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Grand Prize Winner posted:English name question: I know there used to be a lot of towns with streets like Gropecunte Alley and so forth, but did any people end up with names related to their not-socially-acceptable trades? Like, is there today one James Whoremonger living a quiet life in Hamfast or something? There was a dude in my German language class who made the teacher do a  doubletake reading the roll, his surname was Foltermann.Torture-man
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Aug 17, 2016 02:08
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Agean90 posted:Does your war have proto-communists? No? Well then your early modern war ain't poo poo Go Hussites 
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Sep 3, 2016 07:46
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my dad posted:Holy poo poo, loophole 14... 
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Sep 7, 2016 20:22
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:"All right you assholes, listen up! We got new orders from Division, no sniping field-grades *period*. Seems if we do it, those guys will as well and our REMFs ain't happy being team target. If we kill the French leadership, they might get replacements that aren't garbage. 
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Sep 7, 2016 23:08
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HEY GAL posted:when QE 1 said she had the heart and stomach of a king of england, did she mean on her desk And the wingspan of an albatross!
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Sep 16, 2016 22:02
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SquadronROE posted:If I recall correctly it was used to help put out fires in Iraq during the first Gulf War. The idea being that it would literally blow out the flames, I think? I dunno, I'm not a fire-ologist. Pyrologist?
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Sep 28, 2016 01:04
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Ithle01 posted:Maintaining the prestige of the Spanish crown is a very real issue for these monarchs and apparently it is worth spending yourself into bankruptcy multiple times. As for the cash from the New World that did gently caress up the crown's finances, but not in the way people generally assume. The Spanish crown was able to leverage the expected silver coming in as collateral to borrow money with the predictable result that they eventually were spending more financing their debt then they were making every year. As an aside, Tallahassee actually has a really good state history museum with a whole room devoted to Spanish silver coinage. Most of the explanatory plaques end with "and then the guy with the crown monopoly on the mint was executed for embezzling". 
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Sep 28, 2016 23:09
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:That's not exactly what I said. I dont know where or when the idea originates, but it is true we don't have evidence that they were used to break up formations. That said, I also don't think they existed only to defend the flag. I say this in part because halberds served the same role but we always see a few of them at the front of a formation in, say, the Luzerner Chronik. I also have seen two-handed swords at the front in artwork, namely Holbein's Bad War. My money verwhats?
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Oct 5, 2016 00:44
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:If only Cesare Borgia hadn't gotten
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Oct 17, 2016 06:16
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my dad posted:Huh. If that's how it works, I wonder who stole ours. Poland sacrificed theirs to try and spell a Slavic language in the good Catholic alphabet rather than the borderline heretical Orthodox one. My favorite Polish word is probably zdzbla. Except there are also accents on three letters. It means a blade of grass. Multiple blades are zdzbli. Edit: pronounced, uh, Z J as in jerk B Wah. Also I guess this means there are only accents on two letters, I am out of practice. And in my terrible accent it comes out more like izz-jib-wah, for three actual syllables.  I do not have the moral character to do Polish good.
Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 20:53
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Tevery Best posted:Untrue on pretty much all counts. How did I gently caress up my favorite word?Seriously, good post.
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Oct 20, 2016 21:44
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StashAugustine posted:the strategic vision of Patton, the geopolitical deft touch of MacArthur, the humility of Montgomery, the ethics of Zhukov, and the competence of Chaing Kai-Sek Was Chiang Kai-Shek incompetent? I always rather got the impression that he did pretty well for the burning tire fire he had to work with.
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Oct 21, 2016 19:21
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chitoryu12 posted:I thought his name was Moammar Al-Gathafi. 
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Oct 25, 2016 04:09
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OwlFancier posted:"Lost surprise attack against unarmed merchant ship by shooting self in own periscope with torpedo" has to be the most embarrassing way to die to be honest. Only because the Toilet Incident didn't kill anybody.
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Nov 28, 2016 01:54
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Crazycryodude posted:I know I read a good article about this, I'll go see if I can dig it up. Here's what I remember in the meantime. On the plus side, a very high proportion of modern action is against exactly those insurgents, so there is totally a place for the durdly old Warthog in the fleet.
