Messages

976

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics 2019

« on: August 13, 2019, 12:02:00 PM »

Are the Lib Dems working on proposed constitutional changes to prevent something like the end of the May prime ministership from happening again?  I have seen arguments that in the Netherlands, say, if a government can't pass a motion for X, then can't pass a motion for not-X, an election is called whether the government wants one or not.

977

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics 2019

« on: August 12, 2019, 07:54:06 PM »

I am glad that I have a choice: I have not been looking seriously for academic jobs in the UK for a number of reasons.  If you are say a small business in the UK which relies on supplies from or sales to the rest of the UK EU, you don't have that luxury  

Right now, a lot depends on a parliament which hasn't been making the best decisions.

978

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: UK politics 2019

« on: August 12, 2019, 07:26:32 PM »

Yeah, that entitled attitude of large parties, that votes for smaller parties really belong to them in a predictable way does not make sense, especially when the media teaches people to vote for a party or a party head not a candidate and with turnout under 70% (I don't know how things are in the UK, but for a federal election in Canada 66% turnout is respectable, and MPs sometimes get elected without visiting their riding during the campaign). 

I can see how this particular byelection was a special case.

Parties have been dropping like flies in Canada (the Progressive Conservatives44 year old government in Alberta, the Bloc Quebecois, the federal Liberals almost dropped behind the NDP) but its never been in the middle of such a fraught issue as Brexit or paralyzed a whole level of government for three years.  Things didn't seem so bad in London earlier this summer, but London is its own place and I noticed the signs for Marxist walking tours and the stickers with a charming skulls-barbed-wire-and-weapons theme (in South Tirol its posters with a black white and red scheme).

979

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Historical accuracy in popular media

« on: July 14, 2019, 09:49:49 AM »

I have said it before, but I would like to see more stories where the male and female characters basically live in different worlds and do different things, but where the careful reader notices that the outcome of the male plotline is shaped by gossip networks and good textiles and badly stored wine and some of the female characters get exactly what they want while the male half of the cast is totally oblivious.  Or the same but for the noble characters and the commoners.  I would like to finish Nicola Griffith's Hild.

980

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Historical accuracy in popular media

« on: July 14, 2019, 09:33:46 AM »

That is a very good point too!  Even within the city of Vancouver, there are people with very different values and worldviews.  A lot of people today don't really have a grasp on the diversity of human experience, even if they are very concerned about being fair to all races, genders, and disabilities

I don't like grimdark because it presents everyone as awful and cynical, whereas really people who do horrible things often have elaborate stories about why their actions were just, and they often exist alongside people who make great sacrifices to the demands of ethics.  I don't think Alexander the Great was an amoral, cynical person, and I think that societies where many people are amoral and cynical collapse into a mess rather than functioning efficiently and rationally as grimdark insists.

981

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Historical accuracy in popular media

« on: July 13, 2019, 09:14:55 PM »

That is a good point!  Or American westerns ... from what I hear, the audience is supposed to have mixed sympathies between the settlers who will win in the end and the gunmen who are cool.

L. Sprague de Camp's solution in the 1950s was to make his viewpoint characters philosophically-minded, middle-to-upper-class Greeks who were not interested in boys.  Tolkien had his hobbits.  George Macdonald Frazer channeled his grandfather and his buddies from settler days in Africa and his own contrarianism. 

In a novel you have a little more space to get across "to my viewpoint character, disease is not bacteria, it is the hand of a god" than in a roleplaying game or a TV episode.

982

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: If you could act in any historical event...

« on: July 13, 2019, 06:17:25 PM »

I would be happy to walk from somewhere in Syria to Ecbatana in the reign of Cyrus King of Kings, stopping in Babylon to ask some rude questions in Aramaic and again in Late Babylonian.  We know so little about what happened during his lifetime ...

The same for walking from Bavaria to Padua over the Reschenpass in the age of Francesco di Marco Datini.

983

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Ridiculously fast archery?

« on: July 13, 2019, 06:06:36 PM »

Yes, that video and the 'skeptical rebuttal' video which was circulating left me saying "a plague on both your houses!"  I tried to put some information about the diverse styles of real historical archery in my post on Roman Archery from 2015.  Chris Verwijmeren's blog is good, even though I hate the name "warbow" for reasons I want to explain in another post (the people shooting replicas of medieval longbows use the name "warbow" to distinguish themselves from the people shooting 18th century sports longbows who call their sport "longbow", but in other cultures the bows brought to war were nothing like the inch thick monstrosities shooting quarter-pound arrows from the Mary Rose ... as far as I am concerned a war bow is a bow which was commonly used in war, not a particular style of longbow). 

