Do not make shit up if it already exists. “this has been a theme of these posts but please, showrunners: when you are doing the visual design for a fantasy-historical society, you are not going to outsmart centuries of professional… Read More »Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge
The trap of a good job is, that you can become useless. You are good at it, and it works out on the job, but it might happen that you stagnate and have no skill applicable, or even worse, presentable… Read More »Becoming Useless
You are probably thinking wrong about Middle Ages.
Organization matters. “All of those tasks, in turn, require hundreds of literate, expensive bureaucrats to administer.These are not compatible systems. You can have your bannermen call up their retinues, or you can hire long-service professionals, but you cannot have your… Read More »New Acquisitions: Lannister Infantry Kit Review
And it is good news.
Castles were important in the middle ages. And not just because of foreign threat. “Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may… Read More »New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III
This also goes for people today. E.g. terrorist. They believe the shit they talk about. “What I think this show has fallen into is the assumption – almost always made by someone outside a society looking in – that the… Read More »New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
People do not change that fast. “How we view the past has a tremendous influence on what we think about the present. In particular, the tendency to view the distant past as a time of unrestrained barbarism provides us with… Read More »New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part I
Not everyone needs to be classified. “Since its first edition in 1952, the DSM has gradually evolved from a slim document meant to standardize psychiatric recordkeeping into a sprawling classification system that shoulders a set of responsibilities it was never… Read More »You Aren’t In The DSM—Asterisk
You cannot win a war without strong economy. “Because Sparta produced so little of value, the Spartan state simply lacked the funds to supplement its operational capabilities. It could not afford foreign siege engineers or experts (an increasingly dire liability… Read More »Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends