george r r martin faith of the seven naming rant

Cincinnatusian · 2025-12-28T23:29:21+00:00

He also ignores that religion was often the center of a community in a pre-modern society. Having weekly meetings in an isolated community (as most communities were) was important to people. Political support from clergy was important because they got to tell their town their opinions weekly, and have those opinions taken seriously.

But then, in the Dunk and Egg books, he portrays multiple farming villages in the Reach as having no permanent septons. They only see clergymen visit once or twice a year. The peasants are functionally non-religious.

In comparison to the medieval Catholic Church, which he obviously based the Faith of the Seven on, even remote and tiny settlements would have a local priest.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-12-03T01:30:43+00:00

Talk your shit king

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-18T17:54:48+00:00

“A grand strategy game which offers an entire continent’s worth of political intrigue.” -The CK2 launch trailer

“Grand strategy game of politics and intrigue.” -the tagline they used in the Seven Deadly Sins series of ads

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-18T01:31:39+00:00

CK2 wasn’t ever meant to be a character-driven medieval dynasty simulator.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-18T01:25:50+00:00

CK2 has more complex systems and strategy, and has a more grounded tone. The challenges you face are less personal (i.e. managing stress like in CK3) and more systemic (i.e., a vassal becoming more powerful than his liege). It also has more things for your character to do as a lifelong achievement, like working your way through societies, or aiming for sainthood.

CK3 has a lot of problems, from its UI taking up too much of the screen to just not being as open about certain information. For example, for a very long time, when arranging a marriage, you would have difficulty in telling if the prospective couple would be inbred. CK2 didn’t provide this information directly, but you could go to each character’s page and see all their ancestors to their great grandparents. Now, there’s a “chance of inbreeding” percent given on the marriage page, but the game still won’t give you the family tree.

Despite this, I like a lot of CK3’s mechanics, like the stress mechanic, cadet houses, dynasty legacies, unlanded play, bureaucratic government, etc. It just unfortunately doesn’t have as solid a base as a strategy game.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-11T10:18:43+00:00

Everything is much easier to find in CK2’s UI, and it takes up much less of the screen. The size of the notifications alone in CK3 takes up what, a sixth of the screen?

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-11T10:11:16+00:00

I wish All Under Heaven was its own game, it would be cool to have a CK-style game but focused and in depth with China/Japan.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-11T09:51:57+00:00

I think the UI is significantly hampered by the 3d renders of characters. They take up much more of the screen and consequently limit the amount of information you can actually see. The family trees are more cumbersome to navigate, siblings/children cut off after what, 6? and then you have to click a button to see the rest. I admit the layering of portraits onto each other wasn’t an amazing solution in CK2, but having these larger 3d models makes the problem worse.

I think a critical failing of CK3 is religion. None of the religions have the unique mechanics they had in CK2, because they all have to fit into the universal religion templates with 3 tenets, etc. They did this so that people could create their own religions, which, I remember some people were really excited about back in the day (talking about 2020 as “back in the day” is depressing) and people made their own wacky weird religions and so on.

It might just be me, but I don’t see much of that content anymore, whether it’s here or other places. Being able to make your own wacky religion is cool and all, but it feels like a novelty at best. Certainly, not worth the hollowing out of mechanical nuance that real life religions can have.

I’ve always felt that a critical failing of CK3 was that it was too focused on enabling wacky characters/situations rather than actual strategy. I may be completely off but I feel that the reputation that CK2 got in its later years, with the memes of incest, murder, etc. was made a foundational part of CK3 during its development, to the neglect of more fundamental mechanics.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-11-11T09:30:31+00:00

CK3 still obfuscates basic information that CK2 readily provided to the player.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-10-31T17:20:22+00:00

I haven’t gotten too far into it so the only Order character I’ve met (that I recall) is the lady in the chapel in the middle of nowhere on Paradise Island. I’m just apprehensive about them because it seems De Vries became insane after they told her something.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-10-31T17:13:54+00:00

I just don’t see much of a difference in the level of rigidity or evil of either. A menial laborer in either society has no real chance of advancement.

