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Not teaching yet...it's not a career that'll pay the bills so I put that on the back burner until at least next year while I chase contractor funbux. Teaching only pays about $2k per class per semester. That puts it squarely in the "not my day job" category. So for now I read and refine some ideas i want to research, write, and publish. But I do know how to analyze a historian's work. Edit: Also, not saying don't read Gibbon. I don't know of anyone else who's tried to tackle such a huge subject in one massive loving effort. There's definitely value in it, but just know that it's not the end-all. Godholio fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Jul 17, 2014 |
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Jul 16, 2014 20:04
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 04:41 |
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Alright History nerds here's one for you: I'm interested in reading about the War of the Roses. What's a good, entertaining book or author who's covered it?
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Jul 16, 2014 20:14
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George R. R. Martin.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:16
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Godholio posted:George R. R. Martin. Yea yea I know he cribbed a ton from it.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:17
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holocaust bloopers posted:Yea yea I know he cribbed a ton from it. Honestly, fire up Crusader Kings 2 + play as the Lancaster or York faction while skimming wikipedia for highlights of Shakespeare's play Richard III. ..it'll be more entertaining for you, and a hella lot more fun. It loving SUCKS dealing with the Old English language unless you are a history major/armchair historian or shakespeare fan.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:47
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Shakespeare spoke Early Modern English  Old English is so different that you wouldn't be able understand it, let alone read it. Especially since it was written in Anglo-Saxon Runes for hundreds of years. Sounded cool as hell though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8 Middle English is also mostly unintelligible though there's more familiar sounding words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfOMU
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Jul 16, 2014 21:04
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I'll be honest: I can't stand Shakespeare, so I'm not a good judge of his works. and George RR Martin is pretty horrible.....he helped inflict WILDCARDS on the universe. The WILDCARDS series is bad, really loving bad and George RR Martin LOVES the series. Reading some of the WILDCARDS stories made hate the fact I was literate. read the bookbarn WILDCARDS thread, i dare you. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3501532
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Jul 16, 2014 21:31
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Speaking of GRRM the Tales of Dunk and Egg are pretty good. Three short novellas set 90 years before AGOT about a big badass knight and his squire's adventures. It's game of thronsey but without the weird sex scenes, but with plenty of long detailed scenes describing dinner.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:48
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gleep gloop posted:Speaking of GRRM the Tales of Dunk and Egg are pretty good. Three short novellas set 90 years before AGOT about a big badass knight and his squire's adventures. It's game of thronsey but without the weird sex scenes, but with plenty of long detailed scenes describing dinner. Also the popular theory is Brienne of Tarth is Duncan's grand daughter
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Jul 16, 2014 22:53
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I actually like the tales of Dunk and Egg way more then I like ASoIaF proper. I think the focus on specific characters and events helps GRRMs style immensely.
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Jul 17, 2014 01:07
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tuluk posted:I thought it was godholio's dream career, no idea he was able to land a job teaching history. I took a class on Information Operations/Information Warfare and how it has evolved military operations from John Arquilla. It was one the best courses I've ever taken, and we played a lot of InfoChess in the final portion of the class. While I wouldn't say that it's great at modeling actual war, it is absolutely fantastic at modeling how valuable information is to making operational decisions, and causes players to make some very interesting cost/benefit decisions based on incomplete data.
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Jul 17, 2014 01:13
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Dunk and Egg is a simple fun story with a clear end. ASOIAF has been changed and rewritten so many times that it gets a bit silly. It's also a GIGANTIC sprawling world that's a pain in the dick to keep track of.
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Jul 17, 2014 04:42
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The First Law series. Seriously. It's really good.
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Jul 17, 2014 04:45
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ManMythLegend posted:infochess commentary thanks for the feedback from someone who's actually played it. It looks interesting. a peter perla book mentioned it along with a few other items I've been slowly looking at. that old naval tactics book I was about in the navy thread, McClintic Theater Model, avalon hill & SPI wargames, etc.
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Jul 17, 2014 22:50
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Amazon just launched Kindle Unlimited which is basically netflix for books, you can get a 30 day free trial right now. $9.99 a month for unlimited access to over 600,000 ebooks plus several thousand audio books.
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Jul 19, 2014 04:33
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Mustang posted:Amazon just launched Kindle Unlimited which is basically netflix for books, you can get a 30 day free trial right now. $9.99 a month for unlimited access to over 600,000 ebooks plus several thousand audio books. Not to derail but they just started doing that with music too.
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Jul 19, 2014 04:38
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Mustang posted:Amazon just launched Kindle Unlimited which is basically netflix for books, you can get a 30 day free trial right now. $9.99 a month for unlimited access to over 600,000 ebooks plus several thousand audio books. Where's my prime discount you fucks 
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Jul 19, 2014 05:30
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The kindle subscription service looks to be mostly lovely.
