Around 1,950 years ago in Pompeii, a weaver named Successus fell in love with a barmaid named Iris.
She did not love him back.
We know this because his rival, a man named Severus, decided to humiliate him publicly. He grabbed something sharp and carved this into a wall for the whole city to read:
"Successus the weaver loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She does not care about him at all. But he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye."
Imagine walking to work and seeing that with your name on it.
Successus found it. And instead of letting it go, he carved his reply directly underneath:
"Envious one, why do you get in the way? Yield to a man who is better looking and being treated very unfairly."
Severus came back one more time to end it:
"I have spoken. I have written. You love Iris, but she does not love you."
Then, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the wall, the tavern, and the entire argument under 20 feet of ash. The thread was frozen mid-beef for almost two millennia until archaeologists dug it up and translated it.
We will never know who got the girl. We do not even know if any of the three survived.
Pompeii has over 11,000 of these inscriptions. Bar reviews. Bragging. Bad poetry. A bakery wall that says "Welcome, hungry people." Two guys fighting over a girl in the comments.
The technology changes. We do not.
@Grummz What do you even like about these GoW games to begin with? They seem more interactive movies than actual games to me. It's not only this new one.
That and the Wolverine one at the beginning. WTF.
The whole State of Play was mostly a turndown. I only liked a couple things.
"Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all."
―Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985)