I have more posts on archery.

984

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Geoffrey Bibby's "Four Thousand Years Ago"

« on: July 13, 2019, 05:50:20 PM »

A few years ago, I got myself out of a slump by reading a gamer-friendly book on the second millennium BCE Geoffrey Bibby's Four Thousand Years Ago.

(Aside: Ken Hite and Robin D. Laws have one-sentence reviews of gamer-friendly books on http://www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/ )

985

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Historical accuracy in popular media

« on: July 13, 2019, 05:49:29 PM »

That was one thing I liked about the first season of HBO's Rome: they tried to portray Late Republican Romans, not rich kids from California or polite Late Imperial Brits.  They did it in a HBO way (lots of violence and skin) not the way an ancient historian would do it, but they at least tried to show Roman characters as best as they understood them.

A problem is the modern fashion that characters should be sympathetic ie. behave in the way that the reader's culture says people should behave (I say modern because I don't think that any of the characters in the Iliad is supposed to be 'good,' except for maybe Hector and Priam and Hecuba and we know what happened to them).  Pretty much anyone more than 50 years ago is going to say, think, and do all kinds of things which are offensive to modern sensibilities.  Genre conventions are another problem: if Brother Cadfael thought like a 12th century person, he would not act like the protagonist in an English detective story.

986

Exilian Articles / Re: The Pararelational Paradox

« on: June 28, 2019, 02:03:54 PM »

And I am https://scholar.social/@bookandswordblog

987

Exilian Articles / Re: The Pararelational Paradox

« on: June 28, 2019, 12:21:12 PM »

How long has Exilian been around?  From my point of view, many communities moved from decentralized sites to darknets like FB in 2012/2013, Violet Blue thinks it was around 2013 because in that year as many people viewed the web on small Android/iOS devices as on conventional devices with a browser. 

I think it depends on the genre of your website though, and that a lot of the people saying "everyone is on smartphones" or "you need a birdsite account" are speaking magic not description though: they are trying to make something true by saying it, like political commentators.

988

Exilian Articles / Re: The Pararelational Paradox

« on: June 26, 2019, 10:04:57 PM »

Hi Jubal,

  that is one reason why I still post on forums.  Some of the wisdom of forums, like "segregate current partisan politics to an 'off topic' section or ban it" and "you need moderators" is going to have to be reinvented by communities on centralized social media I think.

  Also, forums are run by fellow geeks.  They can go toxic in many different ways, but they are not going to delete search results containing some key technical term because in another context it is rude, or throw away the archives because they pivoted into a browser game (and communities survive as people enter a new hobby, contribute, then get bored or distracted and stop supporting that part of their web presence).

  It just seems like face-to-face communities reward "the organizer" and "the person who sends the weekly emails" but right now Internet culture is focused on people each pushing their own individual identity and hoping to make money out of it.

989

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Historical Prices for Gamers and Writers

« on: June 21, 2019, 01:03:06 PM »

Something better for the early/high medieval period would be great, if someone could find a place which left us enough of the right kind of sources.  Regia Anglorum gives a great collection, but I think many of their prices come from law codes and so on, so they are probably not market prices.  If I try to steal your sword while you are swimming and I get caught, the price I and my kin pay may be more about how much I dishonoured you than about how much the swordsmith in the town down the valley charges.

Last time I played around with the Edict of Maximum Prices, I got a suspicion that the prices for staple foods allow for the fact that those vary wildly, whereas prices for durable goods may be more of a 'moderate middle price.'  So trying to use the list to get a price in 'liters of wheat', like some economists do, could be a mistake: the wheat prices might not be 'average' but more like 'a fair price after two bad harvests in a row.'

990

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: Spears vs Swords

« on: June 20, 2019, 10:18:23 PM »

Matt Easton has another few videos on the demos of sabre vs. spear on foot which he makes his Victorian fencing students do. 

Lindybeige strikes me as one of those eccentric autodidacts who says a lot of things and is happy to drink a pint and argue about which he was wrong about.  He reminds readers and watchers that he is not an expert on anything, just someone with opinions, so I'm not too worried that sometimes he messes up, even though his audience is much bigger than it used to be!