling, lovable characters, and interesting game mechanics. Stardew Valley was a single indie dev deciding to make the game they wanted to play, in a genre that was so heavily dominated by AAA studios that similar games from indie developers never took off. I can keep going, but you get the point. 

So, in hopes of inspiring some major devs, let me share a few ideas for spinoffs of beloved gaming IPs that I think would go over well. Just as an example, I'm going to use Bethesda Softworks IPs for this.  

The Elder Scrolls: 

Honestly, an offline mobile game similar to blades would probably be great, though it wouldn't sell a lot of copies. If you make a viable port to PC as well, it could make some money, but I would recommend using the coding and assets from blades as a jumping off point to save yourself some development time, and thus some costs. The actual mechanics were good, it was the fact that it could only be played online and required either continued monetary investment from the player and/or arbitrary waiting periods. I'd gladly pay $20 for a standalone with those mechanics, probably more than once so I can have it on PC and mobile. If you wanna make it more gimmicky (which, say what you want, can increase sales), lean in on procedural generation of the dungeons. 

A gimmicky genre of games that's become popular recently are the tidy-up style games, where you have a set space (usually a shop of some kind) and a bunch of object that have been thrown around and need to be put back together. One of the more popular ones is actually about a library. If you wanna make bank off of a lot of your neuro-spicy player base, make one of those but with the actual elder scrolls books. You can just use the book assets ported over from Skyrim and that would give us a lot to work with, and if you add in modding support to add more books, including adding text, as well as the ability to expand the library in some way (through mods or through an in-game building system), you could easily charge a good amount for it. If you wanna be able to bump it up to at least $20, add more assets from Skyrim to be put away: weapons, armor, even junk items. Give them the whole of Whiterun's shopping district to organize, or perhaps otherwise hidden levels of the College of Winterhold. Or, for once, use the Bard's college for bard things, like musical instruments, sheet music, and musical theory texts. Though, honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if someone is already working on a mod for Skyrim or Oblivion Remastered with this concept in mind. 

Games based on NPC jobs. One that I know would be heavily embraced by the fans would be a material gathering game, where you go out and get crafting materials, document them, prepare them if necessary, and sell them. So many really successful offline-only games have been built on this premise, with examples including Potioncraft, TCG Card Shop, Schedule I, and those mechanics are found in other hit games like Subnautica, No Man's Sky, and Stardew Valley. Blacksmith simulators have a decent popularity too. 

Fallout: 

Your minigames. Seriously, the hacking minigame, all of the holotape games, even the lockpicking minigame can be addicting. Throw those in a smaller format for cheap, especially if you can make it mobile, and people will gladly buy it as many times as we bought Skyrim, I promise. 

Weapons maintenance and modification. You'd be surprised how many people would just love to take apart the weapons from Fallout 4 and/or Fallout 76, clean them virtually, replace out broken parts, switch out modifications, etc. If you want to make the gameplay loop a bit more meaningful, have them sell fixed weapons to be able to buy lots of broken ones. If you want to tie it into the recent increase in focus on New Vegas, just make them Gun Runners, maybe even let them repair, upgrade, and modify that robot that sells the guns in the game. 

Starfield: 

Variable Gravity Shooting Gallery. Seriously. Imagine the sheer chaos of trying to hit targets that float and bounce around after the first time you hit them. 

Oh, and Poncle's survivor's-like collaborations are gonna make bank. If you have an IP that has lots of enemies and unique weapons that you can draw from, you might wanna see if you can collaborate with them. Every single survivors game and DLC they've put out has been incredibly fun and pretty popular from all I've seen. 

So, hope this helps. 

God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day. 

They're Moving Forward On Moving Backward Regarding The Rights Of Americans With Disabilities

Bellow you will find a few links. The first is to an article about a lawsuit through which Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to overturn precedent and agree that children with disabilities can be involuntarily institutionalized. They phrase it more nicely, something like that the federal law doesn't actually mandate integration of disabled kids in their community and schools, but without that integration, there is only one legal possibility: institutionalization. They can't go without schooling, that's against compulsory school attendance laws which they are not seeking to change as far as I can tell (my guess is because it gives them more control over poor families' kids, allowing them to accost, arrest, and brutalize minors for not being in a school building). If your choice is between you becoming a criminal or you surrendering your child to an institution, then it is forced institutionalization. 

