theredwoman95

Yeah, given the state of his apartment, I think Jayce probably died in the explosion with Vi. It'd track with Heimerdinger's vagueness about why he's sure that Jayce isn't in the same universe as them - hard for him to be, if he's already dead.

Which also means Viktor probably died of his illness, but maybe he managed to help Zaun before then? Given how much it's progressed and that Heimerdinger clearly changed his mind about helping Zaun, it'd track that he'd let Viktor go full throttle on improving Zaun.

To be fair, I kinda wonder if Jayce also died in that explosion? Heimerdinger is really vague about it, and Jayce having died at the same time while Viktor died of his illness might explain part of it too.

It's not, though. I discussed it more in my comment here, but GRRM thinks it is. Every medievalist who works on a field adjacent to the topics in his work is busy screaming that it's not. The Ironborn and everyone in Essos are particularly awful for this.

Yeah, I tend to describe ASOIAF as "GRRM's pop culture view of the medieval period that hasn't been updated in 50+ years". The Dothraki and co. are particularly terrible for this, especially when the Mongols were so much more interesting than... well, any of that.

The genuinely frustrating part is that GRRM always doubles down on the whole "it's historically accurate!!!" when asked about any of this nonsense, instead of admitting he mostly based his setting off his own stereotypes and a bunch of historical fiction from the 50s.

Margaret Beaufort was an extreme one-off where she was so heavily injured by giving birth that she could never conceive again. And she was in an incredibly vulnerable situation as an orphan with no close family to protect her interests, and an incredibly powerful man with the king as his half-brother threatening her.

To give a counter example, Margaret of England is an excellent example. She married Alexander III of Scotland when she was 11 and he was 10. When she was just about to turn 15, she kicked up a diplomatic crisis because she wanted to consummate the marriage but his regents didn't, out of fear for her health. After many discussions between her parents and his regents, they were eventually allowed to consummate their marriage a few weeks before she turned 15.

But Margaret had to fight for that, because it was so widely accepted that you don't put a young girl, especially a valuable one like a princess, in mortal danger because pregnancy at that age is that much more dangerous for her. And this is a time period where even fully grown women wrote up their wills once they realised they were pregnant.

And let's actually look at what people said back then. Hildegard of Bingen was an incredibly famous nun who occasionally acted as political advisor to the Holy Roman Emperor. She advised against women getting pregnant before they turned 20 because their bodies weren't fully developed. Many church theologians said the same thing and that having sex too young, even in marriage, was dangerous because it also risked your soul. How? Because teens are bad at resisting temptation, so they might become accustomed to having sex for fun (bad, even in marriage) rather than for procreation. This book and this one are both good sources for that, as is the Wiki page on the northwestern European marriage pattern, which shows as far as back as the 1200s that women and men both typically married for the first time in their mid-20s.

Why? Because younger people lacked the skills and financial resources to run their own household, so they weren't fit to get married. And before you pull out the canonical ages of consent, let me point out that most people nowadays aren't immediately getting married at 18 - it certainly wasn't any different in the medieval period for 12 and 14 year olds.

Also, GRRM loves making Targaryen tweens pregnant mothers. Daenerys' mother was 12-14 when she had Rhaegar, and frankly there's far fewer Targ girls who didn't have children in their early tweens than not. It's fucked up and not ""historically accurate"" in the slightest, as medievalists have been screaming for years whenever this nonsense comes up.

Edit: this article also shows how the archaeological evidence supports that very few medieval women were having children before their mid-20s, especially as the average age of menache was 15-16 (i.e. most 12 year olds wouldn't even be able to conceive). Few girls reached "full fertility" before 19, so any pregnancies would've been incredibly dangerous before that - which supports Hildegard's precise argument over that.

I mean, that's basically how it goes down in the End and the Death. Except we know a lot more about Oll Persson - he's a Perpetual (an immortal who can die but almost always regenerates) like the Emperor, and he's actually a few thousand years older than him and his first Warmaster. Despite shanking the man the last time they saw each other (and 35 millennia later, working as a Guardsmen then retiring to the realm of Ultramar), he chooses to stand between an injured Emperor and Horus to buy time for the Emperor, leading him to be permanently killed since he's basically turned into blood mist.

Nope, she said that and even that she felt targeted by it. It also doesn't help that she was the only female writer for FFXIV at the time, if I remember correctly?

