Lands of Red and Gold
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mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
canon, excuse meWhich parts were artillery ?Perhaps the SAM that shot down the rotorala.
In case everything isn't clear...
As Flubber pointed out, they were mocking the Christian concept of Easter, because the name is derived from a pagan goddess.
That was meant to be one of the more subtle cues that all was not what it seemed. And a bad ATL pun by having "Oxford" replace "Cambridge".
It's already canon that Sweden establishes a presence in North America. Swedish heritage in some form will be around until modern times. Whether that involves sovereignty is another matter.
All of the Christmas / April Fool's Day specials - and Easter specials, if I ever write one - are meant to be taken in a light-hearted manner.
Apart from the obvious jokes, they aren't intended to be deliberately misleading, but not every detail should be taken as accurate. Particularly, as I've previously mentioned, the exact years. Those are dependent on the speed of technological progress, and I still haven't worked that out precisely.
Part of the joke here was that emus, even if sold as chicks, weigh 40+ kg (90+ lb). That's rather big for one family of 5 people to be eating for an Easter feast, even if they invite half the neighbourhood.
As to whether Ethiopia is more modernised than OTL, well... probably, yes. I do have a general idea of what Africa is like in the equivalent to the OTL 2000s, but it's not set in stone.
Broadly speaking, anything that wasn't part of the jokes was canon, at least in the usual light-hearted way of festive specials.
As a rough guide, the place names (apart from Oxford/Cambridge) are meant to be right. The Easter Duck and Paschal Chicken are both canon in their way, although the way they eat Paschal Chicken in Ethiopia won't be quite as ambitious as was shown here. The Ēostre scene is canon. The police ranks in New England are canon. Rotorala is the canon ATL name for helicopters (or one of the ATL names, anyway). And so on.
As Flubber pointed out, they were mocking the Christian concept of Easter, because the name is derived from a pagan goddess.
A minor nitpick, Jared : In a previous installment, you said the replacement for OTL Cambridge in Maryland is called Shrewsbury, not Oxford. Continuity error or did you mean a different Cambridge in Maryland ?
That was meant to be one of the more subtle cues that all was not what it seemed. And a bad ATL pun by having "Oxford" replace "Cambridge".
It's already canon that Sweden establishes a presence in North America. Swedish heritage in some form will be around until modern times. Whether that involves sovereignty is another matter.
Not a canon chapter, then ?
All of the Christmas / April Fool's Day specials - and Easter specials, if I ever write one - are meant to be taken in a light-hearted manner.
Apart from the obvious jokes, they aren't intended to be deliberately misleading, but not every detail should be taken as accurate. Particularly, as I've previously mentioned, the exact years. Those are dependent on the speed of technological progress, and I still haven't worked that out precisely.
Part of the joke here was that emus, even if sold as chicks, weigh 40+ kg (90+ lb). That's rather big for one family of 5 people to be eating for an Easter feast, even if they invite half the neighbourhood.
As to whether Ethiopia is more modernised than OTL, well... probably, yes. I do have a general idea of what Africa is like in the equivalent to the OTL 2000s, but it's not set in stone.
Broadly speaking, anything that wasn't part of the jokes was canon, at least in the usual light-hearted way of festive specials.
As a rough guide, the place names (apart from Oxford/Cambridge) are meant to be right. The Easter Duck and Paschal Chicken are both canon in their way, although the way they eat Paschal Chicken in Ethiopia won't be quite as ambitious as was shown here. The Ēostre scene is canon. The police ranks in New England are canon. Rotorala is the canon ATL name for helicopters (or one of the ATL names, anyway). And so on.
In case everything isn't clear...
As Flubber pointed out, they were mocking the Christian concept of Easter, because the name is derived from a pagan goddess.
I'll admit that I kinda largely missed that one, except for the fact that I did recognize those are the names of two world-famous and very prestigious British colleges.....and towns, too, for that matter!
Interesting. Care to drop any hints at all in this regard?
Well, I certainly liked this last one.
Cool.
Also, how did you come up with the name "rotorala"? It's pretty cool, IMO.
