EnclavedMicrostate在2022-04-25~2022-05-01的言论

2022-05-01 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

376: How do you eat that?, submitted on 2022-04-25 03:32:55+08:00.

—– 376.1 —–2022-04-25 14:36:12+08:00:

Looks like it’s just a somewhat americanised version of a Mitraillette.

377: 3D VR Ame controlling 3D Ame!, submitted on 2022-04-25 11:21:31+08:00.

—– 377.1 —–2022-04-25 11:40:13+08:00:

Frankly, Ame is the metaverse at this stage.

378: Mindless Monday, 25 April 2022, submitted on 2022-04-25 19:00:11+08:00.

—– 378.1 —–2022-04-26 11:56:28+08:00:

Something often tacitly ignored is the nomadic world here: notions of Chinese continuity rely heavily on eliding the point that nomadic regimes have dominated northern China several times, culminating with the Mongols establishing control over the whole thing for nearly a century. Painting China as this fully independent autochthonous entity rather blatantly elides that it wasn’t.

379: Goddamned Gobshite Godfrey - Weekly Discussion Thread, April 25th, 2022, submitted on 2022-04-25 23:48:17+08:00.

—– 379.1 —–2022-04-26 01:55:56+08:00:

So uh I guess I decided to post the thing in the previous thread after it was already off, so I’m reposting the exact same thing here.

So I have no idea how far this is of interest to anybody, but the discussion around Tsunderia’s graduations and its effect on the agency’s ranking relative to other EN agencies got me interested enough to do some data entry yesterday to find out. I won’t share the full dataset here, but I did a bit of functioning and number crunching to produce some graphs.

To put it mildly, Tsunderia has dropped considerably within the league. To put it more extremely, Tsunderia has dropped out of the league. It had been a close contender with PRISM for the #2 spot in terms of total subscribers, while sitting comfortably in #3 for mean subs per member. It’s now #5 in both categories, with half the total and average subs of Cyberlive at #4.

That said, a huge part of that is because of just how popular Miori Celesta is. At the time of her graduating, Miori accounted for a whopping 65% of the agency’s subscribers. Even if nobody else left, that would mean a huge hit in both total and average subs. But these are also, for that same reason, quite superficial numbers: how much traffic was Miori necessarily driving to the rest of Tsunderia, given how far ahead of the others she seems to have gone?

Which in turn raises an interesting note about the ‘top-heaviness’ of the other agencies: Production Kawaii looks like it has a big lead over Phase-Connect, but it would end up sandwiched between Phase-Connect and Cyberlive without Nene Amano. Cyberlive without Emma would only just edge ahead of Tsunderia post-graduations. PRISM and Phase-Connect, by contrast, seem to have a more even spread, and both would stay where they are rankings-wise without their top member.

What’s interesting is that this doesn’t contrast that heavily with the ‘big 3’ EN agencies (Holo/Niji/Vshojo), where some agencies have some quite extreme breakout stars, and some don’t to the same extent. HoloEN is the top-heaviest, with Gura accounting for around 30% of its total YT subscribers; VShojo is quite close with Ironmouse having a little over 25% of its Twitch followers; NijiEN is the most evenly spread with Vox accounting for only 10% of the total subscribers. On the whole, the top-heaviness trends somewhat lower than at the smaller agencies, but not by an absurd margin, and Holo and Niji would definitely fall in the middle of the pack if mixed in with the others.

Anyway, that was me rambling about stats for a while.

—– 379.2 —–2022-04-26 01:57:46+08:00:

This just in: it has recently been revealed that a surprising number of VTuber fans are in fact cannibals.

—– 379.3 —–2022-04-26 02:58:25+08:00:

I genuinely hadn’t clocked any prior discussion on ‘Pettan 5’ so if that’s an issue I’ve edited that out. I did also do all the stats for the big 3, although I didn’t do charts simply because the other stats are so disproportionate (though I can add those if desired). Looking at top-heaviness and mean time for all 8 agencies:

Agency Mean time at agency (in months) Top-heaviness %age
HoloEN 13.1 28.3%
NijiEN 5.5 10.0%
VShojo 15.9 28.1%
Tsunderia 7.9 44.4%
Phase-Connect 7.8 19.4%
Cyberlive 5.4 42.8%
PRISM 9.8 29.6%
Kawaii 8.0 44.1%

So a quick note that because I now had to account for VShojo, the way the top-heaviness %age worked was modified slightly. Total subs for each agency were calculated not as total subs across all platforms, but the total of each individual member’s higher sub counts between YT and Twitch. Basically, what I did was presume – not necessarily accurately, but well enough – that for instance most of Nyanners’ 795k Twitch followers overlap with her 1.4m YT subscribers, while Ironmouse’s 1.16m Twitch followers include most of her 685k YT subscribers. So I took the higher sub count, whichever platform it was, instead of just totalling YT+Twitch. If I had gone for all platforms rather than taking the higher of each, Ironmouse would be 22.2% of VShojo’s total subs.

