[pb72 spoilers]: the esteemed gentleman's literature and book club

[greenline]

Founding the new city drops our income at 0% science to zero. Hoping to stave off immediate bankruptcy by finishing more workers and growing onto cottages. Plan to revolt to HR + OR next turn as that will be when two more workers complete. Need more cottages - our GNP is in the gutter right now.




Perhaps fitting for such a poverty stricken landscape, our canal city is named after Kafka's Metamorphosis. This is a novella that pulls no punches, and attacks a fear many men have directly.

In the story, one Gregor Samsa, the breadwinner for his family, finds himself mysteriously transformed into some kind of large insect, perhaps a cockroach or a beetle. The exact reason for why is never really explored, nor does it have to be for the work to make its point. Gregor's unfortunate status as a newfound insect means that he can no longer work, and the story of the book is about what would happen to a man who can not provide for his family. 

The result, as you might expect from Kafka, is sad and brutal to watch.

Gregor can not work, and all he can do is stay in bed and gesture helplessly. The family needs their bills to be paid. Gregor wishes he could pay them, but he cannot, so all he can do is hide under the table and wish things were better. The longer he spends as an insect, the more he like to behave as one, crawling around and resisting anthropomorphization. His natural uncleanliness as a bug that eats rotten food makes it more and more of a problem for his family to keep him around. Knowing that they are to dispose of him, he starves to death first.

In this bleak tale, some say that it is a tragedy because the family does not love their son enough, and only value him for the financial benefits he provides. But I think that isn't what Kafka was trying to get across. Caring for a truly diseased and incapable family member is a real and significant burden when there is not so much money to go around, one that Kafka recognizes even from the viewpoint of the sick character. To me, it is simply more compelling to see it as an exploration of that fear of being a parasite rather then yet another roundabout fable for criticizing ungrateful relatives - there are more than enough fairy stories about that subject as it is. There are far less stories that dive so deeply into the theme of the expectations of support and being supported.

I'd recommend reading Metamorphosis once, and then not again for a while. The level of sadness it may inflict is only good in small doses, for catharsis.

Normally I'd want a shrine for that religion, but on such a small map it won't ever be worth that much. Probably more reward in a fast GA.

Sounds like a plan. Need to get either a library or a temple going in Dune, to speed up GP production.

[greenline]

T79: We finally swap into Hereditary Rule / Organized Religion. I am feeling like it would not be so bad to burn the additional anarchy turn now for Judiasm - it gives our workers time to move around and improve tiles before city growth can really kick off with the extra happiness.

Next on the agenda: cottages and missionaries and happy garrisons. We need to do as much possible to kick the economy towards currency, and then use that to set up for a golden age into hopefully guilds and a phract army ready to pounce on whoever's weakest. For as much of a pain as HuckleberryFinn has been in terms of worker logistics, it at least gives a springboard into attacking either Xist or Aetryn if that makes sense to do.




Xist came asking for open borders, and I saw no reason to turn him down as the underdog. I don't think he's going to attack us, given who just attacked him and the current power graphs. I'll be sure to keep some forces on this border just in case, though.








One person researched HBR - I am guessing it was Aetryn. Good news for us, since that's one tech he isn't spending getting closer to Currency.

I don't like this worker Bing is moving towards the canal city. We are equal in power, but he might have more forces concentrated here. Perhaps he recognizes the strategic threat of us being able to move ships through that canal. First order of business may be to just whip walls before granary.




Two more workers, two more writers, both of whom I see as supporting my earlier point about the Yankees not creating many good writers. Toni Morrison is best known for either Beloved or Song of Solomon, which I was surprised to see listed as proof in a decent seeming publication that she was one of the last Great American Authors. Having read both books, I don't see Greatness nor Great Americanness. What I see is the occasional decent scene muddled in the thick soup of poor descriptions and dull plots. Nowhere will you find lively, detailed examinations of people who lived at a time or a place - there is just prose that emanates boredom and frustration, for pages and pages.

The source of all this bitterness has to do with slavery and racism - hardly new or exciting for American literature. That bitterness doesn't lend itself to any kind of teaching moment about the culture, only for the same tired call for repayment that you can't go ten feet without running into these days. The ending of Beloved sums it up well, as the last sentence says: Sixty million and more. Once, there were that many slaves, and Toni Morrison is never going to be satisfied until that debt is paid from your wallet - at least until there is no more money to take. It's good news for Turkey, who gets to walk away scott free from their investment in the African slave trade.




Another northerner, Henry David Thoreau is more well known as a philosopher than a fiction writer. His masterpiece, Walden, a treatise on the importance on living outdoors and in nature, is remarkable for convincing me that there might actually be real value to staying inside and playing video games instead of going outside. Typical for a transcendentalist!

Walden is ridden with unnecessary details that you would expect a philosophical work to gloss over, such as blabbering about the prices of materials for building a cabin or the things Thoreau's neighbors happened to do this or that day. His prose fails to capture any of the beauty a cabin by a pond might genuinely have, being as gravelly and opaque as Puritan literature has always been. His essays are not much better, extolling the virtues of civil disobedience for its moral value in the same tepid manner as those college protestors who like to smear ink on expensive paintings.

If you want to read a smart essay explaining why it's a good idea to live in nature, there are way better men for the job than this one.

[Qgqqqqq]

Censors didn't come for Dahl. His publishers decided to of their own accord, in a bizarre publicity stunt condemned by everyone, including those others accuse of censorship.

