Liam Connell

One of the buggers about academic social media is the occasional pain of realising that you’re not seventeen and you can’t just sit in first year courses happily geeking out any more. This sounds amazing.

It’s also quite funny that if you wanted an actual British liberal of that time to use as a bogey, Lloyd-George is right there. A sleazy, corrupt, imperialist, autocratic schemer who cosies up to fascism in his late career and was actually PM… but knowing that would mean actually reading history.

Fun fact - the first time a New Zealand prime minister met a US President, New Zealand threatened the US with war unless America withdrew from Hawaii.

Telling the story later, the PM complained that when he told the British government this ‘they laughed’

Paul Kennedy did a great book on this which is fittingly called ‘The Samoan Tangle’ with a fun subplot of the British desperately trying to get out of Samoa and being worried that they’ll be drawn into chaos by tiny NZ!

Similarly, the first playthrough of DA2 is a Greek tragedy where your choices inevitably lead to the destruction of the family and city you've tried to save. Then you play it again, and see that no, it's all forcing you to the same endgame. That's the only way to design the game, but it's still dull

To an extent, but I think that a lot of great social art requires the courage to have elements that play against the artist's instincts; cf. the industrial accident which crushes a manual worker, just after the corporate presentation on automation, as if to ask is killing jobs or people the same?

1903 text ‘Colorphobia’ arguing against the White Australia policy. The excerpt contemptuously dismisses the cliche that Australia can be swamped by migrants.

You might also enjoy Edward Foxall, a white establishment liberal and Japanophile who bodies Pauline Hanson a century before her rise.

Charles Sew Hoy - Wikipedia

It’s a much more interesting time and place than people think, says man who did PhD on that time and place. Also check out Choie Sew Hoy of NZ, who set up a lasting merchant family. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...

People get really, performatively weird about the difficulty of Ulysses. It's not that inaccessible, particularly if you listen to it; it demands attention and mental effort, but it's not some literary shibboleth or an emperor with no clothes.

Why do you feel the need to believe you were born in Babylon? What do you get out of it, emotionally?

I think there’s also a perverse incentive in the attention economy for politicians to ignore the dull, workaday policy stuff that’s most think tank output in favour of BOLD NEW IDEAS. That makes people recalibrate what they’re pitching, which hollows out the broader work…

I do think it's striking how they want an absolutist monarchy, but they also don't want to engage in the kind of state building that people like Richelieu and Olivares had to do to centralise power.

this is lovely

I was going to ask you about this actually: I was reading that Mary Renault left 1950s Britain for the Cape because it was an easier cultural climate to be a queer writer, which rather surprised me. Is there any context for that?

American sports, or Yugoslavia in 1942, who can say.

The two most interesting recent TW games are Three Kingdoms and Attila, both of which break with the tendency to pile on advantages for the player. A WRE campaign in Attila is bloody hard! You simply can't get enough men to everywhere you need them. Now, everything gives you more features.

This is true, but their actual campaign in Serbia was was brutal and marked by atrocities.

Italians are a neat study of imagined hierarchies. In 1891, the largest mass lynching in US history. In 20thC Oz, their migration was a challenge to White Australia. By 2025, Albo doesn't code as ethnic. Italians are cultural sophisticates and desirable.

Ofc, legally they're always white....

Which so much less interesting than the idea that the Skaven are corrupters even of Chaos - as Kieron Gillen mused here. Skaven in Brettonia mimic chivalry, but are cowards. Merchant clans in Marienburg, etc. And you could absolutely have a gonzo take on an Abbey of the Redwall somewhere...

I’d fracture the underempire completely, and let you play with new regional cultures. Hell, in Cathay beastmen seem to be partly integrated, so the idea of one Skaven clan (in wigs and frock coats) occasionally showing up to demand recognition as an actual trade partner could be fun.

The Old World was always at its best when the horror was leavened with humour and also, dare I say it, humanism. The fact that the Moot exists and functions and thrives makes the setting more interesting!

Early Modern Skaven could be enormously fun; dark parodies of the enlightenment. I’m picturing a print empire in the Underempire, a republic of letters where the philosophes feed each other to monsters.

There's a lot of fun to be had with a WHFB take on a Garibaldi character and the War of Tilean Reunification.

I'd also advise: don't sleep on the Dawi-Zharr. Disregard the demographic decline, they're natural foils for this sort of Early Modern setting, much more than traditional chaos.

Sold.

I've really no objection to GW deciding to move on from WHFB, but destroying the entire setting seems mean spirited. The Old World is great for precisely the reason that it has room to grow and change and (gasp!) even improve! I mean, very rarely, but still!

... if you happen to run this online, please consider me as a tester.

It was very popular in Australia and New Zealand in its day. Of course, that was when many people were more familiar with British history than our own - the idea of doing a remake wouldn't have really sparked the way it might today.

Yeah. Australia's The Games is both drier and distinctly weirder than the entirely-in-no-way-a-British-remake '2012', and those are far closer comic sensibilities than US/UK.

In many ways, the triumph of Flight of the Conchords is that it's an American show for Americans and a Kiwi show for Kiwis.

The 1939 cover of Time showing Hitler as man of the year. He sits at an organ, surrounded by the corpses of his victims. The caption reads ‘from the unholy organist, a hymn of hate.’

This isn’t true. He was named Man of the Year as the most influential figure, but the cover literally portrays him playing a ‘hymn of hate’ in a cathedral decked with the bodies of his victims. It’s actually a case of traditional media doing its job and portraying dictators as the threat they are.

It's how it has to be! But the tragedy only works once. Because while inevitability works in Euripidean theatre, it becomes frustrating if again and again the protagonist CAN make a different choice.

The game should have offered far fewer choices. But fans wouldn't like that!