—– 379.4 —–2022-04-26 03:32:22+08:00:

In the kouhai/kohai case, it’s more complicated because it is a long vowel, so most common Romanisations render it with a diacritic, so either kōhai (Hepburn) or kôhai (Kunrei/Nihon-shiki). It would be technically incorrect to render it kohai without such a mark, hence why it’s not entirely uncommon to write it out as kouhai if you can’t easily produce a diacritic; it also matches the Japanese orthography more closely.

—– 379.5 —–2022-04-26 11:10:35+08:00:

On the matter of top-heaviness, I came up with it as a quick and dirty way to look at the relative sub counts between the top member and the rest, given that with one exception (NijiEN), all of them have between 7 and 12 members which is a comfortably narrow range. I have been thinking of instead taking the ratio of the top member’s subs to the agency mean, or even the mean of everyone except the top, which should account better for agency size. (EDIT: I also graphed those.)

As for VShojo numbers, as noted there are VShojo members with higher Youtube subscribers than Twitch followers – Nyanners and Melody in particular – hence the ‘take the higher’ approach.

As for tabled numbers I can do that; would probably be easier to take a screencap of my table and post an imgur link so I’ve done that.

—– 379.6 —–2022-04-26 19:10:11+08:00:

Zeta definitely seems very comfortable with preferring English over Bahasa Indonesia as her main on-stream language, while still very much using both. Similar to Reine in that regard, at least from my experience.

—– 379.7 —–2022-04-27 10:47:34+08:00:

If I am not mistaken – but I might be – UP used to run /vt/-takes, so if that was banned then the UP account might have also been banned for essentially ban evading.

—– 379.8 —–2022-04-27 14:07:11+08:00:

Yes, but that doesn’t mean Twitter would necessarily immediately ban all connected accounts. Most sites operate on a largely reactive moderation approach (i.e. there isn’t a problem until someone flags it) so it’s entirely possible for there to be a considerable lag between one account being banned and another by the same user.

—– 379.9 —–2022-04-27 17:42:27+08:00:

Tacitly, Fuji Aoi and Mori Calliope return

I’m not seeing Calli on there, are you sure you haven’t misread Mori Megumi (森恵)?

—– 379.10 —–2022-04-27 18:06:37+08:00:

Ah right, that explains things. Thanks!

—– 379.11 —–2022-04-30 11:42:47+08:00:

I wrote my long-form take on this over on HobbyDrama yesterday (see here), but to state it in brief here, Anycolor going public almost certainly seems like the reason they shuttered Yumenographia last year and then did the ID/KR merger. The announcement shutting down Yumenographia didn’t say it wasn’t growing, just that it wasn’t growing at the rate hoped for, which is very much the sort of thing that public shareholders would care about. My suspicion is that a similar situation existed for ID/KR, that they were not necessarily unprofitable but rather not growing at hoped for rates. So, the best-case scenario if Anycolor was planning to go public whatever the case, was to essentially do some creative accounting by folding the ID and KR branches and subsuming their numbers under the umbrella of the main agency, allowing them to keep the members at the expense of essentially capping any future expansion in those regions, at least in the medium term.

As someone who really isn’t a Niji watcher, I don’t know that my opinion is worth much, but what I’m curious about is where the extra money on the agency side might be going. It seems like with both Yumenographia and the non-CN/EN branches now effectively shuttered, Anycolor has already divested itself of its riskier ventures; does this mean they’re mainly just going to keep pushing EN and/or JP for the foreseeable future?

—– 379.12 —–2022-04-30 12:02:49+08:00:

Yeah the sudden pivot to unicorns and GFE was… it definitely was. There’s really not much to say about OmegaAlpha, it was an attempt to do an A-chan for EN that didn’t go over brilliantly, plus A-chan also tweets in English now so there just wasn’t the need anymore. Who knows, maybe they’ll come back, but I think everyone is willing to just quietly let it slide and occasionally bring it up as a joke, at least as far as the agency and the, er, less perpetually online part of the fanbase are concerned.

—– 379.13 —–2022-04-30 12:08:27+08:00:

The situation seems a little complex. From what I can tell, the report doesn’t distinguish between the branches at all in terms of revenues and expenditures, so it’s probably less that they’re trying to conceal figures for the sake of the IPO (which evidently they can do without the merger), but rather that in the long term, they don’t have to potentially account for those branches in the event a more detailed breakdown is required.