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"And so on" including, as I fear, the anti-cannabis terrorists?
I trust that it will become clearer eventually why a segment of a Western society becomes so fanatical about so harmless a thing?
Lest someone point out that something like that happened OTL, I'd point out that was top-down and was and is cynically applied and enforced. What would motivate a clique of people to crusade so single-mindedly to compel an indifferent government to impose such a ban, rather than simply abstaining themselves and looking down on others who don't?
The crusade OTL to ban alcohol in the USA had a lot more objective reason to be passionate about criminalizing the habits of others; American society was pervasively boozing, and the severe damage it did to US families, with men spending far too much of their meagre paychecks on alcohol then, drunk and full of male entitlement often taking out their frustrations on their family members. And this was before personally operated motor vehicles became common! Yet the Temperance Movement never went to war with the police and the state and the general public the way the anti-cannabis "Boyz" do.
But your guidelines for what's canon and what's a joke would seem to indicate the anti-weed crusade is genuine.
Of course a lot of my befuddlement is because anything I can imagine motivating this kind of hatred of marijuana ought to be directing even more fire at booze, but perhaps what we have here is a society that has already, generations ago perhaps, banned the booze successfully, eliminating alcoholic beverages completely, and now the Boyz are taking the same logic another step?
No, wait a minute, I think other holiday interlude stories of yours describe in some detail alcoholic drinks that are quite common in your 20th century--blue champagne is one IIRC...
So no.
I'm mystified.
The Boyz are too serious to be anything but canon. Could it be only you misdirected us as to what their cause was?
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
So what gods do they mockingly worship at Christmas? And just how seriously do Plirites take gods anyway?
Japhy
Banned
It was a fantastically amusing update Jared. Great as always.
Wait have I ever commented on this here? If not, meh the Timeline is fantastic, blah, blah, blah all the first time poster comments and all that. I like the timeline.
I don't see why people are all getting so freaked out by The Boyz. Moralizing religious militas can tack on fanaticism to anything, just because there poster campaign is against the Demon Weed or anything doesn't mean they're not a bunch of moralizing nutjobs on literally anyone and anything else in addition. In a world where Weed is accepted though, well it would get a lot of attention, like when the Islamic Revolution in Iran went and stopped everyone from smoking, drinking, or playing Monopoly.
Wait have I ever commented on this here? If not, meh the Timeline is fantastic, blah, blah, blah all the first time poster comments and all that. I like the timeline.
I don't see why people are all getting so freaked out by The Boyz. Moralizing religious militas can tack on fanaticism to anything, just because there poster campaign is against the Demon Weed or anything doesn't mean they're not a bunch of moralizing nutjobs on literally anyone and anything else in addition. In a world where Weed is accepted though, well it would get a lot of attention, like when the Islamic Revolution in Iran went and stopped everyone from smoking, drinking, or playing Monopoly.
Oh, and "rotorala..." would '-ala' be alluding to wings somehow in Latin? It looks the more I think of it like a direct translation of "helicopter" from Greek to Latin. It's a more graceful word, though it doesn't lend itself to such a descriptive slang word as "chopper!"
I could see it being shortened to "rotal," or conceivably "tala." The latter has a little bit of the pugnacious punch of "chopper" I suppose; the former would be the more common word though.
I caught how you beg wiggle room on the dates because you aren't sure that the technology should seem so close to ours in general level by the dates given.
We've all had this discussion before, with your wanting an alternate course of technological development. Obviously that's proving tricky to plot out! I still don't see why it should be dramatically otherwise in general pattern than OTL. I don't see suppression or retardation of capitalism in England as necessarily changing the overall pattern; a more likely source of perturbations would be positive developments in the Mediterranean countries, notably Sicily, that would skew early industrial tech in directions more suited to these places.
But I don't think that would retard the development of the suite of technologies we got OTL in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; such industries as steel, mechanized textile works and so on might be relatively behind others we might not so readily imagine, but if the change is a pull from a more developed southern Europe I'd think either the northern lands would be pulled along with them despite a depressed population and perhaps less business-minded governments, or if those retarding factors are effective in the north, the south will develop their own versions of those industrial revolutions as auxiliaries to whatever is making the big florins that they are also doing.
