Damn it all to Hades, I thought it was the video for the song "Ode to a Centipede" from Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" album!

Harbinger, maybe you should watch Real Genius.

Yeah, the idea that "technical prowess always equals great music" is bullshit. The 80s is lousy with guitarists musically masturbating that produced nothing of value except lousy song solos.
And there's nothing wrong with liking one, two or all three of the musicians listed.

AJR, that sounds like it's just a copy of Turtledove's "Guns of the South". The cover certainly depicts what you described.

"Johnathon Strange" isn't 'straight alternate history', as in there isn't a particular 'change point'. It's more like LoEG or Marvel Comics - our world plus something extra. The changing of history is secondary.

PKD did indeed claim that he wrote it with the I Ching, just as his doppleganger in the book did.

Re: Not heeding Thomas' advice on taking Atlanta -
There's some poetic justice in McClellan receiving news of the fall of Atlanta at about the same time as the Democratic Convention.

What are you talking about?

Thanks, TomWaits. You provided the true "Buzzkill" of today.

DPA, not a fan of Futurama?

It isn't revisionist history. Lucas changed actually what happened in the context of the movie.

"Here is a paper with which if I cannot whip 'Bobbie Lee', I will be willing to go home." - McClellan.
McClellan constantly believed he was outnumbered despite being wrong time and again, and therefore couldn't do this or that. Consider Lincoln's reply when he (yet again) delayed pursuing Lee after Antietam after…

No, it will probably be more like this:

TomWaits, you have to admit that the manatees occasionally will randomly create something that almost resembles 'humor', though.

No, he was a terrible President but a fine human being. There's a lesson there, somewhere.

HE'S GETTING SUED OVER THIS! THIS IS NOT FUNNY! WOULD YOU ASK TOM PETTY THAT?

Just watch any of the clips with him on Letterman. For example, to promote his (phony) book on dog stories, he brought Letterman a dog… and brought Paul Schaffer a box of dog treats.

He was saying that their universe turned out to be 'fake' and ours the real one, for whatever that meant - certainly PKD's counterpart in that world thought it didn't matter.
But it's still funny to read reviews that claim that was wrong because 'all alternate realities are equal'.

In Turtledove's defense, in the bloated corpus of the 'Anti-Lost Cause' Civil War literature he actually came up with a plausible reason. No, not 'Guns of the South' which uses the traditional 'time-traveler did it', but that General McClellan had come across an absurd piece of luck in that the Confederacy lost a…

That's nothing. I took a date in high school to Dana Carvey's first movie.