The second is a link from a press release jointly from Veterans Affairs and the Department of Justice. They act like it's to improve care, but what it really does is allows the VA to send the DoJ a list of veterans who are homeless and have any history of disability, the DoJ can round them up, and then the DoJ will seek guardianship over the veterans to be handed to the government. Not to a family member; not to a social worker; not to a VSO; the government, who is the reason these veterans are disabled and homeless in the first place. Once that takes place, the veterans in question will lose all of their rights. Not just some of them, all of them. Their speech can be controlled, they are not allowed to join a well regulated militia or keep and bear arms, they are not allowed to control their own money, they are not allowed to deny medical care they don't want. All of this amounts to the same problem, especially when you consider the only places the government has to house these individuals are the shiny new detention centers they've been building all over the US: forced institutionalization of disabled veterans. 

The third is a link to a proposal from a currently sitting member of Congress to push towards federal designation of "extreme negative reactions to President Donald J. Trump" as a mental illness. Again, it's phrased more diplomatically, they want the NIH to "research" it, but they know that the hand picked leaders of the NIH would gladly declare it, as another sitting member of Congress put it, "an epidemic on the Left." And through that, since "extreme" is as vague and arbitrary as possible, they can declare anyone who isn't sufficiently loyal to Trump to be mentally ill, possibly even disabled as a result. 

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why I put all of these links together, because they're not separate. They've broadcast it for a decade now: the plan is to declare those likely to vote for their political opponents as mentally ill and take away their rights. And it's not something that's merely in the future. There's a fourth link, and it's to an article about an executive order being allowed to proceed to enforcement for this fall's election. What it does is it allows the USPS to decide who gets to vote by mail and who doesn't, with support of the DoJ. They claim its about affirming citizenship, but that has to be proven during the registration process to begin with. It's about the fact that the majority of people who vote using mail-in-ballots in swing states vote against Republicans, so they want to be able to stop those votes for being counted. And what's the #1 reason why someone votes using mail-in-ballots? Disability. 

They're coming first for the disabled, and then for those they have decided are disabled, and then for whoever else they want to. This is naked authoritarianism, and we're allowing it because they're doing so much so fast that we can't keep up. THe term for this purposeful technique is "flooding the zone," and yes, it's been openly admitted to by right-wing leaders and talking heads. 

I don't know what to tell you to do, other than vote this November. If you truly support taking away the rights of disabled children, disabled veterans, and more, then vote for the GOP candidate for each office. If you support maintaining those rights, including Constitutional rights, vote against them, and by that I mean vote for the democratic candidate. Yes, I know, I don't like either party, but one is actively trying to throw me and mine into a new version of insane asylums, and the other is just generally ineffective and corrupt. I can work with the latter. 

God bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day. 

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/20/nx-s1-5891791/disability-rights-community-living-integration-trump

https://news.va.gov/press-room/va-doj-sign-agreement-to-improve-care-for-nations-most-vulnerable-veterans/

https://davidson.house.gov/2025/5/rep-warren-davidson-introduces-the-trump-derangement-syndrome-tds-research-act-of-2025

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-move-forward-with-order-imposing-restrictions-on-ma/

Going Back To The Days Of Asylums By Killing Kids Slowly

Reporting suggests that, since there is no real evidence linking vaccines to autism, there will be a decree from on high (executive order) declaring the link to be true. Let me explain why this is a problem, along with a few other things. 

First, let's look at why that narrative is so compelling: autism is not well known, and the unknown is terrifying to the closed mind, and scary even to those who look forward to exploring it. It's so terrifying, apparently, that parents are more willing to watch their children die a slow, painful, and fully preventable death rather than risk maybe them being autistic. 

I am autistic. I have many loved ones who are autistic. I'm not going to lie and say it's easy being autistic in a world made for and by allistic people (allistic is merely a term referring to the portion of the population that is not on the autism spectrum, just to clarify). It sucks sometimes, just like living as a disabled veteran sucks when I have to live in a nation built by and for able bodied civilians with billions of dollars in wealth and those who can make them money (who, incidentally, are also able bodied civilians). I am reminded regularly that I am not truly welcome in the country I sacrificed everything for, everything I knew I could and then some. 

