orgrinrt

This seems like an attitude thing to me. I’ve done my share of slipping, and never was I replaced. I don’t feel like I’ve had to compete for things in a way special to just men, just the normal inevitabilities of scarcity that concern all genders, beyond the binary and within it.

But then again I have the privilege of living in a social democracy with a social safety net with guaranteed minimum income for everyone despite their situations. I also have the privilege of being male, which makes most everything just easier by default. On top of that, I am a white male in a majority white country, with ordinary name and all.

So maybe I would benefit from checking my privilege here. It’s likely not an attitude thing. It’s likely an inequality thing, as long as you are not yourself part of the privileged majority.

Now I feel a little bit ashamed and awkward, this really isn’t something worth posting, but then I feel like acknowledging my many privileges might maybe make someone reading this think about theirs, and perhaps we can, little by little, make the world a little more equal and balanced place.

Yeah. The controls, the fighting. Even with all the patches and community stuff laid on top, it was a bit too uncomfortable to actually play through for me.

The second one was brilliant. And to this day, despite me having almost 200 hours in Witcher 3, the only Witcher game I’ve actually finished. I think second’s format was perfect. 3 is just too open and beautiful, I get lost in wandering around too easily.

Those would be the extremely moddable games with a good all around base set for replayability, so for me:

• Rimworld
• Mount&Blade bannerlord
• Crusader Kings 3
• Civ 6
• Luanti (and if have to choose a single game for it, Mineclonia I suppose)

As long as I can also archive some amount and variety of mods for each, of course.

If mods aren’t on the table, I think it would still look pretty much the same, except maybe civ 5 in place of 6, and in place of luanti perhaps Witcher 3, or 4 if it manages to release before this thing.

Edit: Actually hold that a bit: I need Stellaris there, especially if mods are ok. But even without. I’d skip luanti/witcher for that.

Yeah, since we have a long history of having been part of the Russian empire. Sweden and Russia warred over our land for centuries. There are a lot of various Finnic tribes within the borders of modern Russia, such as the Mari, the Ingrians and the Karelians. Just to name a few. Before Russia really ramped up their cultural “genocide” (not sure what the word is where they suffocate the cultures and force the languages and traditions not be practiced at threat of jail or such, and moving native Russians to their lands while forcefully spreading the locals across the other lands to be alone and not among their own culture) there were very colorful and lively Finnic traditions quite far, even into Siberia, and with a shared language roots the communication was easy, and as such, trading. It wasn’t until Russia started snuffing out all these other cultures and their members, that the borders and differences became so stark. Before that, it was almost as if they were Finnic lands, though under Russian rule. Modern day Finland was under the same rule at times, too, so in a sense it was just internal movement at those points of time, not even crossing any borders.

It’s a fairly modern and recent development that the differences have become so stark and deep. We only have to look back a couple of centuries and the Finnic tribes across these lands, deep into modern day Russia even, were strong and alive. What we call Russia today, or Finland today, are very recent things. Even Russia has changed by the way of Russification or just suffocating and killing other cultures from its lands, from just what it was a century ago.

But during the Soviet rule, and after it too for a while, it was very common to travel as tourists between us and them. We were very common tourist location, and in the Eastern Finland all the shops had a lot of extra cheese and stuff because so many Russians just on a normal day came to visit and buy the cheese and whatnot. Same went for Russia. The “Suomettuminen” (something probably like Finnification or similar in English, not sure) was a big part of the post-war Finland and USSR, and that meant close relations, even if not really wanted or equal in balances.

Even in the 2020 you read a lot about big Russian money coming into Finland in the form of them buying up vacation places, even whole islands and whatnot. It’s been a bit chilly between us always, even more so after 2014, but it never stopped the somewhat close exchanges of stuff and people. I think 2022 was the final nail, the turning point there. Not sure we ever get back to that type of relation. And honestly, don’t think many want that either. Our relations have always been about self-preservation and not true will to be friendly.

But that is true for all of Europe, and here I’m just giving some tidbits less known to foreigners, there are similar things in every modern day nation and region, so it’s not really useful to know or to compare.

I was originally just commenting on the present contrast there. Not thinking too deep about it.

Well, not much deep green there outside of Greece, which is a country I love precisely for standing out in the region in a brilliant way. But it is true that despite the border lengths not being comparable in length, they have even tougher relations with the deep red neighbor.

Second, there has been a lot of exchange between our nations. It’s not so long that we gained our independence from them in the first place. I would guess it’s been much more extensive for this very reason. But it’s an apples to oranges kind of comparison, and doesn’t make sense to compare even if it wasn’t.

Finland is among the top 5 greens as far as I can tell with a basic eyedrop on the image. Russia is among the deepest reds. So there is nuance in that vs. the balkans especially, that are mostly in the yellow-orange shades.

But either way, just an observation. Not intended to belittle other countries. It is a stark contrast, which I just found noteworthy enough to bring up.

It’s a little bit illuminating seeing the stark contrast of deep green vs deep red at the Northern Russian border, whereas in the more central Europe, or the rest of it for that matter, sees a gradual tend towards the red across the eastern bloc.

That’s a daring thing to be. Such a progressive, healthy country, with all that border with the deep red orcs. But has to be a little bit lonely, too. Not many deep green countries having such stark contrast to a direct neighbor. Not many will understand the extra pressure or weight it carries.

This is a sane take, though I personally do generally tend towards understanding and even valuing the walled garden to some degree. But this is what I’ve always felt underneath it, you found the words.

You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.

For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.

Thanks for the perspective!

Fair enough, those are good points.

I might have gotten a little defensive there for no real reason. It’s a thin line to walk, and unfortunately I find myself often approaching the forbidden (and rightly so) lands of some variation or cultural exceptionalism, and even worse, based on nothing actual or concrete, just vague “what-if”s and imagination.

Sorry about all that

I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.

But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.

But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.

Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.

I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.

Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…

But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.

I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.

Im really sorry about everything you’re going through. Feel free to ignore my curiosity, and I hope you do not feel like you’re being unfriendly if you don’t elaborate (you aren’t, at all!), but I thought I’d ask since it sounded abrupt; Why did the divorce end up being the route to go, after them being seemingly so supportive earlier on? It must’ve been extra hard on you due to that, and I struggle to imagine what happened there for them to end up there 🙁