I played an enjoyed this game. I agree with a lot of your critique but some of it can be hand waved away. A lot of the diversity are mostly fleshed out characters, that don't fall into generic tokens. The truther camp, whilst treated with some scorn by the MC he does come around to some of his rhetoric and by the end that guy is a firm ally that sends men to help you in the final. I agree with the old religious guy being a bit of a nut that is disappointing. His initial plan is great, taking the fight to the zombies to retake earth and marshaling a militia to do so is super interesting, but then Spoilers ahead his plan turns into creating an arc to hide in to live out rhe apocalypse is a but silly and on the nose. The secondary villain is hilarious, a wealthy college frat boy pretending to be gangster and dressing and acting like a black rapper. The first main villain being a crazy, tortured ex bike gang member going feral in the apocalypse was honestly a far better villain than the rest and should have been the end game antagonist. Him or the dodgy government that come and go.
A good review though and I agree with all your gameplay analysis. It was very generic with a few standout mechanics that made it enjoyable.
I've been playing Frostpunk 2, which made me nostalgic for the original Frostpunk so I've been playing both. And between that I've been playing some classic Total wars, Empire, Napoleon and Shogun
Other people have already pointed out the rediculous statement regarding pangea, I'll only comment on the fossil record aspect. You can't really rely on a fossil record with hominids because we tend to favour more temperate and forested climates which don't preserve bodies very well (there are obviously certain situations such as bogs and peaty soils where this is the opposite, and incredibly lucky situations in which a body is quickly buried under a lot of sediment). So you have an abundance of preserved fossil evidence of hominids in dryer climates such as North Africa, but very little outside, which might not reflect the reality of the situation.
The French king wanted money, and he used torture to gain false confessions. In every other country where arrests were made the Templars confessed their innocence, and even in France when Papal authorities questions the imprisoned Knights virtually all of them went back on their confessions. There was a Papal Schism at the time so the Pope was weak and under the influence of the King of France, so ultimately he had to go along with the Templar persecution despite it being very flimsy evidence. There were basically no executions outside of France, only house arrests and members being allowed to swap membership to a different order. There's a lot to say about the Templars but all the conspiracy stuff about their secret beliefs and the grail and so on is just made up fantasy.
I agree, a very good book. I find the ending to be slightly disappointing but not to the extent it ruins the whole experience. The supernatural horror and suspense building up as they travel through a wartorn and plague ridden France is amazing
My issue with this is that you have an orchestra of I'm not sure how many, all working in unison, no one person more instrumental than the other. And then you have the conductor, important, but faced away from the audience because his role is not one that distracts from the music.
Then you have some random guy. Absolutely no contribution to the art being performed except his own narcissistic view of his himself, flailing around like he is the show and not that of the art being performed.
I very briefly worked at cineworld ( like 3 months whilst between contracts ) and we had a red carpet debut screening of Noah, so he attended with some other cast and crew to introduce the movie. His agent made us buy in a specifically large amount his favourite australian drink which we dont usually sell, and he didnt buy a single one. He was rude to all the staff, started smoking indoors, when asked not to, we even opened up a fire exit, he didnt go outside just smoked in the private fire escape. Generally a shit night to work the bar as himself and all the crew were arrogant fucks.
On the contrary I met most of the Welsh rugby team whilst working in a different bar part time (between contracts again) and they were the nicest people I've ever met, even cleared their own table of glasses and drinks before they left.
I only skimmed the text from one of the books I have on spain and got it a little wrong :
"The Society's founder and its first Superior General Ignatius Loyola came from a converso family and that he had wished he had been Jewish to have the honor of being from the same race as Jesus and the Virgin Mary."
Reads to me that he may not have been a converso himself but definitely from a family of them, and had sympathy with Jews.
During and after the reconquista, the Castillian and Argonese monarchy banned Judaism and forced them all to convert to Catholicism or face deportation. This was one of the reasons for the founding of the Inquisition, to ensure the 'Converso's' were being truthful with their conversions. The founder and superior of the Jesuit order was a converso, and had secretly remained faithful to Judaism. The Jesuits eventually started banning converso's after pressure from the Castillian monarchy, but a large chunk of its missionaries were of jewish origin.
