Random Questions Thread

Neat. Thanks a lot for the answers, everyone!

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Is there a term for losing all of your current money in a poker game? Where you go all-in but don't win that hand, preventing you from playing again in that game.

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything that matches your description, so I don't think it exists. However, I did find a list of poker terms that might be helpful to you anyways.

"Can't make an omelette without breaking some children." -Bur

Has anyone here went to Akihabara before?

The only good fanboy, is a redeemed fanboy.

If a thirty-something, powerfully-built military man is suddenly put in conditions where he's forced to stop his training regime (or at least not training as intensively) and is poorly fed (not to a starving rate, just worse than he was before), will he lose much of his muscle mass in 3-5 years of living in such conditions? Say, if he was 180 cm tall, weighing around 90 kg at his prime what will his weight approximately be after living in such conditions? Also, how fast will he regain his form if his living conditions will become better again?

Spiral out, keep going.

I have! But it was many years ago, so I don't really remember much of it.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

I have a story where the protagonist is the body double of a princess type character. What do you think is more interesting - the MC and the princess being identical strangers, or them secretly being twins?

Creator of Heroes of Thantopolis: http://heroesofthantopolis.com/

I think identical strangers appeals to me more, just because I feel like it's a bit fresher.

I recently realized that part of the reason I'm having trouble writing down a summarized from-a-zoologist's-POV description of a race that I've made up is that my visualization of how that race looks like is rather "fuzzy" on certain details ^note in part because I appear to have more or less invented them; I certainly haven't seen any artist draw anything remotely similar to said details, at the very least. I thought of remedying this by drawing rough sketches from various angles, but for a variety of reasons doing so by hand is not an option, so I have to do it via graphic art software. That being said, most of my past experience with such software is via MS-Paint, which I know is definitely subpar for what I want to do (for one, fixing drawing errors or changing the design would be a nightmare^note once I drop down any shape, for example, it no longer remains its own object and, if undoing the act is impossible/unfeasible, must have every last pixel of it manually erased).

Any suggestions?

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 18th 2018 at 10:17:33 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

GIMP is Photoshop's open source equal, Paint.NET is also pretty widely recommended.

Ah, GIMP. I installed it a few months ago in preparation for attempting to fix a minor scanlation error for some manga/doujinshi, but someone beat me to the punch and I kept delaying my plan to familiarize myself with it. Now I have a reason to stop procastinating.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Inkscape is a vector software, and I found it much more forgiving than raster apps like GIMP as a beginner. You only need to work with a handful of shape, path and line tools instead of dozens of filters, brushes and colour grading options, and you can easily modify or delete any individual component you're unhappy with. This tutorial pretty much covers all you need to draw something neat with it.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Honestly, guys, I'm not sure where this would go. Both the History and Alternate History threads seem to be gathering dust, I've already asked this twice in a PM with no responses, and this isn't really a writing question so much as it's an information-for-writing question. Here it goes:

Does anyone here have any decent knowledge about the history of East/SE Asia during the late Tang dynasty period? Specifically, I'm talking from the An-Lushan Rebellion onward. Of course, it's not necessarily just this region of Asia, but also places like Western Europe. What I'm trying to do is write a TL where the mirror Asia-as-Europe from this map is ISOT'd to our world shortly after Obama wins his second term in 2012 (the mirror Asia is also from Nov. 2012). Of course, I'm also planning to tweak some things in the mirror world for the purposes of the TL, but that's the gist of it.

The reason I'm looking for someone with this kind of specific knowledge is so I can outline the general history of the Eastern-dominated world in my first post, before moving on to the actual TL. I want to present an Eastern-dominated mirror world that is at least somewhat believable, and not just "it's a mirror world!" For example-I'm looking for China to fall apart by 812. How does Charlemagne make it so the HRE has a strong foundation to survive as a truly unified imperial realm, since he will die just two years after that? These are the kinds of questions I have. Other questions to give a solid idea of the kind of info I'm seeking for my TL:

- How would an Eastern dominated world develop into modernity (seeing as to how so much of our world imitates the West in matters such as architecture because the West has been dominant for so long)?

- Would Asian colonizing powers develop the same sort of systems of slavery and indentured servitude as OTL?

- What group could be analogous to the Vikings in Asia, especially in terms of forcing the then-isolated island nation (England/Nihon) to stop being so isolated early in its history?