EDIT: The other thing to add, WRT Yumenographia, is that while it may still be accounted for somewhere in the report, the key thing is not that these were changes made for the immediate sake of the IPO but the long-term situation of going public, and the merger being timed for the beginning of the financial year would seem to suggest that.

—– 379.14 —–2022-04-30 13:01:17+08:00:

This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the slowdown on Nijisanji’s side in terms of JP debuts (weren’t there something like 5 in 2021 compared to dozens in previous years?) is due to some kind of perception that they’ve hit a saturation point, and new members are simply drawing on the same audience rather than bringing in new people? It’d explain what seems to have been a really hard pivot to EN in recent months.

The question hanging over it for me as well is how long they can necessarily maintain VR while also doing EN. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but it feels like a matter of time before they go from treading on eggshells to treading on glass.

—– 379.15 —–2022-05-02 07:37:36+08:00:

!Regarding the 4th point…I have no idea how do people equal nationality to being innocent in the whole CN drama XD!<

!Presumably that nobody realistically expects that a Taiwanese person would consider the mention of Taiwan to be a fundamental affront to their identity? The CN drama was of course more complex than that, as it had involved earlier instances of Holomems being a bit blasè about ‘the feelings of the Chinese people’ (Choco got in a bit of hot water over mentioning Tibet, for instance), but still, if the fundamental controversy was over Chinese nationalism then Taiwanese members – if there were any – being involved on the anti side would be highly implausible even if not entirely impossible.!<

—– 379.16 —–2022-05-02 08:40:09+08:00:

!yeah i’ve been seeing “calli’s gonna graduate first” for literal months now, and there’s no actual basis for it.!<

!Nothing factual for sure, although you can probably argue that of all of HoloMyth, Calli is potentially the one with the most motive to graduate and focus on her non-Holo career if it ever came down to it. I do think, realistically, she might be the first of the five to graduate, but that is different from saying I think she’ll graduate soon – which I really don’t, especially with the UMG signing. Plus, if she ever did, I imagine it would be far more likely than not to be an amicable split after hitting some significant milestone. I guess an alternate angle is that Calli may be the most likely to get caught up in a Rushia-style controversy death spiral, but what I think that incident showed is that it could theoretically happen to anyone.!<

—– 379.17 —–2022-05-02 08:59:04+08:00:

This might sound cheesy but my personal take is that Calli found true friendship in Hololive (AKA nakama!) which she might feel has been missing from her previous music career.

Given what she said about some of the people she knew from her old career in the End of a Life stream (clip for context) I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.

380: What were Chinese gangs in the American West like?, submitted on 2022-04-26 03:51:36+08:00.

—– 380.1 —–2022-04-26 11:02:36+08:00:

Sorry, but we have had to remove your comment. Please understand that people come here because they want an informed response from someone capable of engaging with the sources, and providing follow up information. Even when the source might be an appropriate one to answer the question, simply linking to or quoting from a source is a violation of the rules we have in place here. These sources, of course, can make up an important part of a well-rounded answer but do not equal an answer on their own. While there are other places on reddit for such comments, it is presumed that in posting here, the OP is looking for an answer that is in line with our rules. You can find further discussion of this policy here. In the future, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with the rules before contributing again.

381: VTuber Agency “hololive production” Announces the Start of the “hololive Meet” Project, submitted on 2022-04-26 10:26:16+08:00.

—– 381.1 —–2022-04-26 16:08:15+08:00:

Yes to the former, and both yes and no to the latter – sometimes they do attend in person to some extent, for instance Kiara was physically at Dokomi.

—– 381.2 —–2022-04-26 18:23:13+08:00:

No it’s fine! In terms of IRL activities in relation to Dokomi in particular, Kiara straight up said before she was going, and again after, that she was there in person. It’s always possible to talk about IRL activities without revealing one’s IRL identity, after all. Having someone in person at the event in general, but still doing the meetup digitally, won’t be a major issue. It is not, to my knowledge, explicitly known to the general public what the contractual terms are regarding revealing IRL identities, but in general it is prohibited for a Hololive talent to knowingly and deliberately reveal their IRL identity from their Hololive channel or vice versa, but normal accidental slip-ups have always been tolerated.

382: a rare namirin fanart, submitted on 2022-04-26 11:05:13+08:00.

—– 382.1 —–2022-05-15 03:39:46+08:00:

She’s still very active under a different identity. Spoiler following so just, uh, look out: >!IRyS of Hololive’s Project:HOPE.!<

383: question about soju and meimei clips, submitted on 2022-04-26 20:17:16+08:00.

