The actual paper the number comes from (Fate of Empires by John Glubb) is complete bullshit, though. Even the cherry-picked examples it uses, which are limited strictly to the surroundings of the Mediterranean, don’t use any kind of consistent criteria for when an empire starts or ends. He tries to count “Alexander (and his successors)” as one coherent entity and then picks an end year in which all of them had either already collapsed long ago or would not do so for many decades to come. He cuts centuries off of the Roman Empire’s lifespan by just saying that the empire was unstable and getting invaded a lot (and ignoring the Eastern Empire entirely). HIs reckoning of the “Arab Empire” includes three separate caliphates, and the end date isn’t even the actual end of any of them

Other than that, no, it does not attempt to find an average in the sense of a mean lifespan. It actually does argue that 250 years for an empire can be compared to a human living 70 years.

Is it particularly more your fault that things don’t better in Souls games than in any other game in which you are meant to save the world? I think the only difference is that in the Souls ones and others like them, the world is already horrible and needs repaired in some way rather than on the verge of becoming horrible

Interestingly Elden Ring went for quite a different direction. The world is, unquestionably, still an enormous mess that would be horrendous to live in, but they’ve left in far more of the beauty. I particularly like how every so often you hear hostile NPCs playing music or singing if they haven’t spotted you yet, and how there’s a little puzzle side quest about a painter; people are still making art in this ongoing apocalypse. One important allied NPC even actually openly makes an argument that the world is worth preserving if it looks like you’re going for the “destroy everything” ending

Of course the atmosphere and gameplay are still heavy going, both in the Souls trilogy and Elden Ring. I get why that wouldn’t be for everyone. It’s like playable Cormac McCarthy stories, except you can punch your way out of most of the misery if you get it right

I’d be very surprised if “cartoony style” and “low-tech vibe” is not describing Wilds. I assume the bit about respecting of time is something to do with the various timed events in each loop like Ash Twin. I don’t agree with them in the slightest, but I assume that’s what it is

I’m not sure I’d count Outer Wilds as a space game (assuming you mean something in the vein of Elite Dangerous), despite it objectively including a lot of space travel. It’s a detective game, the point is to unravel a mystery

Could you talk a little more about the aesthetics thing? I have no intention to pick a fight with you or tell you that your opinion is wrong, I’m just curious because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that about them before

Also yes the no pausing thing is very frustrating

The gear would not have saved you. The game gets substantially more difficult as you progress, even accounting for your character getting stronger, and if you don’t do a decent job of levelling up appropriate skills that will compound the issue. The starter gear for most of the classes is actually perfectly viable all the way to the end of the game for most players too, it’s not notably weak at all

I love Elden Ring, but I can absolutely respect why it wouldn’t be for everyone. No sense in playing it if you’re not enjoying it, the point is still to have a good and/or interesting time

I’d guess pilot goggles rather than VR

No, not quite. Cargo cults didn’t worship the vehicles, rather the notion of the abundance that they brought. The famous Melanesian ones in WWII happened in societies in which gift-giving was already the key to social power; when WWII came along, both the Japanese and Allied forces brought unbelievable quantities of supplies to the islands and then also intentionally handed out a lot of stuff in order to play into that social practice. It was enough that some locals interpreted it as a sign that they could return to their old ways that had been suppressed under Christian colonial rule, the first signs of a coming new age of prosperity

Anyway all that is to say that no, uncontacted tribes can’t have cargo cults because part of the formation of a cargo cult involves contact

Seems like we’re not entirely sure, but the most widely-accepted theory is that Portuguese sailors heard a Sinhala name and got it a little muddled when telling others Europeans about it

One British guy who got captured there while working for the East India Company wrote that it was this, except for that Europeans intentionally named it after Christopher Columbus because it already sounded really similar

Wikipedia has a couple of them! Sigourney Thayer was an American theatre producer born 1896, Sigourney Trask was an American missionary born 1849, and Sigourney Bandjar is a Surinamese footballer born 1984

A bit of a niche one: I am a big fan of the TTRPG Lancer, and a popular meme format is describing things in the game by cutting and pasting bits of the rulebook like a classic ransom letter

The sand which Sam the Witch panned for riches on the strand which spans, to wit, from headland to ridge

Mirepoix! You can also swap the carrot for bell pepper to get the Cajun equivalent

Spirit in the Sky specifically is a fuzz running on a near-dead battery, so it’s a bit of an odd one. I think the broad approach to the sound is fairly popular though. Stone Foxes come to mind as an example

Sometimes stuff is just popular for a good reason. I love loads of different styles of guitar, but I think my favourite heavy riff is probably the chorus one starting at 2:02 in Saor’s Children of the Mist

Or maybe Flying Whales because, I mean, it’s Flying Whales

Might just be that it’s what the operators were already familiar with. I’ve never used either; is there some reason that Ardupilot would be bad rather than just overkill for this use?

To me it seems like the difference between having a written description of something vs an image of it. I can describe to you a square, 10 centimetres on each side, drawn with black ink in the centre of a sheet of white A4 printer paper. I could also show you a photo of that square. In both cases the information is conveyed, but only one of them involved an image

When I’m navigating I basically always do it by landmarks and turns, which is probably not unusual. I can use relationships of “this street goes west until it meets that street” without having to picture a map. The shape and length of that street don’t really matter for the sake of getting somewhere, only what it connects to

Not sure that I can really compare it to how I would be without aphantasia since, of course, it is all I have ever known, but I do stll enjoy reading. Like other people are saying, I don’t tend to concern myself with visual descriptions

This carries over to my TTRPG gameplay. I rarely ever actually describe what anyone looks like beyond the absolutely vaguest of descriptions (i.e. a heavily-built man, getting on years), which I didn’t notice until a player pointed it out to me. I mostly go by mannerisms, which I suppose is an aspect of appearance

I am still quite good at building mental maps of locations and can do all the classic “rotate a shape” kind of stuff. I can’t visualise it, but I can figure it out. I guess I’m mentally storing it in another format. Possibly related to that, one of the few types of illustration I do particularly enjoy getting in a book is a map

I think it’s just an issue with the cars not working on this track. The Monaco Formula E race a few weeks ago looked great

It’s actually ingenious, there’s no space for the Porsches to spin all the way around like they usually do. It’s basically a safety feature!