Extra Credits

I have a feeling this one's gonna be a doozy...

Especially the part where he makes a mountain of skulls

I love the way one of the most brutal conquerors in human history would have never been if they'd just let him have his farm. It's just such a perfect story.

edited 18th Feb '18 12:10:27 AM by Kayeka

All them "great men" were largely products of their environment.

Its a day late but Happy tenth birthday Extra Credits.

Or the original class presentation of a grad student which would go on to become Extra Credits.

"Sign language with destroyers" is an interesting way of describing things

So y'know that movie cliche where the President has a difficult crisis to attend to and there's always that one angry general who's like, "So we're just going to shove rockets up their bum until they explode, right? Opening fire immediately is always the correct solution!"

Kennedy got to experience the live version of that.

edited 23rd Feb '18 9:15:37 AM by TobiasDrake

Truth is stranger than fiction.

A more urgent version:

I once read a manga about the life of Genghis Khan albeit it was kid friendly about certain things (like widows made into wives of their enemies is another "nice" term of saying they were raped and made into slaves) and the characters made weird "Hmm?" faces when someone said something surprising to them.

The difference i notice about the manga along with Extra History's telling and a BBC docu-drama is how different events are shown. For example, in the manga, Jamuka and Temujin were never childhood friends and the former was a distrustful person who feared Temujin's power while the Docu-drama and Extra Credits did reveal that they were childhood friends and blood brothers and what cause the rivalry between the two was over Temujin choosing his followers by their skills and not by their lineage which Jemuka prefer.

Not gonna lie, but so far Temujin seems like a pretty chill dude. Genghis Khan is considered one of history's greatest monsters so I'm still waiting for the part where he, like, torches half the world or goes on a raping spree through Europe or something.

It occurred to me while watching these videos that I don't actually know anything about Genghis Khan. I just know that decades of media have told me he's one of the worst dudes in history, but I can't for the life of me actually recall why.

edited 25th Feb '18 7:00:51 AM by TobiasDrake

Well, he once seriously considered killing everyone in southern China and turning it into pastureland for his horses, only demurring when an advisor pointed out how it would affect his tax income.

I kept getting Khan mixed up with Attila the hun

How?

They're both horsemen warrior kings from the Steppes who went and knocked around the big empires of the day. Only difference is Genghis was on a bigger scale and his feats stuck for a while. I occasionally flub the two myself as well.

edited 25th Feb '18 10:29:08 AM by Sigilbreaker26

I have no idea,probably because they were both conquerors from the steppes

This basically

edited 25th Feb '18 10:33:59 AM by Ultimatum

Everyone does. Attila came before Genghis and we know like jack all about him. We know he had a big empire that collapsed shortly after his death, we know that he was a bad enough threat to unite Rome with some of the Germanic tribes to repel him, and we know that we was responsible for pushing said Germanic peoples out and that's why they migrated to Rome (but not before enslaving some). Everything else? Like jack shit. His appearance has been described but the validity is uncertain and most likely dubious because it was written by the Romans (they depicted him as really ugly), the Hunnic language has not been properly translated and I don't even think it's been written down, and there's no sources from Attila's side that could give a more detailed picture of his life, just biased Roman sources. I don't even think we know if he was Asian or Caucasian.

It's strange how this one figure who was once a huge threat to Rome is so barely known. When he's brought up in fiction they just turn him into discount Genghis.

It's not strange at all.

Like, seriously, not at all.

Gengis was more of an Empire Builder than Attila, to the point where Gengis recruited/pressganged skilled administrators of the people he conquered to run his Empire, as he was acutely aware of what his people were good at, and what they were not. This means what he did stuck far more. And thus there were people in his empire who could write about him.

The Huns were not so concerned about building a civilization, so there's very little about Attila written by people who knew him left behind for us to know about. Only what his enemies wrote, which a lot of it is... unreliable or conjectural.

That and there's a 700+ years gap between the two that include a major civilization collapse, so ya know, that doesn't help.

edited 25th Feb '18 10:48:02 AM by Ghilz

Okay well, maybe not that strange, admittedly, but point still stands that we barely know that much about Attila.

My historical knowledge on both Gengis and Attila is just what I learnt from Age of Empires.

I don't think Atilla is that much of a blank slate as some other figures I could name ^note looking at you Spartacus but he isn't that fleshed out. Heck, even "Hun" is unhelpful because the Huns were more like the top dog of a bunch of other steppe tribes held together like a big tribute pyramid (which explains why their power collapsed so easily).

The most important facts of his life are still there - he raided the Eastern Empire to extort gold, then got in a feud with his brother Bleda and became sole ruler, then got proposed to by the Western Emperor's sister and took that as an excuse to rampage into Rome and demand stuff, then was beaten by Flavius Aetius and the Visigoths at the battle of Chalons, tried another go at Rome, was talked into calling it off, then added another lady to his harem and died of a nosebleed on his wedding night.

I certainly don't think he counts as an empire builder, just a guy who needed gold to maintain that pyramid.

edited 26th Feb '18 9:09:23 AM by Sigilbreaker26

Ugh, EC, please stop talking about this. Please. You make yourselves look bad every time you try to defend the games industry on this indefensible point.

There is a world of difference between paying $2 to spin a roulette wheel one time and paying $15 for an infinite number of spins at that wheel that are disguised behind the gameplay that players purchased the game for. You are literally trying to say that there is no functional difference between opening a lootbox and playing an expansion pack. You are so very wrong that it's not even funny.

Move on. Go back to stuff about the industry that you're amazing at talking about, because every time you touch on this topic, you just sound like paid shills.

I agree. When you are in a hole, stop digging. Ask for a ladder and get out of it.

To be fair, they do have some good arguments. Any law on the subject should be carefully worded so it doesn't do something stupid, so the main point of the video is quite valid.

Still, the keep coming from the baffling assumption that lootboxes are desirable in the first place, not something that should be purged altogether. And, yeah, they keep making bad, bad comparisons. Like, banning lootbox games for children is in no way, shape or form related to banning musics with explicit content. Blizzard could always just create a version Overwatch without lootboxes(which is literally the desirable outcome) and sell those to minors(and everyone, ideally). Unless you argue this compromises the artistic vision of the game (hah) it is not the same as censoring music.

(also, btw, any law that makes the victim liable to charges is an awful law that should be burned. They rightfully recognize that treating lootbox as gambling could make gamers criminals, which is absurd. But they don't seem to realize the problem is with these gambling laws itself. Such law shouldn't be acceptable for traditional gambling either.)