[greenline]

T80: Revolt to Judiasm. Aetryn sees a huge score increase of 80 points, but hasn't founded any new cities or built a wonder. How might that be possible? Every city growing a pop on the same turn? The game finally updating for the Stonehenge land being grabbed?

I am thinking it will be a good idea to start dumping hammers in one city into Pyramids, just for the fail gold. We will have stone hooked up soon, and we could really use any extra gold to push us to Currency.

Censors didn't come for Dahl. His publishers decided to of their own accord, in a bizarre publicity stunt condemned by everyone, including those others accuse of censorship.

Without going too far into the weeds, the American system and the way the populace has fully ingested 1984 has resulted in a different means by which the effects of censorship are achieved. Mass social pressure coming from employees results in very comparable (though not identical) effects to a overt censorship bureau - although such a thing now exists as well.

"Don't loike it, simple as"
- lads from local

[greenline]

We have perhaps hit the nadir of "yes this is a greens game and I am a noob" plays. Settling the other Equinox spot brings us to -6 gold per turn at 0% science. Ouch. Most of this expense isn't even in distance or unit maintenance - just number of cities! I feel like Organized is not such a bad trait even on Monarch. Protective isn't cutting it alone to keep research afloat anymore.

Well, I guess a crashed economy from a lot of cities is a better problem to have than being down a city because someone razed it with horse archers. Perhaps, with some grit and elbow grease, we can limp to currency, and then rely on wealth builds to get somewhere better. We have all these hills giving us strong production, but not enough green river tiles. A conundrum.




At the end of the day, I will freely admit that I am a bit of a rube and not the biggest Shakespeare guy. I don't like sonnets, or most poetry that doesn't have that whimsical feel that Chaucer pulls off so easily. But I do like Julius Caesar. Perhaps because, as far as Shakespeare goes, it is very straightforwardly written. It is the story of Brutus and Caesar in the last days of the Roman Republic, where Brutus chooses to betray his friend. Yet, even though Caesar is killed, Marc Antony easily and soundly rallies the plebians to his cause, and the conspirators are hunted down and killed in return. The language is not so heavily reliant on poetic flourishes as compared to other plays - perhaps attempting to mirror the more direct way of speaking we see in translated works from antiquity.

But even if the language is direct, the themes are more subtle. The passioned pleas Cassius makes for freedom and against the tyranny Caesar threatens Rome with, seem, on the surface, self evident. Who doesn't love freedom, who doesn't hate tyranny? But the plebs reject this, because the tyranny Caesar offers them is not tyranny at all. Caesar is the man who gives them bread, who crushes their enemies in Gaul, who brings home wealth to share it with them all. Caesar is the man who openly rejects the crown, and in doing so, proves himself worthy of it in their eyes.

When the conspirators complain of tyranny and the end of freedom, what they ultimately mean is that it is the end of freedom and a new tyranny for the senatorial class. The pleb was long since kicked off the ancestral Latin small farm in favor of the Latifundia, and all he knows know is tyranny of one sort or the other - given the choice, why would he not pick the man who gives him bread and circuses and gifts? In a world where the citizen has become a mere cog in the Roman machine, he knows that his best chance at a good life is having one great man, one tyrant to ask favors of, rather than a hundred tyrants or a thousand tyrants or, god forbid, a million. The world that Cassius wants to fight for, of the small Greek-like city state with an energized and empowered citizenry, is no more. By trying to fight for those long dead virtues, the conspirators end up making villains of themselves, and are punished dearly for it.

In that way, it is like a tragedy, yet one with a happy ending.

[greenline]

The extremely embarrassing fight against bankruptcy continues:







I will admit, this has been a useful learning experience. I've never crashed my economy this hard in single or multi player. Some of that is due to always wanting to play on lusher maps. Here there is a problem, half of the land can't contribute financially until I unlock wealth builds. So I can promise I will not do this again. But still, eesh. I don't think I've seen someone go this hard into the negative income just based on settling cities alone.

I'm trying to throw down cottages as fast I can. My capital is growing up to size 8, 9, 10 and each tile is a cottage. But that doesn't seem enough to get back on our feet.

Do cities unlock more trade routes at a certain pop size?

[El Grillo]

No, you can only get more trade routes from techs and civics. However, the value of a route does depend in part on how large the destination city is. I don't remember the exact details, but generally for non-intercontinental domestic routes, the city has to be well into the double digits to go from 1g to 2g.

[greenline]

No, you can only get more trade routes from techs and civics. However, the value of a route does depend in part on how large the destination city is. I don't remember the exact details, but generally for non-intercontinental domestic routes, the city has to be well into the double digits to go from 1g to 2g.

Well, that sucks. I guess the only way out of this is to grow on cottages and coast and crawl with scientists until I get to currency.

Any advice, Tarkeel? Or did I screw this one up completely

[greenline]

The Situation:







Civac has 11 cities, I have 10, Aetryn has 8. I have crashed my economy to 0 just trying to keep pace with Civac. Aetryn, perhaps wisely, hasn't even tried. Civac, despite going even harder on expansion with no traits backing it up, is crushing it in GNP too.

He's definitely a good player, not gonna take that away from him. But I can't say this is really what I was looking forward to in a 'greens game'. Especially not with him presumably having a run on the equator rather than the polar region of the map.

[scooter]

He's definitely a good player, not gonna take that away from him. But I can't say this is really what I was looking forward to in a 'greens game'.

I think I'm ok to say I recently prodded to ask about his involvement level and requested he scale it back a bit, and he agreed to do so.