Children are dying of measles for the first time in decades, with, prior to the Texas outbreak, there not even being cases recorded in the US for nearly ten years. Why is that happening? Because the MMR vaccine, which resulted in the near extinction of measles as a disease throughout multiple countries, was once erroneously linked to autism by a man who was seeking to patent a competing vaccine. He just wanted a reason to fearmonger against the MMR vaccine so his vaccine would get more support. And don't take my word for it, look it up. 

The head of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already made statements that he believes that autism is fully environmentally caused (the genetic component is well documented, so no, not fully environmentally caused), has advocated for forced inpatient treatment for people with a variety of psychological conditions including autism, and has even gone so far as to propose camps for us. Not fun summer camps, the kind we were put in alongside a few other groups back when a scientist named Asperger decided which of us could be useful to society and which were just dead weight to be discarded. 

On top of this, the VA and DoJ have begun the work of rebuilding the old insane asylum system. They've already signed agreements to start picking up disabled veterans off the streets, drag them into court, have a judge sign all of their rights away to the government (this would be considered a guardianship), and incarcerate us for the crime of homelessness and psychological abnormality. Not illness, not disease, abnormality. Because believe it or not, that's how psychological conditions are actually decided on (something that is regularly discussed in the psychological community and may see change in our lifetime). 

This administration has made it very, very clear that they intend to revoke the rights of anyone who is not useful to them as much as they can. They have revoked the right to due process repeatedly; they revoked Miranda rights; they revoked the right to free speech; they revoked the inalienable rights found in the Declaration of Independence; granted, most of these were on a case-by-case basis, but once it's done for one person, it can be done to any. That's why the phrase "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere" keeps coming up throughout history. Every time we give the government the authority to revoke the rights of any individual, we give it the authority to revoke ours as well. 

So, back to the point at hand, why is this reported executive order such a problem? Because it becomes legal fact, and since autism is officially recognized only in a negative light and is officially treated as a curable disease rather than a lifelong condition, it means they can seek to prosecute parents and doctors for vaccinating children. More children will die. More families will be broken. More parents will never be able to be whole again. More marriages will be destroyed. 

And all because some people think that their child turning out like me, or Anthony Hopkins, or Greta Thunburg, etc. is more terrifying to them than the possibility of watching their child die of measles, or worse, forcing other families to watch as their children die because vaccination works best in groups, not on the individual level. 

We spent decades after the end of the asylum system last time just trying to reduce the stigma against talking about behavioral health issues, let alone getting diagnosis and treatment. And this addlepated feckless moron and his equally deranged cronies want to drag us all the way back to the days of frontal lobotomies as treatment for psychosis. 

If you love anyone who might possibly have a mind that is outside the norm, you really should be contacting your congresspersons about this, and speaking out about it. Because soon, those of us who have these conditions are likely to have our rights taken away, and even as it stands, most people don't listen to us anyway. It has to come from those that seem normal, because they just think we're "crazy" and write us off entirely. 

God bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.

A Few Things I Learned The Hard Way

I'm just old enough now to be considered to have some real life experience, so let's pretend I do. Lemme share with you some things I've learned the hard way over the last decade or so. 

First, there are never enough tears to shed. Crying is not defeat, it's not a sign of weakness, it's not something you really should reserve as a weapon of last resort. Crying is literally one of the tools our mind and body has, whether you believe that is because God gave it to us or because our distant ancestors randomly developed it, to deal with the fact that we are, in fact, finite beings dealing with thoughts and emotions that exist in a near infinite quantity, variety, and intensity. Cry often, if you can. If you have your time to cry when it's safe to do so, you may have the strength to hold back tears when it's not safe. 

Second, sometimes we just can't cry for the "right" things. There are so many tragedies that occur in this world, in our lives, in the news, in countries we've never seen nor ever will, and even in our own back yards. There is a constant barrage of things to cry about, legitimately heartbreaking things, and especially right now, when we seem to be surrounded by horrible things, day in and day out, it's sometimes just too much to cry about; the tears won't come. I have a little trick that I do when I realize that I can't cry about what bothers me now: I go back and cry about things that I cried about before but never really changed. 