Sorry if this seems like a needlessly huge post, as well as if it seems like it doesn't belong, but at this point I honestly don't know where else to go.

"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."

Southeast Asian history geek reporting! My reading is mostly on insular SEA/Nusantara from the 16th century onwards, but I can give this one a shot.

It took me a while to make sense of the map and its premise, and I think that there's a huge amount of variables to cover here, so let's go through the points one by one:

• The An Lushan rebellion was pretty much a death blow to the Tang dynasty: it destroyed the governmental infrastructure in both Chang'an and Luoyang, landed the imperial government deep in debt, killed millions of people and weakened its ties to the Silk Road. It would take another century for it to collapse into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, but it was already on its way out long before that. A common pattern in Chinese civil wars is the decentralisation of power to regional governors and warlords - the imperial governments normally loathed to allow the governors their own standing armies but had no other choice when rebellions cropped up. By the end of the war, China was chock full of warlords running their own de facto feudal fiefdoms. It wouldn't take much for one of them (probably a pardoned rebel leader) to rally his troops and march on Luoyang before 812, I imagine.
• I could be mistaken, but to my knowledge, the Carolingian Empire was inherently unstable as a result of the Frankish gavelkind system, which meant that Charlemagne's territory had to be divided up between his descendants. It's possible that the Empire could've developed a strong centralised power structure if he had reformed the inheritance system into a more stable primogeniture, though I'm not nearly familiar enough with the situation to say.
• How the West caught up to the East is a huge and complicated topic - it's pretty difficult to even determine when such a thing happened. I would say that the Age of Discovery was the element that set apart the West apart, since it opened up access to new lands and resources (especially in the Americas) as well as accelerated the course of technological development, consolidation of state powers and development of sophisticated financial institutions.
  • Asian empires, for most parts, had no real economic incentive to go on such far-ranging journeys. China had most of what it needed in the exceptionally fertile Yangtze/Yellow river valleys, and India had the advantage of both rich waterways and endemic spices. However, in the post-An Lushan world you're going for, it's possible to have some of the Chinese states to hit a hard resource cap in their own territory and turn towards a maritime economy. This historically happened to the Song dynasty in the 11th century, as the loss of territory to the Jurchen-Jin and Mongols in the north and the Tibetans in the west forced them to hold on to their remaining territories in the south, which involved massive reclamation works around the Grand Canal and increased engagement in the Indian Ocean trade. You could probably have some maritime Chinese states alternatively forging alliances with the Srivijaya, the Khmer and the Japanese and invading undefended bits of those states' territories, creating the kind of bordergore that you would see in Europe in the late medieval period. Some of them might establish fur-trading outposts and colonies in Siberia, while others might range as far south as Australia in search of new colonies.
  • The spice trade was the main historical incentive for the Age of Discovery - the rise of the Ottoman Empire made the overland trade routes precarious for the Europeans, and the monarchies supported many maritime ventures in search of spice supplies that wouldn't put them at the risk of conflict and markups with the Muslims. Southeast Asia was hardly short of spices, so our Chinese states would probably be looking for something else. It could be precious metals to pay off their trade deficits, which were plentiful in the Americas. Or it could be something as mundane as sea cucumbers (teripang/trepang), which is a delicacy and an ingredient in Chinese medicine. China historically imported its dried sea cucumbers from the Bugis/Macassan sailors of Sulawesi, who would sail out to the coast of North Australia to harvest them (making contact with the indigenous Australians in the process). You could probably stage an early "scramble for Australia" between the Chinese states and their Southeast Asian neighbours, in the vein of the historical Scramble for Africa. The Philippines was also politically fragmented in this time period, so you could have the aforementioned proto-colonial powers vying for domination there and establishing local client kingdoms to pay them tribute.
  • Anyway, re:development into modernity. The compass, the printing press and gunpowder were all invented in China. These things also launched Europe into the age of discovery. But all of these things were invented before the second millennium CE, and by the late Song era (11th-12th century), the rich pre-industrial society had hit its zenith. Part of the reason was that the Chinese imperial administrations were centralised in a very different way from the European monarchies: there's a distinct lack of powerful foreign foes for most parts, so there's no monarchy-military-industry patronage network of the kind that you'd see in late medieval Europe. The idea was to keep the taxes low, the military small and the bureaucracy functional, which allowed China to extract its internal resources efficiently without worrying about external sources. In the Song era, however, the advances in agriculture and metallurgy led to massive swathes of the country being stripped of forest cover, which caused widespread hydrological disasters and put a cap on economic growth. The Song didn't play the maritime trade game for very long before they got overrun by the Mongols, and the later Ming would only invest into maritime voyages for so long before stopping them for political reasons. In a divided China scenario, the individual states would be on constant lookout for each other, which by necessity would concentrate military-industrial power in the hands of their respective rulers. I imagine such a situation would catalyse bigger investment into maritime voyages and technology, as the states would look to overseas resource bases to augment their economic powers versus their overland rivals. They might not launch anything as impressive as Zheng He's treasure fleet individually, but they would probably carry out maritime trade and expeditions at a larger overall scale, over a much longer time scale, which would drive further military advances and project Chinese naval power across the oceans before the Europeans could do the same. I'm not sure if the Indian and Persian states could have done something similar, but either way, there's going to be an accelerated technological exchange along the Southeast Asian trade nodes.
• Probably? A lot of African slave export went east, to the Middle East and across the Indian Ocean. There were records of African slaves being presented to the Sui Emperor by one Southeast Asian ambassador or another in the early 7th century, so the practice was clearly known in East Asia. Most African slaves went to plantations in the Levant (and in smaller numbers across Persia and the Arabian Peninsula), but it's perfectly plausible for East/Southeast Asian powers to tap on them for cheap labour in an alternate history scenario. Labour cost is not really a factor in Asia; the Atlantic slave trade made economic sense because it was cheaper than bringing paid labourers over to the New World, so the biggest incentive for such a system would be, well, a colonial venture.
• The Japanese themselves played a similar role during the medieval/early modern period. Wako/wokou pirate gangs terrorised the Chinese and Southeast Asian coast for hundreds of years, though most of their crew were Chinese rather than Japanese. Asia's pre-eminent naval powers in the 9th-10th centuries were the Srivijaya in Southeast Asia and the Chola in the Bay of Bengal. Neither of them had the incentive to sail to the far north and raid Japan, especially given its distance from the Indian Ocean trade. But I guess that you could have one of Tang breakaway states set up shop somewhere between the Yangtze delta and Fujian and turn into a commerce-raiding naval power, which is probably the most realistic option in this scenario.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jul 23rd 2018 at 5:53:58 AM

