Members Only 96 – Shop Talk, the Return
Month: October 2018
The Halloween Special
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I love Halloween. I think it might be my favorite holiday, and it’s not really because I like spooky things. I actually kind of hate horror movies. The reason I love Halloween is because in the pantheon of modern holidays it stands out. Most holidays in the western world have been rebranded and repackaged to fit a christian theme or a specific nation. It’s traditional to go to church on Christmas and Easter, even if bunnies and fat men in red suits don’t get mentioned even once in the bible. But Halloween is different. There’s no awkward attempt to justify its existence.
Halloween is an out of the closet pagan holiday, and it /feels/ pagan. It feels old.
And that’s because it is. And I love that.
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296 – Darkening Skies
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It begins in France.
The struggle for power between King Louis IV and Hugh the Great had been raging for quite some time…
When we last visited the continent, , Hugh the Great, King Otto of Germany, Duke William of Normandy, Count Herbert II, and various other supporting characters were allied against King Louis IV, the Archbishop of Rheims, and Count Arnulf of Flanders. In response, King AEthelstan tried to intervene by sending a fleet to support the embattled king… Suddenly King AEthelstan died, and rather than supporting the young French King, the English fleet instead opted to raid the French coast.
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295 – The Return of England
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You know the pieces on a chessboard? There’s the knight, and the queen, and the castle….and then there’s the bishop.
There’s a reason why a game that simulates medieval power strategy has a piece called the bishop. Bishops had power.
And it was a power that didn’t flow from the monarchy. And in britain, it wasn’t a power that necessarily had to be aligned with the monarchy either. We’re going to see this over and over again on the island – if you were trying to rule Britain, holy men were often a wildcard in your hand of ambitions. And the more powerful the holy man, the bigger the potential upset.
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Members Only 95 – Slavery Part 2
294 – It All Comes Crashing Down
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The story of the last few episodes is a story about a lesson that humanity has had to re-learn again and again throughout history. When your society is ordered around a single figure it’s likely to descend into chaos the minute that figure goes away. And finding a new balance in the midst of sudden cascading failures is a difficult task that many peoples in history have failed to do.
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