Month: May 2015

A few ideas

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I know I haven’t written here for a while, but I haven’t had much to report. Texting until 5:30 AM is enjoyable, but (at least earlier this week) it means sleeping until 1:30 PM, which, like every time I sleep past about 10:30 AM, makes me feel like I’m wasting the day. Today I only was texting until about 5 AM, and got the 5 hours of sleep I was desiring. With 2 cups of coffee, and writing 1849 words for my Crusader Kings 2 after-action report of Orkney beginning in 769, I feel like I’ve had a reasonably productive day.

Playing Windward, a recently released game on Steam where you control a sailing ship and can do quests, trade between towns, or hunt pirates (or, I suppose, possibly turn pirate yourself), has put me into a maritime mood, and made me want to write something involving boats, ships, and large bodies of water. It would be difficult to integrate that into my ongoing game as the Duchy of Chariton in the CK2 After the End mod, considering, with the exception of the Missouri River and a few other minor rivers in the region, there aren’t many major bodies of water in the lands known as Northern Missouri. Orkney, by virtue of being some islands off the coast of Britain in the North Sea, has slightly better odds, but I’ve decided to consider starting yet another idea.

For a while, I’ve considered writing an “after-action report” involving Sardinia, Corsica, and/or the Balearic islands, in the Western Mediterranean. At one point I actually did start one for the original Crusader Kings involving Sardinia, but that fell by the wayside due to computer issues, loss of interest, or other reasons after about 20 years of gameplay. I also tried starting one for Corsica at one point, but, again, that didn’t happen. I’ve tried playing games in Sardinia and the Balearic islands, at least, in Crusader Kings 2, but I have yet to actually start an after-action report. I thought it might be interesting to write a “narrative”, much like my Master of Magic project, where I write it more like a historical fiction novel and less like a history written by a monk.

According to my historical research, the Balearic islands were colonized by the Phoenicians before they were taken over by the Romans. The Vandals took the Balearic islands shortly before the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire took the Balearic Islands back in the 530s (around the same time that Sardinia and the province of Africa was taken from the Vandals). After Carthage fell to the Umayyad Caliphate in 698, the Byzantines effectively lost the Western Mediterranean, and in 707 (per Wikipedia) the islands submitted to the generous terms of a Muslim fleet, which rendered them, in name, both Byzantine and Umayyad.

This is the last thing written in the Wikipedia article before mentioning that they were sacked by Vikings in a 859-862 raid. As I’ve been thinking lately, Crusader Kings 2, as I suspect of most video games, doesn’t handle multiple overlords very well. There are other historical examples of lords that had to choose which liege lord to obey, but in Crusader Kings 2, in the 769 bookmark, the Balearic Islands, like Sardinia, is Catholic and considered part of the Byzantine Empire, ruled by an Iconoclast emperor (considered a heresy of the Orthodox church). If I’m not completely mistaken, the distinction between Catholic and Orthodox didn’t really happen until the Great Schism in 1054, but it would vastly complicate things to add that in, and there were probably differences in practice before that point anyway, if I remember what I’ve read correctly.

In general, in Crusader Kings, I seem to be fascinated by alternate history, obscure rulers that didn’t historically exist, and, in general, playing as obscure, weak rulers and changing history. For example (though I haven’t done it for a while), playing as a Welsh ruler and becoming King of Wales, or uniting Ireland. Where’s the fun in playing as the Byzantine Emperor or Sunni caliph when you can play as the lord of a desolate bunch of rocks in the North Sea?

Anyway, as for my nascent Balearic game, I haven’t had much happen in the first 4 years. I’m not really sure how I’d write the whole “being de facto independent”, considering that isn’t really an option in the game (and no rebellion for independence yet), but I’ve already thought I may have to make some stuff up about the Byzantine navy and government, so what’s a little bit more fabrication? They do, after all, call it “historical fiction”. 