—– 383.1 —–2022-04-26 20:24:12+08:00:

Virtualyzm for Noel

SlackFunday for Fauna

Major Arcana for Mio

384: Is this study guide for a college level U.S. Federal Government class politically biased? I’m helping my sister study for her final, but even I’m confused by the wording here. If it’s not biased, could someone give her a hand with what’s being asked here (as much as you can)?, submitted on 2022-04-26 21:07:25+08:00.

—– 384.1 —–2022-04-26 21:21:44+08:00:

Hi - we as mods have approved this thread, because while this is a homework question, it is asking for clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself, which is fine according to our rules. This policy is further explained in this Rules Roundtable thread and this META Thread.

As a result, we’d also like to remind potential answerers to follow our rules on homework - please make sure that your answers focus appropriately on clarifications and detailing the resources that OP could be using.

Additionally, while users may be able to help you out with specifics relating to your question, we also have plenty of information on /r/AskHistorians on how to find and understand good sources in general. For instance, please check out our six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay.

—– 384.2 —–2022-04-26 22:28:23+08:00:

Mods can’t pin comments by non-moderators, but you should be able to edit it into the post text.

385: Did Alexander the great idolized Cyrus (founder of Achaemenid persia) .?, submitted on 2022-04-27 02:00:06+08:00.

—– 385.1 —–2022-04-27 18:18:29+08:00:

Thanks for the answer link! That said, I think the issue of Alexander and Cyrus is more complicated than just what I write in that answer, and I don’t want to inadvertently give off the impression that Alexander had no affinity whatever for Cyrus. As I note in that answer, the notion that Alexander read the Cyropaedia is a tempting but unprovable one: we don’t know the curriculum of Alexander’s education in general, and we don’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Cyropaedia might have been part of it. However, the Cyropaedia is also notable as nevertheless the only work in the Xenophontic corpus which we can be reasonably sure Alexander had at least indirect exposure to, as Antigonos’ brother Marsyas had been writing an Education of Alexander modelled on the Cyropaedia when on campaign with Alexander up to 331, and as a member of Alexander’s extended circle of friends would almost certainly have introduced him to at least some elements of the Cyropaedia as a result. All this to say that we cannot say with any degree of certainty whether Alexander was particularly aware of Cyrus as depicted by Xenophon.

That is, however, a different matter from whether Alexander recognised Cyrus regardless, based on other texts or even just word of mouth. There are three episodes that appear in the major sources that suggest that while Alexander didn’t necessarily overtly model himself on Cyrus, he did nevertheless recognise him as a notable predecessor:

  1. Alexander’s encounter with the Ariaspians (aka Euergetes) in 329; (Arr. 3.27.4-5; Diod. 17.81; Curt. 3.7.1-3)

  2. Alexander’s decision to retreat from India via Gedrosia in 326; (Arr. Anabasis 6.24.3)

  3. Alexander’s re-dedication of the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae in winter 325/4. (Arr. 6.29.4-11; Plut. Alexander 69.1-5; Curt. 10.1.30-35, Strabo 15.3.7)

In the Ariaspian case, all three of the cited sources concur very closely. All of them go as follows:

  • After leaving Drangiana, Alexander marched into the lands of the Ariaspians.

  • The origin of the Ariaspians’ alternate name, the ‘Benefactors’ (Euergetes) is explained – they had supplied Cyrus’ army at a time when it was in desperate need of them.

  • Alexander, aware of the services that the Ariaspians had rendered Cyrus, offered gifts to them.

Where there is some divergence is on this last point: Arrian has it that he was also impressed by their system of government, ‘allowed them their freedom’, and offered to enlarge the Ariaspians’ territory; Diodoros has it that the Ariaspians ‘received him kindly’ and were given gifts in return; and Curtius has it that Alexander issued ‘a large financial reward for their outstanding loyalty to Cyrus’, and appointed a Persian governor over them. That this particular episode appears in broadly similar form in all three sources, straddling the official-Vulgate divide, seems reason enough to believe that it is, in the broad strokes, true. While they diverge on the matter of what precisely Alexander did, that, paradoxically, may serve to elevate its veracity by suggesting that the event was narrated by more than one primary source, and that each historian drew on a somewhat different combination. That said, I think the background detail given by Diodoros adds an important layer of nuance:

Saved from utter despair, then, Cyrus gave them exemption from taxation and other marks of honour, and abolishing their former appellation, named them Benefactors. (Diod. 17.81.1)

With this in mind, Alexander’s favour towards the Ariaspians need not be interpreted as a specific attempt to honour Cyrus, but part of a more general policy of maintaining the Achaemenid status quo towards peoples who cooperated with the Macedonian conquest. That said, I personally would argue that the sources’ claim that Alexander intentionally emulated Cyrus holds some water.

