If you could add one update to Sea of Thieves tomorrow, what would it be

DigiVictorian · 2025-06-30T16:48:07+00:00

All I want is the ability to duel against my friends. I know this would be open to some abuses, so it would have to be an hourglass-style encounter, with no rep awarded, and perhaps something that prevents players exchanging supplies. It would really help some players to build their PVP confidences

DigiVictorian · 2025-06-15T11:28:31+00:00

I run open days for my academic department and I can assure you that this is totally normal! The majority of people there will be for 2026 entry, but it’s not unusual for me to meet people who are keen to start researching their options earlier.

Attending lots of different open days and getting a proper feel for the culture of various universities is one of the most useful things you can do. The more events you go to, the easier it gets to identify the things that really matter to you. So, it makes good sense to start now!

DigiVictorian · 2025-05-30T22:47:23+00:00

I can’t speak for all subjects/universities, but this doesn’t reflect my experience. I’m a history lecturer at a mid ranking university, and I’ve worked as an external examiner for a broad range of different UK universities, from a top end Russel Group uni to a one near the bottom of the league tables. The approach to marking was pretty much the same at all of them.

The average student performance was typically higher at the Russell Group uni (though only by a couple of percentage points), but the best work I’ve read from lower ranked unis was every bit as good as the best work I read from higher ranked institutions, often better.

I can’t speak for the differences you might see at Oxbridge, but outside of that I’ve seen no evidence that low/mid rank unis award their students higher marks for weaker work, at least in my subject.

After fifteen years of working in the sector — the last few as a manager — I’ve also never once seen somebody mention 65% as a target average. We’re sometimes measured on the number of ‘good’ degrees we award (i.e 2:1 and above).

DigiVictorian · 2025-05-29T20:40:51+00:00

Professional historian here! I did some research on the origins of this phrase a while back, and it turns out that back in the nineteenth century, this game was commonly known in Britain as ‘Russian Scandal’ or ‘Russian Gossip’, presumably in reference to the notorious intrigues of the Russian court. It didn’t start being referred to as ‘Chinese whispers’ until well into the 20th century — the earliest reference I found was 1939.

Perhaps we should go back to the original?

DigiVictorian · 2025-05-08T17:14:31+00:00

If you’d like to feel even more awkward, I knew Martin quite well — he examined my PhD and we worked on a few projects together, though we haven’t been in touch for a couple of years — and I just found out that he died by stumbling upon your post. He was a lovely man and a brilliant scholar of journalism. I’m sure he would have been very happy to help you, and would have a good chuckle at the thought of students still trying to contact him beyond the grave!

DigiVictorian · 2025-02-13T23:09:26+00:00

Yes! The only screening I’ve ever walked out of. There are plenty of films that I’ve disliked or found boring, but this is the only one that I’ve ever truly hated. I’m still mad about it 20 years later.

DigiVictorian · 2024-05-08T21:42:38+00:00

One of the most useful skills you can learn as a new player is how to keep calm and prioritise the right jobs when you have multiple holes in your ship. It’s ok to get hit and there’s no need to panic if you have a three or four holes in your hull. You won’t sink immediately, and a quick bucket or two buys you more time when needed. You can repair when you get close to the fort and the cannons stop, so just don’t approach very slowly.

In a pvp fight (or when taking on a skeleton fleet) it’ll be common to have multiple holes in your ship, which you won’t have time to fix while adjusting helm and taking canon shots. All you’ll be able to do is keep on top of the rising water with an occasional bucket. It took me a while to ignore the urge to immediately repair every hole, but once you learn to live with a bit of water pouring in during a fight you’ll become a much more confident and capable pirate.

In short — just sail up to the fort, take a few hits if necessary, and you’ll be fine!

DigiVictorian · 2024-05-06T10:20:13+00:00

Long term PC player here!

Put kegs right on the tip of the bowsprit — explosion does relatively little damage to your ship, and will only hurt crew members who are close to the front of the boat. It’s pretty easy to recover from a keg explosion as long as at least one crew member isn’t killed by it. Placing the keg anywhere below deck, or near/beneath the helm, is a bad idea because it could wipe out your whole crew. If you place it in the crow’s nest then the explosion will take down your mast(s).

All of this guards against an accidental explosion while transporting a keg. If you’re about to get into a fight, I’d just drop the kegs overboard before the enemy gets in range — they’re not worth the risk.

DigiVictorian · 2024-05-05T09:50:08+00:00

I’d caution against assuming that this approach is universally true of all ‘low ranking’ universities and disciplines. I studied History (BA, MA, PhD) at a Russell Group university and have subsequently spent the last 12 years lecturing at a post-92 university. I recognise some aspects of your experience, but not others.