I've seen fire arrows used in person, (They have a viking festival in Yorvic, and they used to have a boat burning with a effigy of a dead king before health a safety put an end to it), and there is some written and artistic evidence of them, but they were very specialised (and expensive) arrow tips. You're right though that the flame would go it if the bow is fully drawn and loosed at full speed, so I can only see their use being in ceremonial (boat burnings for instance) or sieges of wooden fortifications where the goal is to set fire to things, not kill targets and you cant use the full tension of the bow and keep the flame alive.
I like shadiversity, but I struggle with his stuff occasionally. Hes a very eager amateur, and gets a lot wrong, not as much as he gets right, but theres obvious gaps in his knowledge.
Swarthy just means darker. And in a region where parts of the country dont experience daylight for a month every year people are going to be very white, so anyone slightly darker than them will be 'swarthy'. The vikings also raided as far as the Mediterranean and even Greenland, so they would come home pretty tanned.
Theres descriptions of "swarthy" Vikings that some claim to mean black or tanned, but this description is often used to refer to the Rus or Sami peoples who lived the East and sometimes integrated with the Norsemen and Danes. It just means they have a ruddy complexion compared to the super pale Northmen
This. The Western Empire went through an eerily similar series of crisis' as the west faces today. Mass immigration, foreigners seizing the highest mantle of government and ruling against the interests of the Empire, a corrupt and bloated ruling elite, suburban and city squalor, huge inflation resulting in the breakdown of industry. Weak military rulers and a slackening of the legions, even ( if you believe in it) climate change with a lot of Romes wine economy becoming infertile with lowering temperatures, Religious tensions and a disregard for tradition, even a transgender Emperor before it was vogue.
I'm reading "The Bothers of Gwynedd Quartet". It's a single volume collection of a four part series by Ellis Peter's, the pen name of Edith pargeter. Its fictionalised account of the life of the last true native born Prince of Wales Llywellyn ap Gruffyd and the struggles he had trying to unify Wales against the English and the politicking of his own family. I'd highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in medieval history. It's well researched, and from an English author it's very patriotic towards Wales. Plus men are men, women are women and God is great.
The author has a few classics, "A bloody field by Shrewsbury" is a great battle novel, and she had a long running series of Medieval crime dramas following a Benedictine monk called Cadfael solving murders with 'the Anarchy' as a backdrop.
You will have to link me to something corroborating that statement as I couldnt find anything like that. All my knowledge of the continuation war was that Finnland was very hands off, not wishing to fully engage and generally only capturing territory lost in the winter war. Hitler was generally exacerbated by the Finns reluctance to fully commit and push beyond their established borders (they did send troops into land never claimed by Finland in the north but this was the only incident I could find). Further the leningrad front was under German command including all Finnish forces and the Northern front, including German forces was under Finnish command.
And even if what you say is true and Mannerheim was heavily involved in the direct siege of Leningrad, rather than just cutting off Russian access to the Borth of the city, I'd be hesitant to call a siege of a major Russian city (it's old capital, bearing the name of the founder of the soviet state no less) a war crime in the same way as the deliberate targeting and murder of civilians is a war crime
Egypt was invaded by the Kushites (Nubians) who were sub saharan, they ruled for about 100 years before being defeated by the Assyrians. So one black dynasty of about of 33 to rule over Egypt....
Shit man, I was watching this feeling all comfy for a rural way of life watching an old man live a good life on a farm, similar to Clarkson. Now I'm a bit depressed realising this man is a modern Cincinnatus and we will never again see his like again in politics...
Not just this, but the humans were forced into this universe by the conjunction of the spheres, they were an oppressed people who were able to rapidly breed and out compete their oppressors to become the dominant species. The elves are doing everything they an to try and reclaim their power and would absolutely eradicate humanity if they could. Even the 'good' ones
It's basically the same situation. Our knowledge and understanding of human history outside of Europe, and a few exceptions like Japan, are totally lacking because those places are dangerous shitholes. You cpuldnt take an archaological team to Syria or Iraq to investigate ancient Babylonians because its honestly too dangerous, and suggesting there was history before Mohammed would get your ass killed out there. If it wasnt for the British Empire and its stabilising influence on the regions it controlled and a few rich English eccentrics who splashed their cash on digging up old and rare things, we would know virtually nothing of the ancient world outside of Europe.
I left mainly because there was no money in the field. Lots of contact work that dried up in the winter or during economic hardships so it was a stressful career to make work financially.
