bookandswordblog @bookandswordblog@scholar.social

New post: when and why did militaries join the cult of youth? (cw: 600 year old mass murder) https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/09/25/the-cult-of-youth/

Got the printed version of an article which had been waiting to be printed since 2015! I only found four small mistakes in their version.

To log out of Amazon's online store, so they can't use the cookie to track you across the web, you have to enable their Javascripts - the dropdown menu with the "sign out" option is otherwise hidden #stateOfTheWeb

@vicorva now I want to turn into an allosaurus with rainbow feathers https://victoriacorva.xyz/books/non-player-character-by-victoria-corva/

New post: ghost soldiers ancient and modern https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/09/18/ghost-soldiers/

After writing my current booklet as a Markdown file in a text editor, I finally printed it. The editing is going much faster now!

"The period was fatal in the extreme to the Jacobite Pretender. The whole body of his adherents in the south had fallen into the hands of generals Willis and Carpenter at Preston, and Inverness, with all the adjacent country, had been recovered to the government" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sheriffmuir #historodons

Alberto Brandolini coined Brandolini's Law of Bullshit on 11 January 2013: "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it" https://www.theifod.com/brandolinis-law-the-bullshit-asymmetry-principle/ #internetCulture #stateOfTheWeb #brandolinisLaw

A financial journalist got confused why some people have lots of books, wracked the place inside his skull and his memory of how economist-pundits talk to him, and decided that "old books are rarely useful" so it must be about impressing visitors 🙄. Has he never encountered the concepts "transaction cost" (tracking down a set of your favourite trashy novelist costs time and often money) or "reference library"?

new post: rationalists, empiricists, rhetoricians (w/ cat photo) https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/09/11/rationalists-empiricists-rhetoricians/ #weirdInternetMovements #historodons

Winchell "Nyrath" Chung, the artist for the OGRE wargame and host of the project rho / atomic rockets website http://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Condolences at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cr1Pc4icusfXMQET5RsbSo-zKRdrkbbFQHzssDBW9xc/edit?usp=sharing patreon at https://www.patreon.com/nyrath

I am locked out of a PayPal account because it added two-factor authentification by SMS or phone call to my old Austrian cell phone number which has not worked since the T-Mobile hack. I don't see any alternative- resetting the password does not work. More and more, if you take elementary precautions the web is hostile to you.