I give him money and befriend him, and this is how he repays me!
This is the thanks I get after shipping him crates of cash. He's now marching on the Bosporus with thousands of Turks after I reconquered Anatolia.
That Orlando Bloom movie was BS!
Does anyone know a way to convert a multicolored image into heraldry? For example, I found a reconstruction of a Palaiologan-era stone emblem from Meteora that may (according to author) have been based on an earlier military banner. It was associated with a donation dedicated to Byzantine military saints, and I’d love to turn it into a proper in-game banner. I’ve included the original image below in case anyone is interested.
I think a warp catchphrase that would be even more cringe than "Hit it" would be "Alrighty then." The captain could be really into ancient comedy movies and maybe get mad at their crew when they think he's being weird.
I was going through my last year's camera roll, and I found myself enchanted all over again by Uchisar. Kappadokia in general was a magical place, especially all the rock-cut towns, but there was something about Uchisar I found particular compelling. Not just from this vantage where there were tons of other tourists taking photos but from other places around where the troglodytic buildings just go on and on and on.
From what I've gathered, this area was continuously inhabited for millennia, and the rock-cut practice was extensively in use during the medieval Roman era.
Does anyone have any information on what Uchisar was called? I've read that Goreme was called Korama, but Uchisar is far enough away from Goreme that I don't suppose they would have had the same name. But I can't find anything about it.
Apparently it means Outer Fortress or some such in Turkish. But it's not just that massive castle in the background, if you panned left and right, there are rock-cut buildings that go on a ways.
Empire fans explaining why secret police are actually wholesome if Romaboo-coded.
After spending many more hours in Starfield, I think I finally understand what feels missing from the setting.
It’s not just the NASA-punk vibe, even though I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not about the limited choices or the typical Bethesda issues.
It’s the complete lack of respect for Earth. Humanity lost Earth. Not "we moved away from Earth." Not "Earth became less important." It was lost, forever. The home of every language, culture, religion, song, food, myth, country, war, family story, your grandma's secret cookie recipe, everything. It turned into a dead rock, and humanity had to escape into space.
That should be the defining cultural trauma of the Settled Systems, not something you learn about later on. Not "Oh yeah, Earth got wrecked. Anyway, here’s New Atlantis." There are some people who care but mostly it feels like something for history buffs or collectors not the central wound of human civilization.
A human society after losing Earth would be fixated on Earth culture. Retro music would be everywhere. Old Earth fashion would stay around. Bars would play the Beatles, Michael Jackson, etc. People would wear MLB baseball caps, football jerseys, denim, military surplus, old national symbols, anything. Restaurants would serve "Authentic Earth Food" even if the ingredients are no longer real. People would debate whether a synthetic tomato tastes like the original. Wealthy collectors would want Earth dirt, leaves, bottle caps, subway tokens, vinyl records, old flags, pieces of concrete etc.
Settlements would be named after Earth places all the time. New Rome. New Toyko, New New York whatever. People would carry Earth like a diaspora remembers a lost homeland.
The NASA-punk look would be much stronger if the game fully embraced this. There should be longing, nostalgia, grief, bad reconstructed pizza. Teenagers would wear ancient Nirvana shirts they don’t get and never listened to. People would argue about who owns what part of Earth’s legacy. Islam, Christianity, Marxism, Capitalism, all focused on returning, remembering, preserving, or letting go.
It really sucks how the main emotional anchor of the story is just like "oh yeah Earth died" and pretty much all of the things Earthlings would have held dear to -- religions, ideologies, etc. just disappeared in favor of other stuff that doesn't really harken back to Earth.
EDIT: People saying “it was 200 years ago, nobody would care” are seriously underestimating how long cultural memory lasts. The American Civil War was over 160 years ago and people are still fighting over Lost Cause mythology, monuments, statues, flags, and what the war “really meant.” Constantinople fell in 1453 and people were still emotionally, religiously, and politically obsessed with it for centuries afterward. Napoleon brought it up.
We would be MAD about losing all of Earth. Probably forever.
Image: Look at Attica/Athens compared to Thrace/Constantinople. The 1337 population balance is wildly off.
In Tinto's alt-history version of 1337 the Attic Penninsula has a larger population than Thrace, including Constantinople. Athens is sitting around 85K, all of Attica at a quarter million while Constantinople itself is only 121K. Worse, Athens is apparently double the size of Thessaloniki.
This is bad-wrong.
Thessaloniki was the second city of the Roman Empire, a major port, a major administrative and commercial center, and one of the great urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean. Historians commonly put its 14th-century population somewhere around 100,000, and the 14th century was in many ways one of Thessalonikis great cultural moments.
Athens, meanwhile, was not doing too hot. In 1337 it was under the Catalan Company, one of the most colorful terrorist robber-baron regimes in medieval history. After Kephissos in 1311, the Catalans became permanent rulers in the Duchy of Athens, and it turns out being ruled by a bunch of cut-throat mercenaries is not exactly demographically stimulating.
Nikephoros Gregoras does not describe Attica as flourishing townlands, to put it mildly. Peter Topping on Frankish Greece and Luttrell on the Latin East give us a depressed, militarized, extractive landscape ran like an extortion racket.
Constantinople at 121K in 1337 is at least defensible as a working estimate, given the long decline from the Komnenian peak and the much lower figures often suggested for the 15th century. Athens at 85K in the same start is wildly, grossly wrong.
The correct hierarchy should be:
Constantinople and Thrace first by far. Thessaloniki and Macedonia second. Athens and Attica well below both.
Please update this part of the map to reflect medieval reality, not the ghost of classical Athens. The Catalan Company did not leave behind a population miracle. The philhellenism is showing, Paradox.