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Jul 19, 2014 05:44
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Bolow posted:Where's my prime discount you fucks This right here This is a post I agree with
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Jul 19, 2014 06:30
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Anyone heard of Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos? Has a lot of good reviews on Amazon and it's one of their Kindle Unlimited books, supposed to be military sci-fi along the lines of Heinlein and Joe Haldeman. edit: Steel World seems interesting too, Earth becomes part of a vast Alien empire to avoid destruction. All members of the empire have to trade something and Earth's commodity are it's mercenaries since the other Alien species are too civilized to have standing armies. Mustang fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Jul 19, 2014 |
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Jul 19, 2014 06:49
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Mustang posted:Anyone heard of Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos? Has a lot of good reviews on Amazon and it's one of their Kindle Unlimited books, supposed to be military sci-fi along the lines of Heinlein and Joe Haldeman. Terms of Enlistment is pretty good, I read it a couple months back. It takes about half the book for the guy to really get into his own stride. Until then you're going to notice how incredibly Heinlein-esque it is and there's also a portion that's like Black Hawk Down 2.0. It's worth reading just for getting into the sequel, Lines of Departure.
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Jul 19, 2014 15:53
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Mustang posted:Anyone heard of Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos? Has a lot of good reviews on Amazon and it's one of their Kindle Unlimited books, supposed to be military sci-fi along the lines of Heinlein and Joe Haldeman. I read the sample. Came to the conclusion that guy writes like a loving high school student so I didn't bother.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:32
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Hopefully Amazon will add more/better authors to their Kindle Unlimited over time. I remember Netflix streaming being mostly lovely low quality movies when it first launched.
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Jul 19, 2014 16:38
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Mustang posted:Hopefully Amazon will add more/better authors to their Kindle Unlimited over time. I remember Netflix streaming being mostly lovely low quality movies when it first launched. yeah, the first year was terrible. poo poo didn't start getting good until they started putting on TV shows. King of the Hill getting put on was the turning point
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Jul 19, 2014 17:19
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Obama Africanus posted:I just finished "Blind Mans Bluff" This is from like a million years ago but whatever. Blind Man's Bluff 2: The Re-tentacleing won't happen because Blind Man's Bluff was written with leaked material. There was a guy who was selling documents to the Soviets, I forget who, but some of them got out and the book was written. (I think that the authors called up the involved persons and said hey, it's out anyways so you can talk to us) The Navy hasn't officially confirmed or denied anything in there because it's all top secret to some absurd degree. e: If you read the official history of Navy Intelligence from that era, all it'll say is that they had "a major intelligence breakthrough" around 1971. That book, now titled The Admirals' Advantage, manages to hint at some truly incredible feats of intelligence collection. The writing is dry, but that owes to it being an adaptation of a formal report. To contribute more, your local base library might have a few official Oral Histories laying around, at least if it's a Navy base. These are absolute goldmines and quick reads if you can find them. For example, the Naval Institute interviewed a series of Bud Zumwalt's staff officers. They revealed that: - During a briefing in 1968, General Abrams got so pissed off at an Air Force colonel that the colonel pissed his pants - In Vietnam, Z relied entirely on his staff to do basic things like dress him. One night his normal flag aide was gone and the Vietnamese cabin boy laid out his best guess at a proper uniform for him. So Vice Admiral Zumwalt comes out before his entire staff wearing a cammie blouse, pants, white socks, white shoes, and a khaki combo cover. He was so wrapped up in thinking about the war effort that he'd shaved looking at himself in the mirror and not noticed. - Z would fly out to the front every morning and literally hand out Navy Commendations and later Bronze Stars like candy. A strapping young boat commander could do something sufficiently heroic at 2200 and have a medal by 0900 the next morning. Z would tell their chain of commands to gently caress themselves and make the paperwork happen. Red Crown fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jul 20, 2014 |
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Jul 20, 2014 00:49
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Just finished The War, the collected dispatches from war correspondent William Howard Russell who was embedded with the British Army headed to Crimea in 1854. From Russell's perspective, we see--and stop me if any of this sounds familiar-- Our Heroes not receiving enough of the right gear and speculation as to where all that money is going, despair that local contractors are feckless opportunists probably aligned with the enemy anyway, mail service that sucks, concern that the news being reported back home is a lot more optimistic than the view from the front, and disappointment with one's coalition partners (but totally digging their cool uniforms).
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Sep 23, 2014 00:57
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Oh, hey, forgot about this thread. This book came up in discussion in GIP before, so I'll mention that I'm reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It's not a bad read, but this guy has a SERIOUS loving hardon for the Romans. It's clear from about 3 pages in that they were the pinnacle of human civilization and if we're lucky we'll match them again someday. It was apparently sunshine and butterflies for several centuries, during which time barbarians were converted (immediately upon defeat) into eternally loyal subjects, slaves were so well treated that they were fine with maintaining their station in life and passing it on to their children, etc etc. If you can get past the phallus delectabitur there's some good info and sources. You just have to sift verifiable events from the author's opinion. Also, keep in mind that it was written in the 1700s and most "current" editions were still re-edited 150 years ago.
