• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Least favorite alt-history story?

I don't even know what you're talking about.

A quick DuckDuckGo has revealed that Infogalactic is yet another iteration of "Wikipedia for fascists", only this time run by the guy whose greatest achievement in life was fucking with the nomination process for the 2015 Hugos. Not sure if he strictly counts as a 'failson', as his parents aren't particularly notable.
 
Okay, to get slightly back on topic with regards to least-favorite AH, there's one timeline on the other place that garnered my attention because of its concept, and then proceeded to take that attention and throw it into the garbage. The timeline in question that I'm talking about is Bog, Vozhd, Rodina - The History of the All-Russian People's State. To give a brief summary, it's got a CP victory leading to a nationalist/fascist Russia led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky. "But Perse," you say, "That doesn't sound too bad of an idea. It's certainly more interesting than a KR ripoff featuring Boris Savinkov. What could be so bad about that?"

Two words: Character sheet.
I don't know why the author chose to do it this way, maybe they wanted to give the audience a better way to participate in the story and how it gets told, but they decided to make a character sheet for people to create their own fictional characters for use in the timeline's narrative as viewpoint charcters rather than using historical figures or fictional characters they came up with on their own. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but that shit's incredibly unappealing to me as someone who used to do a lot of play-by-post roleplaying. It just comes off as lazy and uncreative writing that takes away from the timeline as a whole. If I wanted to roleplay in an alternate history setting, I'd actually roleplay, not throw up a character sheet and let people make characters so they can be included in the narrative because I'm too lazy to come up with my own.
 
Okay, to get slightly back on topic with regards to least-favorite AH, there's one timeline on the other place that garnered my attention because of its concept, and then proceeded to take that attention and throw it into the garbage. The timeline in question that I'm talking about is Bog, Vozhd, Rodina - The History of the All-Russian People's State. To give a brief summary, it's got a CP victory leading to a nationalist/fascist Russia led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky. "But Perse," you say, "That doesn't sound too bad of an idea. It's certainly more interesting than a KR ripoff featuring Boris Savinkov. What could be so bad about that?"

Two words: Character sheet.
I don't know why the author chose to do it this way, maybe they wanted to give the audience a better way to participate in the story and how it gets told, but they decided to make a character sheet for people to create their own fictional characters for use in the timeline's narrative as viewpoint charcters rather than using historical figures or fictional characters they came up with on their own. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but that shit's incredibly unappealing to me as someone who used to do a lot of play-by-post roleplaying. It just comes off as lazy and uncreative writing that takes away from the timeline as a whole. If I wanted to roleplay in an alternate history setting, I'd actually roleplay, not throw up a character sheet and let people make characters so they can be included in the narrative because I'm too lazy to come up with my own.
Yeah, if you are gonna be like doing that build your setting first then do it as an RP on another note, the only fascist Russia i find not a carbon copy of the nazis and interesting is Augenis's aborted TL on it. I'm not saying a fascist russia wont be as evil as the nazis I just find it cliche.
 
Okay, to get slightly back on topic with regards to least-favorite AH, there's one timeline on the other place that garnered my attention because of its concept, and then proceeded to take that attention and throw it into the garbage. The timeline in question that I'm talking about is Bog, Vozhd, Rodina - The History of the All-Russian People's State. To give a brief summary, it's got a CP victory leading to a nationalist/fascist Russia led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky. "But Perse," you say, "That doesn't sound too bad of an idea. It's certainly more interesting than a KR ripoff featuring Boris Savinkov. What could be so bad about that?"

Two words: Character sheet.
I don't know why the author chose to do it this way, maybe they wanted to give the audience a better way to participate in the story and how it gets told, but they decided to make a character sheet for people to create their own fictional characters for use in the timeline's narrative as viewpoint charcters rather than using historical figures or fictional characters they came up with on their own. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but that shit's incredibly unappealing to me as someone who used to do a lot of play-by-post roleplaying. It just comes off as lazy and uncreative writing that takes away from the timeline as a whole. If I wanted to roleplay in an alternate history setting, I'd actually roleplay, not throw up a character sheet and let people make characters so they can be included in the narrative because I'm too lazy to come up with my own.
Big othertimelines dot com energy
 
Okay, to get slightly back on topic with regards to least-favorite AH, there's one timeline on the other place that garnered my attention because of its concept, and then proceeded to take that attention and throw it into the garbage. The timeline in question that I'm talking about is Bog, Vozhd, Rodina - The History of the All-Russian People's State. To give a brief summary, it's got a CP victory leading to a nationalist/fascist Russia led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky. "But Perse," you say, "That doesn't sound too bad of an idea. It's certainly more interesting than a KR ripoff featuring Boris Savinkov. What could be so bad about that?"