I suppose I should stop and consider whether capitalism as we know it is as liable to develop at all, regardless of the form of industry that is most typical of it. Aururian crops basically enable a bigger population, offset by the smaller base after the Aururian plagues take their toll--both factors would seem to tend to favor the lowest classes staying on the land as self-sufficient peasants rather than being driven to the cities, though the cities can be bigger for a given rural population due to Aururian crops being less labor-intensive. The potential for uprooted proletarian masses to be exploited is there on the supply side, but where is the push to uproot them? Aururian crops can't be as easily industrialized so the enclosure movement has less punch behind it. Well, in the north where agriculture was most driven toward a capitalist model OTL, most Aururian crops won't do well, so it should be more likely they'd get proletarianized anyway, at a slower pace to be sure. But in the south, where we might expect more of the action to be, a bunch of self-sufficient peasants might not be so easy to dislodge and might put paid to any regime that tries to enserf them; it looks to me something like that happened in Sicily--the peasants showed their traditional overlords the door (or the gallows!) and put up a new, more populist regime instead.
So are you envisioning a lot of the technology that OTL went hand in hand with capitalism somehow being developed on a completely different social basis? Via lots of small entrepreneurs with roots in numerous overgrown (by OTL standards) peasant villages and country towns, few of them rivaling the medium-sized cities of OTL but there being lots of them, in good communications with each other? So instead of being based on big establishments hiring hundreds of workers at near-starvation wages, we have a sort of yeoman ingenuity with craftsman-proprietors trying to outsell each other?
At some point of course, despite starting from a lower population level, the European peasants would again raise their population densities to the point they are pushing the carrying capacity of the land, Aururian crops or no, even if the ingenious inventions of myriads of local craftsmen with family and social ties to the landed peasants they live among include lots of labor-saving and effort-multiplying gadgets and the rising level of culture leads to more scientific farming as a general practice. The great wave of European migration might come a bit late, and find fewer places where they can just push aside the natives and settle in their places.
Much as I might like the idea of a world where capitalism is bypassed in favor of popular and progressive villages, I fear that the pace of technological development did require the machinery of capitalism, both to create demands and to extort resources from the toiling masses to put at the disposal of capitalists who could then patronize and encourage invention. If capitalism were butterflied away, the world's tech level would be significantly lower than OTL despite head starts in many aspects of culture due to a more prosperous 18th century for southern Europe.
I suppose we could have somewhat less capitalism, and still have it foster technological development in parallel with other social movements for an overall result keeping rough pace with our world.
I await the steady development of the timeline; it could be years before these things get settled! We're still in the middle of the Seventeenth Century in the main story line!
I could see it being shortened to "rotal," or conceivably "tala." The latter has a little bit of the pugnacious punch of "chopper" I suppose; the former would be the more common word though.
I caught how you beg wiggle room on the dates because you aren't sure that the technology should seem so close to ours in general level by the dates given.
We've all had this discussion before, with your wanting an alternate course of technological development. Obviously that's proving tricky to plot out! I still don't see why it should be dramatically otherwise in general pattern than OTL. I don't see suppression or retardation of capitalism in England as necessarily changing the overall pattern; a more likely source of perturbations would be positive developments in the Mediterranean countries, notably Sicily, that would skew early industrial tech in directions more suited to these places.
But I don't think that would retard the development of the suite of technologies we got OTL in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; such industries as steel, mechanized textile works and so on might be relatively behind others we might not so readily imagine, but if the change is a pull from a more developed southern Europe I'd think either the northern lands would be pulled along with them despite a depressed population and perhaps less business-minded governments, or if those retarding factors are effective in the north, the south will develop their own versions of those industrial revolutions as auxiliaries to whatever is making the big florins that they are also doing.
