Author: coemgenvs

accidents happen

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As usual, I recently realized that I haven’t written here for a bit (ten days). I’m not sure I can think of much that is memorable about last week, though now that I say that I guess I did have a nice, and brief, trip home. While I was home I spent some time hanging out with a friend I hadn’t seen much of recently, and on my way back to the City I took a new route on two-lane roads through small towns and the countryside, as opposed to the usual route through or around a large city on the Interstate, so that was nice. I worked Thursday night, and then the next several nights, and nothing particularly memorable comes to mind about those nights.

Then there was Sunday. Continue reading →

Deeds of the Dukes of Chariton, part IV

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(It’s been 4.5 months since my last post in this series. Oops.)

Deeds of the Dukes of Chariton

IV: Victory and Succession
April 2676 – July 2680

In early April 2676, Duke Truman mustered his levies and became known as a skilled fighter.

Prince Salathiel of Iowa, King Franklin’s fourth son, was born on May 15, 2676.

Duke Truman’s friend and chancellor Lavon began to speak in tongues, so he was replaced as chancellor by Milo Trenton, a knight in Duke Truman’s service. Lavon was given overall command of Duke Truman’s 1400 men once they had all gathered at Kirksville, and the army began marching south to Moberly in early May.

In early June the improvements to Maryville’s walls were complete and, a few days later, Duke Truman’s 1400 men met Count Napoleon’s 600 men near Carrollton.

After some initial skirmishing saw Lavon Graham’s 700 men put the Thompson pickets to flight, Theophile Lucerne and Lavon Graham, commanding the Chariton right and left respectively, advanced in support of the Chariton center as Lavon and his 500 men charged Count Napoleon’s 500 men.

Some 200 men of Duke Truman’s army were killed and wounded, while 500 of Count Napoleon’s men were killed and wounded. Only a few of Count Napoleon’s light horse and light infantry managed to flee East, and Duke Truman’s men began to lay siege to Moberly.

Count Napoleon’s surviving men raided near Hannibal and Kirksville, but Duke Truman decided that Count Napoleon’s 80 men were not going to cause any real threat and taking Moberly would bring about a faster end to the rebellion.

In January 2677, Duke Truman’s daughter Evanora was betrothed to Roquat, the eldest son and heir of Duke Poynter of Driftless. After Phineas resigned as spymaster, Duke Truman made his friend Lavon spymaster.

In March 2677, Moberly and Count Napoleon surrendered to Duke Truman. Count Napoleon was taken into custody and imprisoned in Maryville.

In June 2677 King Franklin created the Duchy of the Quad Cities. In August, Duke Eustace of Iowa’s ambition to become King of Iowa was discouraged by a visit from King Franklin, and in September King Franklin inherited the barony of Moline from Baron Otis of Moline, who died of a sudden illness at the age of 39 years. Duke Truman sent Milo Trenton to improve relations with King Franklin, but this failed to have the desired result when Milo Trenton accidentally insulted King Franklin.

On Christmas Day 2677 King Franklin of Iowa summoned his vassals and declared his intent to return Rock Rapids and the surrounding lands to Iowan rule as opposed to its current rule by the 15-year-old Queen Lacotawin of Lakotah, the granddaughter and successor of Tasinagi the Lame. Continue reading →

Last gasp

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My writing class is finally over as of yesterday. Due to a consistent lack of effort and interest, I suspect I’ll probably have to take it again in the future, and I haven’t decided yet when that might happen. The good news, at least, is that the final grade will be available next week, and for now I have about two weeks (technically, two weeks and a few days) before the fall semester begins.

Personally, I’m looking forward to being able to enjoy myself again. For the last several weeks, I was stressing and focused on the class, which usually resulted in procrastination and feeling bad about procrastination rather than anything resembling productivity. Since the class is over, I’ll be able to resume work on my various creative writing projects and ideas, as well as possibly finish a few books and play some computer games.