Two words: Character sheet.
I don't know why the author chose to do it this way, maybe they wanted to give the audience a better way to participate in the story and how it gets told, but they decided to make a character sheet for people to create their own fictional characters for use in the timeline's narrative as viewpoint charcters rather than using historical figures or fictional characters they came up with on their own. Maybe I'm just an asshole, but that shit's incredibly unappealing to me as someone who used to do a lot of play-by-post roleplaying. It just comes off as lazy and uncreative writing that takes away from the timeline as a whole. If I wanted to roleplay in an alternate history setting, I'd actually roleplay, not throw up a character sheet and let people make characters so they can be included in the narrative because I'm too lazy to come up with my own.



I doubt I'm alone in being annoyed when After 1900 gets spammed with shared worlds exercises which don't belong there but having had a look it seems harmless enough. Can't attest to the quality of the actual TL but the format doesn't seem to have been impacted by posters suggesting characters and the stipulations required would appear to prevent it devolving into a free-for-all or being full of Mary Sues. It looks more like the writer just asking people for ideas about potential characters rather than prompting readers to write the TL for them.
 
I don't even know what you're talking about.

Infogalactic is a wannabe wikipedia replacement that sprang from the hackish mind of Ted Beale, alias 'Vox Day', a medium wheel in the Alt-Right. As opposed to Conservapedia, which attempted to create its entries from scratch, Infogalactic was created as a 'fork', a copy of wikipedia as it existed in 2016 or so. There was supposedly a plan to make it capable of updating from wikipedia automatically, but it never happened, and so since then it has been sporadically updated on numerous subjects by editors who clearly don't quite understand what they're doing--in a good example, they've only just added the 2017 NZ general election, because the Alt-Right only started caring about New Zealand this year when Labour was predicted to win big, and won big, thus proving nefarious going-ons to their minds. Badly, unevenly updating it has been its major activity. The other is letting various crazies fill it with bizarre entries like... THIS.

One of them has included a bizarre screenplay treatment there. Not a joke.
 
Infogalactic is a wannabe wikipedia replacement that sprang from the hackish mind of Ted Beale, alias 'Vox Day', a medium wheel in the Alt-Right. As opposed to Conservapedia, which attempted to create its entries from scratch, Infogalactic was created as a 'fork', a copy of wikipedia as it existed in 2016 or so. There was supposedly a plan to make it capable of updating from wikipedia automatically, but it never happened, and so since then it has been sporadically updated on numerous subjects by editors who clearly don't quite understand what they're doing--in a good example, they've only just added the 2017 NZ general election, because the Alt-Right only started caring about New Zealand this year when Labour was predicted to win big, and won big, thus proving nefarious going-ons to their minds. Badly, unevenly updating it has been its major activity. The other is letting various crazies fill it with bizarre entries like... THIS.

One of them has included a bizarre screenplay treatment there. Not a joke.

Lol they literally just copy-pasted the William I article from Wikipedia.
 
I doubt I'm alone in being annoyed when After 1900 gets spammed with shared worlds exercises which don't belong there but having had a look it seems harmless enough. Can't attest to the quality of the actual TL but the format doesn't seem to have been impacted by posters suggesting characters and the stipulations required would appear to prevent it devolving into a free-for-all or being full of Mary Sues. It looks more like the writer just asking people for ideas about potential characters rather than prompting readers to write the TL for them.
That's a fair point. To be honest, my feelings about it might just be related to my own dissatisfaction with actual play-by-post roleplaying in general rather than anything to do with the timeline itself.

One thing that does bother me is when TL writers are willing to put in the effort to write plenty of textbook-style entries, then do a narrative entry from the point of view of a character in-setting, only to say that they'll only do narrative entries sparsely, such as when major events occur. For instance, in another CP victory TL, a major event (in this case the death of a former President during a war as a result of taking an active part in the conflict) is shown from the perspective of a fictional character. Then immediately afterwards, the writer stated that because the TL "wasn't a novel", narrative entries would be few and far between.

Now, I can understand being reluctant to do something like that because you're not confident in your skills. It's hard to properly blend narrative and textbook styles into a compelling timeline. Writers can be good at one and bad at the other, and that's fine. But if you're not confident in your ability, the best way to improve that situation would be to actually attempt it, not just giving an excuse when you've already dipped your toes in the water. It just comes across poorly to me, I dunno.
 
