January 26 marks the colonisation of Australia and the grief, heartache and pain that this has inflicted on First Nations people for generations. It is also a moment to recognise the ongoing survival of the oldest existing culture in the world today.
On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip raised the British flag at Warrane, marking the beginning of British colonial rule on Gadigal land. This date, originally commemorated as Foundation Day, has evolved into Australia Day. However, this day also represents the start of the invasion, suffering, and dispossession for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The true history of these lands spans over 60,000 years, far preceding colonial times.
When British settlers began colonizing Australia in 1788, between 750,000 and 1.25 Aboriginal Australians are estimated to have lived there. Soon, epidemics ravaged the island’s indigenous people, and British settlers seized Aboriginal lands.
Though some Aboriginal Australians did resist—up to 20,000 indigenous people died in violent conflict on the colony’s frontiers—most were subjugated by massacres and the impoverishment of their communities as British settlers seized their lands.
Between 1910 and 1970, government policies of assimilation led to between 10 and 33 percent of Aboriginal Australian children being forcibly removed from their homes. These “Stolen Generations” were put in adoptive families and institutions and forbidden from speaking their native languages. Their names were often changed.
For many Aboriginal and Torres Trait Islanders, January 26 is a day of mourning, symbolising the loss of their ancestors, their land, and their rights. It recalls the devastating impact of the Frontier Wars, the ongoing trauma, and the systemic injustices that continue to this day, including disproportionate rates of Black deaths in custody, health inequities, and the desecration of sacred sites. Celebrating on this day overlooks these painful realities and the resilience of First Nations peoples in the face of ongoing colonisation.
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The truth about white Australia: The genocide few talk about
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The killing times: the massacres of Aboriginal people Australia must confront
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Indigenous kids are still being removed from their families, more than ever before
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Hear me out, gamers:
What if there was a game...
With an open world...
Where you could gather resources and craft items...
They're so many and I feel like they're systems are shallow. I remember as a kid really wanting survival games and now we're bursting at the seams with them and they aren't what I wanted.
Notrium was the best and only good survival game, and it was completely free, had interesting lore, and was open source so anyone could mod it
Oh, looks like it’s on Steam!
I've come to the conclusion that I don't like massive open world games much.
Tears of the Kingdom was what burned me out on them. Too much quantity over quality.
Take a look at Gothic and the first Risen. They're open worlds, but fairly compact and everything is hand made with care. There's a lot of Eastern European Game Jank (EEGJ), but if you can adapt to that the wandering around, fightin stuff, and looting stuff is fun.
Those seem intriguing. Yeah I hope we can get a return to more compact and detailed open worlds instead of gigantic worlds with repetitive and shallow tasks.
I like it when they actually capitalize on having a huge world. Satisfactory's train logistics don't really make any sense unless the world is enormous. Flying around with an Elytra in Minecraft only works well because there are stretches of thousands of blocks for you to maneuver over. But when they just use the open world as a place to dump a lot of points of interest to laboriously churn through (and fast travel between!) it just feels like a tedious version of just having separate areas.
For millions of years humans wandered around central eastern Africa gathering resources and crafting items. At the end of the day all we want to do is walk upright, pick up food, dig holes (which might have food in them), talk and joke with your friends, and not get eaten by lions. Agriculture came out of goddamn nowhere and we were not and still are not adapted to it.
Like my entirely serious, I am a real anthropologist take on the enduring success of the survival crafting genre is that it let's people who are trapped in boxes and only leave their box to drive to another box to do mind numbing repetitive tasks get out of their box and go wander around looking for cool rocks and interesting things to eat, and some very high percentage of humans still, at a very deep level, find that natural and soothing.