That drew out an actual “aww” out of the depths of me, involuntarily.

A picture really is worth a thousand words. Nailed my exact impression haha

I feel like I just leveled up my descriptive abilities for RPG DMing purposes.

When you nut, but Bernoulli keep sucking…

Not in Education, Employment, or Training. NEET.

You’re doing good work.

Nice to see Newton and I have one thing in common, and, let me tell ya, I don’t know shit about astronomy.

Nothing to be done for it.

Journalism is not history, and vice versa. They are different disciplines, with different goals and methodologies. Don’t confuse the work journalists do with the work of historians, and vice versa. John Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution is an invaluable source for historians, of course, but it is only one such source, and any history which overly relies upon it risks giving a biased account. Not to say that that doesn’t happen, but it’s explicitly antithetical to the notional goal of practicing history. No such compunction affects journalism, where the creation of a biased account is not only tolerated, sometimes it’s encouraged, or the entire purpose of a work (as it was when Reed was giving his account of Ten Days That Shook the World).

Reed even calls out his own bias in the preface of his book. He was a devoted Socialist, and his sympathies were with the reds. That affected his account. Furthermore, while he could comment on the Revolution from his vantage point (embedded with Bolsheviks as he was), he’s not necessarily the most reliable (or informed) narrator of what was happening on the Tsarist side of the conflict, simply by virtue of not having access to that perspective in the moment. That doesn’t change the value of his journalism, but it does impinge it’s value as a comprehensive history.

Well, that seems blatantly inaccurate. There’s an absolute tidal wave of popular history content available for layperson consumption. Forget the books that are published which are aimed at general audiences (of which there are dozens, if not hundreds, every single year), you’ve also got YouTube videos, hobby blog posts, more podcasts than stars in the sky, and so on. These are of varying quality, but so is the academic stuff. Plenty of really great, insightful research is published. And plenty of useless dreck emblematic of academia’s tendency towards chasing one’s own tail is published too. With that being said though, if you’re reading a journal article, i.e. published by academics for academics, you shouldn’t be surprised if the language leans on jargon, even if it isn’t “good writing” necessarily.

Legit had half the onion wedged between my jaws before I remembered to check the community.

It all depends on how you’re defining “influence”. As an example, let’s look at the first Resident Evil game and it’s predecessor, Sweet Home. More people have played or heard of Resident Evil than a movie tie-in game that was never officially released outside Japan. However, a huge amount of RE’s DNA (indeed, things that fans will say are necessary to capturing the feel of early RE games) stem from Sweet Home. Hell, RE was initially conceived of as a remake of Sweet Home, until they realized they didn’t have the rights. Below is an incomplete list of features from Sweet Home that were incorporated into the first RE.

• inventory management puzzles
• exploring an intricate, cohesive location inhabited by monsters.
• narrative communicated through found notes and cutscenes
• deliberately clunky combat to emphasize player vulnerability
• protagonist characters each have a thing they can do that others can’t (presaging Jill’s lockpick and Chris’s lighter)
• door loading transitions

So, which is the more influential game? The one that popularized all of these concepts, or the one that originated the concepts? I think a case can be made for both, but I lean towards the originator.

Thank you for posting explanations in the comments for those of us who are not as up to date on their Roman emperors as good sense would dictate.

Funnily enough, from what I’m reading in a cursory search, the more likely culprit for this phenomenon would be the Volkssturm: the last ditch national militia that the Nazis set up in late 1944. By this point, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to outfit troops (and to find troops to outfit, for that matter). I didn’t find anything that confirmed on the historical record that any such event occurred, but it seems more likely than the defenders of Stalingrad being without armaments.

Gotta define your parameters better. Anything can kill a horse with one blow, provided adequate swing speed, or provided a sickly enough horse.

“Keep your stick on the ice fellas, and remember, I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together!”

If it makes you feel any better, you can rest assured that Capitol Hill doesn’t know how the Internet works either.

What are the general contents of a typical journal entry for you? I hear the concept bandied about frequently, but I’ve never understood the relation between journaling and better mental health.

The toxicity I bring to the table is that it feels, to me, indulgent at best, egotistical at worst. Which is its own kettle of fish I need to do something about, but, hey, one issue at a time.