– “Wisdom? – From Civilization V?” –

Sunday – October 4th, 2026 = +13˚C / +55˚F & Partly Cloudy in Our little corner of New Brunswick, Canada @ 12:30 pm –

— I absolutely hated Civilization Games – a Franchise started by Sid Meier – I kept a copy of Civilization IV on one of my non Mac Computers to give myself something to do while working on my game world and frequently needed to do something while processes stalled, for instance – while intense landscape changes were stalling – Raising mountains and getting their look right wasn’t simple – and getting the borders between two sections of terrain was often tricky – { and if they didn’t merge correctly, seamlessly, any player’s ‘avatar’ character crossing a line he or she couldn’t see could fall through a hole in the world and disappear forever in a boundless universe of nothingness and pulling the edges of two different pieces of landscape ofter put everything else on hold for several minutes at a time, & If the borders of two sections of landscape were quite wide and ‘hilly’ I could spend hours lining things up and using the tools to smooth the edges of those two territories {{ sometimes part of the same area – or even more time consuming —> when merging the edges of two areas so anyone playing the game would never have a clue that the landscape was not one huge sheet of visible surface with all its ups and downs and changes in texture: stone, dirt, rivers with underwater surfaces and water that hopefully obeyed the laws of physics, pathways, fields of grass, flowers, sand, et cetera… with all sorts of obstacles, like trees and boulders and buildings and in game surprises, like doorways a character could walk through and end up in a completely different landscape … }}

—> So instead of just crossing my eyes and twiddling my thumbs while some of these processes took upwards of ten minutes to smoothly merge the lines between two or more areas, bits of different colour and different looking stuff like grass, stone, cliffs, ravines, and so on – I would turn to another computer that was running and move characters around in a game world that drove me nuts because it seemed to be a frustration engine designed by a propagandist hell bent on convincing anybody who was stupid enough to play that game that every government in the world was completely insane and the only way to survive was to be ready to kill any person, soldier or not, from another nation. because their sole purpose in living was to kill of subject all your country men, women and children to torture and slavery.

—> Gaaaaa – but Civilization IV had a version that I could mess with, set up ‘My’ Nation on its own continent and fix the starting place for the first city – and future capital city of my civilization with just the right resources to probably give the citizens of my nation an unfair advantage and convince the ‘AI’ leaders and armies of any ‘rival’ or ‘assuredly enemy’ nations that they would have to be insane if they decided to declare war on me – and I mean the first time Mahatma Gandhi came at my friendly, peaceful nation with a surprise nuclear attack I wanted to find the creators of that stupid game who believed that nobody cold have any fun in any world where all rival nations were completely insane and could only thrive on constant warfare, constantly trying to conquer everybody else… and scare the living cement out of them with a surprise verbal attack and maybe chase them around with a metal baseball bat, I never wanted to physically hurt anybody, but their hawkish algorithms were insane and the message that gave to the mostly young male humans who wanted to play that game was psychological warfare in its dirtiest, cheapest, most insidious form.

—> But then – Here’s what I got this morning:

—> And :

—> Maybe there is hope for this world?

– – – – – Jim { hopefully there might be more to follow }