I’m planning on going home for a brief trip next week, so that will be nice. I’m sure being a full-time student again this fall will impact my free time, but I’ll have to see. I never had cause to develop study skills in high school, and after quickly learning that I didn’t like being a computer science major my freshman year of college could definitely have been better.

Anyway, on a lighter note, here’s a brief list of current writing project ideas.

  • Crusader Kings 2: After the End mod history and/or narrative
    • Tribe of the Mouse (central Florida)
    • Duke of Driftless (Dubuque/northeastern Iowa)
    • something in the Ozarks (southwest Missouri/northwest Arkansas)
  • Europa Universalis 4: Super States mod history and/or narrative
    • California
  • Crusader Kings 2 narrative
    • Byzantine Balearics – working title “Edge of Empire”
  • list of fantasy ideas to be made into a story

anniversaries and aggression

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As of July 16, I’ve been working for my current employer for three years, and as of July 19/20 I’ve been living in my current city for 2 years. After working every day from the 15th to the 19th, I had Monday off, which was nice after a busy weekend. Sleeping in and being frustrated about that was less nice, but skipping class Monday has thrown off my perception of time. Yesterday I kept thinking it didn’t seem like Tuesday, and I still think today doesn’t seem like Wednesday. The good news is that, after tonight, I have three days off.

In other news, yesterday I had an excellent start to my day due to developments in an online game I’ve been playing recently. One of the guys involved with the Game of Thrones Diplomacy game I’ve been playing via Facebook message (actually, now that I think about it, it may have been the moderator of said game) invited people to play this science fiction strategy game online, and I joined both the game that was just the Game of Thrones Diplomacy players (one friend of mine and several friends of his – people I may have played RISK against a few times, at most, during my freshman year of college or while visiting my first university) and another game that was supposed to be random Internet people as well as friends of my friend.

I started this game in the north-western part of the galaxy, in a decently dense star cluster, so my carriers didn’t have to travel too far in order to capture unoccupied stars. Over the course of the game, several players were taken over by the AI due to inactivity, and I had begun taking AI-occupied worlds from my northern AI-controlled neighbor. I noticed my eastern neighbor had begun to do the same thing, so I opened diplomatic communications by sending him a message asking if he would be interested in negotiating partition of the AI-controlled planets in order to avoid an unfortunate diplomatic incident.

He didn’t reply, but apparently hadn’t seen the message before launching an invasion fleet at my stars. I had a large fleet at a star next to the one he was heading toward, so I moved those ships into position in order to retain control of the star. His invasion was defeated, but a battle of some 400 ships total is slightly too large to be considered a “skirmish”, in my book. Anyway, I logged on to this game yesterday morning to learn that my eastern neighbor had conceded defeat (despite being only slightly weaker than me, and I think I was in 2nd place overall) and his empire had been taken over by the AI, which leaves 3 human players – the guy who has been in 1st place (if I remember correctly, for essentially the entire game) on the southern end of the galaxy, me, now a solid 2nd place on the northwestern edge of the galaxy, and the new 3rd place player roughly in the center of the galaxy. In order to win, a player has to control 85 (if I remember correctly) of 192 stars. The 1st place player has 37, while I have 31 (or something like that). I’ve thought about messaging both the 1st and 3rd place players and asking if they want to split the other stars between us, but doing both would probably be difficult, particularly since the 1st place player is on the opposite end of the galaxy. I would have to backstab someone eventually.

Long story short, diplomacy is much simpler when you only have 1 human neighbor. The AI may be aggressive if you attack it, but you can’t really negotiate with it (yet, anyway – maybe in a few years online games will have decent AI).

I thought I had more to write about, but I’m suddenly drawing a blank (and should probably get ready for work anyway). 600-odd words seems like a good length for now, and I can always write more later (while procrastinating instead of writing this stupid paper that’s due tomorrow, for example).

summer and strategy

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Apparently I haven’t written any posts here for almost two weeks. I suppose I should change that, shouldn’t I?