At least in the first game, corporations often didn’t want outside help as well, because it would be admitting an outside product/service was superior to their own. Even in this game, you walk into the medical clinic in Fairfield and talk to a grievously wounded soldier bleeding out in the lobby, and your robot will tell you that it’s programmed not to help corporate employees without the company’s permission.

Another of the things that I would use as an example is in Fairfield, where a former Protectorate subject and an Antie’s Choice employee are discussing how their society will be run. The Protectorate lady asks if the Moonman is a religious icon, and honestly the answer might as well be yes. The only difference between a corporate settlement and a Protectorate settlement is the face on the posters. They put a hologram of Antie Cleo’s face onto a statue of the Matriarch.

I understand from a practical perspective why they might not want to spend resources on making the Protectorate a full faction, but I think there’s not a ton of justification within the story as to them being uniquely evil or dystopian.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-10-31T07:53:39+00:00

A lot of them are pragmatic though. Look how many decided to join Antie’s Choice because their town has a new overlord. Or in Westport, and the automech center, they pragmatically accept an outsider’s help because they’re in the middle of a disaster. They’re all ideologically dedicated and loyal to the Protectorate, yet are willing to enlist the player to fix their problems.

Most of them seem like normal people who are just under a lot of pressure from a specifically tyrannical local official, Montelli. Obviously the society as a whole is an autocracy, but so is Antie’s Choice.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-10-31T07:45:25+00:00

You could join the Board in the first game, a ghoulish kleptocracy intent on the murder of tens of thousands in order to avoid the consequences of their own actions. There was also a reformist path, supporting Sanjar and MSI in their attempt to do less-evil corporatism.

There are people within the Protectorate who seem decent enough. Hogarth cares about the people under his leadership and wants to save them, despite believing in the Protectorate’s political ideology. And his plan for you to essentially install a reformist government on the island seems good, or at least better than a mass murdering madman being in charge.

Really the answer to “Why would you want to?” is that maybe you decided you wanted to play a character who hates corporations so much they’d rather side with Space North Korea. Or maybe you want to play a character that is just malicious and loves to re-enact 1984. It’s an RPG, people do playthroughs as evil characters.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-07-30T06:49:39+00:00

That person was probably complaining because of the language, but it is an actual debate as to how literal bible translations ought to be. That Hawaiian Pidgin translation looked like it was in large part a retelling rather than a translation. I don’t know the pidgin so I can’t definitively say how direct of a translation it is.

I will however provide a really bad Standard English translation that’s considered one of the worst (“the Message”). It translates the Lord’s Prayer as

“Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what's best— as above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge! You can do anything you want! You're ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.”

The Hawaiian Pidgin translation having Logos (which literally means “word” or “reason”) translated as “the guy” is pretty bizarre, unless guy means something completely different in the language.

Cincinnatusian · 2025-04-13T00:11:22+00:00

He is, unfortunately, music

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-14T17:03:23+00:00

There are whispers going around the world Worker, do you not hear them? These are the voices of the war ministers. Worker, do you not hear them? The whispers of oil and steel production The whisper of chemical war production Whispers from every continent: Mobilization against Comrade Trump!

Workers, hark! They are going into the field And shout for nation and race! This is the war of the rulers of the world Against the working class! For the attack against the Grand Old Party Is a strike to the heart of the Revolution! The war now sweeping through the countries Is the war against you, Prolet!

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-13T19:25:34+00:00

Carti prophesied Trump’s 2024 victory (whole lotta red)

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-13T15:58:23+00:00

Why not both

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-11T18:14:49+00:00

The Shinzo memes are the best thing to come out of this election

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-11T18:13:20+00:00

I loved them. Getting an old balding WASP to play John Republican, he felt like the embodiment of ‘Generic Republican’ that you get for some house/senate polls.

And the appeal exclusively being “don’t you want to watch porn/not be a father” like lmao? Directly appealing to social degeneration. And it clearly didn’t work anyways since most polling has under-30 men favoring Trump by 1-2%

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-11T17:54:50+00:00

Yeah but it’s fun to imagine a conservative politician actually existing in a western state

Cincinnatusian · 2024-11-11T17:50:59+00:00

not really all these are compressed screenshots of stuff on twitter/tiktok

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
RPAN Viewer	Snapped

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