In the last decade, I have lost my father, two friends, and a cat that had been in my family, that I'd known, for well over half my life at the time (it's now almost exactly half my life, as she died at age 18, and I'm now 36). On top of that, I lost so much of myself, so much of what I had hoped for. I'm not gonna bore you with a full inventory, but, in my experience, by the time you're an "adult," you've cried enough that you can remember something to cry about. And crying about something old, at least for me, helps me process the emotions of what I feel like I should be crying about today. 

There are tools I use to cry about old things. Songs, sometimes old videos, sometimes random audio files, pictures, etc. If you've known me for a long time, you may know some of these song titles, and you may even know why they break my heart, and despite that, why I still listen to them from time to time:

"Letters from War" 

"His Theme" 

"Christmas Shoes"

"Happy Birthday" (not that one, this one's a rap song)

"Cinderella" 

"Butterfly Kisses" 

Third, the pain of grief doesn't actually go away; you just learn to live with it. That sounds like a bad thing, but in a way, it's like whoever or whatever you lost is still with you, even in their absence. You'll never fully know the size or shape of the hole you'll leave behind in the lives of people who you've affected, hopefully the people you love. But when you lose them, you'll know the exact size, shape, location, depth, and searing pain of the hole they left behind. It's less like a wound that will scar over and eventually heal, and closer to cobblestone; the hole from a missing stone is always there, but you learn to tread carefully around it, until you sometimes just need to sit down next to the hole and remember what was lost, and why it hurts so much to have lost it. 

Finally, pretend to be the person you want to be. This is probably one of the most frustrating and annoying pieces of advice that I've ever gathered, and take it with a massive grain of salt, but if you use it this one way, it can help a lot: when you're in a situation and you're not sure what to do, ask yourself what that person, the person you want to be, would do, and then do it, or as close to it as you can manage without harming yourself or anyone around you. The person I want to be is kind, caring, and willing to help others know they're not alone. Which is why I'm writing all this BS for you to read. 

If you bothered reading all of this, do me one solid favor: sometime within the next day, do something for yourself that you wouldn't have otherwise; give yourself a kindness that you would have otherwise been denied. Doesn't need to be huge, maybe it's just making yourself a cup of tea you haven't had in a long time because drinking the same few flavors for the last month has just gotten too boring, or maybe it's changing into clean, dry clothes when you'd normally just tough it out, or something else equally mundane. Just, do something kind for yourself. I believe that every act of kindness we perform, even for ourselves, brings more kindness into the world, and makes it a tiny bit better than it would have been otherwise as a result. 

Anyway, I've wasted enough of your time for tonight. God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.

Purely Hypothetical Thoughts About The Civil Liberties We've Been Losing

 This is purely hypothetical, but let's do a thought experiment. 

If you wanted to be able to create a system in which you are allowed to basically put everyone but you and your peers under constant surveillance, and get them to thank you for taking their right to privacy away, how would you do it?

Here's how I'd go about it. First, I'd start undermining any sort of assistance there might be in raising kids. I'd create a mythology that the "nuclear family" should be the only family unit, much like was done to sell suburban homes, which in turn was to sell automobiles. So I'd probably use that.

That would make it so that grandparents and other extended family have little to no role in raising kids without there needing to be conversations about schedules and driving time and other logistical issues that don't really show up in multi-generational housing or in close knit communities.

Then, I'd start to make it harder to get any other support for raising kids. I'd cut funding to schools so that the environment becomes toxic. I'd cut funding to daycare just to make it too expensive to use for most people. I'd make sure that any working parent has to work even more for childcare.

Then, I'd force wages to stagnate, maybe by creating a tax structure and monetary policy that so heavily benefits the hyper-rich that they can literally work people to death and it be viewed as positive. I'd even create a myth that letting them keep more money would cause wealth to trickle down.

With this, I'd make sure that the hyper rich, large equity firms, and foreign corporations have more access to the residential housing market than actual residents, making housing prices so high that it takes an entire full time job to barely cover it with nothing to spare. Why? So they work more.

Having kids would then require you to be working multiple jobs and/or overtime, at least 60 hours a week, and all that time you have to pay someone else to be with your kids or you have to hope they do well in the extremely underfunded public school that you send them to every day. It never ends.