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Thank you for that information, eagleoftheninth! Quite a bit to take in, especially with some of the other information I've gathered. I'll address more of this in a later PM, but for now, I would like to further ask:

- What would be the chances of either An Lushan himself or An Qingxu allying with a barbarian group in order to defeat the Tang?

- What would keep the British Isles themselves isolationist/closed-off similar to Japan IOTL?

"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."

• Not too familiar with the ethnic situation on the western frontier, sorry. But if I'm not mistaken, the Tanguts and Khitans were both mid-level regional forces, so An prolly could've recruited some of their people as horseback auxiliaries, if not as full-on political allies. The Uyghurs historically supported the imperial government, but I guess you could write a situation where the rebels approached them first - again I'm not that familiar on the relations between An (a Sogdian/Gokturk general) and the Uyghurs, so I might just be spitballing here.
• The British Isles have been in constant contact with the outside world since before Roman times. There was obviously the arrival of the Saxons before our timeframe, but missionaries from continental Europe have also been coming to Britain before and after that - and Ireland was home to some of the world's most important monastic institutions, attracting monks and clergymen from all corners of the Christendom. Considering all the wealth to be found on the isles, I can't think of any way that you could prevent the later Viking raids - but it's possible for Alfred the Great to have banished all Viking settlers from English soil after his victory at the Battle of Edington in 878. Without the Danelaw, you wouldn't have had generations of Viking rulers being obsessed by their claim to the English throne, though you'd probably still have significant raiding activity and some invasions. A united England not distracted by Viking activity would likely have had a better time resisting the Norman invasion in 1066, which would have delayed its interlinking with the French aristocracy. Then have the Anglo-Saxon leadership institute something akin to Edo Japan's later sakoku for good measure, and you have a nicely bottled up (if not very economically well-off) Britain.

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Thank you, again, for that information. I'm beginning to have some greater ideas for my TL already.

"Somehow the hated have to walk a tightrope, while those who hate do not."