I don’t know that I can think of anything recently that’s particularly exciting, since I’m still working, taking a writing class, and corresponding with F (the young woman I’ve been texting since late February).

The night of the 4th of July wasn’t as busy as I had expected it to be, but of course the next day, when I had the kitchen to myself, was the day that more people decided they wanted pizza. I managed, and I’ve heard that my hard work is appreciated, so that’s always good to hear. Days off are always nice, particularly this week – I had last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off work, worked Friday and Saturday night, and then I have three days off this week, which I just realized are about half over, since I had Sunday (for once), Monday, and Tuesday night off.

Last Tuesday I drove to campus and sat outside the classroom for several minutes before one of my classmates pointed out, as he was leaving, that there was a sign posted that class had been canceled. I had received a wake-up call from my mother that morning, which meant I was awake 45 minutes to an hour earlier than usual, and I later saw that the teacher had sent the e-mail canceling class around 8:30 that morning. Driving to campus only to find out that class was canceled was slightly frustrating, but it was nice having class canceled on a day off (even if I had trouble imagining being ill in July, as the teacher apparently was).

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned Europa Universalis 4 or the Super States mod here before, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Europa Universalis 4 is a game from Paradox Interactive (the company that makes Crusader Kings 2) that allows one to play as any country between roughly 1444 and 1820. About a year ago, I discovered that someone had made a mod (the Super States mod) that allows you to play as a US, Mexican, or Australian state or Canadian province that somehow wound up in 1444. Now, of course, there are a few additional scenarios, but playing as a US state thrown back in time has appealed to me. I’ve thought before that it would be interesting to play a game with that mod and then write a history from “the beginning” (1444) to European contact in the late 1400s/early 1500s. European interaction with the new world would be very different if there are equally advanced states of European descent occupying the New World.

Previous ideas for writing this “history” have included Missouri (because I’m a life-long native of Missouri) and California (because it offers more interesting opportunities, like the possibility of having a navy and Pacific colonization and exploration). The creator of the mod, however, has been busy with vague “real life” issues, and has not been able to keep the mod updated for the current version of EU4, since several expansions had been released since the last mod update. However, an update for the mod was released on July 4, which unfortunately wasn’t working but did get me thinking about the interesting possibilty of a strategy game, like RISK or Diplomacy, set in the United States. Or perhaps I should say the Divided States.

Initially I thought it would be interesting to have the players playing as different states, and that led to the idea of having the players start by fighting over a particular state, uniting it, and then moving on to try uniting the States in their image. I drew a few rough maps of Midwestern states (Missouri by hand, Iowa and Nebraska on the computer) for this game, but it’s somewhat hard to do that when you’re not familiar with an area of a state and there’s not much in a region. It’s fairly easy to designate a metropolitan area as a “territory”, or to draw a shape around a town that’s obviously going to dominate an area due to having the largest population in a particular area, but beyond a certain point I feel like it would be difficult for aspiring governments to hold on to territory beyond a certain distance if they’re limited to pre-modern technology.

I’ve also been thinking about the After the End mod for Crusader Kings 2, probably because thinking about the Divided States and pre-modern technology reminded me of it. Lately, for some reason, I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to play in the southern US – I’ve never been east of Chicago, but lately I’ve been thinking Florida, the Carolinas, or Virginia (among other places) might be interesting to play because of the possibility of naval combat. Who doesn’t like ships, right? At the moment I’m considering a project, similar to my Chariton after-action report, for somewhere in Florida, but I don’t think I’ll start that until some time after the Horse Lords expansion is released tomorrow and the After the End mod is updated with whatever new mechanics they decide to integrate.

Summer mix

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Finally renewing my domain for this blog (less than a day before it was due to expire) reminded me that I haven’t written here for a while.

