Interesting Links for 17-09-2024

[andrewducker]

1. D&D is absolutely not medieval

(tags:history dungeonsanddragons )

2. The number of New Zealanders hampered by asthma or serious lung disease has grown by more than 40 percent in three years

(tags:asthma newzealand pandemic )

3. How Britain tried to kill Birmingham

(tags:UK cities history planning )

4. 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft just fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

(tags:space impressive NASA )

5. More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child, study suggests

(tags:children school pandemic )

Comments

[calimac]

1) I never got far enough in D&D to acquire property or minions, so this is all news to me.

3) I was in Birmingham for a conference nearly 20 years ago, and while I never got through or out of the central ring on foot (the conference was at Aston U, which is inside the ring), what I saw was pleasant for a big city and not pedestrian-unfriendly, though certainly far less intimate than London, or Edinburgh for that matter.

[kmusser]

#1. I feel like that was written by someone that hasn't read any fantasy, which is just weird. I don't think it's a secret that D&D was heavily based on fantasy novels of the day, chiefly Tolkien, with a healthy dose of pulp adventure added in. Almost everything they are ascribing to D&D were pretty common fantasy tropes.

[fub]

Not only is it not a secret, it was right there in the text: the (in)famous "Appendix N" lists books and other media that served as inspiration for the original D&D rules.

[hairyears]

1: Oh dear, another misuse of "Mediaeval" parody...

Much of Europe was dominated by feudalism in the later periods we lump into 'the middle ages' but it wasn't the only society in existence.

Scandinavia was a mercantile economy of manufacturing and trading (with rather less raiding or 'viking' than you would gather from popular histories) and status in society was based in wealth and repuration, not on landholdings.

Parts of Iberia (the Basque country), the Low Countries, and countries we now call Switzerland were far more fluid and a bit less hierarchical.

The Norman conquest of England, in the years following the battle of Hastings, can be viewed as the systematic suppression of the trading economy (including chattel slavery) in favour of land-denominated wealth and feudal government and this was not the only form of 'mediaeval' society. Even if it was militarily effectiveand the victors got to write the history books.