How plausible is it if I depicted the field of zoology from several centuries into the future as having at some point redefined the term "drone" as essentially a synonym for the modern-day "worker" in the eusocial caste sense ^note or, more broadly speaking, any member of a infertile/non-reproductive caste that is subordinate to the fertile/reproductive caste(s) in a eusocial species, conveniently matching the nigh-universal (mis)interpretation of the former term in modern-day science fiction circles and media^note "drone" as a technical term only refers to male bees, ants and wasps, all characterized by having no role other than mating with virgin queens when the relevant season comes?

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 6th 2018 at 6:23:21 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Plausible. What you're describing is semantic drift in a nutshell.

Spiral out, keep going.

Yeah, but wouldn't semantic drift be something that the non-linguistics-related parts of the scientific community (i.e. the vast majority) would be opposed to on principle?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Why would it? Science doesn't exist in vacuum. There's still the need (and one of the main functions) to spread the knowledge, to popularize science. For that the scientific publications need to be written and spoken in as close to the same language as their target audience speaks - the laymen.

Modern science, science-as-it-is now, and with it, the scientific language, starts roughly in the 19th century. Two centuries is long enough time for any language to evolve, and the language of science, especially of popular science, is affected by the same principles by which any language acts.

There's also the fact how the scientific thought itself evolves along with or independent of the societal values, and this change would be reflected in the language spoken by the scientists. After all, nobody's born a scientist.

So, we can speculate that if "drone" would have "a member of the human worker caste" as its main meaning in the future among the masses, scientists would be forced to adopt this term, simply for their work to remain accessible. But only when it comes to spreading the knowledge.

If they'd still be using binomial nomenclature, though, the official name of the drone caste would be something like "Homo Operarius" (if it's recognized as a separate species) for using in the "inner circle", and it would probably remain in its unchanging state until the science's understanding of the subject matter changes.

Or the drone caste would branch into subcastes.

Or they'd start using other nomenclature systems.

Or the lingua franca of the future would be something other than English. Who knows? In Russian the word for "drone", трутень, doesn't even carry the connotations of someone who does menial jobs, it means a slacker, a parasite.

P.S. Also, when asking about plausibility of something speculative, always mind your target audience. The majority of people wouldn't be aware that something like semantic drift even exists, or simply wouldn't care on what principles the eggheads name their things, if it doesn't affect the plot and general narrative somehow. If you're writing for the specialists, then you better become a specialist and not waste your time here asking random people. I apologize if it comes off as rude but I'm only trying to give you feedback. I find the situation you described plausible according to my level of knowledge. Someone more knowledgeable would probably not, but I don't have the capacity to say for sure.

Edited by Millership on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:26:44 PM

Spiral out, keep going.

... Scientists don't use binomial nomenclature for naming castes in eusocial species, simply because binomial nomenclature is used for taxonomy, and eusocial structures like caste systems have nothing to do with taxonomy.

Edited by MarqFJA on Aug 9th 2018 at 7:46:37 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

That's why I specified if they are recognized as a separate species.

There were instances when male and female specimens of the same fish were counted as separate species, because of the magnitude of sexual demorphism between them. Scientists could make same mistakes when dealing with castes theoretically.

Edited by Millership on Aug 9th 2018 at 11:23:50 PM

Spiral out, keep going.

I somehow missed that part completely. Must've been the fact that I was reading a Wall of Text, plus still struggling with the after-effects of an intense bout of nasal allergy (pray you don't get the kind of headaches and general exhaustion that I tend to suffer), plus my mind being partly preoccupied with the persistence of a server-wide glitch in a mobile game that I've been playing^note Took over 14 hours before they finally fixed it..

I believe you're talking about whalefish and bignoses (female and male, respectively), though you're missing the part where the scientists mistook their juveniles for a third species (tapetail).

---

For the record, I asked my original question because modern-day entomology has the term "gyne" (Greek for "female; woman") to denote the caste of reproductively active females in eusocial insect species, which are more commonly called "queen"; it's pretty useful, because it feels weird to call unmated gynes "virgin queens" (they don't rule anything yet; that's why fictional works such as A Bug's Life or Antz use "princess" instead), and some species of stingless bees have a second caste of reproductive females called "dwarf queens" that can coexist alongside true queens.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

IIRC, some species of anglerfish also got this treatment.

Spiral out, keep going.