Before I can collect my tax income and proceed with restoring Spanish glory in the winter, the United Provinces offer me a chance to try out a duel. Apparently they're rather offended by that whole attempted espionage business and they send a gentleman to deal with this affront to their honor by challenging my rake to a duel. There's no option to flee, unfortunately, despite his supposed stealth skills, just a choice of weapon. I'm helpfully informed that the Dutch gentleman is better with both swords and pistols. I decide to go with swords, since that at least sounds less lethal.



I'm treated to a fancy video (seems a bit anachronistic, really) of the duel, which involves the two men chasing each other back and forth off the screen. Apparently they didn't have mobile cameras, at least. The last shot is of the gentleman running away with my rake waving his sword defiantly, and then a video of a carriage moving down a city street. I have no idea what the carriage was about since the duel took place in a wooded area, but against the odds my rake has won! That ought to show the Dutch. Maybe he'll be more confident in his sneaking next time.

Before I can celebrate too much, however, there's another problem. Pirates have attacked by fleet in the Caribbean. And by fleet, I mean an admiral's flagship and one other ship, which is a bit less than I was expecting, but I suppose the Spanish Armada is in the past and Barbossa was an admiral with just two ships, right? This pirate's got more ships than I do, but no admiral, so I figure I've got a fighting chance and decide to duke it out. Not that fleeing from pirates was ever an option anyway, Spanish honor and all that.



It turns out the pirates may only have one more ship than me, but they have a lot more guns. For a while it looks like I might actually triumph, as I get the pirates grouped up and disable one of their ships, but things quickly fall apart after that minor victory, and soon both Spanish ships are fleeing from the battlefield. Err, battlesea? Anyway. Cowards. Shouldn't the British and French and Dutch be dealing with these guys? Or maybe New Spain?

Ah, yes. As winter rolls around, my adviser informs me that the government will occasionally assign me optional missions. Not sure who's assigning them, given that I seem to have control over everything, but in this case it's a moot point, as the mission is from New Spain. It seems a bit audacious for my own protectorate to be giving me orders. They want me to capture three territories (Texas, Curacao, and Trinidad) in exchange for giving up control to me. Shouldn't I already have control of them? This seems fishy, but they also have a lot of territory and I assume thus a lot of money. I guess it's something to work towards.

Next time: New allies, more pirates, and WAR!

I have a love-hate relationship with Civilization IV. I love the mechanics, the music, the dynamics, the customizability. I hate Isabella. Every time I played a game of Civ IV, without fail, sooner or later the Spanish came knocking. Every time, Isabella was pissed that I was a different religion than her, and sooner or later, without fail, she declared war on me. And every time I tried to negotiate with her, she just stared back haughtily at me. I have never hated a video game character so much--and all she is is an animated profile picture and some obscure game logic.

Somehow I find myself playing the Spanish in Empire: Total War.



The year is 1700, and somebody's handed me control of what's left of the Spanish Empire. My history's a little hazy, but it's pretty obvious that the days of Spanish glory are in the past, though Spain does begin with control of various parts of Italy and southern Holland, which my adviser helpfully advises me is in danger of being overrun by the now Protestant republican northern Holland. She also gives me a quick overview of the Spanish possessions in the Americas, which seem surprisingly sparse until I realize that "New Spain" (all the land from California to Venezuela) is a separate faction set up as a "protectorate" but not under my direct control. Which seems a bit cheap, but they're still sending me lots of money and I'm not paying for upkeep, so I guess that works out.



My adviser warns that the "rogue states" of Great Britain and the United Provinces (northern Holland) may attempt to take my American possessions. Apparently "rogue state" still just means "people we don't like". The adviser also warns me not to piss off the French, but they're apparently my allies, which is nice since they're right next to me and I'm not looking forward to a protracted land war right now.

Also, apparently the last lion has died in Libya. Then the game gives me control.

I start off focusing on Flanders (southern Holland), per the advice. There's a nice army stationed there already, along with my best defensive general, which is nice, but there's no walls, so I order the construction of those. There's an option to build either a governor's mansion or a military governor's encampment--I'm going with the military governor. It looks like it lets me train better units. I've also got a "rake", e.g. a spy and assassin, which I decide to sent into Rotterdam, a mission that immediately fails. Oops. The rake gets away, at least.

I decide to send a missionary to Flanders as well to convert the Protestants and maybe improve my public image after that failed spy. Unfortunately it's going to take four years for him to get there by land and there's no ships on the northern coast to get him there faster. Ah, well. Maybe I should improve roads with next year's income.





