So... yeah. TotalBiscuit died.

I don't know how many of you watched his stuff, or even have the interest in videogames to know who he was. But he was sort of amazing. Not without flaws, but...

TotalBiscuit was a games critic. He did immeasurable amounts for numerous indie games (and helped get word out about a number of obscure games, including Warframe, back when nobody knew what that was). He helped defend numerous content creators from shady developers who tried to get their content taken down or otherwise censored.

But above all that, he was a relentless advocate for the consumer and unabashedly, relentlessly ethical in an industry and sector where that isn't necessarily normal. Even people who loathed the man were usually wiling to admit that.

RIP TB. We'll miss you.

The XYZZY awards (the annual awards for excellence in Interactive Fiction) have once again come around. Or at least, the finalists have been announced for this year: https://xyzzyawards.org/

So I'd like to take a moment to point to a few current finalists and previous winners, especially for those who don't play IF.

Firstly, a brief author highlight: Brendan Patrick Hennessy is amazing and so is all his stuff. Bell Park, Youth Detective is pretty good, but the star of the show is Birdland, which won six XYZZYs. I've played it, and it really is that good. It's funny and heartfelt and touching, and you should all just go play it right now if you haven't already. Don't worry: it's pretty short. His Known Unknowns is in the running this year, and it'll probably do well.

I didn't play a lot of last year's winners (you can go through them all on the site), but I did play 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds, which had a lot of fun puzzles and was pretty entertaining.

This year, we had Wizard Sniffer which is pretty funny, but it's also a more traditional bit of IF. True, it's not as Evil and Badly Designed as a lot of oldschool IF was (like Zork: oh man, that game actually WAS evil), but it still might be a bit intimidating.

Finally, Chandler Groover's stuff is almost always pretty good. But it can be kinda NSFW and weird.

In one of the bewilderingly long articles about Civ, they wrote this:

Since the end of World War II, the situation has been much different. While small wars have certainly continued to be fought, two proverbial “great powers” haven’t met one another directly on a battlefield since 1945: that’s 73 years as I write these words, a record for all of post-classical human history. As the political scientist Robert Jervis could write already in 1988, “the most striking characteristic of the postwar period is just that — it can be called ‘postwar’ because the major powers have not fought each other since 1945. Such a lengthy period of peace among the most powerful states is unprecedented.” The change is so marked that historians have come up with a name for the period stretching from 1945 to the present: “The Long Peace.”

Emphasis added. Say whaaaaat? Surely in 1500 years of history we've managed more than 70 years without two great powers directly fighting! More research was needed, clearly.

Well... I can't actually reach the Classical era. My understanding of power dynamics in pre-Norman Conquest Europe is severely limited. Actually I'm not too hot on the 500 years after that, but luckily there was this whole string of Crusades, which I figure count.

So I put together a spreadsheet, here. It's not complete. It focusses almost entirely on European wars, or wars between Europe and the Ottoman Empire/the Crusades. It's probably left out a lot of wars between countries that I don't know if they count as 'Great' (was Hungary a 'Great Power' in 1127 when they fought the Byzantines?) but it's enough to answer the question:

Between 1095 and 1945, the longest period of peace between Great Powers was 48 years, following the First Crusade. Between 1500 and 1871, we never went longer than 20 years of 'peace'.

War! What is it good for? Well, based on the data, apparently everyone loves it!

hS