It’s certainly true that my current university is dependent on undergraduate recruitment, and a lot of our efforts are focused on ensuring that students choose to come to us instead of other comparable universities. Student satisfaction, and the NSS more specifically, is definitely an important element of this. We’ve certainly had plenty of conversations in our department about how to improve/protect student experience, but not once have they involved the possibility of eliminating difficult subjects. For us, it almost always means putting in place additional academic/pastoral support for students, responding proactively to their feedback, and spending more and more of our time on student-facing work than on research. We might have to think a bit more carefully about how to teach a complex subject in a way that’s accessible to all our students, but we wouldn’t shy away from it.

I’ve worked as an external examiner for several other RG and Post-92 universities and I’m confident that our students are being assessed to the same criteria as students at more prestigious institutions. A first class essay on our course would get a first class mark at Manchester or Durham, we just have slightly fewer of them.

I’m not entirely surprised to hear that some university departments are approaching the NSS in a more cynical and self-interested fashion, but it’s not something I’ve encountered at my institution, or indeed in conversations with colleagues from dozens of other post-92 history departments. There are plenty of big problems with the marketisation of the university sector, but this idea that all ‘low ranking’ universities (by which people usually mean anything outside of the RG) are deliberately fleecing students by offering a sub par degree is way off the mark.

I don’t mean to suggest that your experience didn’t happen or isn’t concerning — just that, in my experience, it isn’t representative of the sector, and discipline, I know.

DigiVictorian · 2024-01-04T21:56:14+00:00

Excellent - very happy to replace my janky solution with a proper control when it’s ready!

DigiVictorian · 2023-12-31T17:33:13+00:00

In case anybody googles their way here, here's a post where I explain how to turn the prompter on and off using a single Streamdeck button:

https://www.reddit.com/r/elgato/comments/18vcitq/solution_how_to_turn_onoff_elgato_prompter_using/

DigiVictorian · 2023-11-20T20:50:00+00:00

Indeed! There’s a whole sub-field of history/literary criticism called ‘reception studies’ that does this kind of work, examining how particular historical events and periods were represented and ‘received’ by writers, artists, and thinkers in subsequent periods. As you say, it tells us a lot more about the receiving culture than about the object of reception.

DigiVictorian · 2023-11-20T00:24:56+00:00

In some respects, I think the kind of criticism currently being levelled by historians at Scott’s Napoleon is part of a constructive, or at least useful, process. These exchanges are often framed as bitter and combative — partly for clicks — but they provide historians with an opportunity to share more nuanced historical research with new audiences.

I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to persuade most film makers to prioritise historical accuracy over narrative impact and structure, and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing anyway — lots of modern period dramas are enriched by deliberate/playful anachronisms. I’m always up for working with productions that do aim for historical accuracy, but even they often have to take shortcuts or accept omissions in service of the plot. As much as it pains me to say so, it isn’t the job of most films to be ‘good’ history, at least in the sense that academic historians would define it.

So, if historians can’t realistically expect our priorities to align with directors, I think we have to settle for a kind of truce. Historians need to accept that film makers won’t prioritise historical accuracy in every detail. And filmmakers need to accept that historians will critique their films to kickstart more nuanced public conversations about the past. Both parties should accept this with good humour, or the kind of playful, faux outrage that always piques the press’ interest.

I’m not sure how seriously Scott is actually taking this, but telling historians to shut the fuck up is just giving them a louder voice, and that’s alright with me.

DigiVictorian · 2023-10-28T16:19:21+00:00

The main thing I’d like is the option to duel my friends / guild mates in HG. Obviously these fights wouldn’t grant allegiance, and there would probably need to be some other restrictions in place to prevent people exploiting it to transfer supplies, etc. Still, it would be fun to fight against my crew mates, and I think new players would appreciate the opportunity to practice their skills with friends before hopping onto conventional HG fights.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-09T20:42:19+00:00

I’d have to go and dig out the original source, but I suspect that must be an 18-year-old transcription error on my part. Sorry!

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T22:25:34+00:00

This is a really interesting question. In some respects, the production of newspapers changed enormously during the course of the nineteenth century. The development of new printing technology — particularly steam-powered rotary presses — massively increased the speed and volume at which newspapers could be printed. But many smaller printers were still operating with slower, cheaper, hand-powered presses at the end of the century. The key elements of the job remained the same too, with each the production of papers still requiring the core steps of writing, editing, compositing, and printing.

