Skua

It’s about as close to a random person as you can get while still being recorded. They were royalty, but the two real ones get literally a sentence each at max

• Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh married the king of Tara and is described as “having deserved reward from God for her good works, and for her intense penance for her sins” in one source and “deserved to obtain the heavenly kingdom, having done penance” in the other
• Eithne ingen Cinadhon was the daughter of a Pictish king and is literally only recorded as having died
• The legendary Eithne is the daughter of a king of Scotland (mostly Pictish at the time) and crossed the sea to Ireland, where she gave birth to the hero Túathal Techtmar. This is the entirety of her role in the story; a couple of paragraphs in a collection that, in the translation I’m looking at, has 600 pages just for part five

Not sure if I can call this knowledge since I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I identified a couple of women from the 8th century CE who are mentioned in some Irish annals as actually being the same person. As far as I know there’s next to no discussion of these women on the internet and there are basically no historical records of them, at least. So I guess if I’m right it’s very obscure?

The women in question are Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh and Eithne ingen Cinadhon (and possibly also the legendary Eithne mother of Tuathal Techtmar)

Deoends on whether you’re asking for a third of 0.75kg or a third of 1.5 kg

I’m not normally keen on mentioning people’s spelling and grammar mistakes, but if they’re going to be dickheads about the language everyone is speaking while writing “your a dumbass”, “has major issue”, and “germen” then it’s another matter

Well they are right next door to the country that made an award-winning reindeer pizza out of spite, so probably

You’d better bring a copy of the Noita wiki with you so that you can decipher what half the late game stuff is/does. Or even just where it is. Although I suppose if you have basically unlimited time, you could just do your alchemy from first principles

Gotta be one of the Paradox strategy games. I have two reasons for this: the first is that a good game unavoidably takes ages on them, so they have staying power; the other is that I know how to mod them, so I can make myself new scenarios once I get fed up of it. I’ll bring Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 because I like them but haven’t yet played them much

I’ll add in Assetto Corsa and Dirt Rally 2 for some driving. Both have very high skill ceilings that I am nowhere near, so that gives me a lot to do. I also don’t own a wheel, so if I get that as part of the deal then that’d be fun to try. These two also have an odd bonus for me: they both have courses set near my home. I can sort of visit them by playing when I get a bit homesick

Lastly I’ll have Deep Rock Galactic for low effort shooty fun. I can’t always be putting mental energy into games

There are games I like as much or more than these five but which lack the replayability for this scenario. Like I adore Outer Wilds, but you can only really play it once

It’s the estate that makes the income though, not the family. In the UK most of that estate is owned by the position of the monarch itself rather than by the monarch; a perk of the job, not private property. In other words it’d probably still make just as much money in a republic, arguably more since we could let visitors in to see the buildings

Additionally, a figurehead monarch doesn’t address any of the issues with a successful Trump-like politician. Here in the UK I often hear people saying “would you want a President Boris Johnson?” No, I wouldn’t, but him being called Prime Minister instead of President removed literally none of his practical political power

My bad. I blame the thirty eight million times I heard people make the argument earnestly after the British queen died

It’s the country’s law, you can call the high commissioner “king” if you agree to. Ireland calls its prime minister and deputy PM “taoiseach” and “tánaiste” respectively, which are monarchic titles from the Gaelic clan system

Versailles gets fifteen million visitors a year

The simplest method in most cases would probably just be to change the law about succession. Keep the position of king, just make it an elected or appointed one. That way nothing else has to be touched unless you want to change it

The tourism argument is frequently bandied about, but I don’t think there’s much substance to it. The tourist attractions are the buildings (which obviously don’t disappear in the event of ending the monarchy) and ceremonies (which you can keep if you choose to, including the fancy costumes). It’s particularly unconvincing here in the UK when we are literally right next door to France, the world’s number one tourist destination. Versailles does not lack for visitors.

There is no way this doesn’t wind up making an ad that’s misleading enough to get Netflix and/or the advertiser in trouble

• A Highland Song. I can confirm that this one is nice to take a walk through because it is a game about running through a fictionalised version of a place I frequently enjoy walking through in real life. Possibly stretching the definition of open world a little, but the gameplay is about navigation
• Shadow of the Colossus. Which is good because you do spend a lot of time walking across it.

Also, not an open world game at all, but the environments in Pacer are amazing. You barely get a chance to look at them because you’re zooming along a racetrack at 400 mph, but they’re still there. Sonashahar is a futuristic neoclassical Indian city, and I want to explore that

I don’t think I agree with that. None of the Souls games ever had anything like Siofra River or Liurnia. Areas like Leyndell and Farum Azula, sure, but there’s a lot of variety in the Elden Ring map

The visuals were stunning but am I fuck taking a walk through:

• The ultra-plague fallout zone
• The lake of giant sniper lobsters
• The mountaintops of giant spiders made from hands with way too many fingers

I think you are focusing too much on the modern world. You’re ignoring the Middle Ages and before

Also I think you forget that Democracies existed in the ancient world and they didn’t last long either

And they were famous already for being short lived back then.

I just gave you a list of civil wars in England dating back to the 11th century? But with regards to earlier democracies, I didn’t forget, I just don’t think they’re especially relevant since they were not all that similar to a modern democracy like Germany. Even Athens barred most of its population from voting. I think if you want to include them, you need to explain why they are a relevant comparison to a modern democracy. If you’re operating solely on whether or not they allow some people to vote, then constitutional monarchies count as democracies for this purpose and the short-lived fascist dictatorships of the 20th century count as monarchies.

also eastern monarchies as well

I’m focussing on Europe because the article is about Germany, which shares much of its monarchic and democratic heritage with its European neighbours. If you want to bring up other examples, go ahead.

petty succession squabbles

Open civil warfare is not what I’d count as a “petty squabble”. If there’s a years-long war to overthrow a king, that is not stability.

our government can only implement projects on a 4 to 8 year basis which is often not enough to fix problems

While modern democracies haven’t been around that long in the scale of human history, they have been around long enough to demonstrate that they don’t appear to be falling behind their monarchic peers. Take Finland and Sweden as an example; in the past ~100 years for which Finland has been an independent republic, would you argue it has performed worse than its constitutional monarchy neighbour Sweden? I wouldn’t, despite the fact that Finland started in a far worse position and also fought the Winter War and the Continuation War. And similarly, if we look at the the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem to me like republics are doing worse than monarchies that have had otherwise comparable histories.

But I’m not even arguing that democracies are especially stable. I’m arguing that monarchies aren’t particularly more stable.

the evidence seems to point that democratic states have by their very nature an expiration date

What evidence? Again, we have not seen more than a couple of centuries of the modern form of democracy.

it is on shaky ground only 250 years in.

If you’re going to exclude actual civil warfare and overthrow of the government from counting as instability for monarchies, you really can’t count a constitutional crisis as the end of a democracy. Maybe this is the end of the USA, but it’s hardly the first time a country has seen a constitutional crisis. It’s not even the first time the USA has seen one. If the USA does fall completely… alright? Even limiting it to large modern era countries, I can just as easily point towards the Qing dynasty that fell after roughly that amount of time, or the Brazilian monarchy which didn’t even make 100, or the Bourbon restoration in France that was even shorter. Pointing to an individual example that hasn’t even actually happened isn’t evidence of a broader rule.