Only Arrian links Alexander’s Indian campaign with Cyrus, and makes the claim that his decision to retreat through Gedrosia was an attempt to succeed where Semiramis and Cyrus had failed:

Semiramis had come this way on her forced retreat from India, but the locals said that even she had only made it through with twenty survivors of her army, and Cyrus the son of Cambyses likewise with only seven. Cyrus had come to these parts on his way to invade India, but he lost most of his army to the impossible conditions of this desert route before he could get there. The consensus is that these stories inspired in Alexander a desire to outdo Cyrus and Semiramis, and Nearchus says that he took this route both for that reason and also to keep close enough to the fleet to provide it with essential supplies. (Anabasis of Alexander 6.24.3)

The problem with this claim is twofold: firstly, it is not corroborated by the other narrative sources; secondly, Arrian, in his later work the Indika, categorically denies that either Semiramis or Cyrus actually invaded India.

Semiramis the Assyrian queen did attempt an expedition against India, but died before she could give effect to her plans. It was only Alexander who did actually invade India. (Indika 5.7)

The Indians say that Dionysus was fifteen generations earlier than Heracles, and that no one else had made a military invasion of India, not even Cyrus the son of Cambyses, though he had campaigned against the Scythians and was generally the most expansionist of the Asian kings. But then Alexander had come and conquered every country he invaded by force of arms: he would have gone on to conquer the entire world, if his army had been willing. (Indika 9.10-11)

While this doesn’t disprove that Alexander may have believed such stories, the generally confused way Arrian discusses Cyrus in relation to India and Gedrosia nevertheless casts doubt on the claim at Anabasis 6.24 that Alexander was trying to outdo him.

The visit to the tomb of Cyrus is the most substantial episode and the one that most unambiguously suggests a genuine admiration of Cyrus on Alexander’s part. There are essentially three versions of this: the ‘official’ version of Aristoboulos, relayed via Arrian, Plutarch, and Strabo; a variation by Onesikritos, preserved also by Strabo; and Curtius’ version, which is tied in with his narrative of Alexander and the eunuch Bagoas.

Aristoboulos claims, somewhat out of sequence, that Alexander had visited Cyrus’ tomb the first time he was in Pasargadae and found it richly decorated (or rather Aristoboulos himself did, as he was sent in to inspect it beforehand), but on his return he discovered it had been looted. Plutarch alone has Arrian actually finding and executing a culprit, a Macedonian named Polymachos; Arrian has him torturing the Magi responsible for guarding the tomb but ultimately failing to catch anyone; Strabo mentions nothing on this count. All three concur that the tomb was supposed to have had a Persian inscription to the effect of: ‘Visitor, I am Cyrus son of Cambyses. I created the Persian Empire and was King of Asia. Do not therefore grudge me my monument.’ However, only Plutarch and Strabo say that Alexander ordered a Greek version of the inscription to be added underneath. As noted, Strabo also preserves an alternate narrative by Onesikritos, who claims that there was a multilingual inscription all along that read ‘Here I lie, Cyrus, king of kings’. Arrian also relays that Aristoboulos was ordered to restore the tomb as far as possible.

Curtius’ version is a little more complicated because it is integral to Alexander’s involvement with the rather shadowy figure of Bagoas, whom no other sources mention but who, in Curtius’ narrative, plays a significant role early in Book 10 by leveraging his status as Alexander’s lover to arrange the execution of the Persian nobleman Orxines. Orxines’ execution by Alexander definitely happened, but this was, according to Arrian, due to his embezzling funds during Alexander’s Indian campaign. In Curtius’ version, Bagoas entered Cyrus’ already-looted tomb with Alexander, and convinced Alexander that Orxines was responsible, leading to the latter’s execution. Unverifiable as most of the Bagoas story is, it is interesting that at least one of the other three sources seems to also devote space to dispelling the rumour, more specifically Strabo:

…on a later visit the place had been robbed and everything had been carried off except the couch and the coffin, which had only been broken to pieces, and that the robbers had removed the corpse to another place, a fact which plainly proved that it was an act of plunderers, not of the satrap, since they left behind only what could not easily be carried off; and that the robbery took place even though the tomb was surrounded by a guard of Magi, who received for their maintenance a sheep every day and a horse every month.​ (Strabo 15.3.7)

This grants some legitimacy to Curtius’ account, at least in my view, as it suggests that Strabo was likely to have been aware of a version of the story in which Orxines was suspected of involvement in the looting, and, given he was writing before Curtius was, it suggests that Curtius likely drew on the same version rather than completely fabricating the event from thin air, even if he integrated it into the more fantastical Bagoas story.

