Unfortunately Not a Real Pony

So was anyone going to tell me that after World War 2, a number of west and east European countries built forced labor camps where they used German prisoners as slave labor, or was I supposed to find out for myself while reading about the ammonia synthesis reaction?

Katherine Howard did nothing wrong.

Something something Macy having literally like just a vial of demon blood in her, not her own but introduced by a necromancer when she was a baby, and yet still being considered a demon (by the Book of Elders and the demonic nightclub flame test thing at least, oh and also CHARITY the White Feminist from Hell) is a fantasy take on the historical one drop rule.

There's some interesting analysis there but I need to sleep.

"Catherine the Great had a claim to the Russian throne because she was descended from the Rurikoviches..."

So's three quarters of Europe and a significant portion of Western and Central Asia. Should we all start assassinating each other for control over Kyiv?

I picked a book up at the library the other day - The Last Days of the Romanovs, by Helen Rappaport. It sits at the intersection of "gorgeous period clothing" and "family sticking together in the face of great adversity" and "Eastern European history that generally gets butchered by US teachers" so how could I not?

Anyway. It's not a book about the Russian Revolution or communism or anything, but you can't really write about 1918 in Russia without discussing those things.

And like. Holy shit. There's something about reading it in a book, seeing what the Soviet leadership said in their own words (translated, obviously) that hit me in the gut in a way that learning about it in class or seeing it on Wikipedia didn't. I mean. Lenin straight-up used the words "create terror" when talking about how to get the country under control.

My middle school history teacher: "Historically, China had five dynasties."

Wikipedia: "LOL Look at this amateur! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history Read this!"

When you play the Genghis Khan campaign in Age of Empires, one of the scenarios has two warring tribes, both of which agree to join you if you eradicate the other.

So I would use a monk given to me by another tribe and convert all six members of one tribe to my team, which made the game think I killed them all, and ended up with twelve people joining me instead of six.