Linkfest 2022-03-11: Endurance

In elementary school, my favorite teacher showed us a movie or mini series about Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance, maybe this one. In retrospect, he tried pretty hard to instill a love of adventure and a steadfast spirit in his students.


Thanks to a tweet from Victor Valentine Romo, I did try muting these particular keywords, and I do think it cleaned up my Twitter timeline. I see vastly more tweets from people I follow. I copied his list as text here, as he accidentally deleted his own tweet and then reposted it.

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Robert VerBruggen: Fatal Police Shootings

Robert VerBruggen gives an excellent summary of studies that have tried to get at the question of racial bias in the use of force by American police.


Gary Gygax on Jack Vance

This is a fascinating bit of D&D history.


Razib Khan: Getting a Sense of Russian Soul

Razib gives an excellent overview of the history of the Rus, and the key events that shaped their culture and worldview.


Author Larry Correia takes George R. R. Martin to task on Twitter, but the picture I captured is the most telling part. It wasn’t that long ago that GRR Martin fans would have defended him, but after the disappointing ending to the GoT HBO series, 25 years since the beginning of his most famous series, and a decade since releasing a book in that series, apparently his fans really don’t care anymore.


A thread on the difficulties of translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Wulf. It reminds me of attempts to translate ancient Chinese, sometimes you need to guess at important context.

https://twitter.com/AncientDays1/status/1501675083919675392


Fantasy Without Tolkien? Yes That Happened, and Yes It Matters

Brian Murphy looks at the fantasy side of what I talked about in A Follow-up to A Capsule History of English Scifi and Fantasy, the weird phenomenon of people who should really know better perpetuating the deliberate erasure of early and mid-twentieth century authors who didn’t fit some crank’s genre definitions.


John D. Cook: 100 Digits Worth Memorizing

Memorization gets a bad rap, but there are things are really useful to have ready to mind.


Antigone Journal: Greek Fire Signaling

How did signals get passed faster than a horse could move in antiquity?


With Both Hands: Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

I reviewed this book twice, and it remains one of my favorites.


The Long View: World War III

In the 1950s, there really wasn't any reason to be terrified of nuclear weapons. The Soviets had them, but they didn't have very many, and it took a long time for a bomber to fly across the Arctic Circle. The strategic planners and civil defense authorities of the day reacted accordingly. With that settled, they could turn to the far more interesting question of, what would happen if Soviet tanks came pouring through the Fulda Gap.

Dropshot was a plan for war written in 1949, drawing on all the practical experience gained during the Second World War.