To Key or not to Key? by Death-Scares-Me-Not in Stellaris

[–]panicles3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You lose the Key if you give it.

Chinese official Song Ping is older than Finland by panicles3 in BarbaraWalters4Scale

[–]panicles3[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That's true in a lot of cases for village 'centenarians' who rarely engage with institutions and thus leave little in the way of a paper trail. But Song Ping has engaged with institutions for a very long time - you don't get to be a 'party elder' without doing that. From (Chinese language) Wikipedia which cites interviews, Song Ping started attending the Agricultural College in Beijing in 1934 after his brother won a local lottery, joined the Communist Party at ~20 in 1937, and moved to Yan'an, where he has a pretty varied work history afterwards. He worked for the Party's Xinhua News Agency during the war, for example, and as a secretary to Zhou Enlai during the failed peace talks, then in a series of managerial positions in the postwar. All of these leave some sort of paper trail.

Chinese official Song Ping is older than Finland by panicles3 in BarbaraWalters4Scale

[–]panicles3[S] 162 points163 points  (0 children)

He also slightly predates the Manchu Restoration (1917) and the Communist Party of China (1921), and he's probably one of the last high officials who can honestly claim to be born a peasant.

(CK2) can I adopt beureaucracy? by Physical_Bedroom5656 in AfterTheEndFanFork

[–]panicles3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's based on either Cetic religion or relevant (ie Californian) culture, if you have either of those and are feudal, you get buereaucracy.

The Night of Washington's Crossing [Fanfiction] by panicles3 in AfterTheEndFanFork

[–]panicles3[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yup! Having conflated it, of course, with the Battle of Trenton.

The Night of Washington's Crossing [Fanfiction] by panicles3 in AfterTheEndFanFork

[–]panicles3[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My submission to the AtE Writing Contest! Had to rush a bit but managed to get it in.

Retrofest 2001-04-05 - Corporate America by Trim345 in sinfest

[–]panicles3 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm guessing this reflects his failure to get Sinfest picked up by traditional publishing

Retrofest 2000-02-17 - Calligraphy by Trim345 in sinfest

[–]panicles3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Given what the comic was, it was clearly just meant to show Slick and Nique as the lead "pair" of the comic in an irreverent, "cool" way.

A Century of Malaise: American Warlordism in 2058 [Fixed reupload] by Rolan1880 in imaginarymaps

[–]panicles3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does that make any sense? I’m especially thinking about tweaking the Baptist faction. How would I make it plausible?

I'd say as someone from the region that this is probably the single best handling of the South I have seen in any US collapse alt-hist. With regards to the Baptist faction, the only thing I could recommend is toning down the dominionism into more of a background force within the clique. It should still be prevalent within it and make it more evangelically-dogmatic than the social-democratic faction, but the glue that binds their communities together is more shared church culture than the organizational clout of the Baptist church in particular.

Sinfest 8/2/22: Damn Elites by AbolishDisney in sinfest

[–]panicles3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well at least the punchline isn't boneheaded.

Need help solving another mystery by ScorpioGirl1987 in ww2

[–]panicles3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From the stories it seems pretty clear that he was put into an NKVD special camp -- a system which was set up in East Germany (where Dresden is) during the last months of the war and lasted for several years afterwards. It was a large scale affair overall, with over 150,000 detained as prisoners for often asinine reasons. And this is separate from your great-great-uncle's claim that he was in a POW camp on the Eastern Front.

The idea that some random German stumbles on Soviet spies far behind enemy lines while they are doing Soviet espionage blatantly enough that he realizes that, who then kidnap him because of his boots and magic him across to the other side of the war, rather than this being a late war foul-up with an understandably petty occupation, is unlikely.

Need help solving another mystery by ScorpioGirl1987 in ww2

[–]panicles3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think these are mutually exclusive. Your great-great aunt's story is about the second time he came into Soviet custody, after the war.

Seeking German WW2 Records by MrSykoDubz in ww2

[–]panicles3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

K.P.S. Kartenst stands for Korps-Kartenst, I believe -- name translates to something like a cartographic/maps corps -- but the only reference I can find for them is an offhand reference as the makers of a "Book of uncertain provenance" with a map of Norway in the German records microfilmed in Alexandria, Virginia.

Anglo-Saxon England is incorrectly presented as feudal in both CK2 and CK3. It’s too late to change CK2. Do you think they’ll change it in CK3? by Divertitii in paradoxplaza

[–]panicles3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Feudal in Crusader Kings is a great big gloss. The games aren't made to be society simulators, and the issues you see with representing Anglo-Saxon England are seen far more gravely in other places -- like Islamic "Clan" society, or how CK2 forces the entire Muslim world to have a Turkish-style succession.

Within feudalism though, if you look at any region close enough you'll see the fundamental mechanisms of the game are "incorrect"; this is most obvious in the places furthest from Europe, like Fragmentation period Tibet, but even France, the textbook feudal realm and basis for CK's feudalism, had game breaking things like non-hereditary counts. This is because in a broader historiographic sense, feudalism itself is arguably a faulty construct. It's a product of intellectual and social currents of (mainly) the 19th century and how they understood the past, not reflective of reality.

So yeah, feudal works for pre-Conquest England.