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Dec 1, 2016 06:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:You need physical strength to be a loader. There's a Current Syrian Events joke somewhere here.
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Dec 12, 2016 01:26
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Nebakenezzer posted:cryptojews = hidden jews? I'm thinking cryptozoology here Jews
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Dec 12, 2016 04:19
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howe_sam posted:Hey thread, my dad visited Bratislava, Prague, and Vienna this year, and I wanted to get him some books on that general part of Europe for Christmas since he came back with a bunch of questions. Any good recs for the HRE or the Hapsburgs? Danubia and Germania by Simon Winder are both fantastic, assuming threadposters don't immediately beat me to death for inaccuracies of which I am unaware.
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Dec 16, 2016 04:39
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Note to self: never, ever board a Swedish flagship.
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Jan 30, 2017 05:43
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Morholt posted:Exception: Charles Gustav, King of Sweden and Count Palatine of Zweibrücken-Kleeburg, who is sometimes referred to in Sweden as simply "the Count Palatine" when discussing him before he became King. I was confused by this for the longest time. Clearly this creates a justification for Pfalz to invade and conquer your asses for trademark infringement.
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Feb 7, 2017 23:02
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Plutonis posted:They had been doing it before becoming an Empire and the Devshirme system had religious overtones as well as state necessity (keep too many Christians from outnumbering Muslims) The Devshirme in particular was kind of weird as slave systems go, because you were basically a conscripted civil servant or soldier who wasn't allowed to quit until retirement. Especially if you rose to the very top of the system, whereupon you were a slave who was owned by the institution you were in charge of. Edit: ArchangeI posted:I would argue that the system you described was not racial in nature but entirely based on religion. It only turned into modern racism when people who converted from one faith to another (usually from Judaism or Islam to Christianity) were still treated like members of their old faith. This was actually a source of conflict between the Church, which held that all Christians were equal, and the local elites, who were quite insistent that some Christians were more equal than others. Which in turn was in part an outgrowth of the fight between the conversion imperative and the profit imperative. The early Spanish Empire had a good few rich people get very, very angry that the dang Church was converting their chattel and therefore turning them into real actual people.
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Mar 3, 2017 20:46
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MrBling posted:To touch back briefly on slavery, I don't know if this happened anywhere else but the Danish government had to pay the plantation owners in the Danish West Indies when they outlawed slavery in 1848 (The actual slave trade was ended in 1802 but it took a little longer to actually abolish slavery). Because there was no specific laws regarding slaves the owners ended up being paid (supposedly) $50 for each slave they had to cover the financial loss of having to actually pay their workers. I didn't even know there WAS a Danish West Indies. loving Vikings making everything weird.
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Mar 7, 2017 04:54
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P-Mack posted:I'll take your Danish West Indies and raise you Courland's colonization of Tobago. I know about that one but only because a chunk of my ancestors were smug wealthy German Kurlanders. Relatedly, guess my favorite underappreciated Russian Empress
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Mar 8, 2017 02:00
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Squalid posted:One of my ancestors who owned a plantation in Arkansas was crippled and shortly died in 1865 after being assaulted by a criminal gang trying to extort money out of him, money which the war had made disappear. Family legend is that while they hung him by the neck and were demanding the location where he buried his (nonexistent) money, his newly freed slave came around with a shotgun and chased them off. Only because if he'd told them where it was buried the ex-slave wouldn't have gotten his modest cut. 
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Mar 14, 2017 07:51
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HEY GAIL posted:late medieval/early early modern supercannons I've always had a certain fondness for that one Italian mad engineer's contribution to the fall of Constantinople. "Hello, Mr Sultan! The Christians decided not to purchase my preposterous omega-mortar, would you like to?" edit: he's in the article and also Hungarian
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Mar 23, 2017 04:15
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OwlFancier posted:spades... already existed. citation needed
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Mar 23, 2017 04:20
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Pontius Pilate posted:How did Gerald Ford not only get a supercarrier named after him but the whole class? I know he was in the navy but c'mon, it's Gerald Ford. There are common sense exceptions. People who would suffer negative health effects or serve a vital purpose and need to keep their strength up. Soldiers are both categories, really
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Apr 6, 2017 07:28
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Hermsgervørden posted:If I had to asphyxiate on a gas, I would deffo choose Nitrous Oxide. Knowing nothing at all about this, I wonder if that's ever been tried as a chemical weapon? It's lighter than air. This is not an optimal characteristic.
