Random stuff I don't think I can shove into a proper update. Might get added more, who knows.
- Emmanuel Macron was the Second Coming of Jesus, but he said nothing that changed any theology so his impact was nil.
- Monarchism is still seen as credible in this world, with republicanism still having left-wing implications due to being associated with the Narodniks.
- There is some weird spatial anomaly at the top of Mount Everest that haven't been investigated much because it's inconvenient to get there.
- Britain leased a piece of Antarctica from the penguins for 3,250 years off defining a year in small print off the local days and nights, so it's 99 Antarctic years. The penguins themselves aren't happy, but at least the Brits bothered with a treaty rather than seizing it via war.
- Tom Daschle was the last Chairman of the Committee of the Volga German Autonomous Socialist Republic before transitioning it to a democracy.
- The Tsalal existed, but died out, being replaced by the Yamanians in the peninsula. The penguins
hate green, seeing it as an evil colour. The exiled Nazis in New Swabia venerates Tsalal as the "first Aryans" and seeks to underneath "ancestral Aryan knowledge" in abandoned snow-covered cities.
- There exist a LGBT-led communist utopian community in the Coral Sea Islands just off Australia.
- France is in this situation where the head of government is agreed upon, but one of the two heads of state varies on where you are. The President
selected by the National Assembly is undisputed, but the other, the monarch, varies. Legitimists, Orléanists and Bhopalists [yes] compete for control.
- Napoléon's line rules an alternate Anglo-Corsican Kingdom [the Corsican Principality] since the 1800s, as a reward of him pulling off a major win at Waterloo, the first major blow since the liberation of the Netherlands to France's ambitions.
- Burgundy has never lost its independence, although it has definitely got on hard times, up to becoming the Burgundian Soviet Republic.
- Tasmania is German, but has quietly declared independence since Germany collapsed. It's now a republic.
- There is a libertarian socialist republic in the Balkans named 'Liberland'.
- Iran used to have a Muslim plurality, but is now firmly Zoroastrian.
- The Concord of Nations is based on Ni'ihau after a dispute with the Commonwealth over its New York City base.
- Nekomimi (cat-folk) exist, they're a mutation, but one of the most common. They have tended to be persecuted in the past.
- There is a nekomimi nation in the southern Ryukyu Islands [the Yaeyama Islands, here the Yeema Islands] that's sort of a 'land of sanctuary' for them.
- The Russian name for nekomimi is
koshavek, a portmanteau of
kosha [cat, lady-cat] and
chelovek [person]. The plural of
koshavek is
kosheti.
- There was once a Koshavek Autonomous Socialist Republic in the far east, but after Narodnik Russia fell apart and the area became controlled by the Manchus, most moved to the Yeema Islands. There's only 10% left in the former Koshavek ASR, and it's shrinking every year.
- The conspiracy theory about Alexei Kosygin, that he's Tsarevich Alexei, is true in ATL. His descendants rule Moscow, and the Anchorage line refuse to accept their claim, of course. The House of Romanov is divided between the two, and badly.
- The Kalmyk people never move back to Dzungaria, and hence there is still a strong presence in the west.
- Transylvania is led by a vampire lineage [the Grand Counts], but vampirism is but a human mutation and not something that creates 'monsters'.
- The accepted terms for LGBT people are as forth
--
Variant (aka gay or lesbian, can also be used as a wider 'not-straight' application)
--
Ambisexual (the term for bisexual)
--
Diem (the old, and offensive term for trans, comes from
diemfylikos, used before the western gender revolution)
--
Metamorphic (the new term for trans, mostly used to label people as such outside the West, also vaguely covers third-genders)
- And for the opposite...
--
Linear (means straight)
- The Sultanate of Zanzibar is a British puppet on behalf of Oman, but it is very unstable.
- This is the flag of Britain
- The blue, red and green can be interpreted two ways. The first is that it describes Britain's tripartite identity, with blue for Celtic, red for Latin and green for Muslim, with the white lines denoting the three exists in harmony. Or it can represent the fiery essence of the people (red) on grass (green) under the sky (blue). The later is not the original meaning (the first was), but it is more used those days for a more
'secular' Britain.
- There are elves in Dalarna, which is called Elfdalia. They tend to be more mysterious and insular than the elves elsewhere. Also, really anti-fascist.
- Ruthenia is socially-liberal for the region's standards, mostly because of a crippling awareness of their past being one of a poor, rural land powerless to do anything, and hence they had this whole obsession of being 'modernised'. It's dying down now, with the country relatively developed.
- Beef is banned in La Mancha because it offends the talking cows. Yes.
