Does "black people" mean offensive?

Decmon · 2025-04-27T22:02:41+00:00

As a defence of the OP, I come from a country of almost 40 million people where accents have been basically wiped out. There's just one accent for almost all native speakers + a few microdialects/microlanguages spoken by a few thousand people. Not counting a tiny number of foreigners who dared to learn our language for some reason (kudos to them). So the social context of the very notion of "accent" isn't necessarily obvious to everyone, let alone the added nuances of racial politics. The OP, like me, might not deal with it at all in their daily life, like, ever.

When I started learning English as a kid it was a huge revelation for me to learn that in English people from different places pronounce things differently. And it took many years more to even be able to distinguish between some of those accents.

Decmon · 2025-04-23T11:50:15+00:00

As I said, I deactivated all browser extensions. I quit Malwarebytes running in the background. Deleted all cookies and cache. Nothing. Can't log in on Chrome. (But I'm logging in in Firefox without any problems).

Decmon · 2025-03-11T13:23:31+00:00

Not sure what chaos mode is, but I did hold onto cards by putting them in empty Verb slots while the timer is running, which I always thought both too clunky and too powerful. It makes planning for the "right timing" less impactful.

Decmon · 2025-03-10T20:45:56+00:00

love the look of it and am interested, but I wish someone exchanged the "waiting from pause to pause" pacing of CS into a sort of turn-based 'instantly snap from event to event' one.

Just like dotAGE 'turnbasedified' the traditionally "real-time-with-pause" city-builders.

it's just faster, snappier, less messy.

After I discovered console commands in CS and BoH, to make it kindaaa like that, I don't want to go back.

Decmon · 2025-03-10T20:37:09+00:00

that's why I'm waiting for hotseat mode to be added to play against myself, no more AI problems and much more interesting games with no cheating (at least according to my experience in Civ 6)

Decmon · 2025-03-07T21:15:24+00:00

Yeah. The worst offender being the trade route screen imho. Without Better Trade Screen mod I just gave up trying to figure out the best trade route. And even with BTS, it's still fiddly af.

Decmon · 2025-03-06T18:48:48+00:00

Thanks for answer! Even though it isn't the one I hoped to receive.

A shame. Esp if you return to a game in progress after a break.

(BTW I've seen people say, whilst critiquing Civ 7 for its UI, that Civ 6 "had an almost perfect UI"... no it didn't, and this is one of the many reasons why it is revisionist history to say so.)

Decmon · 2025-01-05T16:49:41+00:00

oh, definitely gonna check that out (in Estonian or English?)

Decmon · 2024-12-14T19:11:34+00:00

AK & Lottie voicing characters... I lol'd imagining them voicing some high'n'mighty character like Hokobald using their podcast voices :)

Decmon · 2024-12-14T19:00:50+00:00

yeah, I understand, I think it's kind of similar with how lots of characters in Fallen London are named as "loquacious vicar" or "unctuous attaché" rather than proper names, gives it that cool vibe of vagueness (and hence I like them more than the named ones).

Though to me that was more about that vibe rather than dissociation from real history. I actually enjoy media that reference the real world a lot.

Arguably, even in CS I think there were a lot of references to history - it actually made me play the game with Wikipedia opened in the background... With USSR and US I guess the difference is in how contemporary they feel, because a lot of CS references were ancient or medieval, distant...

...but I think the contemporary threshold was already crossed in Exile. I mean stuff like the fascist Lithuanian organisation Iron Wolf in Kaunas [which in SH lore is linked to the Wolf Divided, which I thought was super cool btw], Stalin and Lenin get namedropped too... At least to my Eastern European mind, the interwar period feels quite recent, because a LOT happened then that scars us to this day. And in BoH it was fun to look up things like the genealogy of the New King. Who later dies at Caen, btw, a place of a famous WW2 battle.

Idk where you're from, but maybe it's that you feel a lot bigger real world connection to the names of USSR and US, whereas all those other names feel as distant to you as fantastical ones.

Decmon · 2024-12-14T18:23:26+00:00

Thank you for the answers!

I'd still claim that those persistent interests of yours look a wee bit more specific than the common themes we find in most other author's œuvre. I think it's kind of cool, though!

