Skua

Costing relevant people money, basically. Strikes, sabotage, obstructions, that sort of thing

What sort of folk music do you play? I love Scottish and Irish folk and primarily play guitar, but I've never really figured out how to properly incorporate it into that kind of music

So long as you don't mean professional musician, I guess I count. I'm a decent guitarist and a reasonably competent bassist (the skills are transferrable, but they are not the same if you want to do anything interesting on bass) who does a bit of blues, rock, and metal. I've done a little bit of music production, essentially just enough to put together recordings with programmed drums at home and have them not be completely awful. I'm also working, very slowly, on learning piano and would like to learn violin, but life has gotten in the way lately and made that difficult

Settling the tonewood argument once and for all with bonewood

Then why call it the Eastern Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire if it's the same thing?

Because it's helpful to compartmentalise something with so much history. We can refer to Capetian France and Valois France even though they're both still France, for example. It is unusual for such compartmentalisation to be used with a geographic aspect rather than (only) temporally, but the Roman Empire was unusually big, especially for its time

The two were, of course, independent from one another for basically all practical purposes. I just also think that both are equally the meaningful continuation of the united empire

In very technical terms, the split was a legal loophole to maintain a "single" empire on paper for their own egos and to avoid conflict. In practice and in hindsight, they're 2 different things.

Surely if we are going with the principle that only one of the two halves of the empire is the real continuation, it ought to be the one that kept the capital and administrative structure of the unified empire? Or if neither is the real continuation, did the empire die under Diocletian and then Constantine ruled over a separate entity altogether after the end of the tetrarchy?

Does the British Empire still exist? I would say no.

To keep the analogy accurate here, we'd have to make a few changes. The British monarchy does not call itself the "Southern UK" - you pointed out yourself that the Romans did not call the ERE a different thing - and it'd also have to keep control of a substantial chunk of the colonies when Britain falls to Germany. I do think that, in that case of George V moving to Australia and continuing to rule, say, New Zealand, India, and South Africa from there, I would still consider it the same empire. This exact situation actually pretty much happened in real life with Portugal and Brazil, it just didn't happen in advance of the fall of Portugal and didn't last very long.

Other than this would make some great alternate historical fiction.

I think one of the big HOI4 mods, Kaiserreich, actually does do this! Although as I understand it, it was due to a communist revolution after a stalemated WWI. I do not know the details as I've never played it, I only found out because I had been chatting about ideas for an alt history WWI outcome with a friend and we found out that we had basically accidentally come up with Kaiserreich's version of Europe

That's more or less where I'm at too. I do have to recognise some personal bias though. Partly because I don't know that much about the Indus Valley Civilisation. Partly because for some reason I find it quite frustrating to not have a "proper" name for a society when talking about them, even though I completely understand on a rational level that we just don't have enough information to know what they called themselves

Still, I totally understand how someone could become fascinated by this society in particular. We have so much evidence but never quite enough for solid answers in so many cases. It's a tantalising mystery

This is arguably more of a Sumer question, but how do you feel about the theory that the Indus Valley Civilisation can be identified as the Meluhha that the early Mesopotamians traded with?

Clock towers are way older than the industrial revolution and also occurred in quite a few different societies, so probably not as a general rule. There are a couple in England and France (Salisbury and Beauvais cathedrals) that are 700 years old, and if you include non-mechanical-clock timekeeping devices like sundials and water clocks then you can go back even further. I could imagine that it's quite possible that there was at least one instance where this was caught and people arranged for some kind of separate public clock, though

Mongol guy's font change has been living in my head all afternoon. Why is it only him? Why does getting the Mongol empire make him start speaking in a Charles-Rennie-Mackintosh-looking font? Like, the artist obviously likes to play it loose with typefaces in the rest of the comic too, but this one guy seems like the centre of the typographical attention and I do not understand the choices made

Well, one of several

I'd argue it is the same thing, it's just that the Roman Empire lasted so long and it was changing the whole time, so it's often necessary to compartmentalise it to a degree

I would say yes, just a very short-lived one. I'd struggle to come up with a definition of an empire that excluded Nazi Germany short of just arbitrarily imposing a minimum required lifespan. It was definitely a large, powerful, expansionist state that conquered other areas in order to subjugate them for the benefit of a metropole. The Reichskommisariats were basically intended as colonial administrations, not to mention client states like Slovakia