Clueless Northman

Die Another Day is most probably the worst Bond since Moonraker. Sorry to disappoint you. You'll see soon enough. I assume also that, just like with that silly Homefront video game, picking North Korea as the Big Bad is a political and commercial decision, because we surely don't want to piss off China.

Sadly, when you have on one hand an author that is assumed by some, due to context, title, writing, to be a troll and complain about it, and on the other hand people who assume those who complained about that author to be trolls as well, we definitely have some kind of communication breakdown. And this happens among people who are on the same political side if not on the same subgroup - one fears to probe the depth of the breakdown at the level of the society as a whole.

To be fair, there are solid reasons for having some emphasis on Roman and Greek times, not only because they're the forerunners of Western/Christian societies, but also because we've kept a lot of their writings around, and only ancient Indian and Chinese literatures are vast. And that's despite having lost 90% of Greek and Roman non-Christian texts, and despite a sizable chunk of what's been preserved being about Law, Medicine or commentaries on ancient Classics and ancient philosophers. It makes things easier to work with when you have a good chunk of what they wrote and thought about themselves lying around - compared to Celts who didn't write, or Mayas whose works were systematically burned during the conquest. There's also plenty of good literature in Medieval times as FalagarV2 said- as long as the writers were writing about non-religious themes (as in not about Bible or Quran), but alas, the amound of religious writings massively dwarf the other works, which thankfully wasn't the case with the Greeks and Romans. Not that religious writings are shit per se, it's just tha when you have 100.000 pages about the Gospels or about the Quran, it tends to become quite repetitive and a good deal of it isn't really inspired or inspiring.

What really worked with me with the Skyfall song is that the first 1 min and half was pure classical Bond music straight out of the 60s. After that, it went more modern and Adele-ish, probably, but the beginning is brilliant for a Bond movie.

Its recorded path was quite the same as the paths of previous flights in the last few hours. So if it made a sharp turn, then it means something else happened that cut off the transponder and made it turn right sharply. Otherwise, it's obviously the missile strike that disabled all comms, and one has to assume it induced the plane to turn for some reason - which seems to be the simplest solution.

Good for him. Let's hope Sapkowski manages to finish his book series before the TV series catches up with it

Some of his military advisers can probably understand what they see when they look at pictures of the Iranian hits. At the very least, some top guys in the Pentagon are able to see the precision of those missiles that hit the base, and that should be enough to convince them staying too long in Iraq is a sure way of losing a lot of men (and expensive military hardware). We're not talking about Saddam's Scuds, when the locals had just as much bad luck of being hit by a failing Patriot than by a Scud.

Frankly, the only major geological layer that I can think of is the famous iridium layer, the one dating from the end of the dinosaurs. Not saying T-Rex suddenly got sapient, ate up the others and then nuked each other, mind you. Surely not, honest I'm with Free Northman, though. Any previous civilization would've mined plenty of resources and would've used them. Oil is renewable in the very long term (hundres of millions of years for sure), but iron, gold and others would be trickier. That's also why I'm totally of his opinion about space exploration. Whatever cleaning, whatever efforts we need to do here right now to stop the destruction of our environment and to ensure our short-term survival, we have to put aside a considerable amount of resources to go and mine asteroids and to be able to take from outer space some resources that will soon be depleted here around. If we don't do it, we're not just condemning mankind to be stuck forever on Earth, we condemn the whole of earthly life to be stuck on this rock for the next billions of years, until the Sun has enough of us.

Paul Bairoch made the point decades ago. Besides, the mere economic history of the USA is the ultimate proof of this: they knew that they would be strangled by British free trade and had to go the protectionist way to allow their own economy, specially their industry, to grow; that had been US official policy since the times of Hamilton and during the whole 19th century. As for current US benevolent international role, the numerous deaths and the growing chaos in the Middle-East that could well follow the fresh assassination of Suleimani, top IRGC general, and Muhandis, deputy leader of Iraqi PMU, might tell a different tale.

That would be Germany during the 30-Years War, I think. I'm not sure Britain was worse during this time than during the later Viking era. Way messier and dangerous than during the Roman times, obviously, but I agree with Leech that other places in Europe were arguably worse - Italy between the death of Theodoric and the rule of the Lombards had it very rough indeed. Frankly, for the 450-600 period, the Eastern Empire was probably the safer bet, and Wisigothic Spain a decent option; France would be ok, once Clovis had conquered it all, so the first third of this timeline would be quite tough. Of course, if you planned to live beyond 600, then I would stay clear of Byzantium or move West and shift allegiance - things went downhill quite fast without Justinian.

Antiquity is the ancient (and first) historical period of recorded history before the Middle-Ages. Middle-Ages are basically called that way because they're the middle period between Antiquity and Renaissance and modern times. Antiquity is usually considered from a European point of view, but even then it still means that Mesopotamia and Egypt are included, so it's very far-reaching and definitely covers a wider set of times and cultures than the later eras - and of course, it doesn't mean shit when it comes to the Americas, South and East Asia or most of Africa. (there was quite recently a thread about Latin and Greek literature; I expect there was one about Medieval literatures, or possibly several on different topics, but couldn't remember what or where it was) On the other hand, the usual view that accompanied this distinction - that Middle Ages were a time of backwardness with illiterate peasants eating barely better than dirt - is going away. Not to deny some things went terribly wrong, a lot of things were forgotten, a lot were destroyed. But first of all, there were progress, research and creations in some fields during the later centuries. Also, the process of ending of the previous era, the Classical Age with its own culture, literature, values, references, that eventually totally left place to the Chritisan world of, say, year 1.000, wasn't clear cut in 476 - one can argue it began during the crisis of the 3rd century and lasted for centuries - at least to the 6th century, if not the 7th depending on places. It's basically impossible to pinpoint a precise time, and it's only if we compare how things were in 20 AD and in 9200 AD, that the huge differences clearly signify that major upheavals occurred and we're dealing with totally different eras in most aspects - differences between Southern Europe between 430 and 530 AD wouldn't be that glaring, I'd say.

Major characters in Romeo and Juliet are teenagers.

Funnily, I'm deep into Curtius' History of Alexander right now - which differs a little bit from the original (Greek) Alexander Romance. And due to Sir Leech's post, I finally gave in and bought Plato's early short dialogues. At long last, time to go back to the man and read some Socrates (had read, the Symposion and the trilogy of Socrates' last days years ago).

You could trash previous rulers of Rome as much as you wanted to, as long as you didn't mess with the current ruling dynasty. The fact most writers were from the Senatorial order helped as well with some kind of protection - and also explains why they tend to criticize past Emperors, considering that the Empire made the Senate quite irrelevant, apart from a rich men's club. If you wanted to trash the current Emperor, it was a bit trickier. In this regard, Procopius' Secret History is a riot and a must-read. Now, if you want Greek historians that are a bit more reliable, trustworthy, and who have some in-depth understanding and analysis, I'd say Thucydides and Polybius are your best bets. Not really. Like many other of Socrates' disciples, it's his execution which was a key moment. Xenopho pretty much cut ties with Athens after that and went full-Sparta fanboy. After all, he implied that everyone outside Athens celebrated Sparta's victory as the return of Freedom in Hellas. Well, they didn't have Twitter at the time, so if you wanted to play it like Trump, you had to be a bit more creative.

For example, when Cavill was first cast as Geralt and showed off his costume, fans were bemused as to why he didn’t have the game character’s beard Wait, what? These aren't even fans of the games; he only has a beard in Witcher 3, not in 1 and not even in 2.