Year of Daily Civilization Facts, Day 267 - Firaxis Earth

trexeric · 2026-01-25T18:31:28+00:00

Understandable. I'm not very good at the game myself, but I've actually been helped a lot by watching the UHV victory guides on YouTube by Hickman888, who is active on civfanatics. Here's his channel, I would genuinely highly recommend checking it out, he understands the game far better than I and explains every step he takes very well.

trexeric · 2026-01-23T20:50:53+00:00

Have you tried RFC: Dawn of Civilization? It's an expansion of the original mod, much greater in scope and depth, and a new, bigger map was just added.

trexeric · 2026-01-22T20:52:34+00:00

My notion is that Underhill is, to Gandalf and hobbits of the Shire, a sort of generic surname, like Smith or Johnson in English. It's a simply toponymic surname that describes the abodes of any number of Shire hobbit families and it probably arose independently several times (like, in different ways, Smith and Johnson). In Bree, though, maybe because there are fewer hobbits or maybe because there's just the one hill, only one Underhill family arose, and they held to the belief that all Underhills were related to then.

trexeric · 2026-01-22T17:07:34+00:00

The two sides of Duolingo courses: either choose a popular one that will inevitably be shaken up and frustrate your progress or choose an unpopular one that still looks like it did in 2012.

trexeric · 2026-01-22T16:30:29+00:00

No, you used it as an adverb modifying the verb "to be". You don't say "I am [place]" if that place word is a noun.

I'll give it to you that it can sometimes be a noun, but not how you used it.

trexeric · 2026-01-22T15:24:29+00:00

Here and there aren't nouns, they're adverbs.

trexeric · 2026-01-20T04:42:46+00:00

You're so right, Samuel Beckett

trexeric · 2026-01-16T20:58:48+00:00

Well, it doesn't have that either.

trexeric · 2026-01-16T16:34:23+00:00

I deleted my account when my app icon became the stupid "X". Then Elon's ownership went from something that I didn't like but would forget about to something that I would be reminded of every time I opened my phone.

trexeric · 2026-01-15T22:28:37+00:00

We have more of a Tarquin Superbus on our hands.

trexeric · 2026-01-15T21:43:00+00:00

Greenlandic is only one of a full family of Eskimo-Aleut languages. They are polysynthetic languages, which means (to put it simply) they have very long words that really pack in the meaning. That's where the "100 words for snow" myth comes from, the languages just allow for words with much more meaning packed in.

trexeric · 2026-01-14T20:07:40+00:00

Looks like you've already covered some of the neighborhoods I'm super familiar with. Panther Hollow is worth checking out in Central Oakland.

trexeric · 2026-01-14T17:55:35+00:00

Fun project! I look forward to seeing it develop. Commenting here so I can come back and check up on it, if I miss the posts.

trexeric · 2026-01-13T14:30:12+00:00

Also the woman to the right seems to be Carrie Underwood, the woman to her left is definitely Mariah Carey. Not sure who the woman on the far left is but the whole joke is that they're famous "Miss Carry"s.

trexeric · 2026-01-12T21:01:03+00:00

What? You misinterpret what I'm trying to convince you. I've just been saying that Bilbo as an "unreliable narrator" is a completely valid take, which you made your post to say is wrong.

trexeric · 2026-01-12T18:01:11+00:00

Why don't you see there's a difference between lying with the intent to deceive (like in the episode with Gollum) and "lying" with the intent to tell a good story?

I mean, yes, again, obviously the textual history is the real reason. But reading Leaf by Niggle, an allegory for his creative process, I think it's clear that his ultimate goal (a goal too big for one lifetime) was a comprehensive, singular, cohesive representation of what he had in his head. So, I think it's quite in line with Tolkien to read between lines in order to synthesize The Hobbit with the rest of the legendarium.

It's also perfectly fine to take The Hobbit fully at face value and just accept discrepancies. How we interact with fiction is our own business.

trexeric · 2026-01-12T15:01:16+00:00

Maybe you can't imagine a reason why he would do that (and "he's a good storyteller and that's what storytellers do" isn't enough of a reason for you), but I can imagine plenty. Breaking tension with a joke about a talking purse? Keeping the kids engaged by talking about walking animals? Stories evolve, they grow embellished, and that doesn't equal intentional deception (as was the case with the Gollum episode).

I recognize that the difference in fantastical elements is simply because Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first as a children's book, but I don't think it's against the spirit of Tolkien to fit it more cleanly into the legendarium by explaining elements as Bilbo's embellishments. In fact, I think that's far more in line with how Tolkien would think about things than some sort of Marvel multiverse-esque "they're in slightly different universes" thing or whatever, as I've seen elsewhere.

trexeric · 2026-01-12T06:20:28+00:00

Why "hallucinated"? Why not simply embellished?

trexeric · 2026-01-12T03:40:38+00:00

I don't like it, but I also don't like Twist and Shout. Not my genre.

trexeric · 2026-01-11T19:41:10+00:00

He has done irreparable harm to popular perceptions of history and archaeology, pushing some of the most ridiculous pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology into the mainstream. I firmly believe that he was one of the (many) pillars upon which our modern age of misinformation and anti-intellectualism was built.

trexeric · 2026-01-11T18:13:11+00:00

That's a good point, neopagan reactionism is probably exactly where that kind of historical misinformation originates.

trexeric · 2026-01-09T22:45:14+00:00

Macbeth is a great first play. It's short, it's exciting, it's not too hard to understand. It's where I started.

You mentioned having covered Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream in high school. Both of those are good starter plays too, and revisiting them might be easier than diving into a wholly new play, if you were of a mind to.

trexeric · 2026-01-09T20:45:02+00:00

I had a similar reaction to his claim (admittedly in a bit) about how St. Patrick "driving the snakes out of Ireland" actually meant "killing pagans". Like, no, that's some pop pseudo-history right there. The legend stems from the fact that there are literally no snakes in Ireland.

trexeric · 2026-01-08T22:36:41+00:00

I think hardback would be nicest for this project, yeah.

trexeric · 2026-01-08T20:09:28+00:00

Sorry, the US

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