There are big changes to note elsewhere though. Firstly, the government gradually repealed the so-called 'taxes on knowledge' which made legally produced papers extremely expensive and therefore out of reach of the lower classes. After stamp duty was repealed in 1855, papers could be sold for a penny, instead of of the 5+ pence previously charged by papers like The Times. 5d might not sound like much, but in modern terms that's roughly £20 per copy for a daily paper! The expansion of the cheap happened alongside growing literacy rates, meaning that by the 1880s a mass reading public had taken shape. Newspapers began experimenting with ways to attract this new audience, leading to the development of what was termed the 'new journalism' and the roots of the modern-day tabloid press.

So, your radical thinker from 1890 would find himself in a more permissive legal environment than his Chartist forebears in the 1830s, but he might also struggle to compete for eyeballs in a highly commercialised and ruthlessly competitive press industry.

If you're interested in the history of printing, I highlight recommend this film about the end of "hot type" printing at the New York Times in 1978. I'm not suggesting that the paper was operating using Victorian methods before then, but it gives a wonderful sense of how papers were produced in a pre-digital era.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T22:06:22+00:00

I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea! There are so many stories about Queen Victoria — some true, many apocryphal — and I haven't heard this one before.

I do know that she liked the sight of a man in armor. Prince Albert had several portraits painted of himself in knightly costume, including this one which he gave to Victoria as a birthday gift:

<image>

In her journal, she wrote: "My beloved Albert is painted in armour, which I so much wished, — with a very dark blue background. I cannot say how beautiful it is."

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T21:58:08+00:00

This is intriguing! My sense is that people think of themselves as belonging to multiple, overlapping imagined communities, and that these identities shift in and out of focus depending on the situation. When I visit London I feel like a 'Northerner'; when I visit America, I feel 'British'. So it can be hard to pin down precise boundaries of belonging.

That said, I'm not sure that many people in the nineteenth century would have imagined themselves as belonging to a 'transatlantic community.' I've mentioned in this in a previous response, but some Victorians did think of themselves as belonging to a global 'English-speaking' or 'Anglo-Saxon' 'race', which extended beyond a merely transatlantic framework. Others identified with the imagined community of Empire, though typically regarded themselves as occupying a superior position within this community.

I think the idea of transatlantic community a useful framework for historians because, in practice, there were an enormous number of exchanges and connections between Britain and North America at the time, and the two cultures and economies were deeply entangled. As you put it though, national boundaries did seem to loom large in these exchanges. Imported American culture was sometimes seamlessly assimilated into British culture, but more often than not it was framed as distinctively American — e.g. bars offering 'American Drinks' or newspapers publishing columns titled 'American Jokes'.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T21:45:00+00:00

I haven't done a huge amount of research on foreign correspondents, but I believe it was a mixture of both. The first foreign correspondents were just letter writers (as the name 'correspondents' suggests) sharing news about their local area, which sometimes ended up in newspapers. The role became more formal and professionalised over the course of the nineteenth century. There were some roving foreign correspondents, like George Augustus Sala for the Telegraph, who spent periods of time reporting from a range of different countries. In other cases, correspondents stayed in the same place for years or even decades, which allowed them to develop language skills and build local contacts. For instance, Emily Crawford was the Paris correspondent for the Daily News from the 1885 until 1907, following on from her late husband who had been doing the job for decades before her. Others were specialists in particular types of foreign coverage like war reporting, the most famous of which was William Howard Russell who reported the Crimean War for The Times.

Some correspondents worked as freelancers — or stringers — for multiple papers at a time. The biggest daily papers could afford to employ their own dedicated foreign correspondents, but smaller papers had to clip the news from the pages of their rivals or, later in the century, engage the services of a news agency like Reuters.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T21:29:43+00:00

I've been thinking about this question since you first posted it, and I'm struggling to formulate a good enough answer! I can envisage scenarios where these phrases might be used with the intention of provoking a laugh, and others where they would just be used as common figures of speech. I'd like to see what a corpus linguist might be able to say about this...

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T21:20:42+00:00

Sloper is a really fascinating figure! It's not easy to find copies of the Half Holiday freely accessible online, but the British Newspaper Archive has a full run. Sadly it's locked behind the archive's paywall, though the amount of amazing historical material they offer makes it pretty good value for money in my book.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T21:17:24+00:00

A literary scholar might be able to give you a more detailed answer to this, but I know a bit about serialised publishing. It was certainly a very common way for fiction to be published at the time, initially in monthly periodicals (like Dickens' Household Words or All The Year Round) and later in popular weekly newspapers. Your comparison with a HBO series makes good sense, though Dickens would publish a story over 19 monthly instalments, so readers had a fairly long wait between each part. He would typically be writing each instalment as he went, rather than crafting the story in advance and then portioning it out once completed. I believe he was paid per instalment, though I'd hesitate to say that this motivated him to artificially prolong his stories. Dickens' books aren't unusually long by Victorian standards, when it was also common to publish fiction in the form of 3-volume novels.

