Alicornutopia

Milliways. Time in Milliways doesn’t work like time outside it. Time in one part of Milliways doesn’t work like time in another part. If event A happens before event B somewhere, this will probably* be the case everywhere, but that’s about all you can say if one or more of the “where”s involved are any part of Milliways.

* I believe Alicorn doesn’t want to write more complex time travel in the same world as Bells, so this is more like “almost certainly”.

Subjective time is part of sentencing because doing it some other way would be weird.

Ace will sign up before she leaves but hasn't yet.

anthusiasum wrote:I'm sort of curious as to how Sabrina intends to fight oppression with Pokemon. (Although maybe the answer will be revealed if I read a bit more).

She'd make a million plans for Setting Things Right, get talked into trying to amass large amounts of money for lobbying, mostly by robbing, get frustrated with how slow things are going and end up taking either something or someone hostage.

What happens after that is left as an exercise for the reader.

A list of the anachronisms I remember from the Connecticut Yankee and Demon Cam sandbox:

—I mentioned Northumbria once. Not only did it not exist in the mid-6th century, but when it did it was an Anglian kingdom. Should have said Ystrad Clud. Oops.
—Same with Canterbury. It did exist, but was more or less in the heart of enemy Anglo-Saxon territory. It was not remotely the seat of the Church.
—For that matter, Catholicism didn't exist in the British Isles until the end of that century. This one is not my fault, as Mark Twain definitely had the Catholic Church controlling the kingdom(s?) already.
—Heraldry did not exist in King Arthur's time. Neither did plate armor. Yes, really.
—The "massed chivalry of England." England didn't exist and Arthur was at war with its predecessors, and chivalry was not yet dead but also hadn't been born. But it's Twain's phrase and I like it.
—Caerleon and Camelot aren't supposed to be the same place, but I needed a city in Wales to put the castle in. Caerleon worked.
—For some reason I thought Hank was from 1895, when in fact the book was published in '89. I don't think the extra six years mattered much, though it does mean I overestimated his familiarity with motion pictures and Caerleon gets a better sewer system. This Hank is from 1895.
—Language. They should be speaking early Welsh, but since Hank doesn't speak that they're all speaking modern English. This will continue to be ignored if they talk to people who should be speaking Cumbric or Old English or something.
—Galangal is native to Indonesia. Trade routes were surprisingly close to being that good, but the Silk Road only reached to Italy. I regret nothing.

And probably a lot more. If something seems like a mistake, it very likely is and even more likely does not matter (but I'd want to know anyway).

Speaking of plate armour, I've heard that it is actually way easier to move around in than most people think, but I'm not a medieval scholar so I don't have a better source than "it looked plausible in the commentary on that video I didn't watch on Tumblr".

It was also plausible in that viedo on tumblr and some of my own small amount of research. Basically, you can’t fight in something as immobile as everybody imagines, so they wouldn’t use it. However, Twain’s plate armor was quite cumbersome. Basically, I imagine the entire sandbox falls under Twain’s historical disclaimer:
[quote=Mark Twain]
The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are historical, and the episodes which are used to illustrate them are also historical. It is not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also. One is quite justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one.
[/quote]

All I relevantly know about plate armor is that canon Hank really hates it.

At the comment about ventilation, I imagined it having little ionic fans (or something else similarly no-moving-parts-level-of-silent) placed at all the positions that air could be induced to enter, but hidden under the actual armor. Something with really good heat transmission would help keep the temperature close to environmental. Weight and flexibility are obviously a simple matter for material science; even today we can make metals or composites that basically feel like heavy-for-the-thickness cloth but will stop anything short of a pretty decent firearm; something that will turn a sixth-century blade is no problem at all. Put a hard shell over it to help spread the impact (especially from bludgeoning weapons) and some padding with the best sweat-wicking-away cloth known after yet another 150 years of wars in the Middle East and hikers in the desert, and it'll be pretty comfortable in the likely climates of the British isles while being practically impervious to weapons of the day (you wouldn't want to get hit with a catapult stone while wearing it, but even that probably wouldn't kill you if the armor had the right kinds of protection for the neck and such). The helmet is still an obvious weak point unless you make the visor out of diamond or something, instead of the traditional slitted-but-you-can-still-get-an-arrowhead-or-dagger-blade-in openings for seeing and breathing and such.

from a biblical standpoint, the sin of sodom and gemorrah was not, in the 6th century, understood to have anything to do with homosexuality. it was about not sharing wealth with the poor, about not being kind to strangers, and things like that. homosexuality as the concept we understand it today didn't really exist until the 19th century. of course there have been people of all genders who loved all genders as long as there have been humans, but the concept of gender identity and sexual orientation is very modern. back then, it would not have been unusual, or even frowned upon, for people to have relationships with people of the same sex. also polygamy was widely practiced. Most Biblical figures had multiple wives and concubines. The idea that marriage is between a single man and a single woman is very modern. Hank might be modern enough to have modern sensibilities about these things but the 6th century people shouldn't have much trouble with either homosexuality or polygamy (and especially not with polygamy).

Also religious marriage by a priest was something only the nobility would have had access to, and it was mostly a legal thing to secure that their progeny would own the land that they owned. regular people (peasants) did not own land and had no reason to get married with a priest and a church. people would still have gotten into relationships with each other of course, but marriage was only an aristocracy thing.

Shoal wrote:from a biblical standpoint, the sin of sodom and gemorrah was not, in the 6th century, understood to have anything to do with homosexuality. it was about not sharing wealth with the poor, about not being kind to strangers, and things like that. homosexuality as the concept we understand it today didn't really exist until the 19th century. of course there have been people of all genders who loved all genders as long as there have been humans, but the concept of gender identity and sexual orientation is very modern. back then, it would not have been unusual, or even frowned upon, for people to have relationships with people of the same sex. also polygamy was widely practiced. Most Biblical figures had multiple wives and concubines. The idea that marriage is between a single man and a single woman is very modern. Hank might be modern enough to have modern sensibilities about these things but the 6th century people shouldn't have much trouble with either homosexuality or polygamy (and especially not with polygamy).

Also religious marriage by a priest was something only the nobility would have had access to, and it was mostly a legal thing to secure that their progeny would own the land that they owned. regular people (peasants) did not own land and had no reason to get married with a priest and a church. people would still have gotten into relationships with each other of course, but marriage was only an aristocracy thing.

*writes this down for potential long-lived character*