I suppose I should stop and consider whether capitalism as we know it is as liable to develop at all, regardless of the form of industry that is most typical of it. Aururian crops basically enable a bigger population, offset by the smaller base after the Aururian plagues take their toll--both factors would seem to tend to favor the lowest classes staying on the land as self-sufficient peasants rather than being driven to the cities, though the cities can be bigger for a given rural population due to Aururian crops being less labor-intensive. The potential for uprooted proletarian masses to be exploited is there on the supply side, but where is the push to uproot them? Aururian crops can't be as easily industrialized so the enclosure movement has less punch behind it. Well, in the north where agriculture was most driven toward a capitalist model OTL, most Aururian crops won't do well, so it should be more likely they'd get proletarianized anyway, at a slower pace to be sure. But in the south, where we might expect more of the action to be, a bunch of self-sufficient peasants might not be so easy to dislodge and might put paid to any regime that tries to enserf them; it looks to me something like that happened in Sicily--the peasants showed their traditional overlords the door (or the gallows!) and put up a new, more populist regime instead.
So are you envisioning a lot of the technology that OTL went hand in hand with capitalism somehow being developed on a completely different social basis? Via lots of small entrepreneurs with roots in numerous overgrown (by OTL standards) peasant villages and country towns, few of them rivaling the medium-sized cities of OTL but there being lots of them, in good communications with each other? So instead of being based on big establishments hiring hundreds of workers at near-starvation wages, we have a sort of yeoman ingenuity with craftsman-proprietors trying to outsell each other?
At some point of course, despite starting from a lower population level, the European peasants would again raise their population densities to the point they are pushing the carrying capacity of the land, Aururian crops or no, even if the ingenious inventions of myriads of local craftsmen with family and social ties to the landed peasants they live among include lots of labor-saving and effort-multiplying gadgets and the rising level of culture leads to more scientific farming as a general practice. The great wave of European migration might come a bit late, and find fewer places where they can just push aside the natives and settle in their places.
Much as I might like the idea of a world where capitalism is bypassed in favor of popular and progressive villages, I fear that the pace of technological development did require the machinery of capitalism, both to create demands and to extort resources from the toiling masses to put at the disposal of capitalists who could then patronize and encourage invention. If capitalism were butterflied away, the world's tech level would be significantly lower than OTL despite head starts in many aspects of culture due to a more prosperous 18th century for southern Europe.
I suppose we could have somewhat less capitalism, and still have it foster technological development in parallel with other social movements for an overall result keeping rough pace with our world.
I await the steady development of the timeline; it could be years before these things get settled! We're still in the middle of the Seventeenth Century in the main story line!
Jared'll say his piece, but from my perspective....
Twenty percent of humanity died in the plagues. Said blights are depressing population growth dramatically.
Progress comes from people.
Twenty percent of humanity died in the plagues. Said blights are depressing population growth dramatically.
Progress comes from people.
Lycaon pictus
Donor
"Rotorala"… interesting.
I've sort of toyed with the idea of "ala" as an ATL catchall term for planes of any sort. Are you thinking along the same lines?
I've sort of toyed with the idea of "ala" as an ATL catchall term for planes of any sort. Are you thinking along the same lines?
"And so on" including, as I fear, the anti-cannabis terrorists?
I trust that it will become clearer eventually why a segment of a Western society becomes so fanatical about so harmless a thing?
That was the punchline of the whole 1 April special - something which was described in such an over the top way that it was clearly a joke.
The mockery of Christmas usually takes other forms, rather than pseudo-worship of gods. There's been some vague hints in the previous Christmas specials.
Congxie - and Plirites in general - interpret gods as powerful beings, but take the view that not even gods know everything. The gods may be helpful, or sometimes, may be unhelpful. They're pretty syncretic in which gods they accept, though their views on Christianity differ. Some Plirites view Christ as a good moral figure whose followers wrongly deified him, some of them think of Christ as a god, but not an omnipotent god.
It's more or less the Latin for "rotary wing". Basically, helicopters were named in Latin rather than in Greek.
This has been a standard disclaimer for a while. Not just for the speed of technological progress, but also the speed of social progress.
There's a lot of factors pushing both ways. Whether they more or less even out, I'm not sure, but quite possibly not.