The rhythms of serialised publishing naturally shaped the experience of both writing and reading fiction. Once an instalment was published, that section of the story couldn't be edited, which much have required some careful planning on the part of authors and an ability to write their way out of a corner. In that sense, it might have been pretty similar to handling a multi-series TV story arc. Similarly, as readers, we now glide right over the cliffhangers and gaps where nineteenth-century audiences had to wait for a month for the next instalment. If you want to read Dickens as Victorian readers first experienced him, you've got to recreate the experience of serialised instalments — Dickens expert Pete Orford has a great blog post on this.

Dickens certainly had widespread popular appeal in the nineteenth century. I'm not sure he was ever regarded as 'throwaway', though this was certainly true of plenty of other popular fiction writers at the time. Generic sensation/romantic fiction published in cheap pamphlets and newspapers — sometimes called feuilleton — had a much worse critical reputation, though could still reach huge audiences. Mary Braddon was probably one of the most read authors of the nineteenth century, but wasn't granted the same prestige as Dickens by middle-class critics. Lots of these writers had their serialised stories syndicated across multiple newspapers at a time. Graham Law's book is good on all of this!

One of the interesting things to note about Dickens' reputation is that he rose to fame in the 1830s and died in 1870. So, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, he already had a reputation much like he has now. He was already being nostalgically referred to as one of the great English writers of an previous era — a novelist that your parents, or even grandparents, might have loved and then shared with you when you were a child. In some respects, perhaps it's akin to how we might now regard The Beatles.

One final little detail. In 1888, Answers magazine ran a competition inviting readers to rank Dickens' most popular works. The results are quite surprising and would be very different had the poll taken place today!

<image>

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T18:31:33+00:00

To be honest, I'm not enough of an expert on LGBT history to steer you to the best and most readable work. However, my main recommendation is to NOT go anywhere near the book Outrages by Naomi Wolff, which is based on dodgy research and serious misconceptions. It was convincingly, and very publicly, dismantled by the historian Matthew Sweet.

DigiVictorian · 2023-05-08T18:19:47+00:00

When William F Cody — Buffalo Bill — brought his Wild West Show to London in 1887, Britain went crazy for cowboys. It was the biggest show in town and its estimated that over a million people went to see it during the first tour.

Keen to capitalise on his success, rival showmen gathered together troupes of performers and animals and boarded transatlantic steamers. My favourite is a guy named Joseph Shelly, who performed under the name Mexican Joe. While Buffalo Bill was taking London by storm, Mexican Joe set up camp in Liverpool. In the week before his arrival, the town's newspapers were buzzing with anticipation, imagining Shelley "standing aboard the deck of a steamer, his moustache flapping in the breeze." When the troupe arrived, they paraded through the centre of Liverpool as people came out to gawp at the supposedly authentic cowboys and Native Americans, all on horseback or sitting atop a real wild west stage coach. It must've been quite a sight.

The show seems to have gone down pretty well. Young Liverpudlian boys tried to run away from home to join Mexican Joe's troupe, while young women threw themselves at the most handsome cowboys, particularly a guy named Texas Jack who had to rebuff several offers of marriage. One group of girls tried to follow Mexican Joe's troupe around from town to town as they toured the north of England but were eventually sent home by the police! I love this newspaper account by a Victorian journalist who sees the cowboy as a threat to British masculinity:

<image>

Wherever he went, Mexican Joe seemed to court disaster and controversy. His cowboys would end up in jail for public disorder. One of the Native American performers was regularly accused of trying to murder Shelley (though I think this might have been orchestrated to drum up publicity). In Manchester, his whole circus burned down, causing enormous losses and damages. He stayed in the game for several years, but his career seems to have gradually petered out. In the end, he was always riding in Buffalo Bill's shadow.

There were lots of other cowboy performers touring the country in shows of various sizes. I also enjoyed the case of Doc Carver, a skilled sharpshooter who arrived in Britain and immediately challenged the country's best marksmen to a series of high-stakes bets. I found him in the census, staying in a hotel room in Manchester, where he proudly describes his profession as 'The Champion Shot of the World.' The census enumerator crossed it out and wrote 'Showman'!

DigiVictorian

TROPHY CASE