- There's a Latin-speaking country in North Africa named Numidia. They dislike everyone else, especially the Rational State of France-in-Africa, which is a country ran entirely by the Cult of Reason. Yes. Don't ask me why. They thought the 'Historical Compromise' of France in the 20th century was too much.
- Avatar [not the blue-skinned ones] is a show about
Azula as the Avatar. It's surprisingly good.
- Sam Nunn [which if you read the
dramatis personae was an edgy rock-star] was leader of the Southern Greens for a joke, but resigned immediately.
- The popular video-game franchise
Assassin's Creed has its main character be Isabella Auditore da Firenze, someone who although she ends up a trained Assassin and a silent killer, never loses her utmost faith in humanity, and tries to face every task with a pep in her step.
- A fan favourite character in another video-game franchise, named
Animal Crossing, is the eagle character Ezio, who speaks in an Italian accent (toned down from Mario-style to an authentic one over time) and likes to flirt with people, even as he helps them as the main secretary of the town.
- The Ottomans once had control of New England (the one in the Caucasus), which they called
Yeni İngiltere Kralı.
- The Guanches of the Canaries still survive. Their language is spoken by around 20% of the Canaries. The land is part of Britain.
- The Canadian Province of Little Egypt [southern Illinois] is an area where Egyptian immigrants tends to reside as a result of the place being sold as 'Little Egypt beyond Egypt' by Canadian companies looking for more workers. The architecture is also very Egyptian Revival, mostly fuelled by patriotism for the 'old country'. There even was a successful referendum in the 2000s to have the ceremonial head of state be the Pharaoh.
-
The Simpsons is a medieval fantasy drama about the ruling house of the Spring Kingdom, the Simpson dynasty, and their bitter feuds. The aging King Abraham disinherits his son Crown Prince Homer in a clash between the two before forgiving him and restoring his succession, but upon Abraham's death his bastard son Herbert emerges from the Winter Realm claiming to be the true heir. Meanwhile, the estranged mother Monica plots her next steps and there's murmurs that Homer's children with his wife Margaret (Bart, Lisa and Maggie) are not his own. [genuinely might expand on this]
- Cyrillic-writing countries doesn't use Arabic numerals, they use
Cyrillic numerals.
- It's "the" Ukraine here. Or "the Ukraines".
- British hereditary rules are based on a concept of
contract with the monarch. Titles are not an one-time gift, but the forging of an understanding between the crown and your family. Hence any change of succession rules is ultimately determined by
family law, not the Crown's.
- Null Island exists and is owned by the Musk family as a private-owned island. The Musks are Martian billionaires those days.
- The Michigan Upper Peninsula is the Canadian Province of Ylämaa, and is Finnish-speaking.
- Eugenics is unfortunately still a thing, and has been much more into genetic manipulation, with all the implications that has.
- Ed Miliband once acted as The Doctor in
Doctor Who.
- Glamorgan sausages and laverbread are still eaten in ATL Britain, and probably more than OTL.
- The dinosaur island of Roarack [a bit north-east of Madagascar] has two major parties - Dinocrats and Reptilicans.
- German is still written in Fraktur.
- Speakeasies are a sort of relaxed atmosphere. Light music, wide variety of food on offer, tea, coffee and of course soft drinks, and comfy chairs. Alcohol is generally avoided unless the place is registered as a "alcoholic establishment". Prohibition went further than in OTL.
- Natas are a normal part of Canadian cuisine due to Portuguese influence.
- Western Islamophobia often makes the distinction between what they call
"indigenous" Islam (i.e British) and
immigrant Islam. Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders in TABE would couch their rhetoric more in "immigrated non-Western values", rather than "Islam" as a general thing. Ibadi Islam is seen as the "good Islam", because of its perceived difference and especially in its British form, the most
"Westernised" of all.
- The standard Romanisation of Mandarin Chinese is
Romatzyh, replacing Wade-Giles in the 1930s.
- Albanian is written in the
Elbasan script, albeit the alternatives (Arabic and OTL Latin) are valid alternatives in Tosk and Gheg areas respectively.
- The Australian Commonwealth has never celebrated Australia Day. For them, the national day was always Wattle Day.
- The Sumerian word for 'drone' is ragabanna (air-rider).
- There is a second, smaller, moon, Minmun, and there is an extremely rare eclipse that can happen incorporating Minmun. Basically you need the moon to not cover the sun, just most of it, and you need Minmun to be a certain distance from the Moon and to be in front. The whole thing is nicknamed the "divine gaze", or "God's eye" because of the whole resemblance to an eye. Here's an illustration.
