Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ehndras]

I also went through the existing words, and decided to statistically bias some of them back towards slightly shorter variations, and therefor slightly shorter sentences, as a response to the feedback I regularly get about some of the sentences being too wordy. You’ll see the same in the earlier example, where we have some sets using the same short word twice to boost the chance of that word being selected (this is of course not an especially elegant way to do it, but let’s be honest: my programming is not known for its elegance). This should ensure that sentences will tend to be just a little shorter and a little less wordy, and I’m going to continue this trend of chopping out irrelevant words whilst maintaining sentence variety – though this is a tricky balance to strike.

To build upon that, one can assume scholars, priests, and some bureaucrats might use lengthier descriptions/sentences in general.

Or, a GREAT way to figure out someone's affinity: if you ask me about something random, you won't get much out of me. Ask me about a topic I like, and... Well... *points to wall of text in last comment*

If you're conversing with random person #12 and suddenly their answers go from curt to holy-shit-that-was-in-depth, chances are you struck a chord of which they're either highly knowledgeable or highly opinionated.

Thus, some guy from the culture who praises Keshua may give you the expected greeting out of custom, but a hardline fundamentalist or thoroughly devout follower might betray their religious zeal by adding more flavor and depth to anything that warrants a response based on faith.

The same goes for insults, compliments, and other questions.

Once you put in personality traits, someone with anger issues may go all-the-fuck-out with insults and threats, or be more likely to default to such things. Their opinion of you may be harder to shift into the positive, but far easier to sway toward the negative.

A kind, compassionate, humble, etc. insert-nice-guy-meme-here individual might be overly gentle and tread carefully in negative territory more as a general behavioral bias, and less a sign of implicit context.

I'm sure we all know people who will rarely mention something negative, but still hold negative or even aggressive opinions. All the same, there are those who will always find something negative to say about anything, and default to that.

Some people, well, they're just quiet. Or whatever the opposite of verbose is. They'll say far less, but not necessarily rush you to end the conversation. This accounts for people who aren't necessarily in some great rush to get elsewhere, but still have a solid reason for why they talk as they do.

Others, never shut the hell up. We ALL know someone like this. Get the bastard talking and you'll be the one having to suddenly remember an appointment.

OH. That reminds me.

How you choose to greet, or say goodbye to someone *should* have an impact on their opinion of you, and shift their behavior.

You could secretly be a follower of the Cult of Lazarus, which everyone hates. You *could* use that in a greeting, if you so choose to deviate from the basic *click greeting*, to test their opinion or see if your hunch about them also being a hidden cultist - and thus potential ally or source of information - is correct. Or, you just want to piss that self-righteous prick off. Who knows. If you get him to attack you, you have an excuse to defend yourself. Scratch one inconvenience, and without the law getting on your back.

If your cult is legal, they have no defense. Their opinion alone does not constitute an applicable reason to attack someone, so you effectively just baited them into criminal activity by taking advantage of their personal or cultural beliefs and opinions.

Good job!

[Ehndras]

It's strange [allowing women in the military] because such civilizations are preparing to win the Darwin Award.  Keep in mind that before WWI almost all wars were limited wars, and it was nearly an annual thing before gunpowder (no extended peacetime).

That said, low fantasy is rife with dying or nearly-exterminated societies where this is appropriate.

Or, contextual basis only.

General allowance rule gives way to actual contextual basis for allowance.

For example, in modern military, some don't allow women at all. Others, allow women in NON-combat roles. I know a few ladies who are monsters with a rifle, and one who, according to her commander, is impossibly astute with a grenade launcher as if she was born with the god damn thing.

If a culture does NOT allow women, its absolute.

Perhaps another culture allows women, but only those who cannot bare children. Maybe only female slaves. Maybe they have a cultural quirk where their archers tend to be female. If magic is a thing, maybe women are the usual mages due to the whole sage-crone shtick. Of course, combat medics *are* often military, yet non-combat roles.

