Oh, believe me, I am well aware that my time is extremely fucking nigh…

I am a pretty poor player and I played my 9yo while I was distracted the other day. A few mistakes and ill-advised trades later, I am scrambling frantically for the stalemate. Maybe it makes me petty, but at least I can still claim I haven’t been beaten by anyone that lives in my house (yet).

I have read it, but I forgot about that detail until you reminded me. I probably have to reread now :)

Haha, I’m just glad at least some people enjoy reading them, since I can’t help but write them (and listening to my endless digressions down Wikipedia rabbit holes is exhausting for my partner).

I agree with everything you said, except I would argue that capitalism is the Sixth Horseman of the Apocalypse, seeing as one of the original four was already replaced during a translation. The original text were interpreted as “Conquest, War, Famine, and Death,” and the story I remember from my New Testament course in college was that in the early 1900’s, it was thought that Conquest was too similar to War, so they used one of the later passages that specified that the horsemen would bring death by “sword, famine, plague, and the wild beasts of the earth” to rebrand Conquest as Pestilence. In fact, now reading up on it from Wikipedia, apparently the first two horsemen were likely both supposed to represent war, with the white rider (Conquest) representing “righteous/justified war” and the red rider (War) supposed to represent “civil war,” which is interesting.

In fact, given how vaccines and modern medicine have dramatically lowered the death by infectious disease in the 20th century, it’s likely time for another rebranding (relevant xkcd), so I’d replace “pestilence” with “capitalism” or even “profit” if I were feeling flowery.

edit: Upon further reading, apparently the third horseman (Famine) could also be interpreted as a form of capitalistic excess, since it’s accompanied by a voice that describes rising market prices for staples such as bread and is carrying market scales. Traditionally, this is thought to indicate Famine as loaves of bread would be weighed during food shortages, but the accompanying voice seems to indicate that luxuries are still available, so I could easily make the argument that the passage is about the rich tending to their own needs while ignoring the needs of the poor (which sounds an awful lot like modern US politics/capitalism).

Edit 2: So I guess I’d rebrand all three of the riders preceding Death so that I’d interpret things as “Imperialism, Extremism, Capitalism, and Death,” or put a little more poetically, “Conquest, Discord, Avarice, and Death”

IIRC, you can copy the link and go to archive.ph to get past the paywall.

Edit: here’s the link