Last poster WINS !!!!!!

And I just read that epicc post.... I like it

Sulleh wrote:

i like your mercian eagle btw Vrangor. Shame you all lost though.

Sulleh, I hope you're just pulling my leg, which I admittedly deserve I am aware that the British Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry badge closely resembles the insignia of the Byzantines, but the double-headed eagle that I fly is a modified Byzantine Imperial symbol. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-headed_eagle : "According to the most prevalent theory, the single-headed eagle was modified to double-headed by (Byzantine) emperor Isaac I Komnenos (1057–1059) being influenced from local traditions..." This is what it looked like:



...according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_heraldry .

The early usage by the Roman Empire (and the Roman republic) was of a single-headed eagle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexilloid



Emperor Constantine moved the Imperial Roman capital from Rome to Constantinople ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I ) as this was a more defensible position in the early 300s. Quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-headed_eagle , "Constantinople was the successor of Rome, and the Byzantines continued the use of the old imperial "single-headed" eagle motif. Although the roots of the transformation to double-headed are almost certainly connected with old depictions in Asia Minor, the details of its adoption are uncertain." Usually, the two heads were used to symbolize the power over both the Western and Eastern Roman Empire, or later, to symbolize the unity between the spiritual (Christian) and secular power in medieval Europe. Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_eagle , "In the Western World, many nations adopted the eagle as a symbol in order to emulate the greatness of the Roman Empire." I would add that this pertains to the US too, not only in the heraldry, but also considering the usage of the Roman terms "senate," "congress" and many others, even the usage of Latin (Roman) language in official seals and the military mottoes (semper fidelis = lat. always faithful).

Now, if you read carefully, you probably noticed the word "cypher" (quote): "The dynastic emblem of the Palaiologos dynasty, the double-headed eagle with the Palaiologos sympilema (cypher)." But what is a cypher? I will leave it to you to research further if you're interested; I will only direct you to the fact that the cyphers are still in use, but have evolved over the millenia. The traditionalistic UK (as a de iure monarchy) has lots of this stuff, for example the famous Queen Victoria's Royal Cypher (VR - Victoria Regina):



...or Elizabeth Regina:



Back to my flag. It is a Byzantine imperial flag where the Paleologoi cypher was replaced with a stylized "B" (a cyrillic letter V, for "Vrangor"). The font I used was the Studenica font ( http://www.neobyzantine.org/download/fonts/ ) based on the monastic texts from the Studenica monastery founded here in Serbia in 1190 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studenica_monastery ). Back then, Serbia was (mostly) part of the Byzantine empire, or under their influence. Its cultural heritage is Byzantine (Eastern Roman) as opposed to the Western Roman or the Islamic.

Admittedly, the cap badge of the Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry (regiment formed in 1992, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mercian_and_Lancastrian_Yeomanry )



...does remind me of the modern Serbian coat of arms, adopted in 1882, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_coat_of_arms



...but there is an additional late Byzantine Imperial Cross with four Greek BETAs on a Serbian shield (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_empire ). This comes as no surprise to me, as the Roman conquests took them all the way to what they called Britannia, though they never really conquered it:



Btw, the British regional name Mercia is a Latin (Roman) transliteration of the old English "Myrce," meaning "border people" (modern day English Midlands -- that's how far they effectively controlled, so these guys were called "border people"). This will later become the medieval Kingdom of Mercia...

i win

i win and i love this game

my turn to win

sorry fellas..

The winner is back.

And the winner is me.

no me

one word. rothgar.

one world one adamaska

...and one winner - me.

And one overlord.

And about your earlier post Vrangor... that's really interesting. My picture is a flag with blood on it. One of us may not be thinking enough about their picturees.

There's no "enough" in Nature, Sulleh. It's a term inherent to human beings. What may be enough for me, may not be enough for you, and vice versa. For some people, there's never enough money -- they always want more. For others, there's never enough thinking

In engineering, for example, you keep perfecting a design until you reach a certain point, where you have to invest much more in it in order to make it just a bit better. That's where you stop and send it to the other department, which then calls it a "product" and puts copies of it on the market. Different development teams (esp. their managers) have different ideas of just what "enough" is, so you get, well, different products. So even in engineering, where everything appears to be exact, when you scratch the surface, you realize such elusive terms have no universal definition...

Your flag may have a hidden message in it, it's just that not everybody is able to interpret it. I am not sure you are either, as it may well be an expression of some subconscious idea of yours (?) Mine is more straightforward and explicit...

Ah, and btw ... I won.

i win

No, you don't.

but I do.

again guys i win

wrong again. the winner is me.

win

victory

indeed

i win

Win.

i win