Joshua Woodson ♏

Military History & Gaming ~ SALVE • 伝説 •

[Tax @Taxington]

ranked in apex is a mental experiment to see how far someone can be pushed before insanity

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

Legend

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

205 years ago today, Napoleon Bonaparte died on a tiny British prison island in the middle of the South Atlantic. He was 51. He had ruled most of Europe. And he changed the world so thoroughly that you are still living inside the systems he built.

Start with the obvious one. The Napoleonic Code. He commissioned it in 1800, sat in on the drafting sessions personally, argued with the lawyers, and pushed it through in four years. Equality before the law. Property rights. Religious freedom. The end of feudal privilege. It is still the basis of civil law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, most of Latin America, Quebec, Louisiana, and chunks of the Middle East and Africa. About a third of the planet writes contracts using rules a Corsican artillery officer wrote between battles.

He sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 for 15 million dollars. Roughly four cents an acre. It doubled the size of the United States overnight. Without that deal there is no St. Louis, no New Orleans as an American city, no Lewis and Clark, no Manifest Destiny. The American century starts with Napoleon needing cash for a war.

He invaded Egypt in 1798 with an army and, weirdly, 167 scientists, mathematicians, and artists. They found the Rosetta Stone. That single slab is the reason we can read hieroglyphs at all. Egyptology as a field exists because Napoleon brought scholars to a war.

He built the Bank of France, which still runs French monetary policy. He created the lycée system that still educates French teenagers. He shoved the metric system across Europe at sword-point until it stuck. He emancipated the Jews of every territory he conquered, tearing down ghetto walls in Rome, Venice, Frankfurt. He abolished serfdom in Poland. He standardized road networks, civil registries, and tax codes that European governments still operate from.

And then there's the soldiering. He fought around 60 major battles and won most of them. Austerlitz, in 1805, against the combined Russian and Austrian empires, is still taught at West Point as one of the closest things to a tactically perfect battle ever fought. He was outnumbered, baited the enemy onto ground he had pre-selected, and broke them in a single afternoon. Three emperors took the field that morning. Only one walked off it on his own terms.

He slept four hours a night. He read constantly, dictated letters to four secretaries at the same time, and personally signed off on everything from cavalry boot specs to the seating chart at the Comédie-Française. Wellington, the man who finally beat him at Waterloo, was asked decades later who the greatest general in history was. He answered without hesitating. "In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon."

He lost, in the end, because he could not stop. Russia in 1812 swallowed his army whole. Six hundred thousand men marched in. Maybe a tenth came back. He abdicated in 1814, escaped from Elba, ruled France again for 100 days, and lost it all for good in a wheat field in Belgium in June 1815.

The British shipped him to St. Helena, a volcanic dot 1,200 miles off the African coast, and waited. He spent six years there dictating his memoirs, gardening, complaining about the dampness, and quietly rewriting his own legend so effectively that Europe spent the next century arguing about him.

He died on May 5, 1821, during a storm so violent it ripped up the willow tree he liked to read under. His last words trailed off into fever. France. The army. Joséphine.

Nineteen years later France brought him home. Two million people stood in the snow to watch the coffin go by.

He was a tyrant. He was a reformer. He started wars that killed somewhere between three and six million people. He also wrote the rulebook that a third of humanity still lives under.

Most people who try to conquer the world are forgotten inside a generation. Napoleon has been dead for 205 years and we are still arguing about him because we are still using his furniture.

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

@PylesAusten13 @CyberPunkCortes Clean af 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

@PylesAusten13 @Chaosxsilencer Peak gaming experience

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

So true 😂😂

[Wars @wars]

The military tank race was running smoothly���until a Russian tank turned the event into complete chaos.

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

💯

[Roman History @romanhistory1]

Today 49BC Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signaling the start of civil war. He was leading one legion, the Legio XIII Gemina.

This act of war on the Roman Republic by Caesar led to widespread approval amongst the Roman civilians, who regarded him as a hero. The historical records differ about which decisive comment Caesar made on crossing the Rubicon: one report is Alea iacta est (usually translated as "The die is cast").

[Daboy🕷 @Daboyui]

...like yea all of this is great in theory but bro 4 of these games have no info, 2 of them were announced in 2021 and we are still waiting, the one that just got announced is in early stages

Its really hard to be excited for SW games when we barely get anything from them

[Daniel Dami Biu @damiebi10]

This was Arkham Batman in live action

[Joshua Woodson ♏ @Stitch_H17]

Origins was goated

[Radec @realradec]

it's a crime that Batman: Arkham Origins never got a proper remaster like Asylum and City

[Pokemon Legends Shitpost @PLShitpost]

13 days

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

It's Game of Thrones and it's not really an argument. This show was a cultural juggernaut, every week the whole internet watched together, it was endlessly quoted, children were named after the characters, and no one brings it up anymore because the last season was so awful.

[Military History Now @MilHistNow]

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools."

— Napoleon Bonaparte, born on this day in 1769.

[culture jpeg @culturejpg]

Scarface (1983)