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  1. Pirate Madagascar

    These updates always brighten my day. I love that you're still trucking along with this TL, Tynnin, I love what happened to Admiral Bonny here and I love Grace Kelly's bloody path of revenge. This TL is still my favorite TL.

  2. Non-Westerners You Want to See a Timeline About

    Prince George Washington really warrants an appearance somewhere.

  3. Domain of Soissons: A new roman empire

    Mind you, structurally Soissons had very little to do with the Roman Empire. Syagrius ruled the place more like a barbarian warlord than a Roman governor, as his behavior leading up to the Battle of Soissons indicates, and in general there seems to have been next to nothing of civil government...

  4. WI: Romans retreat to Italia + Dalmatian coast in early 5th century?

    Holding onto Africa, or at least Carthage and its hinterland, is absolutely vital. That's Rome's breadbasket; without it, Italy would gradually shrivel and starve, as it historically did after the Vandals seized the place. Italy+Dalmatia+Carthage might be doable. The Alps, as always, serve as a...

  5. For the Dream of the Dead Empire: A Post-Roman TL

    Fair enough. If you're only a recent graduate, it shouldn't be too hard to bluff your way into a local university's library system, since you still know the ropes. Managed to get into the University of Michigan's papyrus collection myself once, without anybody challenging me. One thing that...

  6. Hungarian Empire Possible?

    Doing a quick glance over the Nicobar Islands article on Always Informative Wikipedia, Denmark's repeated abandonments of the archipelago in 1809, 1834 and 1848 don't really speak well of its promise as a site of colonial settlement and expansion. It doesn't help that the largest plot of land...

  7. Challenge: More American Cities Like Detroit

    It's not that bad on the ground, when you're actually living here and see the city every day around you. People publish and publicize the most sensational and dreadful pictures, and skip over the well-maintained houses which are only a block away. It's quite frustrating to see over and over...

  8. Hungarian Empire Possible?

    Going for colonies nobody else wanted to have is a pisspoor basis for a colonial empire that would give the French or British a "run for their money". What colonies are there that no-one else would want to have, anyways? There's Caribbean islands here and there that Hungary could maybe stake a...

  9. Whats your favorite kind of Russia?

    One that both gels with the general feel of the story and is likewise a plausible product of the story's butterflies. So any of the above, depending.

  10. For the Dream of the Dead Empire: A Post-Roman TL

    Say, Shakaka, have you had a crack at Penny MacGeorge's "Late Roman Warlords"? It has a dashed good section on Northern Gaul, and discusses the probable shape of "Soissons" at the time. How many Romans with Barbarian names were there? All I think of that are related to the area are Arbogast, a...

  11. AH Challenge; Rome Discovers Steam

    I've always wanted to give this a fair shot and actually flesh out a crude scenario, rather than just whinge about how useless Hero of Alexandria was on his own. Trajan's conquest of Mesopotamia lasts longer than it historically did. Greater exposure to the fashions of the Orient leads to a...

  12. Russians take China instead of Manchu?

    Hold on, I just drove through the part of the Russian steppes (drove from the Georgian border to Astrakhan). It's pretty awful out there for massive settlements. The land's dry and most of it's only suitable for pastureland. Good, reliable water sources are few and far between, and in general...

  13. Yesterday's Tommorow: A Plausible Roman Steam TL

    I'm pretty much in agreement with you there, but with the additional caveat that there's very little groundwork established in this period for the precision needed even for 18th-century 1st-generation engines. There's no temperature guage for Palonius and others to work with[1], no measurable...

  14. Yesterday's Tommorow: A Plausible Roman Steam TL

    Hero of Alexandria made a tea kettle that could spin around on an axle, and that's pretty much all the aeolipile was. Now, within 20 years of Hero's tea kettle, in this timeline there's a guy who's managed to make a working steamer-- one that, while it did capsize, managed to nonetheless produce...

  15. Research/Note Taking

    Take notes of what you're looking for. If there's more that seems potentially useful or interesting, wonderful, you can look that up in the book again later. If you've got your own copy of the book, toss in as many bookmarks (to mark tables, maps, or whatever) and penciled-in notes in the...

  16. Yesterday's Tommorow: A Plausible Roman Steam TL

    By hand? I'm particularly having a hard time with the use of the aeolipile as the driving force for a cart. The boiler was basically a glorified tea kettle, and since nobody understood much of anything about air pressure it never really was able to produce that much force to work with. Even...

  17. AHC: Keep Music Good

    You keep saying that taste doesn't matter, this is a simple what-if without any of that going on, and then you say stuff like Surely you can see that comments like that feed into the very arguments that you deplore?

  18. AHC: Keep Music Good

    I'm impressed with Blinde Willie McTell's "A to Z Blues" and Lucille Bogan's "Shave 'Em Dry" most of all. Damn, that's some profane stuff.

  19. AHC: Keep Music Good

    It was probably just that radio stations were less likely to air this stuff back then.

  20. Magna Mundi - The Game

    On reflection, was it really a good idea to do a fully-fledged MM spin-off in the first place? Ubik's always had a bit of an ego (to put it lightly), especially when you look at things like the fun2mm project, which was a MM sub-mod that removed the piracy stuff and apparently made Ubik quite...
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