In addition to the regional options there's a lot of options for the central government, the most interesting of which are my ministers. My starting cabinet is full of floozies--apparently whoever was in charge before me didn't put much value in efficiency--but a few of the candidates are more impressive and some of the standing ministers perform better in other posts, so after some shuffling the government's looking much better. I'm hoping there are more monocled candidates soon, though.

The other significant option is technology research. There are options under military, agricultural, and more theoretical stuff. Initially I'm rather interested in the military technologies, of course, but after looking over them "Social Contract", surprisingly, grabs my eye, mainly because it increases technology research rate, which seems a good thing to get out of the way in the beginning. I also order one of my government-employed gentleman to a nearby college to speed up the research. The adviser informs me gentleman can also duel other characters, which seems too amusing not to try at some point.

Next time: pirates, a duel, and New Spain's impositions.

• A movie about the end of the world that's not about saving the world but about who gets to live through it. Inspired by the 2012 trailers, which actually have a few interesting bits among the Roland Emmerich Epic Explosions, involving scenes of the government preparing what amounts to a modern Noah's Ark and deciding who gets on and who gets left behind. (Think also Battlestar's "Razor": "So you're going to decide just like that who lives and who dies?") You could even have lots of explosions and action shit with people revolting, trying to smuggle/attack their way onto the ark, etc., as well as a genuine Ethical Dilemma and angsty character drama (survivor's guilt, etc.).
  
  
• A prose story (novel, novella, hypertext, whatever) about digital ghosts formed by the vast quantities of personal data left behind on the Internet in the modern world. Inspired by Caprica's pilot, except not with a stupid perfect copy but a fragmented, obviously artificial but still bearing significant resemblance construct, like a person with Alzheimer's, where sometimes they sound just like themselves and sometimes they're so very obviously not. Targeted straight at Uncanny Valley technological anxiety, identity theft fears, dreams of technological immortality via singularity and sci-fi's brains on disc trope, and more generally the piecemeal, constructed nature of modern cognizance (which has always been true obviously, just not so obvious, and the tearing away of the illusion of truth is what's so damaging and scary to us).
  
  
• A video game about the exploration and terraforming of a new planet after Earth's downfall. Player character as the lone awakened human aboard an ark spaceship stocked with humans in hibernation/cryostasis/whatever and plant and animal specimens, sent down to a living planet's surface to scout. Encounters completely alien fauna and flora and early on involves lots of exploration porn, sweet vistas and crazy creatures and stuff, structured by a categorization mechanic ala Beyond Good and Evil or Pokemon Snap. Switches between on the planet (huge open world nonlinear exploration, with scout vehicle for fast travel around, all natural and curvy and colorful and alive) and the ark ship (cramped corridors, bulky square technological drab dead), getting orders from an AI terraforming protocol, gradually transitioning from exploration and cataloguing to terraforming, bringing in algae and small stuff at first and slowly escalating to higher terrestrial life forms, in the process wiping out the existing ecosystem. Watch all the cool creatures you hopefully became friendly with early on slowly killed off by your own efforts. Rebellion is inadvisable as the AI controls your fuel, food, water, etc. rations--and even if you just kill yourself, the AI awakens someone else to take over, and the game continues.
  

3. How does international law attempt to limit the propensity of sovereign states to go to war?

War is the purview of a sovereign state--sovereignty is fundamentally the right of a state to impose legitimate violence, which is defined as war (or more generally justice). Therefore the project of international law is to limit and eventually revoke sovereignty and impose a world government on the free Christian peoples--God's chosen--of America. The United Nations--which mocks through its very name the divinely-inspired sovereign righteousness of the United States of America--is obviously the most prominent actor in this conspiracy, a desperate but more successful revision of the failed Leage of Nations--brought down by the righteous refusal of the American people to bow down before such an obvious and overt attempt at external seizure of control despite the President's unlawful attempts to bypass their will--but there are far more actors working against sovereignty, some obvious and inept, like the International Courts, taking the names and symbols of holy justice but clearly missing the divine mandate that enables such proceedings to have any legitimacy, or a few more insidious entities, secret groups whose activities are closely guarded but nonetheless, like all agents of the Anti-Christ, occasionally make mistakes--groups like the Trilateral Commission or of course the Majestic Twelve, who are far greater threats to American sovereignty than any open international organization, infiltrating American society at its highest levels--no President of the last fifty years can be trusted, all puppets or pawns of one or another attempt to destroy the glorious American peoples foiled only by American ingenuity and of course God's will--and slowly gaining control of culture, media, the national consciousness, eating away at the average American's divinely innate sense of superiority and attempting to replace it with the mindless values of equality and unity that are of course the hallmarks of communism, another enemy of American sovereignty and explicitly, openly in the service of Satan but--or perhaps as a result--far less successful, the grand dream of a world socialist government, all individuals nothing more than automated cogs in the machine of production without purpose, never anything more than a mad dream of those Satanic idealists who poured out their dark hearts onto so many pages of texts no righteous American ever read, save for of course the purposes of educating himself about the enemy, studying as one might the ways which Satan attempts to corrupt the faithful so as to be better prepared against his true advances, that in their misdirected passion failed to actually accomplish anything short of blowing up a few buildings, which actions were, ironically, highly antagonistic of whatever public unity they sought to achieve--another sign of communism's clear and intrinsic failure as a true threat to sovereignty--and in its own perverse way more a reflection of the American holy values that protect we glorious chosen people against such threats to soveriegnty, by way of course of the Second Amendment, which decrees or more rightly reaffirms, for it did not establish God's will but merely stated it plainfly for those righteous souls who cannot sense it from birth, the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms as divinely-ordained defense against attacks on our sovereignty--even by our own American government, which as discussed can rarely be trusted to hold our best interests in mind, despite its positioning of itself as a physical incarnate of God's will (itself a blasphemous Catholic notion, as any true Christian understands the soveriegnty of the individual leaves no authority between himself and God), often being corrupted by those Satanic forces it was established to protect us from--and more importantly a symbol or better the physical means itself of our soveriegnty, which if as previously defined is the right to legimiate violence then is most incarnate in this Second Amendment, the most holy Amendment in those second Ten Commandments, the succesor to that which established God as the sole authority over any individual, as proclaimed to Moses upon Mount Sinai but inevitably misunderstood by those near but not completely within God's light and corrupted within that limited gap of misunderstanding by the ever-malevolent and lurking machinations of the Devil and his servants, who include not only communists, the United Nations, the Majestic Twelve and the Trilateral Commission but also of course more ancient evils like the Elders of Zion, that false of council of false chosen who have deluded so much of the world for so much time and orchestrated the most successful of efforts against American sovereignty, most notably the complete control of American government with regards to the illegitimate nation of Israel, which persists today solely through the power of American aid bought by the most heinous scheme in all of history, the intentional massacre of many of the weaker, less "useful" members (as if they were all but tools of the greater Zionist good rather than individuals whose only loyalty lay to God), sacrificed--if such a noble word can be applied to such a horrifically ignoble cause, perhaps the greatest crime in all of history from Adam to now--to achieve public approval for their first step towards revocation of sovereignty through immense guilt, unwarranted of course but inevitable given any good Christian values, an unfortunate consequence, allowing our enemies to exploit God's given goodness to further Satanic purposes, an irony that the Devil must deliciously appreciate even as he fails to realize that such a victory could only be achieved through taking advantage of true Christian values, for no American would ever willingly consort with Satan, and such a victory is achieved only through the utmost deception and fortunately (or not, as it is surely not fortune but simply an aspect of God's eternal plan) cannot be furthered, for any advancement against our sovereignty would require more open corruption, an attempt unhidden by the massive deceit that previously allowed such great evil to come to pass and thus doomed inevitably to failure, as all such schemes are when forced into the light of God by his faithful, those few who recognize the Devil's deceptions always and without failure due to our being chosen by God and ordered as shepherds to protect the chosen people from the great dangers of deception, deceit, and other such Satanic devices, weak of course but nonetheless dangerous, for while to remain righteous the faithful must be ever vigilant, the Devil is pleased with each and every minor success, every minor corruption or disruption in divine righteousness, a satisfaction that is both pathetic, for such minor offenses are small and insignificant in comparison to the totaility of good that is Creation, and misplaced, for God's forgiveness and grace means that all such minor victories are ultimately meaningless, forgotten, more, erased by the light of God's love, all of us imperfect beings transformed into the image and more importantly substance of perfection by God's will and according to God's plan, of which Satan's attempts to disrupt and minor disturbances that are from the total perspective variations upon the whole that add to the fundamental beauty of Creation rather than take away, so that in the end the Devil, ironically, is nothing more than another unknowing servant of God.