- Pronouns
- he/him
Discuss this article by @Coiler here
I haven't encountered this particular commentator or their enthusiasm for the M-113, but it does bring to mind others who pop in from time to time, utterly convinced that they've got a particular idea that absolutely would've changed history if only it had been acted on.
If it's any comfort, I was wholly unaware of their existence until now either.When Colin sent me this article and the first line was 'Mike Sparks is one of the most infamous internet commentators' and I had no idea who that was at all, I was somewhat worried it would be the equivalent of me writing an article about 'msscribe' and it would be greeted with general bewilderment.
Pleasingly, the twitter post also got more engagement than most do and has a comment of exactly that type on it.When Colin sent me this article and the first line was 'Mike Sparks is one of the most infamous internet commentators' and I had no idea who that was at all, I was somewhat worried it would be the equivalent of me writing an article about 'msscribe' and it would be greeted with general bewilderment.
The fact that three different people have replied to go 'oh, god him' means I probably misjudged that one.
I just need to always trust Colin's instincts, clearly.
There has to be a very obscure conspiracy theory that he was accidentally ISOTed here from the Command & Conquer Red Alert universe, where you really can convert an APC to any kind of vehicle role if you garrison the right kind of infantry inside.
Like @Talwar and @Hendryk, I'd never heard of him either - but always reading about events/people/whatever that I'm familiar with would be boring, and I enjoyed the article (thanks @Coiler). I found the two complementary conclusions ('even the craziest concepts can start from a viable foundation' and 'good ideas can frequently spiral into bad ones') very interesting - they could be applied to many fields, including the writing of AH.When Colin sent me this article and the first line was 'Mike Sparks is one of the most infamous internet commentators' and I had no idea who that was at all, I was somewhat worried it would be the equivalent of me writing an article about 'msscribe' and it would be greeted with general bewilderment.
There has to be a very obscure conspiracy theory that he was accidentally ISOTed here from the Command & Conquer Red Alert universe, where you really can convert an APC to any kind of vehicle role if you garrison the right kind of infantry inside.
Obviously, if the Germans had had something like the M113, Sealion would have been perfectly feasible.it does bring to mind others who pop in from time to time, utterly convinced that they've got a particular idea that absolutely would've changed history if only it had been acted on. The WAllies using the Frisian Islands as a staging ground against Nazi Germany comes to mind as a prominent example from a few years back.
Moving this back around to Mike Spark's decades-long obsession, perhaps there is a reality where the M113 'Gavin' is so-named, and there's something ever-so-slightly different about that reality to ours.
I agree, it'd only reach some people but that's an advantage nowadays in today's internet discussion space for dropping subtle hints (I'll be doing an article on this at some point).Actually, thinking about this more, the addition or subtraction of a nickname for a piece of military hardware is an interest 'soft' AH way of indicating that you've diverged into a parallel reality that can be noticed by those with a particular niche interest before those who might not have that knowledge, and therefore have to wait for a broader ahistorical event to occur
One thing that always sticks in my head is in the original Shuffling the Decks when @Meadow and @Lord Roem very early on in the book note that - after Churchill's death as the PoD for the titular shuffling - the M4 Shermans advancing through Europe have their nicknames changed to 'Winstons' rather than retaining their OTL designations, as a spontaneous event by the soldiers manning them. It's very much a passing comment, and doesn't have any effect on the greater story; and nor would anything much have been lost in terms of the narrative if it hadn't been there. But I think it's a fantastic little nod to the specialist reader (albeit, of course, in an explicitly AH title) that the timeline is changing in more subtle ways as well as more obvious. I don't know if that was a Meadow or Roem bit (probably the former) but it's a nice touch
Moving this back around to Mike Spark's decades-long obsession, perhaps there is a reality where the M113 'Gavin' is so-named, and there's something ever-so-slightly different about that reality to ours.
Ftr I didn't know who this was but I do know msscribe so that'd be one person at least.When Colin sent me this article and the first line was 'Mike Sparks is one of the most infamous internet commentators' and I had no idea who that was at all, I was somewhat worried it would be the equivalent of me writing an article about 'msscribe' and it would be greeted with general bewilderment.
The fact that three different people have replied to go 'oh, god him' means I probably misjudged that one.
I just need to always trust Colin's instincts, clearly.