Ha! I tried to explain the S morpheme to a bunch of high achieving SAT tutorial students and their faces turned cartoon character exploding thermometer red as I did it till finally some girl at the back just cracked and asked, "What the hell are morphemes? What the hell is this test testing us on?"

Attila is pretty great. You still have a great state penalty if you are playing someone like the Persians, but it's much easier to see and compensate for.

Man, Fall of the Samurai is good. With the exception of Napolean and Empire I now play their initial games about 40% for the game itself and about 60% for how much better their inevitably superior expansion will be given that I can appreciate how much it builds on the original.

Bwahahaha! That's the best thing I'm gonna read all day, let alone in this thread, simply by knowing such a thing exists.

Wanting to be more like the USA/West, as a sentiment, is the author of an incredible amount of misery even inside the US/West.

I don't know I used to think that. And then an Orthodox friend spent an hour telling me about how the battles between Arians and Orthodox would have 'There was a time he was not' on the former side and the Kyrie on the latter and, brother, I was sold on that conflict.

It is not a field of work that encourages anyone but the self-motivated. As a result the range of surprise when forced to engage with others ranges from pleasant to horrified and vacillates wildly between those extremes.

Would you default then to an understanding that it's impossible to understand the period without viewing it in terms of both continuity and discontinuity?

Such fluency was an awfully common hallmark for the period. I'm not saying it would have been common generally, but within academic circles it would have been more or less bog standard.

Obviously the British empire is aggressively dismantling in the period after WWII, yes, but between the wars you have a complex period with devolution of powers to entities like Australia and Canada balanced against the new mandates in the Middle-East. Going into WWII, the British Empire is still exactly that with…

Where do you fall in the Late Antiquity vs 'Dark Ages' divide? I'm a Peter Brown fan myself so I'm fairly convinced, but it's interesting to me that the collapse camp has been demonstrating more vigor of late.

Given the choice of where I'd be born (or, better, where I'd magically appear as a socially integrated 30 year old) I'd still pick anything in Late Antiquity over the 2nd century.

That was explicitly what inspired Gibbon, the monks moving into their churches into the forum and what an awe-inspiring perversion of the right order of things he felt that to be.

I've been enjoying 12 Byzantine Emperors a great deal, but I might do that one next.

That's a just-so story told in a lot of English departments, but it's not terribly true.

That's cause he's awesome!

I was very impressed by the disgust rhetoric used by the against fluoridation campaign. "It comes from factory farms" said in the right tone of voice in a YouTube apparently gives you ALL the authority and wins you any argument.

Depends on who you ask/how you interpret it working in the early empire.

Even saying tor/tee as their dichotomy is simplifying it a bit, they were just very granular, by our standards, when it came to sex and more coherent about other relationships.

Less than you'd think. Ok, wait, I have no idea what you might think… what I mean is, the libraries and scholarly community he had at his disposal weren't unimpressive.