Hell, maybe rather than battle drums, culture #5 brings yodeling or ululating ladies along to freak out their enemies and raise troop morale. Hey, Banshees, man.

I see no reason why all of this shouldn't be possible.

Sure, having a large chunk of your females in combat roles in any stone to iron age setting is a bad fucking idea if you don't want to go extinct, but then again, nothing says culture #9 doesn't have a weird thing about women giving birth to as many kids as possible and then marching off to war while someone else takes care of the kids.

As a scifi writer and avid student of history, I can imagine thousands of eccentric variations and the specific cultural tendencies and incidents that spawned them.

Chances are its been done by some culture or other.

Anyway, as I've learned, the best way to protect your women isn't to keep them useless and have big strong men nearby to protect them...

Its to teach them how to fight so they can defend themselves.

Sometimes, the "big strong men" won't be around. Maybe they got sick. (some diseases target one gender more than others.)

Maybe they got killed while hunting.

Maybe they died in battle.

Maybe the bloody idiots are busy getting drunk and don't notice the raiding party just west of the treeline.

Best way to prevent catastrophic loss of your only source of new humans?

Teach them how to fight and kill.

[Ehndras]

(Or, like in World War I/II, maybe they all marched to war and got killed. Now you have a ton of women who wouldn't have worked in industry due to cultural prejudices and expectations, suddenly working your factories, building weapons, bending iron, and doing all that "unladylike" stuff hardline conservative men like to grumble about. If threat of invasion is a thing, it'd be wise to also teach those ladies how to defend man and country alike. The only reason cultures don't do this is to reinforce the hierarchy of male dominance. Give women power and they won't be as likely to cater to the whole "hey, you're marrying the 2nd son of this merchant, and that's final. Go bare his children, serve him wine, clean his clothes, cook his food, and be a servant for life. What? *scoff* Military duty? Over my dead body!)

[Scoops Novel]

Good stuff.

[Greenbane]

Well, the truth is women are less expendable than men in an ancient/medieval context. You can of course teach your female population how to defend themselves, but there's a difference between learning self-defense and having the extensive training of a soldier. And from a society survival standpoint, it's just inefficient to enlist a sizeable portion of women into the military when they could be back home making sure the population doesn't decline. Especially in the context of frequent wars. It's not exclusively a measure to "preserve the patriarchy".

If the time comes the army's decisively defeated and the enemy's marching on your population, women defending themselves could be somewhat useful, but the war's already lost by then.

I'm sure there could be cultural quirks that'd create exceptions to this norm, but they'd be that, exceptional. Eccentric variations.

[Ehndras]

...Which is the entire point of dynamically producing cultures via RNG.

[Ehndras]

Also, y'all vastly underestimate the human ability to procreate. Ask my grandmother's 20+ kids, or her 19 or so siblings and their 17-24 kids each.

If we discount all the deaths due to the 3 instances of Bubonic Plague(4th or 5th century, 12th century, 14/15th century I think it was? China, Byzantine Empire, medieval Europe), plus Spanish Influenza, Typhoid Fever, etc, we'd have a HELL of a large population.

Come to think of it, we need to worry more about keeping enough of a varied genetic pool and viable breeding pairs safe from disease than any war... We've lost far, far more lives to disease/accident/disaster than all the wars ever fought by our species.

[chevil]

ptw

[Retropunch]

Also, y'all vastly underestimate the human ability to procreate. Ask my grandmother's 20+ kids, or her 19 or so siblings and their 17-24 kids each.

If we discount all the deaths due to the 3 instances of Bubonic Plague(4th or 5th century, 12th century, 14/15th century I think it was? China, Byzantine Empire, medieval Europe), plus Spanish Influenza, Typhoid Fever, etc, we'd have a HELL of a large population.

The issue with that is that these diseases hit everyone in the area so it doesn't make anyone stronger or weaker. It's not about overall population size, it's about individual civilisation's population size. Before modern medicine (like your grandmother) - women in combat makes for a much smaller population size for whichever civilisation fields them.

