This Seems Like A Lot Of Sweden For Me

So here’s Twitter’s recommendations for who I ought to start following.

Sure, but does Sweden ever follow me? I hope not. I feel nervous enough I have like twenty people reading this on a regular basis. A whole country? My sole qualification for having a country follow me is that I’m pretty good at the Europa Universalis line of grand strategy games. Also when I play Tropico the economy is a weird swingy mess between boom and bust years but everybody feels really, really secure in their civil rights.

I don’t have anything against Sweden, since it’s almost never the problem when I play a grand strategy game. But I don’t see why Twitter is so sure I need to think about it so much suddenly. Also I feel like an account that’s called Sweden.se seems awfully on the nose. It’s like having a site that’s usa.usa.usa. At least as long as that actually is the flag of Sweden. It might be. A lot of those northern European countries have flags that are white crosses on a color, because they got to pick first. Also I don’t know who sweden/Fredrik is, or whether that’s just a joint account for everyone in Sweden who’s named Fredrik. I would hope they take turns with it. Oh, now, wouldn’t it be something if the account was really an enormous troll by Finland?

Also I figure to have only the one comic strip essay on my mathematics blog this week and yesterday’s was it. Enjoy!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose five points today as traders were all confident everyone else knew something in bidding up the index and that if they went along with it maybe someone would tell them what they’ve heard.

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Oh, *Honestly*, Grand Strategy Games

From the tutorial for March of the Eagles, a variant on Europa Universalis III that skips Ancient Rome and is all about the Napoleonic Wars, which I picked up because it was really cheap and why not?

I’m not sure what idea it is I’m even picking here, although I had clicked on “Naval Movement Ideas”, so I imagine it’s some national- and era-appropriate idea for the Royal Navy, like maybe having ships that move or something. Still, at least it has a nice reassuring ! to fill right margin.

So I expect the box there with the ‘OK’ button is supposed to be double-checking you really want to do this (which is pick a National Idea that gives you some benefits). But it’s hidden by the List of Ideas, which can’t be minimized or closed, and it can’t be brought in front of the List Of Ideas, and, oh, I don’t know. I guess that’s a picture of a guy with a bandage around his head on the top bar there, with a 0.88 underneath it, and not a water balloon being filled from a tap.

If you need me I’ll be over in Roller Coaster Tycoon III Platinum.

Why Grand Strategy Games Take Seven Freaking Years To Learn How To Play

From about the second tutorial screen to Europa Universalis: Rome, a grand strategy game variant I bought when it was on sale and only just got around to now that I got the mothership game done one time. And depending on how wide a screen you’re looking at this on it might be hard to see what I’m pointing to, so you might want to click on the image until it’s big enough you can read the text easily.

I’m sure the interface won’t be any harder to understand than the ancient Roman calendar, in which you might specify that today was, say, the 22nd of June by declaring it was the “tenth day to the kalends of July”, or how you’d say that the 12th was the “first day to the ides of June”, because the ides are the 13th in most months and the 15th in a couple of months. And sometimes they’d just throw in an extra month between the 24th and 25th of February because what the heck, why not, and I’m not even making that up.

And I am just awestruck by the multiple levels of failure involved with this screen. I would like to know how they overlooked a few ways to make this even better, such as:

• Make the text dark grey on a slightly less dark grey background, possibly one with a lot of very dark grey cross-hatching.
• When you pause or unpause the game, have it shriek.
• Make the images less directly representative, like, instead of a pile of coins for the treasury and money use a pile of salt, represented by a bottle of soy sauce, which can be quite high in salt; or perhaps represent research with a plain footlong hot dog.
• Set the screen to occasionally strobe, and in the midst of the strobing effect, have the computer grab some manner of blunt instrument and poke you in the ribs with it, then punch you.

So in summary, I would like to note that when one of the trilithons making up Stonehenge fell in 1797, a report in the Kentish Gazette placed blame for the fall on the burrowing of rabbits undermining the wonder. (Pages 39-40). Thank you.

Why Grand Strategy Games Are Thrilling

I have a deep love of grand strategy video games. Let me explain the genre. You know Sid Meier’s Civilization, possibly from the guys who spent 1993 through 1998 sitting continuously at the computer mumbling weird things about taking on the Ruso-Aztec alliance? It’s what that grew into. Civilization is still around, but it’s not nearly complicated enough a game for me. I prefer the Europa Universalis line of games, by which I mean, last week I just finished my first-ever complete game of Europa Universalis 3, a game I bought in Like 2009 and hadn’t yet understood. I did win.

Anyway. I was playing China, and along about the early 18th century came this exciting bit of pop-up news:

This is noteworthy because my China didn’t have the naval explorers to go poking around the world. Apparently someone just came up to the Imperial Mapmaker and said, “Hey, you wanna know something the rest of the world hasn’t been letting you in on? Oh, you’re going to love it. This is finally going to make sense out of those weird rumors you’ve heard about New Haven and Saybrook and fill in that gap to the west of Woonsocket!” … … I’m kidding, of course. Why would the Ming court have heard about Woonsocket, Rhode Island, at that stage in history? But, hey, access to Danbury, that’s something!

And I just haven’t stopped giggling about the potential wonders that alternate-history 1722 China hopes to find now that they’ve got an “in” with Connecticut.

In other stuff, my mathematics blog gave me reason to talk about comic strips yesterday. Also, Apparently Frank Page’s comic strip Bob The Squirrel has observed some problems similar to mine.