[pb72 spoilers]: the esteemed gentleman's literature and book club

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The espionage screen shows that Bing has the same 72 EP we do against him at +4 a turn. Seems like he has not met anyone else yet either.

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turn 51 overview. I should have realized last turn was 50 and done it there. Whoops!




Capital just 2 pop whipped another settler, for the 'Animal Farm site'. With the granary, regrowing the pop should not take too long. Hoping to set up an early cottage on the river,




Dune is growing to size four to double whip a worker. We need workers like nobody's business to clear out the forests and get these cities working more improved tiles.




Creation taking advantage of the three improved high yield foodhammer tiles to build another worker. The worker that just mined the copper is chopping the plains hill forest. Overflow could go into another worker or a settler. Probably a settler, since the capital can finish another worker?

Research is set to priesthood at 0%. The question is whether to go full steam on monarchy, or to make a pitstop at monotheism for judiasm and OR. Given the other players going for early religion, I feel like the risk of monotheism is not worth it.




International news shows that an unknown player built Henge this turn. Early date for it to fall, especially with no IND. It can be worth it, maybe if they pushed for early stone that was nearby, but I question if it will be all that good on this map. Most cities will scoop up all their good tiles and food in the first ring, from what I've seen.

[Tarkeel]

T51 isn't that early for Henge, and it would have been a good project to dump the chops at Dune into if it was still available. Likewise, Oracle at Priesthood might be worth dumping chops into as well, even for "only" Monarchy.

Don't undervalue an early religion; OrgRel is great for setting up infrastructure and Theology (with well-spread religion) would give us another promotion. It's easy to start getting too cute with the setup however, and our main limiter seems to be research and not production.

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I put the research into priesthood for now - I feel like chopping oracle out in Dune is the safer bet then risking it on an early religion.




This is some pretty awesome wizardry for a greens game. This is with CRE as the only early game boosting trait. I can try and console myself by pointing out that we've been tailing Bing in CY this whole time and he might be stuck working unimproved tiles for a while longer. The spiteful part of me wants to call this SHARKING! At least if civac is doing as much micro work as I suspect. Oh well. Perhaps we may need to work on coordinating a dogpile with the other greenies, if our scouts could find them!




Micro for the turn: Dune finished a monument, then double whipped a worker at size four. Creation is about to finish another worker as the worker chops the plains hills. Republic double whipped a settler, overflowed into a spear, and grew to size 3. The workers that were chopping a forest at republic laid down the first cottage at Republic - now they are needed to lay a road to the soon to be new city and work on pasturing the sheep and cattle there. I am thinking we can move two workers up to Dune to work on an oracle chop plan. Creation can work on another settler with the chop overflow from the worker.

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A lot of stuff happened in the past 3 turn range. It's hard to keep track of the turns in a PB compared to a PBEM, at least for me! Just because of how often you end up playing double turns, instead of one save pass = one turn. I'll try and cover it all as best I can.

First off, our scouts in the east and west finally met the other two players, on the same turn.




I'm not sure about this site that Xist is aiming to settle, seems kind of food and commerce poor. But maybe there's a juicy river or tile I was missing.




No sign of Aetryn's borders in this direction. The land is so poor out in this direction it will probably be a while before we end up being neighbors. The only thing of value is really the spices, which we aren't going to beat Bing to on the other side.








The city screen for the greenies does give me a bit of hope, showing that we are at least keeping pace with the non civac teams - even if our spot in CY has taking a recent beating. Instead of us being the clear loser in a shark pool, we may instead be in a good position to lead a future dogpile. Of course, if Aetryn settles two more cities in the time since I took this screenshot, I will be the fool here.




We form the beginnings of an Oracle plan. Dune grows to size 4 next turn, and will be in prime position to double whip a worker, while the other worker starts pre chopping the forests. I would need to do the math here to figure out when to line up the chops and overflow so that I spend the minimal amount of time building this thing. I really don't have the faintest clue on where to start, though. PBSpy can tell you I've been busier than usual this week, so I don't have the time to sim that I hoped I would have.

Tech micro: priesthood came in. Saved gold for a turn and moved on to masonry. If Monotheism falls after that, it won't be too much of a loss, since having PRO walls on hand for a Praetorian emergency will be not the worst thing in the world. 




We also founded a new city on the 'Animal farm' site. Two workers just finished pasturing the cows - they'll finish the road to Republic and then hook up the sheep.

Other worker duties: One worker finished chopping a forest in creation, leaving us two workers in that area. I will have them mine a hill that can be swapped between Creation and Republic, and then put down another cottage and another road so that all the cities are connected. Creation will start work on a settler at size four with plans to double whip. Republic I will grow to size five, so it can work two cottages and the ivory, and then work on another double whipped settler. Hopefully this isn't too slow development as to fall behind, although I fear it may be the case. I'm certainly no micro fiend.

