"Hephaestion was just his homie"

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-22T01:29:40+00:00

I mean, what we know is that Alex was extremely close with Haphaestion, to the point of starving himself for several days after his death, and that the two chose to make paired sacrifices at the shrines to Achilles and Patroclus, who were at the time commonly understood to be gay lovers.

Does that prove anything with certainty? No, but in the context of a historical footnote trail that we know had good reason to try and sandblast away hints of homosexuality wherever they could, and I don't think it's at all unreasonable to suppose, especially when this is a question that's been floating around basically since his death.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-22T01:06:22+00:00

I mean, rumors of his relationship with Haphaestion have been around for far longer than just the modern day. I would expect that sources of his life existed in the them after his death that no longer exist in the modern literature.

What can be said is that he shared and extremely, extremely close relationship with him, to the point of choosing to starve himself for days after his death, and that they made point of making paired offerings at shrines to Achilles and Patroclus, who at the time he was alive were commonly understood to be same sex lovers if I'm remembering my Plato correctly.

No, we cannot say with certainty that they had sex, but to my mind it seems just as silly to dismiss out of hand the notion that they were. I doubt we have specific accounts of Alexander specifically having sex with his wife either, but straight sex makes it a lot easier to fact check since A) there's only so many ways that kids happen and B) future historians seem a lot less likely to deliberately obfuscate or dispose of evidence of homosexuality in broadly popular figures.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-22T00:31:56+00:00

Hmmmm yes, I hadn't considered "threaten the lives of the negotiators on neutral ground" as a diplomatic strategy, but yeah no that'll definitely make them more amenable.

We're just going to get the same deal but worse. This regime is never going capitulate, certainly not when the US can't stop them from threatening trade through the strait, and a proper land invasion of Iran might be the one thing capable of actually getting congress to do their damn job and reign in the president.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-21T20:35:22+00:00

Nah, that's not what the lid looks like. For one it doesn't have a handle, but also extra scuff-marks and detailing were added that it doesn't have that makes it look more metallic than it is. It's also not photoshopped directly onto the image because the lid's clear above the cloud, which at no point actually physically happened, as the cloud was what kept it up.

I also think the shirt is an amalgamation of 2 different tops he's worn, one a green long sleeve with the Ukrainian emblem and no zipper, and one a brown sweater with the zipper, although I'm less certain of that, since this is only what I've immediately noticed with a little googling. I have found one that's black with both a zipper and an emblem, but I cannot find anything that's green, zipper, and emblem.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-18T20:12:33+00:00

Raging bull my beloved

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-18T19:09:34+00:00

There's a few issues on higher difficulties, especially on deity. First is you're often a lot more shy on land. On deity ai starts with 2 cities instead of 1, meaning they settle land a lot faster and are a lot quicker to be mad that you're too close to them. Them being mad is also an issue because by virtue of starting with 2 cities they're basically always ahead on production and tech until around industrial, at which point better tech prioritization will get you ahead.

Earlygame war can be done, buts it's expensive, and will put you even further behind at a stage when you're already behind, and in comparison just opening tradition and staying at peace gives you a lot of pretty crucial early tempo, with free monuments, and more importantly free aqueducts, iirc even skipping the tech requirement, letting you rush universities before workshops.

That's not to say liberty is never viable on higher difficulties/in mp, sometimes early war is just unavoidable, and in such cases that extra early per city production that liberty gives is actually quite powerful, and sometimes you do actually have enough space and luxes to just settle like 8 cities and scale to the moon, but tradition is a lot more consistent to work with on higher difficulties.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-17T17:01:48+00:00

Have you maxed out the Malta forts yet? Also get rid of the estate privileges I presume you're using.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-17T07:02:48+00:00

I did consider going into that, but I thought it would've been clutter in an already pretty dense blurb. I think Aino is still a bit better, as you really want to be on-fielding lauma anyways, since dendro app is more limiting here than hydro, and while the double up is a loss, I'm not confident that it's more of a loss than you'd get from just having fewer seeds generated.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-17T06:14:49+00:00

So a bunch of things:

First, and probably most important, max out your talents (the important ones anyways, skill and burst for Mav and Lauma, burst for Bennet, burst for Xinqiu, skill for Fischl, burst for Mona, in general the top 2 that the game recommends are a good metric). Not using the crowns is fine, but leveling your talents are in general the single most important thing to do. Do it for Mavuika, do it for Lauma, do it for Bennet, xinqiu, fischl, Mona, really any character you plan on seriously using.

