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I have many snails.
Jun. 7th, 2010 12:21 pmI bet Random that I couldn't breed pink (or yellow, but pink would be ideal) snails from her unwanted collection of pest snails, so I snagged a dozen, set them up in a bucket and then a tank, and now I have a hundred or so. Another couple of months and I can have another cull to end up with the ones closest to my desired colour. It's slow going, but as three-year-projects go, it's fun and easy.
I'm playing Caesary on Kongregate. It's a 'free' game which wants *way* too much money to get ahead (having three builders instead of one would cost me about £3 *per week*), but it does manage to at least be perfectly fun to play even with only the free stuff. If options cost less, I'd probably already have thrown money at it. Instead, everything costs about twice what I consider reasonable. Good game, though.
I finally got around to watching Francesco's Venice and it's astonishing. I didn't realise that Enrico Dandalo, Doge of Venice basically hijacked the entire Fourth Crusade to go and sack Constantinople (then a Christian city) as revenge for their soldiers blinding him a few decades before when he was merely Venice's foremost merchant. Now that's a grudge. It also, finally, makes sense for me of why Byzantium got sacked at all. 'For the money' didn't quite cut it for me, although Venice did take many, many treasures back (and used them to encrust St Mark's Basilica, which holds the remains of St Mark, which were also stolen, this time from Alexandria).
Oh, and look up the Venetian voting system some time. I am trying to imagine it being made into a board game - randomly get nine cards and use them to trade for forty tokens, then roll dice to get 25 of those, and so on and so on. At the end, you have a single Doge, but nobody's quite sure how.
I just want to know when and how Venetians set up the British Civil Service.
I'm playing Caesary on Kongregate. It's a 'free' game which wants *way* too much money to get ahead (having three builders instead of one would cost me about £3 *per week*), but it does manage to at least be perfectly fun to play even with only the free stuff. If options cost less, I'd probably already have thrown money at it. Instead, everything costs about twice what I consider reasonable. Good game, though.
I finally got around to watching Francesco's Venice and it's astonishing. I didn't realise that Enrico Dandalo, Doge of Venice basically hijacked the entire Fourth Crusade to go and sack Constantinople (then a Christian city) as revenge for their soldiers blinding him a few decades before when he was merely Venice's foremost merchant. Now that's a grudge. It also, finally, makes sense for me of why Byzantium got sacked at all. 'For the money' didn't quite cut it for me, although Venice did take many, many treasures back (and used them to encrust St Mark's Basilica, which holds the remains of St Mark, which were also stolen, this time from Alexandria).
Oh, and look up the Venetian voting system some time. I am trying to imagine it being made into a board game - randomly get nine cards and use them to trade for forty tokens, then roll dice to get 25 of those, and so on and so on. At the end, you have a single Doge, but nobody's quite sure how.
I just want to know when and how Venetians set up the British Civil Service.