For instance:
- ~20% drop in global population in the seventeenth century, and slower population growth thereafter, with all of the consequences for smaller markets, fewer geniuses, etc
- changes to agricultural patterns from the plagues and introduction of Aururian crops and technologies which messes up some of the patterns in OTL (e.g. the British Agricultural Revolution was potentially a precursor to the Industrial Revolution)
- reforestation as a result of the plagues (i.e. smaller population abandons marginal agricultural lands) meaning that there's more timber around, which slows the switch to things like coal etc
- social changes as a result of the plagues, *30 Years' War etc, which may well mean that the social conditions which were conducive to industrialisation aren't found in England (very likely) or even anywhere much in Europe (potentially quite possible)
- smaller supply of slaves meaning fewer sugar producers in the short-term (which according to some, provided the capital needed for the industrial revolution) and much more limited supply of cotton thereafter, which may mess up the whole industrial revolution in itself
Balancing this out, there are some things like greater population in some areas which benefit from Aururian crops, a few ideas from Aururia which help the development of science (medicine, geology, even peer review), and a couple of odd spin-offs of European contact which advance the development of science (e.g. they now know much sooner just how devastating the effects of virgin soil epidemics are, since they have written sources, which flows into how disease is viewed (not of divine origin), which flows into the scientific mindset, etc).
In terms of industrialisation in particular, there's not exactly a consensus on what factors were necessary in OTL, never mind what might be alternative paths. So it's quite hard to judge how this all works out.
I'm looking at a few things, but most notably, it doesn't look like all of the conditions of the industrial revolution of OTL may fall into place at once. In particular, what we call the industrial revolution was really two kinds of revolutions happening which only came together later.
There was the "big iron/steel/coalmaking developments" and the "fine mechanised mass production of smaller things", to use some very non-technical terms. The second relied on textiles more than anything else (from what I can find out so far) to drive the development of mechanisation and mass production.
With textiles out of consideration for a long time (ain't enough cotton, y'see, with fewer slaves), I don't know what fills the void. Possibly the development of cast iron fills the crucial leap to "mechanised mass production + big enough market to make it worthwhile" - cast iron is needed for all sorts of agricultural tools, plus cast iron cookware as a huge potential market if people have the money. There's also brewing, and maybe a few other things. But I'm still not yet sure.
I await the steady development of the timeline; it could be years before these things get settled! We're still in the middle of the Seventeenth Century in the main story line!
At some point the timeline will need to move from "intricate examination of every year/decade" to "broad sweep of history with a few vignettes". I'm not sure when that will be. Quite possibly after the Proxy Wars and more European plagues hit Aururia. (Measles will be bad. Smallpox may be worse.)
Oh, it does, it does. Although since the Congxie already mistrust white anglophones anyway, there's already plenty of suspicion to go around.
That word was just something I made up when I needed an alternative term for helicopter. I haven't gotten as far as thinking of broader terms yet.
What I'd really love is to find a plausible way to have "pteranodon" become the ATL name for fixed-wing aircraft. Ptera (wing) is easily justifiable, but "toothless" is harder to come up with a plausible reason for.
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
So do they make a point of studying World mythology to find gods to worship? Would one find devotees of Cernunnos or Quetzalcoatl among them?
Well, maybe it could apply specifically to jet-propelled aircraft, as opposed to propeller-driven (no spinning teeth).
FDW
Banned
This sounds a whole lot like what I know about Pre-Modern Asian economies of OTL. (Particularly Japan, but also China)
Personally, I like the contraction "rala". I just like the sound of it.
So, Jared, if rotorala is the canon term for helicopter, do you know what the term is for aeroplane?
mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
I know the Easter Bunny comes from the Osterhase
Is there a real world antecedent for the Easter Duck you mentioned?
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...YQziU_XVKGtT8WcHQ&sig2=L4b5cZFZlRNMfv32qb1Iyw
Is there a real world antecedent for the Easter Duck you mentioned?
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...YQziU_XVKGtT8WcHQ&sig2=L4b5cZFZlRNMfv32qb1Iyw
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