Meanwhile, I'd make sure that my peers, the super rich and powerful, have full access to everything I'm cutting off from the working class; they'd have access to high quality housing, good childcare, and well funded schools, even their public schools as funding could be based on property taxes.

Then, if a new technology came out that allowed people to have their very lives quantified and surveilled constantly, I'd make sure there was a way to heavily monetize that, a way that would be out of reach for the working class except to become middle men in an absolutely broken system.

I'd make sure that the most popular ways to access that technology were addictive, and used tools to actually make your quality of life worse by using them, increasing stress, decreasing access to good information, and flooding users with misinformation constantly so they can never tell what's true.

This is part of where that lack of funding for education gets to play double duty, because since I'd have defunded education except for the rich so much, none of the working class would have ready access to the education necessary (like epistemology) to be able to assess information on their own.

Then, I'd build entire companies that market directly to children but allow unvetted adults onto the platforms, wait for the inevitable and horrific crimes to occur, and then use that to justify getting the government to tie everyone's currently partially anonymous data with their government ID num.

Of course, that would be sacrificing children in the most horrific way possible, but we're looking to build a surveillance state here. I'd set up all these different things that would be the government taking away people's privacy and autonomy and label it all with "think of the children!"

Oh, and I'll have set up a cultural construct that makes parenthood equivalent to godhood, making child abuse ridiculously common in the nation I'm overseeing, so common that it's still part of our cultural media and treated as either humor or justice, punishing bad kids; doesn't need to make sense.

That way, anyone who has education and/or experience raising kids can't tell the parents that they need to parent, because "how dare they tell you how to raise your kids!?" I'd ensure the news covers juvenile crimes heavily, alongside the horrific crimes above, so everyone is scared for and of kids.

Then, I declare that I can fix it all with some new laws. Laws that make it so that you can't buy what you want because kids can't have it; laws that make it so that you have to give your government ID number to corporations to be sold with your data; laws that take away your liberties one by one.

And then I'd do just that. I've already made it so that parents will literally fight and die to support these laws because they never had access to the time or resources to learn that I'm lying to their faces, since none of these laws would address root causes at all. But I'd run into a problem.

See, I might be stuck in a nation that, say, had a court case that enshrined the right to privacy to include freedom from unnecessary search and seizure, but also freedom from government interference with personal choices. I'd need to get that overturned, so I'd get millions to fight for that.

How would I do that? Focus on the wrong part of that court case and turn that into something demonic, sell it to religious leaders who benefit from their "flock" being too undereducated to identify a scam, and spend decades getting the highest court in the land stacked with corrupt judges I control.

Once I get that overturned, I'd have some of my peers in the ruling class make a big deal about how it's all about that wrong part of the court case, and declare that they'll fix it by passing laws that don't actually enshrine the right to privacy, and then they never pass the laws anyway.

See, it's all basic slight of hand just scaled up; I'm making them look in the wrong direction so I can pick their pocket. Make them think the right to privacy only matters about one subject, and then pass laws that revoke their right to privacy when they use that technology I mentioned earlier.

On top of that, any technology that powerful would almost certainly become necessary to daily living, so by passing these laws, like, say, requiring all general use operating systems to store and transmit that government ID data as "age verification" (yeah, a lot of people will buy that).

I might even write the law so that it doesn't technically require government ID, but I'd made it a fine, so that profit-driven companies that might be held liable will be forced by their shareholders to go with the most extreme version just to be safe. I might even coordinate this globally.

And then I just have to wait until enough horrible things are happening at once to quietly pass these laws and rules and regulations that take away freedom without people talking about it, because they're more important things going on, like say, a budding dictatorship in a superpower republic.

But the one thing I would hope no one figures out is that the ruling class are all in on this because that dictatorship needn't be the way they control our lives and work us to death; they can do it through surveillance, restriction of access to resources, and continued toxic fiscal policy.

In short: I'd have built the system and situation that the State of California, theocratic organizations like Collective Shout, government ranging from the UK and former commonwealth nations, the EU, and more are using to sell you that to protect children, they have to own your entire life.

There's a reason I don't want Newsom to be the next Democratic presidential candidate: because he's not progressive; he talks like one, but his policies are that of a neoliberal, which is a form of conservative that figured out that the working class will rise up if conditions get bad enough.

