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Recent content by Hendryk

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    Alternate History General Discussion

    My go-to recommendation if you want to learn more about computer networks in the USSR is How Not to Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters.
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    Alternate Technologies: A Nuke By Any Other Name

    In The Years of Rice and Salt, uranium is called alactin, but I don't recall if nuclear weapons themselves get a name of their own--trying to preempt their development once physicists from various parts of the world have figured out their feasability is a plot point in a late chapter. In Red...
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    Things that look like alternate history but aren't

    Following WW2, wargaming became a favorite hobby of middle-aged British ladies.
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    Fiction Friction: Beloved Characters That Nearly Weren't

    Does Aeneas count? :unsure:
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    Scenes We'd Like To See: Alternate Movies, Television & Other Pop Culture Miscellanea

    This video by Bullets & Blockbusters explores the various ways The Empire Strikes Back might have turned out. There was the low-budget Plan B in case Star Wars didn't recoup its costs, which became Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Allan Dean Foster; the collaboration with veteran screenwriter Leigh...
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    Alternate History General Discussion

    And perhaps later on it might be moved to, say, Columbus.
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    Fiction Friction: Beloved Characters That Nearly Weren't

    Before he became the de facto leader of the Muppets, Kermit was a supporting character in Sam and Friends. Apparently he wasn't even a precise species until becoming a frog.
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    CROWDFUND CAMPAIGN: Worlds That Could Have Been, an AH encyclopaedia

    This is a splendid project and it's a great idea for SLP to support it. Looking forward to seeing it completed.
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    Non-Trek Worldbuilding. Part 3: Early Star Wars.

    One clever way in which the dichotomy between the imperial core and the periphery is rendered is wear and tear. The core gets the shiny, pristine, "classically SF" looking technology, while in the periphery people make do with secondhand or jury-rigged equipment. Luke needn't have said "If...
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    AHC: Preserve animal-combat-based sports.

    I would say it's part of the long term societal trend towards shielding ourselves from the sight and even the thought of animal suffering, which, while arguably hypocritical, is not really a bad thing. We do still--uneasily--live with the reality of industrial livestock rearing and slaughtering...
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    Non-Trek Worldbuilding. Part 3: Early Star Wars.

    Indeed, the "set your blasters on stun" thing is probably one of the most overt Star Trek references in the Star Wars universe, and I'm not aware of the "stun setting" on blasters showing up ever again (how can a bolt of energy be set to stun anyway?). This begs the question, can the Force...
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    Sport and Politics. The Olympic Games, Part 6

    One can see why they changed the name. I remember Ben Johnson's fleeting moment of glory--I was an exchange student in Canada at the time, and my host family were rooting for him. That is, until he was found to have cheated.
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    Alternate History General Discussion

    It took me a couple of minutes to understand that this was about football. For a moment I wondered if this Man City was another Humansville, Missouri.
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    Non-Trek Worldbuilding. Part 3: Early Star Wars.

    Now I'm not the most well-versed person in Middle Earth lore, but I don't think that's where the inspiration for Yoda comes from. To me he looks like he was inspired by the same Japanese swashbuckler movies that Lucas took many other plot hooks from (The Hidden Fortress etc.)--he's the wise old...
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    John le Carre, a Trade Secret. Part 3

    One counterfactual involving Le Carré which I once brought up here, is that he mused that his childhood bore similarities to that of Kim Philby, and that with the right incentives he might himself have been enticed to become a spy for the USSR. (From Conversations with John Le Carré)
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