Naming scheme details will come in a separate post, as this one is long enough already.

GREEN QUESTION: When people have gone for a CtH serfdom game, when do they usually swap away from slavery? Or is there not a standard sort of answer for that?

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The Diamond Age is one of my personal favorite fictional novels ever, one that personally spoke to me in a way few other writers have managed. It's also a book that unironically uses the phrase 'pert breasts' in exactly the kind of stupefyingly cliche way you would expect from science fiction. The author, Neal Stephenson, truly is a man of contrasts.

On one hand, The Diamond Age is a simple yet enthralling tale about the importance of education and the subtleties we modern people hardly consider in how it should be applied. It is a story about a young orphan girl in a world that is set in the far future, yet borrows much from the past. It is a world where people have wealth beyond our current dreams, but who live out the lifestyles of the Victorian past because it helps them function that much better. It is in that context that the book tells us about what education can be used for. Not just the simple acquisition of knowledge, about mathematics and science, but also about the kind of attitude it can impart on the pupil.

This kind of education starts well before the orphan girl, Nell, ends up in a formal school. She is given a computerized book that shows her stories, and these stories lead to her running away from an abusive father and eventually being taken in by an upper class family. These computer stories end up being voiced by a woman on the other side of a screen, who sees Nell interacting with the book and wishes she could rescue the girl, while it takes Nell herself a long time to realize there is a person behind the storybook.

And gradually, you get to see how both the storybook and the Victorian upbringing are designed to instill character and knowledge. The book pushes Nell to tinker with things and feel the boundaries of her situation, instead of merely observing. Later on, the school she joins does so as well, but in a less obvious way.

One of the teachers at the Victorian-like school the girls go to is Miss Stricken, a caricature straight out of some Dickensian or Roald Dahl book. She is a large and ugly woman with no children of her own, who seems to enjoy being strict and giving unnecessarily overblown punishments to children. In any modern story, she would simply be the villain, who in the end is overcome by the children and then laughed at. Instead, in this story, she is here to teach another lesson. In having to deal with her strictness and her seeming unfairness, the girls learn that in school, just like in the real world, there are people who may be strict and mean who have power over you and to succeed in life you must be able to deal with that. The other teachers at the school explain this to the children, and they end up writing Miss Stricken letters of appreciation on her birthday.

It is for that and other things, especially the ending, that I love the book for. There is a lot more that I do not like at all.

Half the book is devoted to a confusing and laborious subplot involving some kind of Chinese Neo-Something plot to create an army of super children, a subplot that only reveals just how out of touch the author is when he stops writing about Japan. There are a lot of words regarding side characters who aren't Nell that are a waste of your time. There is even a stupid drug and sex cult that people join because it will illuminate the secrets of the universe, or solve a cryptography problem. If the first sentence summarizing the chapter doesn't include Nell, you're going to have a bad time.

I can't help recommend this book for everything I do like, but expect a lot of rough edges. It's not Stephenson's most polished work (that would be Anathem, which you may see pop up later).

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For our two new workers, we have a double feature of authors who I haven't read that many works from. So it is possible I would be missing out on things from them that I would enjoy more.




Kurt Vonnegut has given us many novels and short stories, and his most famous one is Slaughterhouse Five. This one is not one I would recommend. 

It is a story about a guy who served in the second World War, who ended up being visited by aliens who wanted to see him have sex with a super hot celebrity. Then, years later, he gets assassinated for blabbering about aliens and world peace during the Days of Rage. If you think that sounds self indulgent to the extreme, you'd be right.

The prose attempts to form a lot of koans and wise sayings, that really are mostly nonsense. The big climax of the book revolves upon imparting the great relegation to the reader that the bombing of Dresden was kind of bad and unnecessary. Like another contemporary author, Vonnegut really seems distraught over the idea that war might feature bad and unnecessary violence. If only people just fought their wars cleanly and nicely, maaaan.

There is also a lot of time travel, which accomplishes little besides moving around events in the story to make it seem more interesting than it really is. If you took away the time travel and aliens, you'd just be left with the average post World War biography of some boomer going to Woodstock and then getting shot in the seventies.

I've been told that Vonnegut has more to offer in books besides this, and someday I do hope to give him a second chance. 




Derrida is a French philosopher who only tends to get brought up by conservatives looking for the little cheese eating gremlins who ruined academia. If one wants to points fingers for that sort of thing, it makes far more sense to look at Rosseau or Foucault. Derrida's work is far more on the technical side, and of little interest to those who aren't linguists.

I am not a linguist, yet I decided to read one of his books. There is an interesting idea in it. But is it worth getting there?

I'm not sure how much blame to put on Derrida and the culture of modern philosophy for how difficult his books are to read, and how much on the translation. Either way, there's no getting around how much Derrida's writing is loopy, ponderous, dripping with complicated and hazy word choices, and just never seems to get to the point. 