But that part is largely beside the point. What really matters is that while yes, Alexander could merely have been indignant over the desecration, he was clearly interested in the tomb beforehand. Where the Aristoboulos and Curtius versions differ is simply in terms of the timeframe: Aristoboulos claims that he had already visited the tomb once in 330, while Curtius suggests that he did not enter it until his second visit to Pasargadae in 324. In both versions, he made his first visit before being made aware of the looting, which is enough to suggest a genuine interest in Cyrus on some level. Just far from outright idolisation.

386: What are some examples of states or leaders “crossing the rubicon” and taking extreme political risk, specifically in the modern period (18th century onward)?, submitted on 2022-04-27 10:12:26+08:00.

—– 386.1 —–2022-04-27 11:29:06+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

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387: Famously lazy Enlightenment philosopher?, submitted on 2022-04-27 10:24:01+08:00.

—– 387.1 —–2022-04-27 11:30:06+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

388: friend found the suisei bus in hk, submitted on 2022-04-27 12:12:46+08:00.

—– 388.1 —–2022-04-27 19:19:09+08:00:

Nice! I unfortunately missed the window for its original route and I don’t think I live near where it would be going now.

389: Do the hololive members receive singing training ? If they do, who teaches them ?, submitted on 2022-04-27 22:09:31+08:00.

—– 389.1 —–2022-04-28 00:58:33+08:00:

Most notably how her singing coach straight up ghosted the training agency one day.

390: When Would “Cold War II” Have Started, and What Specifically Caused It?, submitted on 2022-04-27 23:14:26+08:00.

—– 390.1 —–2022-04-27 23:21:19+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates our ‘20-Year Rule’. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

391: What was the name of this ancient game, and how did the story go?, submitted on 2022-04-28 00:35:47+08:00.

—– 391.1 —–2022-04-28 00:39:00+08:00:

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392: What’s going on with the strong quarantine rules happening in a China?, submitted on 2022-04-28 21:07:17+08:00.

—– 392.1 —–2022-04-29 12:04:47+08:00:

Answer:

It’s a mix of issues relating to how China has been dealing with the Omicron variant. I think there are a few headers worth stressing:

  1. The extremes of some of the measures involved are not entirely new. If you remember doors being welded shut in Wuhan in 2020, then doors being bolted from the outside in Shanghai in 2022 should not be unfamiliar. The PRC (People’s Republic of China) has adopted what it terms a ‘zero-Covid strategy’, where the aim is to completely eradicate the virus within Chinese borders rather than to ‘live with the virus’ as many Western countries have opted for; it has also entailed doing so as rapidly and immediately as possible through harsh measures up to and including completely restraining personal mobility, rather than through lower-intensity measures such as limitations on group gatherings (which was what Hong Kong did this year instead).

  2. The overall effectiveness of the lockdowns, purely from the perspective of limiting cases and deaths, does not seem to be in question. After a series of local lockdowns beginning on 16 February, Shenzhen eventually locked down as a whole for a week 14 March to 21 March, and subsequently reopened, having had a total of 643 cases and zero deaths out of 12.5 million people. In Hong Kong on the other hand, social distancing had been in effect from late January to late April, and the city ended up with some 1.2 million confirmed cases and nearly 9300 deaths out of a population of some 7.5 million; asymptomatic and unreported cases may put that number at anywhere between 3 and 5 million by pessimistic estimates. That is to say, Shenzhen had one case for every 15 deaths in Hong Kong.

  3. However, Omicron is making it increasingly troublesome. As alluded to, these have been increasingly long lockdown periods simply due to how Omicron slips so easily through the cracks. Shanghai has been particularly infamous on this count in having its one-week lockdown stretch out to over a month; Xi’an was locked down for over one and a half months from early December to late January; Shenzhen got off easy by only really having to deal with the harsher measures for about a month or so. There has also been concern over the costs of lockdowns relative to the aforementioned efficacy: an unverified post on Shenzhen social media that gained some traction claimed that the hard lockdown of 14-21 March cost 60 billion RMB (around 9.5 billion US dollars), for an average cost of around 15.7 million USD per case uncovered.