- All Seven Wonders of the Ancient World survive. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon tends to be socialist propaganda those days though.
- List of fun religions.
- Atlantis has their religion, which is a distant relative of the Berber traditional religion. Cult of the dead, ancestor worship, all that sort of thing.
- The Penguin religion venerates the cold and sees heat as evil. To them, hell is fiery, yes, but heaven is cold. And their "evil colour" is green.
- The Lemurs have a polytheistic religion rooted in natural phenomenon. Volcano god, etc.
- The Elves in Scandinavia are a strange mixture. They say they're Protestant, but they also do all the nature rituals and whatnot of their ancestral religion. They're basically double-jobbing religions. Syncretism and all.
- Equestria is obviously a dual-deity worship, based around their immortal princesses, Celestia the Sun Goddess and Luna the Moon Goddess.
- Kushinya is mostly Muslim those days [and a fair few irreligious/atheistic people due to the socialist history], but you can feel traces of a very old religion here and there, one based around worship of the life-giving oases they built cities around.
- The Naga are the sort of people that more or less keep to themselves. Slithering around, they tend to have their own religion based around their snake-goddess. They also say they're Muslim, but that does seem to be mostly because they found it "trendy". They have a very very loose interpretation of that faith, and syncretises it a lot with their native religion.
- The Orcs are firm Calvinists. They may interpret God more militaristic and prefer the Old Testament to the New, but overall very Calvinist.
- The dinosaurs of Roarack, they worship the Meteor. Not because they love it. But because they fear it. They know they've been spared somehow, while every other dinosaur perished. But they don't know why. It tends to be either "the Meteor has a special plan for us" or "the Meteor didn't see us". This has led to a bit of a sectarian divide, but overall the religion is united.
- The Siren, they're kind of odd. They have a sort of malformed version of Greek polytheism, with the Muses taking prominence. They worship the Muses, and see Calliope as their superior goddess.
- The Basque Republic still tries to get the world to stop calling them Navarre. And they fail every time.
- The main global organisations
- The Concord of Nations: The long suffering United Nations equivalent, it tries to get all of Earth-Prime to work together...
- The Global Socialist Union: Battered, but still strong, it leads its ragtag countries against the tide of cyber-capitalism.
- The World Pact: Once at death's door, the inexplicable fascist supranational alliance is crawling back.
- The Earth Monetary Organisation: Tries to get people to consider the idea of abolishing national currency and adopt the "Universal Credit".
- The International Democratic Congress: It bitterly fights for liberal democracy in theory, or in actual practise, liberal capitalism. So NATO.
- King's Lynn in Norfolk is in ATL Queen's Lynn due to a different monarch being on the throne at the time it stopped being Bishop's Lynn. The republicans tried to change it to Lynn, but after a while they got it reversed back because "it's our name, we don't want it changed by you".
- The Great Unknown is
something under the Pacific Ocean. And no, Mu has confirmed it isn't anything like "Mu 2".
- Zombies exist. Well, they're
zombis, but yeah. Thankfully they're not much outside periodical breakouts in the Caribbean and West Africa.
- There was once a "Republic of Two Nations", of Poland and Veneda, before it collapsed to foreign invaders. The last President of the Republic, and the last head of state that governed both Veneds and Poles, was a Pole by the name of Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz.
- There are a lot of ways to refer to people who have magic, but the most preferred by the present is "magically gifted". The Burnsand Academy for the Magically Gifted, located in the mountainous French-speaking Canadian province of Vermont and the premier magical school in the American Dominions, was one of the first to use the term, back in the late 19th century, when it was established.
- Integration of citizens of other specieses varies quite a bit in countries and by specieses. The four Japans all integrate the native nekomimi very well but struggle with other variants. In the last British election, multiple Equestrians were elected to the Senate and the country had one as Tosaig once. (and unknowingly, the country elected a changeling Tosaig, but that's not really applicable). Overall, "visible variants", as the PC term is, face considerable discrimination and ignorance. Hence why a lot of them prefer to stay with their own, often in their own countries.
- Smedley Butler is widely regarded as similar to OTL Eisenhower in Canada since he led the forces in WWII. He was appointed the first native-born Viceroy of Canada after the war despite his obvious socialist beliefs and having once said that he voted Democratic Socialist despite their "clear reformism". And because he's from the Philadelphia suburbs, he speaks British, not English. So his name here is Caradag Drystin Bonter.
- Donald Trump in ATL achieved nothing of note apart from being a B-list movie actor and the spouse of the Prime Minister of Carnolia-Slovenia.