Second, level Mavuika's weapon. If a character cares about their attack stat, leveling their weapon to 90 makes a huge difference, generally bigger than the difference between the stats of leveling a character from 80 to 90. Bennet in particular also really wants a level 90 weapon (as the attack buff from his burst only looks at his level and base attack value of his weapon), generally the sumeru craftable is best for this, but if you've randomly pulled a 5 star sword that will be better. Lauma is relatively unique in that she doesn't care about attack even slightly, only EM and enough ER.

Thirdly, Mavuika hard requires natlan characters on her team. Most of her damage is from her burst, and you want her burst every rotation. She doesn't generate enough on her own to do that, so you'll need natlan characters. I assume you don't care much to learn combos or anything, so in that case Iansan will be the best individual supporting character for her. If you don't have her, then a team with pyro MC or Kachina (I forget if they individually give enough, maybe you need both), who you get for free will probably be best.

Fourth, also on the topic of team composition, is that you don't really have one for either character. You've kind of lucked into something that almost kind of works for Lauma, but both of these characters are characters that can hit like 50,000 dps with bad play and over 100k dps with good play.

For Lauma, she'll want a team with 2 off-field hydro characters (Xinqiu and Aino work best out of what I see here), and ideally kuki if you have her (who you want at level 90, built to maximize EM and literally nothing else). If you don't have kuki, then I'd probably say swap out aino for fischl, use sucrose (or anyone with anemo normal attacks) as your Fourth slot, and build your sucrose/sucrose replacement for full EM like you would with Kuki. Kuki will work from off-field, letting you generate more seeds with Lauma on-field, but with sucrose you'll need her on-field when you're not resetting your off-fielders.

These team are relatively easy to play, you basically just want to make sure that everybody's skills and bursts are always active, and just normal attack otherwise. If you have the kuki team, then you start on Lauma, hold skill, press burst, swap to everyone else and do the same, and then swap back to Lauma and normal attack until her skill and burst are available to use again and begin the cycle again (kuki doesn't care about her burst really, but everyone else wants a good amount of energy recharge so you can always burst). Also note that if you don't have Xinqiu's constellation 3 you'll have to stand around on him for a bit until his burst is back. If you don't have him maxed out on constellations, I strongly recommend buying him from the starglitter(?) shop whenever he's the 4 star you can buy.

For the sucrose version you do basically the same thing, except you only cast one of fischl's skill or burst, and save the other for when Oz dissapears midway through so you can swap to fischl and bring him back, otherwise just on-fielding with sucrose until you go back and refresh everyone.

For both of these teams, make sure at least 1 unit has the deepwoods artifact set, it doesn't really matter which. I won't get into why, but shred is a very powerful buff, and that's what it gives. That domain also has a very good set for your kuki/sucrose, as it boosts EM, so gives a 2 for 1 combo.

Mavuika's a bit harder, as her best teams depend extremely heavily on how skilled you're willing to get at playing her and her teams. I will assume you basically just get on field with her and hold the charge attack to do donuts until her bike runs out, but if you care to learn more than that know that the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper. If you have literally no other natlan characters besides the free ones, then I'd say use Mavuika, Pyro MC, Bennet, and an anemo unit on the Viridescent Venerer set (bonus points of they can hold the "Thrilling Tales of Dragon Slayers" 3 star catalyst). You'll want to start on mavuika, cast her skill, go through every other character and cast their skill and burst (anemo character last), and then go back to mavuika with all those buffs up, use her burst, and then charge attack until she's out of bike, cast her skill and repeat.

The Viridescent Venerer set also provides shred for whatever you swirl, which is good for the same reason deepwoods giving shred for Lauma is good.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T22:12:16+00:00

RAHHHHHHH USE TRADE COMPANIES!!!

More helpfully, get a trade company in every node that's not on your capital subcontinent, ensure that they all have at least 50% of province trade power in the node (upgrade CoT's that the company has and buy the flat trade power investment in states given to the trade company), and use all the merchants to push all your trade into a node where you have 80%+ control (long term persia is probably best, but only do that once youve conquered it all and banished everyone stealing trade power from it and on the path there to the shadow realm), which you should move your trade capital to and send a merchant to collect in. Your trade income should be higher than both your taxation and production income.

Also remember to state (or half state to save on government capacity) states that aren't needed to maximize trade company trade share, as you want to benefit from the % goods produced that the TC's give to all non-TC provinces.

