I think about history sometimes.
Joined December 2010
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My theory is that Emperor Basil II was a time traveler from a timeline in which the Bulgarians were the ones who conquered Constantinople.
The OP is making a joke but people are reading this headline and thinking it's ambiguous. No, it is not ambiguous. There is only one way to read it, but you have to pay attention to and understand punctuation.
This fits a pattern I've already noticed. Young people virtually never use hyphens, and many don't even know how to use them.
Paradox pretends that CK3 is a history game, but really it's a fantasy RPG with no magic.
Premodernist retweeted
Very funny that the routine line about the Treaty of Westphalia being the beginning of a "modern state system based on sovereignty" was apparently just anti-Habsburg propaganda, useful to nationalists across Europe, which 20th century scholars happily endorsed.
People replying that it started with the baby boomers. It did not. It started with the millennials. All older cohorts are retcons.
One of the weirdest cultural changes in my lifetime is how in less than 20 years everyone somehow became deeply invested in a generational label as a core part of their identity. I know of no parallel for this in any other historical period.
The modern mind cannot comprehend this.
The incredulity in the quoted thread is misplaced. The map is fairly accurate, with due consideration for the roughness of our estimates. Several people are insisting there must have been more large cities in other parts of the world. There weren't.
That ribbon of territory between Japan and Western Europe was where the vast majority of the human race lived at the time. The current distribution of the world's population is not how it has always been.
Also note that these are cities with at least 100,000. That is not large by modern standards. Modern-day Conroe has 120,000. Port St. Lucie is approaching 300,000. A few outliers in 1700 were larger, of course. London at the time was maybe 600,000 (a little bigger than modern Canberra). Even the largest city in the world was still probably smaller than today's Buffalo or Leeds or Winnipeg.
The world of 1700 was still a very rural and wild place.
Cities in the year 1700 with over 100,000 people.
ALT Most cities over 100,000 clustered in Asia and the Middle East (Qing China, Mughal India, Safavid/Ottoman realms); Europe had a few growing hubs and Africa only Cairo, while the Americas had none that large. This reflects a pre-industrial world where urban size depended on river-fed agriculture, trade networks, and imperial capitals—patterns later reshaped by industrialization and colonialism.
Premodernist retweeted
People on Twitter suddenly realising that vast swathes of academic writing are meaningless guff reminds me of the recent exposure of poor food standards at kebab factories. If you’ve ever read an academic paper/eaten a kebab it’s the least shocking scandal ever
A century ago the time zones were pretty close to this, and over the decades they crept westward.
"named in a more culturally sensitive way"
"Chicaukee"
This map re-imagines the states of the #USA. Each state is now home to approximately the same number of people and is of similar size. States are also largely named in a more culturally sensitive way. You'll find me in Bayou or Yosemite.
This assumes that races are biological realities that people will by nature have a loyalty to, rather than historically contingent social constructs.
Moreover, they did not have our hindsight. Like people in any generation, they assumed the way things were in their lifetime (e.g. the state of affairs with the European settlers at any given moment in time) was the way it would always be.
Hank Green apparently thinks women in colonial America didn't spend money?
There's somehow a gap between what YouTubers do in their videos and what viewers like to see. It's baffling. Are YouTubers not also consumers of YouTube content? Don't they also get annoyed by this stuff? Nothing on this list should be surprising to any YouTuber.
I asked my YouTube subscribers what they hate the most about YouTubers these days. I got hundreds of interesting responses, here are some of the most popular replies:
- AI use in almost any context, but especially AI-written scripts or narrators, as well as AI graphics and thumbnails.
- Videos that are artificially stretched or padded to be long, especially those that are stretched to be an hour or more in length.
- On the opposite end, shorts. Everyone seems to hate YouTube shorts.
- YouTubers who only offer the most surface-level takes on things while pretending to be profound analysts.
- Front-loading videos with clips of the “most exciting” moments from the video to come.
- On the opposite end, excessively long, rambling intros that take too long to get to the point.
- Very obvious and forced scripted transitions to the ad read instead of just being like “and now a word from this video’s sponsor.”
- Confusing, unclear, or overly click-baity titles that communicate nothing of use to the audience.
- A lot of people also tend to hate YouTubers AB testing thumbnails and titles. This one is a bit hard to hear, because I find that feature to be quite popular among YouTubers themselves, just because it relives the stress that comes from worrying about picking the wrong title/thumb. But I get how it can look a bit needy and grasping.