He signed the Digital Age Assurance Act either knowing that the only way developers could meet that requirement and the requirements from Visa/Mastercard, the EU, the UK, and Australia is to integrate government ID systems into the verification and allow that to be tied to user data or blind to it.

Now, I can't say for certain whether or not this conglomeration of a perfect storm to take away privacy and autonomy rights from people all over the world was planned, but I can tell you that the people who benefit from these laws will be able to break them for their own data; it's always a fine.

If a fine is the only punishment for breaking a law, that is a law that applies exclusively to working class people. The ruling class can either use their wealth and influence to avoid being charged in the first place, or pay the meager fine out of their petty cash. The punishment doesn't harm them.

Now, a lot of this is legitimately just coincidence. The myth of the nuclear family used to sell the suburbs and keep people out of multi-generational housing was done well before anyone would have come up with this idea, for instance. Same with the decades-long plan to overturn Roe v Wade.

But it's clear that these laws to "Save the Children" won't affect members of the ruling class, a massive percentage of which clearly were either aware of or participated in Epstein's crimes or similar ones, I think we're being lied to about why they're targeting working class civil liberties.

They're not protecting us, or our children, from the most vile ones, they are the most vile ones. So why are we letting them take away our rights to privacy, autonomy, access to information, and more? 

Because they think we're too ignorant to know better, and what scares me is they might be right.

So I'm doing what I can do, which is point out what I've pointed out here. If you read this far, thank you and I apologize for being so wordy, but that's who I am. 

Try to do something good for yourself today, some kindness you wouldn't otherwise. It literally makes the world a better place.

God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day. 

Hard Truths I Don't Wanna Talk About But Have To

Note: this was originally formatted to be posted to Bluesky, but it got really long, so I posted it here. That's why it looks like I somehow typed it out on sticky notes. 

Let me go ahead and say up front that I fully expect to receive a lot of backlash for this. There may even be threats against my life, and there's a non-zero chance that this will result in my psychological conditions being exacerbated to levels I can't actually survive. Yet, I must speak. 

First, I'm gonna recommend that anyone who feels like that they might want to get involved with any kinetic action in the foreseeable future read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein. It contains a layout of a proper revolutionary setup, including some analysis of the "why"s involved

Then, I suggest you do some cursory reading on revolutions in history, both successful and unsuccessful. Note how few of the ones that sacrificed the element of surprise as well as exposed all their members to public scrutiny before they were ready to act failed. It's a lot.

Next, I need to spell out some hard truths. 

Calls to violence will not produce the results you want if you want to end the fascism.

Note: "calls to violence." If you did the reading I recommend, you understand why I chose those words. 

I'm an infantry veteran; I know violence is a tool.

The reasons why calls to violence result in failure are numerous, but two are particularly important:

One: You expose yourself and all your comrades to intense scrutiny and surveillance. You don't want your enemy watching you until after you've begun to act.

Two: You lose the element of surprise. 

To be an effective tool for positive change, violence must be controlled, carefully directed, and focused on practical outcomes rather than retribution. If you fail to keep those in mind, at best you create a decades long insurgency which will eventually be wiped out. You will lose. We will lose.

Authoritarian regimes don't need excuses only once they've fully cemented their power, and believe it or not, the current authoritarian regime in the US is actually farther from that today than they were 10 months ago; they're losing their power base and they know it.

The actions already being undertaken, many of them including partial cooperation with some elected officials and organizations that have proven they serve the community rather than the federal executive, are working. The SS cosplayer is being reassigned, they're paying to cool down rhetoric.

Why? Because in most nations today, the governing mechanic known as democracy still has much more power than they want you to know. If they could actually make your vote and your voice useless, they wouldn't be paying billions to buy or silence them. The narrative that it doesn't matter helps them.

That hasn't changed; all that's changed is the tools they use are slightly different. Instead of massacres like Tulsa or assassinations, they use voter suppression laws, destruction of education, propaganda, poverty/long work hours, etc., all under the color of law. It's not better, just different.

And yet they fail; they fail a lot. NYC has a mayor who is actively and visibly progressive, so much so that his in-person service to the community has become a meme among many who support him. WI has a progressive leaning state Supreme Court for the first time in my lifetime, possibly longer. 