At the heart of Grammatology, Derrida eventually gets to his thesis. Language is made up of signs, symbols, characters and words that represent things that exist in the real world. And, if one studies language enough, one can only determine that this relationship between the sign and the thing being referenced is ultimately circular. There is no beginning or end to the chain of symbol and sign. That, on its own, is a fascinating observation, but still not one that means much. It relates to how language might have formed, evolving via still unknown processes as the modern human came from primates. It relates to the attempts to construct new languages today - mostly a hobbyist effort, but more technically serious when programming is the subject. But it is not an observation that holds much political significance.

I just wish someone else could have written this observation in a book that isn't such a pain in the neck to get through.

[Tarkeel]

A lot of stuff happened in the past 3 turn range. It's hard to keep track of the turns in a PB compared to a PBEM, at least for me! Just because of how often you end up playing double turns, instead of one save pass = one turn. I'll try and cover it all as best I can.

A lot of that is down to simultaneous with few players in the early stages. My other ongoing game is luck to get two turns in a week.

First off, our scouts in the east and west finally met the other two players, on the same turn.

That's good news, remember to swap EP spending around! Weird that they are in opposite directions though.

We form the beginnings of an Oracle plan. Dune grows to size 4 next turn, and will be in prime position to double whip a worker, while the other worker starts pre chopping the forests. I would need to do the math here to figure out when to line up the chops and overflow so that I spend the minimal amount of time building this thing. I really don't have the faintest clue on where to start, though. PBSpy can tell you I've been busier than usual this week, so I don't have the time to sim that I hoped I would have.

Remember that failgold is also in our interest here. For me the Oracle is mainly something to dump those chops into, and not a goal in itself.

GREEN QUESTION: When people have gone for a CtH serfdom game, when do they usually swap away from slavery? Or is there not a standard sort of answer for that?

I wrote something about this in relation to PB58, which was one of the first games to take advantage of CtH serfdom. Here is the start of a small discussion about it, which continues into the T200 report.

Serfdom was very strong for us in that game, but even then we first swapped to it T162 for a golden age, and only permanently on T180. There were two prerequisites for this: ReplaceableParts for the hammer bonus on windmills, and Nationalism for drafting. In the latest random games it has also featured heavily before these techs, as it gives an early oomp but at the cost of scaling and emergency preparedness.

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Not much to report for the current pair of turns. Whipped another worker in Dune, Republic and Creation swap to settlers.

I set max EP spending on Aetryn. I have a hunch he will be the biggest threat after Bing/civac. The distances involved make me not very scared of Praets.

I don't think the land is quite bad enough here to justify early serfdom, at least until we get machinery. So aiming for HR + OR if we can swing it.

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We grow to a collection of six workers, as we whip another settler. Republic will be on course to whip another settler in a few more turns. I think I will need to do some chopping work to get the next few out quickly.




Richard Wright, at first, seems like someone offering candy to an intellectual audience. His autobiography, Black Boy, has a lot to go through, and it is told fairly honesty. There is his start with a rather unstable seeming family, struggles with the racist South when trying to prove himself, a journey northward, a fall in with the nascent American Communist Party before it turns sour, and more. My opinion of some of the conclusions in the autobiography has probably lowered since I last read it, but it's not something I would call bad, or disturbing.

One part of his autobiography tells about a play he wrote. What happens in that play?

Native Son is the story of a man not like Richard Wright at all. It focuses on the fictional man named Bigger Thomas. Bigger Thomas is a violent and impulsive man. When carrying a drunken woman to bed, he smothers her for fear of being caught in a suspicious position, after kissing her, of course. Then he throws the corpse in a furnace. Then he tries to pin the blame on another man. When that fails, he runs away with his girlfriend, who he then rapes and murders. Then he is caught by the police and sentenced to death. Before he is killed, he gets to solemnly reflect on his rage with a kind and thoughtful lawyer and friend, who want to talk about how misunderstood he is.

The moral here may be something vaguely charitable, acknowledging that Bigger Thomas is a monster, yes, but he was a monster created by some system more evil than himself. The shape and nature of this system may be argued, but most would acknowledge the existence of this system to some degree. And yet, the novel seems to ask for far more sympathy for Bigger Thomas than is deserved - a man who will happily rape and kill whites and blacks alike, just according to his own impulsive whims. Even if evil men create monsters, the nature of monsters is to destroy their makers, and I have no interest in pleading for sympathy with monsters looking to kill me because of what was done centuries ago.

But even in our modern times, we seem to have lost that aspect of the story, for it is now common just to see men like Bigger Thomas praised as martyrs and heroes outright, with no negative qualities to speak of.

In Black Boy, the reception of Wright's play disappoints him. Perhaps it was just too early for its time. But I'll stick with his autobiography.