Recent content by Yora

The comic segment of Marvel has actually been doing poorly for a long time. The movies are doing great, but people have been speculating about the comic department getting closed and Disney selling a license for making what would basically be movie tie-in comics to smaller publishers for a long...

As they say, nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution. I think a lot of things in media distribution that are now regarded as stopgap measures will find some appreciation and have people thinking "why don't we keep doing this"? As I mentioned in another thread, the whole distribution...

Aside from the stories writers are interested in telling, I now feel like the biggest impacts on fiction will come from the side-effects that are hitting the publishing industry. I don't know about the book market, and the movie industry is basically always in a state of panic. But I've been...

Now that's something I can believe. Big simple evils with a face, that can be overcome by stabbing it with a sword would be very appealing in escapist fiction. Probably no great artistic contributions to literature and cinema, but popular and potentially very lucrative. Oh dear, that means...

In that regard we will see huge regional differences. Here in Germany we have a very strong welfare system that provides high job security and provides quite well for the unemployed, and we also have an economy strong enough to cover the costs for it for quite a long time. Small business owners...

Personally, I think right now epidemiologists are collecting tons of data that never were available to them with our modern statistical methods that at some point in the perhaps not too distant future will be absolutely critical. This might not be the Mega-Death-Flu, but Mega-Death-Flu will come...

The Black Death is really on a completely different scale, literally by orders of magnitude. A recent worst case projection if everything goes wrong and infection rates are very high, estimated that up to 0.6% of the US population could die. For the Black Death, many areas in Europe lost 30 to...

I don't see a zombie comeback. We're still at the tail end of the last zombie hype. And more importantly, zombies aren't really about disease. Zombies are about riots. Most zombie-fiction isn't even about zombies, but about normal humans in a depopulated wild west with no social order. That...

The main question that religions would have to answer is how the common people are getting convinced that getting sacrificed is good for them. What do they get out of the whole arrangement? Because if they think it only benefits the priests and all they get is suffering, they are not going to...

Or wait and hope someone forgets to lock the gate. That's actually how a couple of sieges are reported to have ended.

I know that at least for woodcutting axes, there are literally dozens of different types. And woodworkers can tell you exactly which ones are best for what jobs. From my understanding, in most times and places and in most historical sources, people talking about swords simply call them...

The best way to get past a wall is always to use the gate. Get some people over the palisade and open the gate for the rest of the attackers. Setting fire or cutting through a wall will take a very considerable time, which the defenders will use to shot arrows and spears at the attackers. It's...

The setting is only the stage for a plot to play out on. You can have great stories with very little worldbuilding or a lot, but no amount of worldbuilding can replace plot. Setting is not a story. When it comes to books, I can't actually think of any that have exceptionally good worldbuilding...

I want to get an overall impression of the look and style of the scene. Details are not really important, unless they are important to how the characters will interact with them. But I want something to help me imagine where the scene takes place, instead of just having disembodied voices in a...

All of Japanese history except under the Tokugawa really. Up to the 10th century, straight narrow swords were also quite common in Japan. I just looked it up, and that show is actually set in the early 20th century. Getting a rapier from Europe would have been difficult mostly because they...