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Apr 13, 2017 00:10
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BattleMoose posted:
Oh man, the author of that source was a literal no-poo poo "water fluoridation is a commie plot!" guy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Racey_Jordan
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Apr 16, 2017 17:11
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Fangz posted:How *would* you best sabotage a fighter jet? Build the runway out of substandard concrete that spells easily.  It's like the screws idea but keeps on giving!
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May 6, 2017 00:23
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Alchenar posted:They're either a long list of 'imperialism is bad' or 'eh, colonists bring with them the same cultural respect for institutions' Or in Sri Lanka's case, kinda both!
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May 14, 2017 04:03
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Phobophilia posted:lol every loser who writes time travel books where they single handedly go back and remake the medieval world in their image would have the poo poo kicked out of them Fortuitously this is ultimately what happens in Mark Twain's!
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May 21, 2017 01:02
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Ghetto Prince posted:Stuck in development hell where it belongs, but it might get released as some kind of low budget romantic comedy after about fifteen years worth of rewrites. Possibly my favorite thing about Mr Clemens was his love-hate relationship with German.
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May 27, 2017 17:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:Draaaagoooooooooooooooooooooons! The last great horse-rider event in conventional warfare of which I am aware was a bunch of Polish dragoons with a couple antitank weapons loving up a German mechanized infantry column. 
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Jun 2, 2017 00:52
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Merkel sounds a little too British to me... And have you seen her steeple her fingers? Classic British Imperial supervillain gesture.
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Jun 21, 2017 22:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:Crossposting from TFR as I figure some people here will be interested. I think TFR just bought 25 of the things in the past hour. They're almost out, thanks goons. Someone should drop them a line so they can start an SAMart thread
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Jun 29, 2017 04:02
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Ithle01 posted:I feel like we're getting off base here and I do agree with you that there were cultural differences towards conquest and colonization that affected the way the Chinese expanded versus how Europeans did. The Ming didn't expand into Taiwan because they didn't think it was profitable to do so, but they did expand to the South and exert influence over large areas of Central Asia for security. The Ming authorities were by and large unconcerned with the economic potential of trade with their neighbors for some reason though.The thing that's weird is that they had no problem pushing South with resettlement, but were vehemently opposed to the idea of contact with Japan or their Northern neighbors until it was forced on them even if the trade could be beneficial. I remember reading that there were two camps of scholars trying to influence the crown s stance toward the North, one faction wanted a giant wall and no contact while the other faction wanted trade so it could play the tribes off against each other while making a profit. They wound up in modern Hong Kong, actually.
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Jul 2, 2017 06:02
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my dad posted:"In short, as the owner/operator of both a dick and a set of (admittedly male) nipples I'm not entirely sure that Suetonius is writing about impossibilities here. " One of my favorites in forums history.
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Jul 3, 2017 22:41
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spectralent posted:So, a lot of recent CK2 playing has made me think of the Romans and the ERE and it's slow decline. I'm mostly wondering when, militarily, the Romans lost their edge. When I covered ancient history, I was taught that Romans had warfare loving down to an extent nobody else did, and had an understanding of logistics and tactics at least decades better than the nearest alternatives. I think even pretty recently I've read about how the Romans would plough through france and germany taking thousands of dead and wounded for a hundred or so casualties on their end. So, when did that erode, and why, if I'm right at all? It was a preposterously gigantic factor. One could make a solid argument that some of the other factors related to subsequent conflict and failure to develop more stable (non-Ottoman :turkey: ) institutions were, you know, a direct result of all that.
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Jul 5, 2017 23:23
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:What was the last battlefield casualty due to an arrow shot from a bow? If we discount poo poo like the Andamans, Kenya in the late 00s saw some disputes where poor rurals broke out the huntin' bows for a post-election mini-civil-war.
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Jul 7, 2017 00:35
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