More than that, you're completely right that women were taught how to fight and hunt, but that doesn't mean you'd want to purposefully expose your only source of growth to danger. This isn't like it's just a theory I made up, it's how it's happened across every civilisation in the world ever (which is a pretty large sample size!) and for a pretty logical reason.

As a similar (and interesting) example, we can look at the real world example of the Fore people. The Kuru disease caused large imbalances in the gender balance of societies which took part in the cannibalistic rituals as it was mainly women who ate the brain which led to the disease. This led to some tribes shrinking to the point of extinction, whilst others were weakened by their lack of available soldiers and were therefore invaded.

 

[Heretic]

Once I hope that i will see realise. It was a lot of times ago.
There is no hope, but a lot of great stuff is here.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Once I hope that i will see realise. It was a lot of times ago.
There is no hope, but a lot of great stuff is here.

We *will* see release of 0.8 in the next month or two. I'm just a junior employee in a very precarious and hyper-competitive career field and it's just hard to now find the time I found during my doctorate

[Greenbane]

Also, y'all vastly underestimate the human ability to procreate. Ask my grandmother's 20+ kids, or her 19 or so siblings and their 17-24 kids each.

As far as I know, given child mortality and the very real risk of mother's death during childbirth, I don't think medieval families could get anywhere near that big.

Not to mention the fact a woman giving birth to over 20 kids means being pregnant for over 15 years almost non-stop, somewhat less if there's a couple of multiple childbirths along the way. That's your entire prime in medieval terms (15-30) focused on one thing, and it won't be martial training nor going off to war.

Also, in general, I'd say having 20+ kids is quite rare, especially 50-60 years ago (I'm guessing that's about your parents' age). And there's also the matter of providing for so many children. You'd either have to be really wealthy or have exceptionally poor family planning. Even if it were medically viable in a medieval context, nobody but the richest nobles would be able to maintain so many kids, if that.

Anyway, this is getting off-topic. Take your time, Mark. As always, life comes first.

[Ehndras]

Indeed. Albeit, this was normal at that time in rural Brazil. You needed multiple generations of children to work the land. Sure, they went through some rough patches early on, but having children was seen as an investment: labor production.

(Father would be 71 if he were alive, my Mother 60)

Bastards really got up in age, too. One of my great-aunts is still kicking at 103, and another great aunt died at 109 around 2 years ago. Ironically, they lived in what amounts to mud huts, never went to doctors, and ate off their own gardens.

[Ehndras]

URR, don't worry buddy. You've got this.

I'm still an avid fan and player, among many, of UnReal World - which has been developed on and off since 1992! No rush, man. Do what you need to do, and do what you can.

We players can get a little antsy sometimes, but as you age, you realize all good things come with patience.

[Ehndras]

Interestingly enough, childbirth has always been a trade-off. Some cultures are better off at it, while others have critical levels of pre-natal mortality and/or (usually and) maternal mortality during birth. Even today, with modern medicine and all, this trend persists.

Adolescent pregnancy

Fact sheet
Updated September 2014
Key facts

    About 16 million girls aged 15 to 19 and some 1 million girls under 15 give birth every year—most in low- and middle-income countries.
    Complications during pregnancy and childbirth are the second cause of death for 15-19 year-old girls globally.
    Every year, some 3 million girls aged 15 to 19 undergo unsafe abortions.
    Babies born to adolescent mothers face a substantially higher risk of dying than those born to women aged 20 to 24.

Birth rates

There has been a marked, although uneven, decrease in the birth rates among adolescent girls since 1990, but some 11% of all births worldwide are still to girls aged 15 to 19 years old. The vast majority of these births (95%) occur in low- and middle-income countries.

The 2014 World Health Statistics indicate that the average global birth rate among 15 to 19 year olds is 49 per 1000 girls. Country rates range from 1 to 299 births per 1000 girls, with the highest rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

Adolescent pregnancy remains a major contributor to maternal and child mortality, and to the cycle of ill-health and poverty.