Procrastination and stress continue in my summer writing class, but I met for an individual conference with my teacher today. After arriving 5 minutes before I had signed up for the conference, we talked for a few minutes before we were done, which was still a few minutes in advance of 11 AM, which was the time I had signed up for my conference. We didn’t have class today, and don’t have class tomorrow, so a couple extra days of being able to sleep in slightly will be nice. Long story short, my grade is better than I had expected, but since there’s now just under a month left I need to step it up so I haven’t completely wasted my time and money and have to re-take this stupid class yet again.

As for the non-academic parts of my life at the moment, work has kind of been dominating my “free” time. For whatever reason (sleep deprivation?), I don’t think I’ve done much of late as far as playing computer games or otherwise entertaining myself, but I’m still probably spending too much time on social media. On the other hand, as much as I may dislike my current job, I do have to pay rent, tuition, and other bills somehow.

Other recent amusements have included online versions of the board game Diplomacy, continuing conversation with the young woman I’ve been texting since late February, and last week’s quick trip home. Continue reading →

post-solstice

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I haven’t written here for a couple weeks, and something made me think I should write a post instead of doing anything actually productive.

Today marks the beginning of the third week of my summer class, which going well, for the most part. I think it’s interesting that the teacher is a graduate student who’s about my age, but I’ve thought that was interesting when it happened before (for a chemistry lab during the fall 2013 semester). One day during the first week she asked if anyone knew about Myers-Briggs types, and I raised my hand and helped her remember several of the dichotomies. She is apparently an INFP. Other interesting things about the class include the two older gentlemen taking the class – I think they’re probably both in their 60s, but one’s a history major and the other is some kind of business triple major, majoring in finance and two other related majors I can never remember. I remember wondering what the class would be like – at 24, I’m barely a non-traditional student, so I wasn’t really afraid of being the oldest person in the class, but it seems slightly more likely to happen now than it would have been when I was a “traditional” college student, or at least when I was taking classes before I turned 23 (which I believe is the age beyond which my current university considers a student “non-traditional”). Other than them, and one girl who said she was still in high school (almost making me envy people who live in college towns and can therefore take college classes on campus before graduating high school), most of my classmates appear to be traditional college students. For that matter, now that I think about it, I probably don’t look like a non-traditional student (see above about being barely non-traditional).

In other news, I’m looking forward to the end of this week. After working until midnight last night and 5-9 PM Friday, Saturday, today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, I’m currently planning on visiting family, though it will only be a brief visit. Originally I had a dentist appointment scheduled for Friday, but then that had to be rescheduled. Around a month ago, I made plans with the young woman I’ve been texting since late February to (finally) meet this Friday, and after some uncertainty while I decided whether I should change plans, I decided to proceed as planned, so that should be interesting. If nothing else, staying up late texting is entertaining. I probably should get more than 4 hours of sleep tonight, though that has more relation to my procrastination/lack of effort on the first project for my writing class, rather than being distracted by flirtatious text messages. If I had been more diligent (story of my life) last week, when I was supposed to be working on it, I presumably wouldn’t be as stressed this weekend, though somehow I wasn’t motivated enough to actually make any progress.

Even with coffee, I think 7 hours of sleep over two days is about my limit. Tonight I’m thinking about going to bed before 3 AM, but it remains to be seen exactly what happens. I’ve had some ideas lately that I finally listed and am thinking about incorporating into a project, but I think I’ll write about those later.

Summer is a-coming in

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I haven’t been doing anything particularly exciting of late – work, occasional writing, playing computer games, and so on. Of course, now that I say that, I can think of a few different ideas for potential posts, like being called in to work last Friday five minutes before a tornado warning went out, or some tabletop roleplaying ideas, or recent interest in the After the End mod for Crusader Kings 2, specifically the tribal game I recently re-discovered. For that matter, I could also write about the dream I had this morning.

Maybe I’ll do a bit of each. Continue reading →

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)

Continue reading →