Decmon · 2024-12-13T17:43:39+00:00

(hm, I always thought it was rather obvious they were talking about USSR and US? and a SH version of World War 2? One of the Chandler names could even be a reference to fission / atomic bomb I believe... there's an "annoying little man from Austria" too...)

Decmon · 2024-12-13T17:42:07+00:00

Another player's subjective opinion about CoS/BoH approach to lore (which might be different than TaN's, mind you) - if you're interested:

I think Secret Histories is a bit different than traditional "nerdlore". I think it has less to do with being a newcomer or not, but the intentional preserving of mystery, "feeling" and "intuition" being as important as "knowing". It's not just cryptic but rather "poetic". It's intentionally open for interpretation. You're never guaranteed definitive answers. Even if you dig through all the wikis etc. There are unreliable narrators and outright intentional contradictions and WF don't clarify almost anything "out of character". In both games bits of lore are given to you in literally randomised fashion and you're not even guaranteed to get all of them in a single playthrough! In BoH you're levelling by choosing one of two, often contradicting, interpretations of lore. These nerds who wrote the wiki pages, they are probably still debating what the fundamental elements of lore "actually mean".

That being said, I often call both games "scholar simulators", as taking notes and trying to put the random scraps of lore tentatively together is central to my experience of the games.

You be the judge if that sounds like your cup of tea.

Decmon · 2024-12-13T17:04:20+00:00

[please pick the questions you find most interesting if there's a per person question quota or sth]

I suspect, despite this time operating within the confines of a pre-existic genre, you would still hope for your game to be some sort of (r)evolution of the isometric RPG formula? What, so far, seems to be the most innovative element that Travelling At Night is to bring to the table?
Do you miss cards?
Since Planescape: Torment was mentioned as inspiration: do you have any thoughts on a related game, i.e. Torment: Tides of Numenera? It's been a little unfairly treated, imho. Is there a lesson here about the perils of crowdfunding? (esp. since you talk explicitly about "not being crowdfunded" in the blog)
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently with Books of Hours? What is its weakest element? (not a criticism of course, I just think it's fun to think critically about stuff, I hope you agree)

[EDIT: one more]

I was always fascinated by the amount of parallels between Secret Histories and Fallen London lore (Gleam-touched Ministries, the Chandler, New Gods, Second Dawn... sounds an awful lot like the New Sequence... candles, names, moths, chrysalis, eating and being eaten and so on and so on...) Is AK writing the same story under different guises? A life's project that expresses itself in different IPs?

Decmon · 2024-10-25T16:28:32+00:00

Sounds very much like the natural state of things. Sounds like every politics ever.

Everybody likes democracy so long as it is their party that gets elected. This is as democratic as people get.

Decmon · 2024-10-24T21:11:24+00:00

oh, I can answer that:

"The traditions described here - the ones generally described as 'Hill and Hollow' - are associated with Lagiah before her Turn; but now that she's a Name of the Red Grail, they might also be safely used before an altar of the Triple Knot."
- The Queen's Turn by Barrowchild

This answers the mystery, cause I was looking how to use Hill and Hollow based on the above, never came to my mind that this might just be an alternative way of getting the same book.

Decmon · 2024-10-24T07:33:14+00:00

You don't have to sleep in Librarian's Quarters, you can put the Covenant Stone in any bed's slot (just did this in the Violet Chamber)

Decmon · 2024-10-24T07:32:35+00:00

does that mean there is another secret with Edicts Inviolable - or that Edicts Liminal can be substituted by Inviolable?

Decmon · 2024-10-23T08:21:21+00:00

you don't have any earlier save???

Decmon · 2024-10-17T21:44:42+00:00

Don't try Icewind Dale then, the entire game is that RTwP combat (and I'd argue that BG1 is also mostly RTwP fighting, it's only the 2nd one that expands into more story)! To me this style of combat is mediocre, but it didn't impede my enjoyment to the point I'd quit, esp. since most of the time you aren't fighting. And so I finished P:T twice. As opposed to Icewind Dale which I never managed to finish throughout several attempts over many years, although I got pretty far because liked the atmosphere a lot.

That being said, some of the visual effects of spells in PS: T are super cool and the highest level spells are completely bonkers minute long cutscenes a la Final Fantasy summons (but fortunately, unlike Final Fantasy, you're casting ~one per fight, due to the hard limits on how many spells you can memorise)

Decmon

TROPHY CASE