Like, I can understand Harriet Tubman. She was not in any sense a "world leader" or even a politician, but it's really desirable to have a black leader for the US to represent some of the less horrendous aspects of this benighted country and if you want to choose someone with name recognition who's outside living memory^[1] you've got slim pickings. Tubman was at least involved in politics, and the espionage side of hwr story fits well with the game's mechanics. It's definitely uncomfortable seeing her operating treasure fleets and colonizing the new world, but that's just table stakes for Civ as a whole.

I have no idea what possessed them to choose Ada Lovelace, though. Not only was she not remotely a political figure except in that she was technically a member of the English aristocracy, she wasn't a figure at all in her own lifetime. Her contributions to computing weren't recognized for generations after her death, and even then she's mostly impressive for her foresight rather than any actual contributions that might have changed the flow of history. If you're just going to pick arbitrary famous people from history to be "leaders", what's even the point of calling them that anymore? Just say "mascots" or "avatars" and call it a day.

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1. Not that this has always been a rule! Gandhi was assassinated a mere 43 years before he became a leader in the original Civilization. By that metric someone like Malcolm X or Fred Hampton who was more explicitly involved in nation-building projects would be fair game. ↩︎

the day Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson star across from one another in the sort of fucked up art film about inventing new kinds of emotional disorder that both of them have made their stock in trade is going to be a glorious day

every time I remember that Wendy Carlos is still alive some little muscle I didn't even know I was tensing relaxes

World where demons are real and around and ontologically evil but with an extremely Christian-fundamentalist definition of "evil". They don't care what sins they facilitate as long as they're sins. Murder is just bad economics: you're getting someone killed who would do sins of their own. Even labor exploitation isn't great, because ideally everyone has free time for the real big-ticket sins like lust and sloth and gluttony.

So of course a bunch of demons end up working as pornographers, musicians, chefs, and so on. But it's also rare to see a queer youth center without at least a few demon volunteers absolutely dead set on helping everyone accept themselves. There are even a few who really play the long game doing labor organizing and base-building so that one day humans will be free from the shackles of capitalism and the sins of idleness will really start rolling in.

Angels exist in this setting too but they're such dour killjoys that barely any humans will tolerate spending time with them and they mostly just live off in their own towns in the middle of otherwise deserted areas.

There's a scene in L.A. Story where Steve Martin says "I couldn't be a woman. I'd just play with my breasts all the time and never get anything done" and like. Yeah. Sometimes it is like that.

"Dwarven women have beards and are nearly impossible for outsiders to tell apart from men" is obviously very good worldbuilding, and by and large and fantasy world that doesn't have hirsute dwarven women is cowardly. But consider instead a world in which almost all dwarves are men, but they still have an approximately 50/50 divide between dwarves with testes and dwarves with ovaries. Women are rare and largely independent of genitalia, but through some combination of custom and preference they generally shave their beards.

Bonus points if other races are super regressive about gender. "So you're a woman?" "No, look at my beard, I'm a man." "But you said you've borne three children..." "Aye, Stonehew, Hematite, and little Ore." "Surely you mean your wife bore them..." "Nae, but she's the one who knocked me up!"

The color on this ended up so intense that it kind of blew out my phone camera a bit. I'd previously made this with dry vermouth and it was not very good, but it's quite pleasant with the proper blanco, which is much sweeter than dry but not as rich and tannic as sweet vermouth. I'm pretty sure the grenadine is here mostly for color, so you'll either want to use Rose's for the bright red hue or else leave it out entirely, since nice homemade grenadine tends to be brown like the pomegranate molasses used to make it.