A quick DuckDuckGo has revealed that Infogalactic is yet another iteration of "Wikipedia for fascists", only this time run by the guy whose greatest achievement in life was fucking with the nomination process for the 2015 Hugos. Not sure if he strictly counts as a 'failson', as his parents aren't particularly notable.

He's also the only person to be thrown out of the SFFWA, and he managed to fuck the Hugo nominations up again in 2016, and then managed some petty vandalism as he and his followers left the premises in 2017 due to diminishing interest and rules changes. Oh, and he has a lousy right-wing publishing house that, among other things, published Victoria.

As to his failson status, Ted's father Robert Beale founded an early Internet security company and made a fortune that he quickly put to work funding things like WorldNetDaily, aka Breitbart before there was Breitbart. Ted unveiled his 'Vox Day' persona there and got into feuds with various science blogs about creationism in his columns, which oddly enough ceased to be part of the site when his father stopped funding it. Robert then got into the sovereign citizen "tax protest" stuff--the rest of his family, save for Ted, quickly worked with the government to lock him out of the company and turn him over to the authorities. Sometime before this happened, Robert signed a bunch of his assets over to Ted who fled abroad, where he has remained ever since. Robert followed this brilliance up by attempting to have the judge trying him "tried by a citizen's court" which to those not blessed by an understanding of sovereign citizenry amounts to a conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

Which is why Robert is presently in prison.

As for Ted, he's more or less the online fash's Kevin Bacon--follow any thread of it, and eventually you'll find him there, generally attaching himself remora-like to the proceedings. He's been the patron of last resort for guys like Milo Yiannopoulos, he was an early proponent of Gab, before turning on it--the list goes on.

Really not seeing what the point of bringing it up was tbh?

Beale really tried to sell Infogalactic as the cool wiki for cool fascists that so much cooler than evil, doomed wikipedia.

At least, before it failed to take off. Now he almost never mentions it, which is pretty much the standard Beale project story.
 
That's a fair point. To be honest, my feelings about it might just be related to my own dissatisfaction with actual play-by-post roleplaying in general rather than anything to do with the timeline itself.

One thing that does bother me is when TL writers are willing to put in the effort to write plenty of textbook-style entries, then do a narrative entry from the point of view of a character in-setting, only to say that they'll only do narrative entries sparsely, such as when major events occur. For instance, in another CP victory TL, a major event (in this case the death of a former President during a war as a result of taking an active part in the conflict) is shown from the perspective of a fictional character. Then immediately afterwards, the writer stated that because the TL "wasn't a novel", narrative entries would be few and far between.

Now, I can understand being reluctant to do something like that because you're not confident in your skills. It's hard to properly blend narrative and textbook styles into a compelling timeline. Writers can be good at one and bad at the other, and that's fine. But if you're not confident in your ability, the best way to improve that situation would be to actually attempt it, not just giving an excuse when you've already dipped your toes in the water. It just comes across poorly to me, I dunno.


That does sound a bit abrupt in the case of the CP victory TL but I've seen that sort of format before and as long as that's what they had planned I don't really see a problem. Granted that's possibly because I'm guilty of it myself, some people like to experiment or dip their toes in the water only to then abandon doing so due to a lack of confidence or it just not working for them. That can be narratively jarring but sometimes it can't be helped, like when characters develop minds of their own or storylines go off on unmapped routes.

Vignettes are really good alternative for that sort of experimentation or just for building up confidence as there's less hassle involved than having to commit to a TL and if it's bad then you don't feel as much need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
Last edited:
Victoria is William Lind. He's actually worse.
He certainly has interesting ideas about parenting, if his idea of a good mother is someone who leaves a hand grenade dangling within reach of a baby.

VICTORIA_900.jpg


I haven't gone beyond the prologue, but given that the opening scene is a heretical woman being burnt at the stake to the approving comments of the narrator, Lind's idea of the perfect society looks very much like the Islamic State but for Christians.
 
I haven't gone beyond the prologue, but given that the opening scene is a heretical woman being burnt at the stake to the approving comments of the narrator, Lind's idea of the perfect society looks very much like the Islamic State but for Christians.

Ayyup. Got it in one.

Now imagine them fighting every variety of straw liberal and regional stereotype imaginable. Oh, and gobs and gobs of racism.
 
Back
Top