Tag: writing research

How to Play Hazard (The Dice Game)

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Here’s something I came across researching the book project I’m working on right now, set in early Georgian London: hazard, a dice game with crazy rules, though it’s the ancestor of the simplified dice game craps, which I’m pretty sure is familiar to anyone reading this. Kristen Koster has a reasonably good summary of the game here, but I figured I’d try write it up as well, and see if I couldn’t make the rules a little simpler to follow. I figured some notes about cheating would also be appropriate, since that was widespread in dice games historically. Whether you’re …

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Mary Ambree and Female Warriors

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Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …

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Bruno Overload

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This post deals with some recent readings I’ve done on the subject of Giordano Bruno. It’s divided into three parts: Recent Readings covers the books I read, and my reaction to them, with a special emphasis on the system of artificial memory (that is, how Bruno modified the classical art of memory/memory palace system) that was one of Bruno’s biggest claims to fame in his own time. Side Note: The Temples? plays Six Degrees of Separation between Bruno and Jonathan Swift. I’ve narrowed it down to five degrees, too, which surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t: Europe from 1580 to 1680 was a pretty small world, and …

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A Short History of the Donghak Peasant Revolution by Soonchul Shin and Jinyoung Lee

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Note: I’ve appended an update to the end of this post, with information provided to me on Facebook. Read on for more.   Original Post: I’ve been reading up on Korean history—not just out of interest in filling in some blanks in my historical knowledge, but also, I’ll confess, because of an ongoing writing project, and because the library at work has a ton of materials to which I previously had no access—and the results have been interesting… for the most part, anyway. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. There’s hits and misses, and the book I’ll be discussing today is …

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