They’re really not beating any of the allegations there.
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Things that look like alternate history but aren't
- Thread starter Meadow
- Start date
I see Wiki has a prime example on its frontpage today:
en.wikipedia.org
(The fact it was first performed by Chinese students in Tokyo and was rewritten to evoke mistreatment of Chinese migrants in America is particularly ironic, given what came afterwards).
Black Slave's Cry to Heaven - Wikipedia
(The fact it was first performed by Chinese students in Tokyo and was rewritten to evoke mistreatment of Chinese migrants in America is particularly ironic, given what came afterwards).
I don't know if this qualifies for the thread or is just 'random interesting thing', but I was just looking up the etymology of the word 'hobby'.
'Hobby' in the sense of a diverting but pointless (beyond self-entertainment) pursuit is not all that old (I think) and comes from the old children's toy; a hobby-horse is (usually) a stick with a simulated horse's head on the end which a child straddles and pretends to be riding a real horse. That term itself comes from a real Irish breed of horse, and thence from words meaning 'to hop'. Anyway, 'hobby' was instead applied to personal pursuits by broadening the meaning from the child's toy of 'activity that doesn't go anywhere'.
Hobby is also the name of a type of small bird of prey, probably unrelated (except perhaps by the 'hopping' sense I think) whose scientific name is Falco subbuteo. Falco is Latin for 'sickle' (referring to the wing shape of the bird - of course 'falcon' has since become a recognised English term) and 'subbuteo' means literally 'sub-buzzard', indicating hobbies are smaller than buzzards. However, a lot of us will know the word 'Subbuteo' as the name for a form of table football, and may now be scratching our heads wondering what flicking small model footballers has to do with being smaller than a buzzard. Well, apparently, Subbuteo's creator Peter Adolph (1916-1994) - who served in the RAF during the war so I can imagine there were lots of jokes about his surname... - wanted to patent his game idea as simply 'Hobby' but was told he couldn't. So he used the scientific name of the bird, despite that having nothing to do with the intrinsic meaning of the word 'hobby'.
The English language is a strange beast.
'Hobby' in the sense of a diverting but pointless (beyond self-entertainment) pursuit is not all that old (I think) and comes from the old children's toy; a hobby-horse is (usually) a stick with a simulated horse's head on the end which a child straddles and pretends to be riding a real horse. That term itself comes from a real Irish breed of horse, and thence from words meaning 'to hop'. Anyway, 'hobby' was instead applied to personal pursuits by broadening the meaning from the child's toy of 'activity that doesn't go anywhere'.
Hobby is also the name of a type of small bird of prey, probably unrelated (except perhaps by the 'hopping' sense I think) whose scientific name is Falco subbuteo. Falco is Latin for 'sickle' (referring to the wing shape of the bird - of course 'falcon' has since become a recognised English term) and 'subbuteo' means literally 'sub-buzzard', indicating hobbies are smaller than buzzards. However, a lot of us will know the word 'Subbuteo' as the name for a form of table football, and may now be scratching our heads wondering what flicking small model footballers has to do with being smaller than a buzzard. Well, apparently, Subbuteo's creator Peter Adolph (1916-1994) - who served in the RAF during the war so I can imagine there were lots of jokes about his surname... - wanted to patent his game idea as simply 'Hobby' but was told he couldn't. So he used the scientific name of the bird, despite that having nothing to do with the intrinsic meaning of the word 'hobby'.
The English language is a strange beast.
- Location
- NYC (né Falkirk)
- Pronouns
- he/him
Isn't that a one of the pictures on the wall at the end of The Shining?
I won't post pictures for sensitivity reasons, but Germany also has this weird subculture of LARPing as indigenous Americans (to a way greater extent than, e.g. kids in the fifties playing cowboys and Indians) which is understandably viewed with Some Concern by said indigenous Americans.
Native Americans in German popular culture - Wikipedia
Especially as it was most popular in East Germany - though apparently there was some attempt to make it political there by tying it to American Capitalists Genocided the Natives and so on.
I won't post pictures for sensitivity reasons, but Germany also has this weird subculture of LARPing as indigenous Americans (to a way greater extent than, e.g. kids in the fifties playing cowboys and Indians) which is understandably viewed with Some Concern by said indigenous Americans.
Native Americans in German popular culture - Wikipedia
Especially as it was most popular in East Germany - though apparently there was some attempt to make it political there by tying it to American Capitalists Genocided the Natives and so on.
I remember learning this years back on s B movie website, the Native Americans were seen as romantically tragic IIRC.
napoleon IV
Moo Deng Xiaoping
- Location
- Washington, Douglass Commonwealth
- Pronouns
- he/him
So the East German stuff is interesting. Basically a lot of Germany's obsession with Native Americans comes from the author Karl May, who wrote a bunch of Westerns in the late 1800s focused on the plight of Native Americans (though May never actually visited America). Unfortunately Hitler was a huge Karl May fan, so the East German government was uncomfortable with May's work. But Westerns were still very popular in East Germany, and the government realized that there's a fairly obvious anti-American take on westward expansion and Germans would already be familiar with this. There's also a trend across the Eastern Bloc at this same time for anti-American Westerns, the Germans took it further than most but there's a number of these films from other countries as well as a separate trend of Osterns (basically Westerns but set in Siberia and Central Asia, think White Sun of the Desert).I won't post pictures for sensitivity reasons, but Germany also has this weird subculture of LARPing as indigenous Americans (to a way greater extent than, e.g. kids in the fifties playing cowboys and Indians) which is understandably viewed with Some Concern by said indigenous Americans.
Native Americans in German popular culture - Wikipedia
Especially as it was most popular in East Germany - though apparently there was some attempt to make it political there by tying it to American Capitalists Genocided the Natives and so on.
- Location
- NYC (né Falkirk)
- Pronouns
- he/him
I did find it hilarious that at the same time you had Italian westerns being filmed in Spain you had East German westerns being filmed in Yugoslavia.
It's incredible how much of the world looked like Spain in the 1960s according to movies. The American West looked like Spain. The Belgian Ardennes looked like Spain. Even Beijing looked like Spain.
Which is all the more ironic considering that Sharpe decided that Spain looked like Ukraine.
- Location
- Arlington, Virginia
- Pronouns
- he/him
Well, they share a history of wars that serve as bellwethers for ascendant fascist menaces…
Usborne predicts the future from the 1970s (albeit a better future where smartphones still have proper keyboards).
"Sockets for physical media", we were robbed.
It's interesting that Canada, Australia, and England just had elections so close together. It reminds me of the way India scatters its national elections over the course of weeks in different states. Maybe there's an imperial federation or something out there that would run its elections in a similar manner.
Prezident
Well-known member
- Location
- Steel City, Westsylvania
Also interesting how many party leaders have lost, not only nationally, but their constituencies as well.
napoleon IV
Moo Deng Xiaoping
- Location
- Washington, Douglass Commonwealth
- Pronouns
- he/him
Mariani Wine was a cocaine-infused wine that inspired Coca-Cola. Pope Leo XIII loved it and gave it a medal; this ad from the company is bragging about that.
- Location
- London
That era’s version of PKD’s Solarcaine, maybe?
