Dogmantra

Dogmantra wrote

Shadowrun Dragonfall is probably my favourite single player story based game.

When I first beat it, I immediately started a new game and played it through a second time. It absolutely nails the difficult moral choices that so many games struggle with.

Also there's a dog!!

Hong Kong is good too, but if you're gonna play em both, start with Dragonfall because Hong Kong made some good quality of life upgrades to stuff like the inventory system and I'd hate for people to miss out on Dragonfall because it feels like a step backwards.

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Dogmantra wrote

according to the game super mario 64 DS yoshi is the pre-evolution of mario, luigi, and wario, and he evolves by using a stone shaped like a hat.

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Dogmantra OP wrote

(I mean it should stand on its own but I'm kind of obsessed with the parallels between the themes of shelley's ozymandias and the long term nuclear waste warnings and this is kind of a riff on those ideas. shelley's poem can be read as saying 'how foolish ozymandias was to declare himself the mightiest and to think he'd never be bettered' and I wanted to write something that was like 'how foolish of us to presume we can tell what people in the past were thinking')

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Dogmantra wrote (edited )

oh sorry, I meant they never used the name, they definitely used the city!

I mean of course they called it byzantium when it was called that, but it was changed to constantinople when constantine upgraded it to the new capital, so it was never called byzantium during its big role in the empire if you get me.

My point is that calling the Eastern Romans "Byzantines" is a bit like calling people from France "Gauls". Like, yeah that is where Gaul was physically located, but the modern nation of France is a different thing.

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Dogmantra wrote

I am 100% convinced that the fall of the western empire is traditionally considered 476 because the emperor whose deposition caused it was called Romulus Augustulus which is like... such a perfect bookend for the empire? city founded by Romulus, turned into the empire by Augustus, and the last ruler shares a name with both of them? But this time it's an ironic echo because the empire is a shell of its former self.

Nevermind that Romulus Augustulus was a usurper who was never officially recognised and that the man he deposed was recognised as the legitimate emperor until 480.

Nevermind that the Domain of Soissons existed, a province in northern Gaul where the governer insisted that it was merely another Roman province waiting for a new emperor. The locals called it the kingdom of the romans. It existed til 486 when it was conquered by the Franks.

Nevermind that Roman culture and art and administrative structures stuck around in the west for hundreds more years! Especially in somewhere like Britain where Romano-British culture was such a huge influence on our borders that we still feel its fallout today.

It's all too easy to make history fall into neat stories. And I love the story of Rome falling in 476 because so much of why it happened echoes why Rome was such a powerhouse. But it's not really an accurate representation.

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Dogmantra wrote

right? that's fucked up too!!

they were romans. by the time the split between western and eastern empire was really embedded, the east was by far the more influential and important part. new emperors in the west were basically given legitimacy by the east. the western empire officially fell because the east abolished the position of western emperor after the deposition of romulus augustulus & assassination of julius nepos.

the east was in charge. they called themselves romans, they acted like romans, they controlled the roman empire.

but we name them after the name of their capital city that they never used? I get it's convenient to have a different name for the continuation of rome after western rome fell. But we have a name for that already... eastern rome.

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Dogmantra wrote

here's a fucked up fact about cities!

istanbul was the capital & most influential and important city of the roman empire longer than rome was

it was constantinople and before that it was byzantium, it has always been one of the most important cities in the mediterranean area but the way history is talked about it's like they're three different cities

but no!!! THEY'RE THE SAME PLACE

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Dogmantra wrote

Reply to rumors by ellynu

yeah? well I met a traveller from an antique land who says that's bullshit

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