Half May

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Other than having trouble falling asleep May 13 after work (cause: momentary obsession with comparing Missouri in the After the End mod for Crusader Kings 2 to Missouri as it actually exists resulting in staying up until 4:40 AM, then not falling asleep until like 7:30 AM) I’ve had a decent few days. My mom came down to help my brother move out of his dorm room, and since she didn’t want to make the approximately 5 hour drive twice in one day she came down the 14th (the day after her birthday). My brother was an RA for the last month or so of the semester, so he was busy with checking people out of the dorms. The night of the 14th we all went out for dinner. The next morning she and I went on a walk, got coffee and gas at the gas station near my apartment, and went to campus to fill up her car with my brother’s stuff. After a couple hours of helping him move furniture and carrying stuff out to her car, Mom and I went out for lunch, she did some shopping, and she bought me a few groceries before she left about 4 PM. The morning of the 16th, my brother dropped by before he left about 10 AM, and I spent most of the day not doing anything significant. After my roommate got back from work shortly after 3, we headed across town to a small local convention. We got there about 4 PM, and had been there only a few minutes when I felt my phone vibrate. I looked and saw I had a new voice mail and a missed call from work, so I checked my voice mail and learned that I was apparently scheduled to work 4-9 PM on the 16th. The last time I checked my schedule (May 11), I wasn’t scheduled to work again before 4 PM on May 17.

Long story short, I wound up being an hour late, and we weren’t very busy for the 4 hours I was there. I’m hoping it doesn’t have any dire effects, but it’s weird that my schedule changed, probably on one of the days I had off, and my manager didn’t call me to ask if I could work on a day I was scheduled to have off, like she usually does. Yes, perhaps I should have checked my schedule more recently than Monday, but why would I do that if I have no reason to be there, considering I usually avoid my place of employment unless I have to be there (for example, to work a scheduled shift)? I can handle changes to my work schedule, particularly after a few days off, but I usually prefer to have more than -5 minutes warning, and it would have been nice before I was on the opposite side of town.

Anyway, in happier news I checked my grades and the Business Applications professor commented that I had “great answers” on my final, so that’s good (even if I felt like I wasn’t writing anything particularly original), and I had 100% on that. As of today, I have about 3 weeks until my summer class starts, and final grades for the semester will be available Tuesday. With an A, my GPA should improve (and continue to do so once I retake the Writing class this summer).

(Below the cut: early morning storms, and some pertinent thoughts on college and graduation)

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Summer!

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My Business Applications final has been available for a week, and was due by the end of finals week, which if I remember correctly is Thursday of this week. (See previous posts about online classes leading to disconnnect from campus schedule.) Anyway, I submitted my final earlier this afternoon, and according to my math even if I don’t do very well on my final I should achieve a satisfactory grade, considering I have 100% or close to it on all of the assignments, and about 90% on the two quizzes over Microsoft Excel and Access in the last weeks of April. Now I can enjoy the week until final grades are available and the 27 days until my summer class starts.

Technically, that number should probably be more like 26, considering today is essentially over due to my working from 4 to midnight tonight. Tonight is, however, the last day I work this week, and now that my spring semester is over I can (finally) return to amusing myself with Netflix, Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, and writing.

In Chariton news, I’ve played to (if I remember correctly) 2767, and the current Duke of Chariton is in his 50s, so he probably has less than 20 years left. My current plan is to finish playing his rule. I’m not sure what will happen next, but Paradox Interactive (the company that makes Crusader Kings 2) released the first information about the next expansion, which will probably be coming out sometime in the next month or two. For my next After the End-related writing project, I’m considering playing as a Norse chieftain in the wilderness once known as Wisconsin, but that probably won’t start until after the next expansion is released. I know the After the End mod has expanded to California, and I’m looking forward to updating my version of the mod from 0.4 to 0.5 and seeing how California might impact the rest of the map (though I admit I don’t anticipate much influence from California to reach the Midwest).

I’ve also been thinking lately about how I haven’t posted much about the Chariton game here lately, which I’m going to have to address now that I’m done with the spring semester. I think my writing has reached the point at which I’ve played to, but since I haven’t looked at that for at least a week or so I’ll have to look at that later. I also keep thinking about writing 25-year updates to show the state of “the world” (or at least the part on the map), which would be at roughly July 2691, 2716, 2741, and 2766. I’ve also considered playing a while in “observer mode” to see what the AI might do. So far, the current Duke of Chariton’s heir has proven to be quite lustful, considering he’s acknowledged a bunch of illegitimate children in addition to a decent number of legitimate children.