A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
A look at history and popular culture
This is the second part of our look at many of the smaller issues of historical realism in Amazon's Rings of Power, following on our more substantive discussion of the major worldbuilding problems the show experienced. I had hoped to keep this at two parts (actually, I had hoped this would just be a one-off … Continue reading Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part II: Falling Towers
This week we're going to return to Amazon's Rings of Power, as promised in the first post there were a plethora of smaller believably and realism issues with in the show that I wanted to discuss but which didn't rise to the storytelling problems of those major issues. These are the sorts of small issues … Continue reading Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part I: Exploding Forges
This week we're going to take a look at the worldbuilding of Amazon Studio's Rings of Power from a historical realism perspective. I think it is no great secret that Rings of Power broadly failed to live up to expectations and left a lot of audiences disappointed. In the aftermath of that disappointment, once one … Continue reading Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat
I generally try to avoid having Twitter disputes spill on to the blog. Generally what happens on Twitter is best left on Twitter and in some cases not even that. However this past week I was pulled into a Twitter debate with Noah Smith about the validity of the way that historians offer our knowledge … Continue reading New Acquisitions: On the Wisdom of Noah Smith
This week we're going to take a long look at Expeditions: Rome, a turn-based tactics RPG by developer Logic Artists, set in the first century BC Late Roman Republic. In particular, we're going to look at how the game both constructs and uses its historical setting. This is a particularly important topic to discuss because … Continue reading Collections: Expeditions: Rome and the Perils of Verisimilitude
This is the fourth and last part of our series (I, II, III, IV) examining the historical assumptions of Europa Universalis IV, Paradox Interactive's historical grand strategy computer game set in the early modern period. Last time we looked at how Europa Universalis IV often struggles to reflect the early modern history of places and … Continue reading Collections: Teaching Paradox, Europa Universalis IV, Part IV: Why Europe?
This is the third part of our series (I, II, III, IV) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy computer game set in the early modern period, Europa Universalis IV (which is in turn the start of a yet larger series looking at several of Paradox's games and how they treat their historical … Continue reading Collections: Teaching Paradox, Europa Universalis IV, Part III: Europa Provincalis
This is the first part of a three (...sigh. four) part ( IIa, IIb , III) discussion of an idea I am going to term (borrowing from one of its proponents) the 'universal warrior' - the idea that there is a transcendent sameness about either the warrior experience or warrior values which provides some sort … Continue reading Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part I: Soldiers, Warriors, and…
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the fourth part of a four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO's Game of Thrones. We're looking at, in particular, if Martin's claim … Continue reading Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the third part of a four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO's Game of Thrones. We’re looking at, in particular, the degree to which … Continue reading Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part III: Horse Fiddles