In terms of finds, my most interesting dig was working for the National Museum of Serbia tracking down paleolithic sites along the Danube, we were trekking up mountains with local guides taking us to caves that hadn't been used since Tito and his rebels used them to fight the Germans in ww2, and taking core samples, then if we found anything interesting we would do a full excavation. Coolest thing we found in a cave in Montenegro was a fully articulated Auroch head and spine. Aurochs were an ancestor to modern cows but about twice the size and horns nearly 2 metres in length, this thing was a beast to look at. Not very significant but coolest thing to look at.
Most important find would be at ham hill in Somerset. The place is a huge hill fort dating to the bronze age, we found a series of grain pits, most were empty but one had been filled with human remains along with a beautifully polished stone axe which are super rare. They believe the grain pits when not used for grain storage would be symbolically used in burials because of their association with rebirth and life. So the bodies weren't dumped in a hole but carefully placed there with their prized belongings for rebirth in the afterlife.
I used to be an archaeologist over 10 years ago now, and this has been slowing taking over the field since the 60's. It used to be that we used to study the differences and traits of cultures that inhabited certain areas. For example in the British isles we would take the varying styles and designs in buildings, pottery and clothing, etc.. to give distinct names to the people of different eras and looking at the influences from elsewhere for changes in designs when they occured, we used to take it too far and before advancements in genetic research it was believed that wave upon wave of invasions or migrations would replace ethnic groups, e.g The beaker peoples, Celtic, Saxon and a viking Invasions, the first three of which have since been largely disproven. This all focused on material remains so whenever something new or distinct appeared it was big news. Around the 60s there was a wave of theory know as 'New Archaeology' which I'm convinced was just a front for Communism taking over the field, which shifted away from great events, places, people in history and focused on the hidden lives of normal people, the interconnectivity of societies and so on. All of this wasnt a bad thing in theory for the field but the manner it was wielded meant that distinct finds would be destroyed or ignored, and inconvenient evidence contrary to 'New Archaeological' theory would be quietly shelved, and archaeologist who published contrarian opinions would lose all credibility.
It's one of the reasons I left the field, besides there being no money in it, was that it felt like a lot of private digs were setting out to prove a theory and fitting the evidence to suit it rather than letting the evidence and data points speak for themselves. I even saw entire periods or prehistory just refused to be investigated because it touched upon modern taboos, for example early human evolution and the genetic differences between races. A lot of evidence is starting to discredit the out of africa theory and instead suggest that humans evolved separately and differently globally from a far more distant ape relative than previously believed. Aboriginal peoples are essentially a completely different species to Western Caucasians, sharing wildly different genetics. They share a much closer genetic makeup to the denisovan hominins who were thought to have gone extinct around the time of the Neanderthals, where as Western Europeans can often share up to 20% of our genetics to Homo Neanderthalis which is none existent outside of Caucasians.
When this was all first discovered it was massive news and had articles with every Archaological magazine and national geographic etc... now it's been essentially memory holed and you have to seriously dig deep, ironically, online to find any articles on it
Shit man, I'd help you with this sounds awesome.
I used to be an archaeologist, honestly the idea we went around stealing artifacts is plain bollocks, the vast majority were purchased, and the few we just took were legitimately saved from destruction. Take the Rosetta stone for example, arguably the most important discovery in Egyptian archaeology, it had been taken from its temple by the mamuluks and used as a building stone in Fort Julien, then discovered by the French during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign then captured by the British. Egypt's honestly a great example for all this because the Arabs that had conquered and ruled Egypt didnt give a shit about its ancient past and so the tombs were all robbed and destroyed whenever found, it's only British and French antiquarian's who gave a shit about this stuff that saved it.
I want to scream aloud at you so often when you post. Its masculine vs feminism yes!! But women follow the most masculine popular opinion as is their role in society. They must be controlled because they are creatures controlled by emotion and it is our role as men to control them via our masculinity
When are we gonna realise that 'they' represent everything wrong with our society
Oddly I kind of liked the movie for this reason. My girlfriend is a massive normie, but is hesitant for vaccines because of her heart condition which isolated her from some of her family, so when we watched this movie she related so hard with the covid pandemic and it redpilled her faster than I ever could have Edit* Dont look up I mean
Ceasar was a based populist, so this is a great advert. But I disagree that Trump is a Ceasar figure, he's not here to overthrow the republic but instead he's here to restore it, so hes more like Emperor Aurelianus, come to save us from the crisis of the 3rd Century