Rooster in a Landscape.
Oil on board, David Major
https://imgur.com/KD1NuAF
The Soul of the Ape & My Friends the Baboons, by Eugene Marais.
http://adistantmirror.com.au/the-soul-of-the-ape-my-friends-the-baboons/
Eugene Marais spent three years living in the South African wilderness in close daily contact with a troop of baboons. He later described this as the happiest, most content time of his troubled life. This period produced two works which are testament to his research and conclusions; they have very different histories.
Firstly, there was a series of articles written in Afrikaans for the newspaper Die Vaderland. They were then published in book form under the title Burgers van die Berge, and were first published in an English translation in 1939 under the title My Friends the Baboons. These pieces were written in a popular vein suitable to a newspaper readership, and were not regarded seriously by Marais himself. They are a journal; a series of anecdotes and impressions.
The Soul of the Ape, which Marais wrote in beautifully clear and precise English, was the more serious scientific document; however after his death in 1936, it could not be found. It was lost for 32 years, and was recovered in 1968, and published the following year.
The excellent introduction by Robert Ardrey that is included in this volume was part of the 1969 and subsequent editions of The Soul of the Ape, and adds greatly to an appreciation of its importance.
Together, these three texts give us as complete a picture as we will ever get of Marais' three year study of these complex relatives of humanity, and its implications for the study of consciousness.
Eugѐne Marais is also the author of The Soul of the White Ant, his exploration of the psyche and social life of the termite. It was always his intention that the two bodies of work, on termites and apes, were companion pieces in the search for an understanding of the psyche that would span the gulf between the insect and primate worlds. The point of Marais' work was, always, the mystery of consciousness itself, on which grounds it is as relevant as ever.
Imp2 map for testing
The link is to a download page for this new map/scenario for the strategy game Imperialism 2. It's a work-in-progress, so it needs a little testing.
http://adistantmirror.com.au/imp2/
It's probably best played with with a non-precious, copied Imp2 folder.... (I find that the game works fine if I just copy the folder).
Just copy the two .gob files and the Euro1500 folder into the 'Data' folder.
The Euro1500 folder contains the actual map files, and the .gob files contain all the text strings, including the country and province names.
The two .gob files are actually the same file with two different names - as far as I can work out, the U.S. version of the game and the version for the rest of the world read different files, so I've just included the same file under both names. I'm guessing that Imp.exe will just read the file it wants...
As for the map, I've tried to lay out the resources so that every playable country has a strength and a weakness - e.g. they might have not much iron, or not much copper, they might have more iron than their neighbour, etc..... except Normandy, which has everything, so, in theory at least, it should be the easiest power to play. The idea is that each major power should (hopefully) require quite different planning.
Also, no playable powers except Normandy and Ulaidh have horses, and the two Irish minors have them. And if you want tin, you pretty much need to talk to Dumnonia (Cornwall).
The layout of the powers, both playable and minor, is a rough version of Britain in the era of the heptarchy. If you just want to jump a few hundred years, and invade the whole joint ala 1066, you can play as Normandy.
Because there's no way to hack the actual gameplay, I'm playing around with seeing whether resource distribution can influence the AI's strategies. That's why, for example, I've made the initial food layout for each player pretty tight- so the AI has to concentrate on getting food sorted, before doing anything else. I've tried to make life hard for them to start with. I thought that if all the great powers have to do some basic housekeeping before their wheels fall off, it might delay the land grab in the New World (which I've always thought happens too quickly, and doesn't leave sufficient time for a diplomatic game....) ... so far I've found that it works. and the rush to invade the New World doesn't seem to happen so early.
It's a pity that all the resources are displayed on the map. It's the same in the official Europe map - I think it would be much better if the resources were all hidden and needed to be searched for, as in the randomly generated maps...
I haven't played past a dozen or so turns at the moment, so it may well happen that things go weird at some point! I think big resource wars will happen, when the need for wool, tin and copper become acute....