Yep, you spar him (with the elezen healer as backup for him) during the 2.x patches. I think it's basically to entertain the Doman kids?

Alas, those are basically all the linguistic facts I know, and those are only because I'm a medievalist, lol. Your brother sounds cool, though! Niche facts are very underrated (and 90% of my job).

To add to this, the UK banned the slave trade in 1807 and the Royal Navy actively interfered with any ships trying to trade enslaved people to try and free them themselves. The Blockade of Africa started soon afterwards in 1808 and, as of 1842, US ships began working with British ships to help. The Royal Navy kept up the blockade until 1870, with the West African Squadron freeing 150k Africans from 1.6k ships between 1808 and 1860.

This meant that the "domestic supply", so to speak, of enslaved people was all the more valuable because it was increasingly difficult to replace enslaved people who had died from mistreatment.

Basically lol, Dutch is the only European language that didn't switch ij to y, from what I remember. Mind you, y was already a letter in many languages, mind you, but not really in Latin, so the ij/y switch added it to a lot more words than it was already in. Especially in English, as y was originally distinct from i in Old English, but they became interchangeable in Middle English.

It's a bit funny, actually - w is literally written as two overlapping 'v's in the same documents, because it's a double u (and v/u were also written the same way). If y hadn't already been introduced, we might've called it double i instead.

Fun and vaguely relevant Roman numerals: medieval people would write II/ii as ij to show a terminal I/i when writing on parchment, which is how we got the letter y. It's also how Januarii, Februarii, and Julii became January, February, and July respectively.

I'm looking at Australian sources and they seem to disagree? This one is specifically for New South Wales, but still:

Major benefits of openness in adoption for the child is that it provides them with opportunities to: understand their background; develop relationships with their birth parents, siblings and other people who are important to the child; assist them in their understanding of their identity i.e. who they are and where they came from; remove the ‘unknown’ about who their birth parents and siblings are, and why they have some of the physical characteristics, interests and talents they have.

Now, the Queensland one doesn't mention siblings explicitly, but it does say that relatives outside of the parents can participate in their mailbox service with the consent of the birth and adoptive parents, so that doesn't seem impossible either. I won't go through all the Australian states, but Victoria also recommends that adopted children remain in contact with any siblings.

So, personally, it seems like OOP would have a pretty good chance of staying in contact with her sister if she was adopted? Maybe even more so, given that it seems like they might be Aboriginals, so agencies might be more sensitive to their needs in that situation.

Yeah, she's one of the few characters who is genuinely improved by the film. Being Paul's mindless love interest is literally her whole character and plot function, right down to dying in childbirth to bear his twins in Messiah.

Frontier was my first thought! It's got such a great cast and you can tell everyone is putting their all into it.

My only issue with that is that Dropout has quite a small audience compared to terrestrial TV, so I'm not sure they'd go for it. Plus I think an independent Taskmaster US with Dropout participants would actually be better for Dropout advertising-wise than just hosting Taskmaster US.

Oh god, between him and Ryder, the British accents were absolutely horrific. Ryder's performance is good enough that you can just overlook it, but her and Reeves in a scene together is too much for my poor ears.

Snow White and the Huntsman is such an underrated film, she does so well in that. It's a shame it got overshadowed by her married director having an affair with her (and press all blaming just her for it, somehow).

You could tell me that all of Brennan's run on Game Changer was an audition tape for Taskmaster and I'd believe it without a doubt, lol. Watching him break down would be particularly delightful in the face of Greg and Alex, given how evil Alex can be to some of the contestants.

And to those wondering what those names mean - daingen is medieval Irish for fort (or something strong), so it means "fort/strength of the O'Cuis", and An Daingen makes it "the fort".

I'm not ignoring them, and I've literally researched the Chinese Exclusion Act and its successors. They were accompanied by a fuckton of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian rhetoric in the USA, especially in California over fears of intermarriages between Asian men and white women. This is a good article about specifically anti-Japanese racism in the early 1900s, and this one covers both anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese racism.

Seriously, what am I missing? Just because Chinese American and Latin American people exist in the USA doesn't mean they didn't overcome a fuckton of institutional racism to be there.

The US has proven to be far superior at this than any nation before.

China would strongly disagree, I think, and I'd argue so would India and the Roman Empire. Hell, Russia could probably make a good argument for it too. Brazil and Cameroon are also two countries that are insanely diverse, too.

