Recent content by napoleon IV

He spent a solid week after getting this portrait forcing everyone to call him Arthur-kun, a week Secretary of State James Blaine later called "the most miserable period of my life. Fucking weebs."

Thanks. My inspiration for this was an observation from someone (I forget who) that Trotskyism is almost a prophetic movement in how it centers itself around (supposed) world-historic personalities. And it occurred to me that prophetic movements often end up becoming family affairs, and Lev...

Premiers of the Soviet Union 1917-1924: Vladimir Lenin (Bolshevik) 1924-1926: Alexei Rykov (Bolshevik) 1926-1939: Lev Trotsky (Bolshevik) 1939: Christian Rakovsky (Bolshevik) 1939-1977: Lev Sedov (Bolshevik) 1977-2005: Vsevolod Volkov (Bolshevik) 2005-0000: Nadezhda Volkova (Bolshevik)...

The bigger problem for Britain is that the only way they're losing Ireland to the French is if they've lost their naval dominance. And if Britain's lost its naval dominance then the whole of British grand strategy collapses, and what they're left with is the French across the Channel and the...

What's really wild is that Biden is old enough that he could have theoretically met Joseph Stalin.

From Separated by a Common Language: A Guide to American Slang and Culture (published 1991): "We've already discussed how Americans will be very confused if you call cigarettes fags, but you should also be prepared to be confused at American slang regarding tobacco. You see, in America they...

Famously the American Civil War features a ton of battles that have two different names depending on which side was discussing them, because the Union tended to name battles after local geographic features (such as the Bull Run and Antietam creeks) while the Confederates tended to name battles...

President Benjamin Netanyahu delivers the State of the Union, with Speaker John Boehner and Vice President Orrin Hatch in the background. This could technically happen, Netanyahu was born in America.

So I had a draft of something I was writing in the AH Rundowns thread, but it's gone away and I can't find it. Is there somewhere on the forum that I can find the draft or is it gone forever?

This is also a bit of a cop-out, but if George VI had died just a few years earlier (not hard to imagine given his health problems) then Queen Elizabeth II would have ruled for slightly longer than Louis XIV.

The Foreign Workers' Club of Moscow baseball team in Gorky Park, 1934. The team was formed by Americans who had emigrated to the USSR and was popular enough that Soviet Supreme Council of Physical Culture announced the introduction of baseball to the Soviet Union as a national sport. Sadly most...

"Je suis un cowpoke, pilgrim."

In the Soviet Union Novy God (New Year's) was promoted as a secular alternative to Christmas (which was frowned upon by the communists), and as a result Novy God is an extremely popular holiday in Russia that has a lot of Christmas customs such as a Santa Claus-like figure, decorating trees, and...

It's the kind of thing that's fun as a joke, like have the robot write an AH and then we can all laugh when it makes Harold Wilson the Emperor of Bolivia, but like others I don't really see it as a serious tool. I honestly think the biggest use of AI in the writing sphere is going to be to...