  4. This is not being micromanaged particularly hard from Beijing. Simply put, the PRC’s central government is more a reactive than a proactive force when it comes to the enforcement of its directives. The ‘zero-covid strategy’ is less a coherent policy and more a mantra, a target that local and regional jurisdictions are expected to pursue on their own. In Xi’an for instance, one city district got locked down early, was forced to open by city-level authorities, and then got locked down again two days later when city authorities ordered a citywide lockdown. This is also why provision for those under lockdown has been so uneven, with similar stories having come out of Xi’an, Shenzhen, and Shanghai: the availability of food and necessities has been largely contingent on the effectiveness and/or beneficence of each individual locale’s party officials in terms of organising logistics. In most cases, officials at a low level in the chain will act on their own initiative in an attempt to fulfil the general terms of the central directive, but are also aware of the risk of censure from up the chain if they are deemed as acting too quickly or too slowly. So some will go all out and do mad things like weld doors shut to seem like they’re really doing a lot, honest! And others will fail to make advance preparations for a sudden uptick of cases and leave their constituents hungry. Direct central intervention is more the exception than the rule; most officials along the chain are acting in response to their perceived notions of what the expectations at the centre are.

  5. The surveillance apparatus has played a significant part in the COVID strategy so far, but the full implications of that are open to question. Without going too far on this point here, a relatively comprehensive health status app was made mandatory for use which tracks your most recent COVID test and can be used to deny entry to various places if you have either not tested recently enough or if you are supposed to be in a locked-down zone. Cities introduced ‘grid-management’ systems that allowed individual housing estates and ‘urban villages’ to be cordoned off, and where limited mobility within the area existed, but not beyond.

A couple of good things to read on this are:

This thread by Christian Goebel from early January discussing the decentralised nature of the Xi’an lockdown, pertinent to the Shanghai case.

This article by Mary Ann O’Donnell looking at the Shenzhen lockdown from a sociological perspective (a dense read, but where I got a lot of the info for the above from).

—– 392.2 —–2022-04-29 12:06:15+08:00:

Above I allude to the security apparatus, and I decided not to go into it too far because it’d start verging outside the impartiality expected from a top-level. I’d recommend looking at O’Donnell’s article and its sources, as there is a case to be made that the grid-management system can be understood as either a slightly softened import from Xinjiang, or as a sort of low-security tier applied to Han Chinese cities while ethnic minority regions get the high-security regime.

EDIT: I’m not sure if I’m being misinterpreted or anything, but all I’m saying above is that there’s been two possible interpretations of the grid management system in relation to the current Chinese surveillance state in Xinjiang: either Xinjiang has been used as a testbed for technologies being rolled out on a less intensive scale in China, or that the surveillance state in general is being ramped up everywhere, with ethnic minority regions e.g. Xinjiang disproportionately targeted.

393: Why must my parents come at the perfect time…, submitted on 2022-04-29 10:55:42+08:00.

—– 393.1 —–2022-04-29 17:05:13+08:00:

It’s an MV for a recent original song by VTuber Houshou Marine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_hUpHUTJwQ

394: What Happened to Alexander the Great’s Cloak?, submitted on 2022-04-29 14:04:49+08:00.

—– 394.1 —–2022-04-29 16:26:06+08:00:

Alexander supposedly wore cloaks, but that doesn’t mean he supposedly wore a specific cloak. Now, we do know the style of that cloak: Alexander is known to have worn a purple chlamys as part of his royal costume, per a paraphrase of Ephippos of Olynthos preserved by the rhetoretician Athenaios (translation via Andrew Collins):

…nearly every day he wore a purple cloak, a purple tunic with a white middle, and the Macedonian kausia with the royal diadem. On social occasions, he put on the sandals and the petasos on his head, and took the caduceus in his hand. Often he also wore the lion’s skin and club just like Heracles.

That does not suggest that he only had one particular purple cloak in his possession.

The provenance of Mithridates’ supposed Alexandrian cloak is an interesting tidbit in itself: it is not actually mentioned as being worn by Mithridates himself, but rather by Pompey at his triumph, per Appian (The Mithridatic Wars 117):

Pompey himself was borne in a chariot studded with gems, wearing, it was said, a cloak of Alexander the Great, if any one can believe that. This was supposed to have been found among the possessions of Mithridates that the inhabitants of Cos had received from Cleopatra.

This passage alludes back to The Mithridatic Wars 115:

The city of Talauri Mithridates used as a storehouse of furniture. Here were found 2,000 drinking-cups made of onyx welded with gold, and many cups, wine-coolers, and drinking-horns, also ornamental couches and chairs, bridles for horses, and trappings for their breasts and shoulders, all ornamented in like manner with precious stones and gold. The quantity of this store was so great that the inventory of it occupied thirty days. Some of these things had been inherited from Darius, the son of Hystaspes; others came from the kingdom of the Ptolemies, having been deposited by Cleopatra at the island of Cos and given by the inhabitants to Mithridates; still others had been made or collected by Mithridates himself, as he was a lover of the beautiful in furniture as well as in other things.

Cleopatra in this case is the Cleopatra, i.e. Cleopatra VII. How she came to be in possession of such a cloak is never explained.