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Sep 23, 2014 03:30
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Also about the Roman Empire but with a military focus (and of course, much more recent) is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. It goes into great detail about Roman military organization, defenses (the limes), tactics, logistics, and (duh) strategy. The same guy wrote a similar book about the Byzantine Empire that I haven't gotten around to yet.
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Sep 23, 2014 04:40
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hannibal posted:Also about the Roman Empire but with a military focus (and of course, much more recent) is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. It goes into great detail about Roman military organization, defenses (the limes), tactics, logistics, and (duh) strategy. The same guy wrote a similar book about the Byzantine Empire that I haven't gotten around to yet. I have this book but I only just started reading it and not very far into it, but it is really interesting. It's not often that someone with an international relations background writes a book about poo poo that happened 2 thousand years ago, so it's pretty neat.
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Sep 23, 2014 04:55
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Mustang posted:Anyone heard of Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos? Has a lot of good reviews on Amazon and it's one of their Kindle Unlimited books Can't wait for the next book in this series. I saved and crossed off a lot of books in that npr100 list. Glad to the Farseer Trilogy is on it. Those booKS got me through my deployment
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Sep 23, 2014 05:04
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hannibal posted:Also about the Roman Empire but with a military focus (and of course, much more recent) is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. It goes into great detail about Roman military organization, defenses (the limes), tactics, logistics, and (duh) strategy. The same guy wrote a similar book about the Byzantine Empire that I haven't gotten around to yet. I haven't read this one yet (it's on my list) but just realize that he's one voice in a reasonably active debate. I know there are a couple of more recent books out that disagree with him.
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Sep 23, 2014 06:50
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hannibal posted:Also about the Roman Empire but with a military focus (and of course, much more recent) is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. It goes into great detail about Roman military organization, defenses (the limes), tactics, logistics, and (duh) strategy. The same guy wrote a similar book about the Byzantine Empire that I haven't gotten around to yet. Luttwak also wrote the excellent Coup D'etat, it's basically a how to manual on overthrowing the current government in power.
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Sep 23, 2014 12:02
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Godholio posted:I haven't read this one yet (it's on my list) but just realize that he's one voice in a reasonably active debate. I know there are a couple of more recent books out that disagree with him. Yeah, since it's from 1979 I can see the current thinking on Roman strategy being different. However there is a lot of interesting archeological/paleontological info in there too. Might as well throw in my current reading, Richard Evans' trilogy on Nazi Germany (Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War) I'm halfway through the third one and they're pretty good. The first one covers the post-WW1 period and the rise of the Nazis, the second one covers the time when the Nazis were in power before 1939, and the third one covers WW2. I own Shirer's book and while it's good, it's a bit out of date with the current scholarship and really covers things more from a reporter's point of view (which is really not bad for what it is). Evans is a historian and it shows (I'd say 1/3 of each book is footnotes and references) and I think the depth of writing is better for it.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:48
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hannibal posted:Might as well throw in my current reading, Richard Evans' trilogy on Nazi Germany (Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War) I'm halfway through the third one and they're pretty good. The first one covers the post-WW1 period and the rise of the Nazis, the second one covers the time when the Nazis were in power before 1939, and the third one covers WW2. I own Shirer's book and while it's good, it's a bit out of date with the current scholarship and really covers things more from a reporter's point of view (which is really not bad for what it is). Evans is a historian and it shows (I'd say 1/3 of each book is footnotes and references) and I think the depth of writing is better for it. Echoing this, the Evans trilogy is some amazing scholarship and reading.
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Sep 24, 2014 21:32
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Wanted: a history of the Indo-Paki wars of 1965 and/or 1971. Added stipulation: that aren't written by anyone from India or Pakistan.
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Oct 9, 2014 03:30
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Just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. Holy poo poo, read this book now. An astronaut get left for dead on Mars in the near future and has to survive until NASA can rescue him. Apparently the audiobook was extremely well done. The book is written in audio-log entries, so it translates really well to a reading of it.
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Oct 12, 2014 02:36
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gleep gloop posted:It's game of thronsey but without the weird sex scenes, but with plenty of long detailed scenes describing dinner. Explains why it's only a novella. Take out all the play by play cunnilingus accounts and random breast milk fetish stuff and you've got about 20 pages of story, plus some food. And graphic accounts of people making GBS threads in a field. Seriously though, Alison Weirs "The Wars of the Roses" is pretty good, if slightly Lancaster biased.
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Oct 14, 2014 19:24
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I dunno Martin spent like 30 goddamn pages describing the food at Joffrey's wedding.
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Oct 14, 2014 19:45
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Bolow posted:I dunno Martin spent like 30 goddamn pages describing the food at Joffrey's wedding. 20 pages plus some food
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Oct 14, 2014 19:54
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I think we missed the perfect caption for your av: quote:Thank you for playing “should or should we not, follow the advice of the galactically stupid?”
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Oct 14, 2014 20:51
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