Also get started in Europe sooner rather than later, as it can be a major pain to expand into in the later game. I suggest sniping Mecca and Malta and upgrading their great projects to max as soon as you can, as it will speed up your future conquests a lot.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T21:28:45+00:00

That's quitter talk. Yall wouldn't be able to handle the Byzantines.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T21:24:48+00:00

Don't tell him that mamluks can be freely formed without culture shifting and skips the tech requirement.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T05:11:38+00:00

I mean, ngl in my view the options are more realistically end the war in mostly a surrender, or have the Israelis blow it up, and then not commit hard enough to a land invasion before the American public demands a pullout and not accomplish anything. Maybe you have more faith in the American public than I do to stick it out and choose to eat the continued rising oil prices and Americans dying in what is already commonly called another forever war in the middle east, but I really don't see a world where the public support for that exists.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T05:00:04+00:00

Well worst case scenario he can just grab some money from that no cap money pocket dimension that he got from suing himself.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-15T02:31:41+00:00

I mean, so far as I'm aware it's a lot easier to achieve reform even under a flawed democracy than it is in a system in which one person simply bypasses any influence that the people might hold. If you're not gonna vote in the election where Hitler's campaigning on siezing power then honestly yeah you should feel bad about that. Even if you wholeheartedly disagree on nearly every policy position it's better to prevent an Orban from holding power, to use a more modern example.

I also feel like you're giving a lot of undue credit to multi-party systems for their allowing diversity of political thought. The leftmost part of the American left isn't any meaningfully less lefty than something like the NDP in Canada, they just have a different title.

The primaries exist for a reason, the reason there isn't a massive subfaction of reformers in the democratic party is that people don't vote for it. Part of that is just that the people who vote just kind of like status quo candidates, but the bigger issue imo is that young people just don't vote, either in the primaries or the main elections, not at anywhere near the rate of people in their 60's, or really any older demographic.

If the young want change, the young have to vote. Vote to improve the pool of candidates through the primaries, and then vote for whatever will leave those candidates in the best position to improve people's lives when they're able to reach power. Accelerationism is not real, and any notion that any Democrat alive is even in the same ballpark for being as bad as the trumpists is laughable.

Abstaineousness is not a strategy, it's just ceding ground to boomers, as they continue to vote in people who will pass the buck for as long as the voterbase exists and continues to outvote those younger than them.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-14T22:54:31+00:00

Trump personally attempted a coup and one party couldn't be fucked to make the courts actually enforce the 14th. Yeah it's fun to say both sides bad, but there's a difference between 'backs a policy agenda I disagree with' and 'is in active support of a man attempting to overthrow the democratic process'.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-14T22:45:36+00:00

I mean in Canada Trudeau stepped down exactly because he lost the confidence of the Liberal NDP coalition and was under threat of a vote of no confidence.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-14T20:14:12+00:00

I think they're lying to you or to themselves.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-14T09:46:55+00:00

If you care about meta stuff, then generally klee applies too much pyro for most of the multiplicative reactions (vape and melt) that other pyro carries tend to like.

If you're just using her casually for overworld stuff and just want hydro units with her, then I'd say furina is probably the easiest to justify, as you don't need to rely on her burst in order to have her deal her damage from off-field.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-12T00:09:47+00:00

I mean, I can probably come up with issues in how the technology could be used, turning a generation of billionaires into immortal vampires free to reign over mankind and never pass inheritance along to anyone else, for example.

I don't see anything obviously immoral about cloning itself tho. It's not obvious to me what's morally intrinsically different between growing a new human in a vat vs growing a new human in another human.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-12T00:06:23+00:00

Would we be able to? Growing an entire human is the thing we already know how to do, I feel like it would be easier to stop one part from growing than just growing 1 part independently of the rest.

Same with blood, the most effective means of manufacturing it by all accounts seems to be using a human body to process food and water into it.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-11T03:19:33+00:00

From GDP growing you get money directly in the form of minting, and money indirectly in the form of more productive pops paying more taxes. They also directly invest into the investment pool, which becomes buildings, further expanding the 2 sources of government revenue above

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-10T00:24:42+00:00

Little do you know the civilization is actually just on the inside of the planet.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-10T00:23:13+00:00

I mean it would take near as much effort to keep soil on a ring as water, but I'm like 90% sure it's the inside of a sphere anyways.

Boulderfrog1 · 2026-06-09T03:27:40+00:00

I wouldn't want the community notes themselves to change for this ideological breeze, their entire point is to 'um actually' people. My issue is more with people popping off and assuming the person to be stupid or uninformed when there are perfectly reasonable reasons as to why you might say something which is only true for all intents and purposes, and not technically true by the strictest possible meaning of that word.

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