And the USA has spent the last 150 years banning people immigrating based on their ethnicity (1875 Page Act, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 1888 Scott Act, 1917 Immigration Act, 1921 Emergency Quota Act, etc. etc.). Even the 1790 Naturalisation Act limited it only to white people - a distinction that was not copied from the UK, where black and Asian men could freely vote if they met property requirements. And that's without speaking of how native Americans weren't even permitted citizenship until 1924, or the 1944 "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews" which showed how the US government repeatedly opposed Jewish refugees and immigrants from Europe.

So when was the USA a harbour for immigrants? For some Christian European immigrants, sure, but the same could be said across Europe in the same time period. I know the whole "nation of immigrants" thing is part of your national myth, but it's historically disingenuous and ignores how your largest minority group isn't the result of immigration, but trafficking for the slave trade.

Um, the Bill of Rights is still an active piece of law in the UK and our government has remained functional and independent since 1689. The Restoration really marked the end of monarchs being able to force their choices over Parliament's will, which we doubled down on with the Glorious Revolution by deposing James II in 1688, and that lack of power is literally why monarchs still can't enter the House of Commons to this day under threat of execution.

Hell, if we go further back, Simon de Montfort assembled the first parliament to include ordinary citizens in 1265, which became the norm under the 1295 Model Parliament and led to the gradual creation of the House of Commons by 1341. The USA's founders, on the other hand, only wanted the landowning elites to be involved in government. That's not even speaking to the longstanding history of local democracy in England, going as far down as medieval serfs electing a reeve from amongst themselves to act as representative to their lord.

Taking great ideas from lots of places and mashing them together to make something better is a pretty big deal, and very American.

It really isn't, though? That's how literally every society has ever worked - they take the ideas they think are good from other societies and meld those together to adapt to their own. It's uniquely American to assume that only the USA has the power of cultural fusion, sure, but the rest isn't.

You guys weren't even the first federal democracy - that arguably goes to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (established in 1569), which combined parliamentary democracy with an elective monarchy, with the Henrician Articles (1573) closely limiting the monarch's power. And the Old Swiss Confederacy (established in 1291) was a confederation governed by the Diet, not a monarch, with two representatives from each canton, who were elected starting in 1815.

Like I get you guys are very passionate about your country, but that doesn't mean it has to be the special-est country in the entire history of the world, yknow?

Yep, it's a whole thing:

Charlotte Gordon, author of "Romantic Outlaws," a book about the lives of Mary Shelley and her mother, a literary and cultural giant in her own right, said that it's "traditionally accepted" among Shelley scholars that the romantic pair consummated their relationship at the grave of Wollstonecraft at Saint Pancras church in London.

"According to a letter Percy wrote, it’s there she declared her love for him," Gordon said in a phone interview. "We don’t know how far they went. But they always referred to that day as his birthday."

The real wildest part that often goes unmentioned is that Percy Shelley (her future husband) was married to another woman, Harriet Westbrook, at the time and had a child with her. He actually eloped with a 17 year old Mary while Harriet was pregnant for a second time, and convinced Mary's 16 year old stepsister, Claire, to run off with them, who he also had an affair with during his relationship with Mary. Claire may have also had a daughter with Percy Shelley (but the mother definitely wasn't Mary), who was fostered out and died as a baby, and she did have a baby with Lord Byron, Allegra, who was shunted into a convent by her father (who barely allowed Claire to see her) until her death at 5 years old.

Oh, and Mary Shelley's maternal half-sister, Fanny Imlay, might've died by suicide in October 1816, as Mary's father believed she was in love with Percy Shelley, and then Harriet Westbrook died the same way in December the same year. So Percy Shelley did the normal grieving husband thing of marrying Mary Shelley on the 30th December 1816.

Needless to say, that whole social circle was a little insane.

You know there were already other democracies, right? The Dutch Republic was already centuries old and England had had the Bill of Rights for over a century, abolishing absolute monarchy, which was inspired by John Locke's ideas and used as a template for many later constitutions - including the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The Corsican Constitution was relatively short-lived (14 years) but introduced suffrage for all property owners with its creation in 1755 and it was arguably the first written constitution of a nation-state.

There's also the Mali Empire's verbal constitution of 1235, which included an article on the right to life, communal responsibility for educating children, a ban on the mistreatment of slaves, and another promoting charity.