And you know what the pivotal factor was for each of those victories for us, for the working class? Working class voter turnout, especially among marginalized groups that are constantly being fed propaganda that their vote doesn't count. Clearly, it did and it does. They're scared of our votes.

Yet that's not enough. Electoralism is the least effective method of activism for the left. So we need to use other methods. Not just violence, but protests, boycotts, targeted campaigns against bad actors to shame, discredit, or even destroy them socially and economically, all legal and effective.

And yes, there come times in history where violence becomes a viable tool for positive change, but it's important to avoid accelerationism, because the people who pay the price during violent upheavals are the poorest, the most vulnerable, the people we need most to protect. The cost is always high.

The highest casualties in any war are civilians. Not soldiers, not politicians, not even journalists and other third parties in the battlefield. It is up to us to prepare so that such casualties are reduced as much as possible. Prep water treatment, long lasting food, shelter and repair tools, etc.

If you want to go to war, prepare to defend peace. That doesn't just mean get ready to fight, it means get ready to help people who want no part in the war, no matter the reason. They're innocent, and they're going to be the ones paying the price if we screw all of this up. So be ready to help them.

Finally, I need to point out some things a lot of people do not want to admit: winning the slow way sucks ass, it feels like injustice, it costs far too much, and I don't know anyone that actually wants to do it. Yet, it produces much better results, in regards to both cost and lasting power. 

Also, we're not alone this time. We have support from people and organizations that have never properly supported us before, and some of them are willing to literally stand with us. The National Guard is a state and local militia; their existence is a check on federal governmental power. 

We've seen local authorities, state leaders, political organizations across the sociopolitical spectrum, and more finally provide a little support. Don't blindly trust any of them, obviously, but it's a good sign when even the NRA can see when the authoritarian goons have gone too far.

And this leads to the last harsh truth: violence needs to be our last resort for a reason, because we are getting much more support this time around in part because we refused to let agitators turn our protests into cover for rioting, vandalism, and other crimes. We need that. 

If you want to live in a country that relies on democracy, a country in which the voice of the people matters more than the voices of politicians and agitators, you need to win more people over. You alienate too much of the populace and the only way you win is by becoming authoritarian yourself. 

Most of the time, after a collapse of an empire, what replaces it is a significantly more authoritarian and often much more conservative power structure. This is born out in history time and time again, and if you think this is bad, imagine if it was replaced by a real theocracy with no democracy. 

That's what you risk when you go kinetic: millions of innocent lives lost, a forced need for authoritarianism no matter who takes over, and the very high likelihood that we end up with either a hyper-conservative theocracy or an overt oligarchy, all without any level of democracy. 

Why? Because the people who can weather the storm the best still come out on top, and right now, that's pretty much just the obscenely rich and/or corrupt religious leaders. The only way to change that is to ensure that there are effectively zero casualties, which is impossible in kinetic warfare.

"The soldier, above al other people, prays for peace," is something that I wish were more true, but for many of us, it is quite true. There is nothing I want more than a nation where everyone can thrive, where poverty means you get chicken instead of steak, not that you're homeless. 

I do not believe I will ever live in such a country; if one does exist in my lifetime, it won't be mine. But I will continue to do anything I can to push us towards that end. I was promised "liberty and justice for all" when I signed up for service, and I will die before I accept less than that. 

That all being said, there may come a day where violence is the only viable option left, and should that day arrive before I expire, my intent is to help those in need, not become a hinderance. Good militaries do that for their service members, because it lets them fight harder on the front lines.

But for now, despite everything, including the murders perpetrated by ICE, what we've done so far has had a significant effect. We haven't won the war yet, but we're making headway. We've convinced a majority of surveyed Americans to support the cause at least a bit, and that's not nothing. 

Keep up the fight, but keep things holstered for now. Take the time we've bought to learn more, prepare more, and build community support networks. Even if we win without violence, all that work will make us stronger, and we'll have more power to make changes that help everyone. 

Some good resources for you:

"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein

Belle of the Ranch on Youtube (leftist news channel, no sensationalism, incredibly good analysis)

https://archive.org/details/military-manuals (lots of good info here)