A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
This week we're going to take a bit of a detour to talk about how we should imagine the warriors of Gallic/Celtic armies were equipped and fought. I wanted to write about the topic because the YouTube algorithm served me up a video on it, which isn't ever fully wrong but struck me as importantly … Continue reading Collections: Who Were ‘the Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?
Since I finally got out to see Dune (2021), I wanted to take a chance to share some of my reflections on it and this week was a good time because I had nowhere near enough time otherwise to get the next Fortifications post ready. So first I want to give my own reaction to … Continue reading Miscellanea: Reflections on the Sands of Dune (2021)
This is Part IV of our four-and-three-quarters part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude) on the Fremen Mirage. We began by sketching out the basic outline of this pop theory of history: that a lack of wealth and sophistication leads to moral purity, which in turn leads to military prowess, which consequently produces a cycle … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part IV: Desert Power
This is part II of our four-part series (I, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I've termed 'the Fremen mirage,' after the fiction people from the science fiction novel Dune. If you are just tuning in, we defined the core tenants of the Fremen Mirage back in more detail in the first post: The … Continue reading Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part II: Water Spilled on the Sand