I would propose that there are two ways this cloak might have ended up with Pompey. The first is that the cloak was genuine. It may have been buried with Alexander when Ptolemy I purloined the funeral carriage and had his body interred at Memphis in 321 BCE, and was then transferred to Alexandria when he was reburied ca. 280; at some stage, Cleopatra decided that one of the cloaks would be gifted to or stored on Kos. The second, and I would argue far more likely scenario – as Appian’s own scepticism suggests – is that the cloak was a fake, passed off as one that had actually been worn by Alexander. But at what stage of the process this forgery occurred is unclear: It could have been that it had been done by the Ptolemies, or by Mithridates, or even by Pompey for all that we know. It would not be the first time that spurious claims had been made about certain items of Alexander’s insignia, as I discuss in the case of this answer on Eumenes of Kardia and Alexander’s armour and sceptre – or, more correctly, his alleged armour and sceptre.

—– 394.2 —–2022-05-04 11:59:56+08:00:

Without being too glib about it, who gives a damn? Appian suggests that nobody actually took the claim that it was Alexander’s cloak seriously. As for your suggestion that he had it when facing Caesar in Greece, I could find no reference to this in Appian, Plutarch, or Caesar, and so I don’t think it’s in any way a historical claim – not unlike what you seem to have absorbed about Mithridates wearing it before his allies. Is it possible you’ve picked up a bit from some piece of historical fiction? As far as I can tell the entire history of the alleged cloak of Mithridates is contained in a single sentence of Appian.

395: Can’t believe British food is this bland, no this is not fake look it up. The Royal Institute Of Chemistry was involved in this somehow, don’t ask me why, cause I don’t f*cking know?, submitted on 2022-04-30 12:09:02+08:00.

—– 395.1 —–2022-04-30 12:54:43+08:00:

Toast sandwiches aren’t a normal thing to eat in Britain though. They were devised in the 1860s as something digestible for invalids – i.e. hospital patients – and brought to public attention in 2011 as a semi-joke during the recession.

396: Unclarity about Terminology: The term “Viking” is a modern word, submitted on 2022-04-30 23:02:29+08:00.

—– 396.1 —–2022-05-05 17:15:57+08:00:

So, there are two kinds of ‘wick’s – those derived from Latin vicus and/or Old English wīc, which simply means ‘dwelling’ or sometimes ‘market’ in the OE case; and those that are cognate with Old Norse vik and mean ‘bay’. Alnwick and Warwick belong to the former, while Keswick and Berwick belong to the latter. However, as far as I know the latter only includes ‘wick’, whereas the former can also be ‘wich’, so Sandwich, Ipswich, Norwich, and Woolwich get their ‘wich’es via Latin/Old English for ‘dwelling’ rather than Old Norse for ‘bay’.

397: Amane “not a lesbian” Kanata, submitted on 2022-05-01 14:09:07+08:00.

—– 397.1 —–2022-05-02 08:42:29+08:00:

But she lives in Germany

*Austria. Tragically, the Holy Roman Empire is now long gone, and the definition of ‘Germany’ has contracted considerably to exclude the land of schnitzel and Sachertorte.

—– 397.2 —–2022-05-02 12:40:55+08:00:

It’s not for us to speculate of course, but she mentions it often enough that it’s hardly a secret.

398: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of May 2, 2022, submitted on 2022-05-01 23:00:16+08:00.

—– 398.1 —–2022-05-05 17:20:22+08:00:

I mean, it’s also causing damage to the dress, adding wear that will mean it’s been pushed that much closer to the point where it ceases to exist as a physical object.

—– 398.2 —–2022-05-05 17:22:00+08:00:

I’m not saying historical minis are better, but they are. There’s no being tied to a specific game system, there’s easy real-world inspiration at your fingertips, it’s great.

—– 398.3 —–2022-05-05 17:27:42+08:00:

You will be painting the Grande Armee day in, day out, young man, and you are going to like it! Or else.

—– 398.4 —–2022-05-07 16:36:45+08:00:

Dumb as that phrasing is, I have seen some serious suggestions that some of the COVID control measures and mechanisms that have been rolled out in China proper have been at least partly derived from systems employed in Xinjiang – near the end of this article for instance. Though even there it’s not wholly sure what to make of it – is the Xinjiang model being replicated wholesale, or are Han Chinese cities and communities getting the ‘lite’ version of programmes whose full force is still targeted against ethnic minorities?

—– 398.5 —–2022-05-07 16:39:35+08:00:

I know the illustrations for the original… quintilogy(? I think that’s the word) gave him a kind of olivey skin tone so it’s definitely not an unreasonable take.

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