This week in Andalusada, 12/8/2012

Sunday, 12/2/2012

After a derpy comment to R. last night, my first edit of the day was an expansion, and then a rearranging, of the 8.8mm page.

• This led to an edit of ACP, to mention that 8.8x53mm ACP was now a cartridge...
• I also planned to link the Black Friars into the mythos of the Palace of Granada, but while I was doing so I accidentally reverted it to a draft. Since I wasn't sure what it was called, I renamed it "the Winchester Alhambra," which is now its new URL.
• Once that was done (and all the links to it were corrected), the next thing on my to-do list was to fill out the Black Friars themselves. Which was done, linking them (again) to the palaces of Granada.
• Next up on the editing list: the Second Mahdist War, to establish that al-Mahdi dies on April 5th, 182?. Once that was done, the next thing to edit was (unsurprisingly) April 5th.
• After that, my next edit was to the Occidentals, filling out some details about their relations with the Mozarabs and inventing a small number of them that emigrated after the Sodalite Revolt.

Having filled that in, I posted my one new post of the day: the Sodalite Revolt itself. It's still very WIPpy, but that's to be expected.

• Which called for a significant cleanup of the Sodality itself.
• And, in turn, an expansion of the post on Dystopian Catholic France to mention the Bastard Prince, and the occasion of his bastardy.

And so to bed.

This fortnight in Andalusada, 11/24/2012

This was supposed to be a weekly post (these things usually are), but due to Thanksgiving weekend I got rather derailed by stuff... so here goes.

Saturday, 11/17/2012

I didn't post anything particularly new on Saturday. Instead, I filled out a number of other things instead - starting with a significant expansion of Don Musa. His dates were settled upon (1796-1887), and his service with Caliph Yusuf was pushed back a few years because Yusuf I hired his father first (which means that I need to introduce that father for a bit, if only to kill him later.) He's also been made into a dirty old man; his first wife (who also needs introducing) predeceases him, so his wife can bear him Don Ibrahim without being nearly 60 herself; and, unlike the rest of Andalusada, his old age and death have been written in.

• After that, a bit of editing was done for Yusuf I: his dates were written in (1772-1839), and mention of Abu Musa was made.
• Don Ibrahim's birth year was pushed to 1860, and his formative years have been colored in more than anyone else's in Andalusada. His details - his relationship with his mother, his memories of his father, how that relates to Yusuf III - makes for the first family dynamics I've written anywhere in the blog.
• Yusuf III also got a considerable expansion of his own.

And so to bed.

This week in Andalusada, 11/17/2012

This week was much less productive than I'd hoped it would be. A big part of that was because of something that hasn't happened much before: posting on both of my blogs about convergent topics, which occupied most of my week because it took so long to write.

Saturday, 11/10/2012

Yes, I mentioned it last week too, but I got one further post up before the library closed: the Maud Missionary, which I should've written last week. (Or not.)

• Seadling got edited a fair bit, to incorporate what I know about both Japanese pistol cartridges and to incorporate some details about Seadling as an ammunition company.
• Hispano-Baltic Texas had its foreign affairs rewritten, to state that it has some historic ties to Taiping China through Ross.

And so to bed.

This week in Andalusada: 11/10/2012

Last week was unimpressive. This one, at least, got off to a better start.

Saturday, 11/3/2012

The first thing that was posted was a serial killer, whom I'd discussed with R. last week while derping about revolver designs that never really took off.

• While I was at it, I revised Mahdism a very little bit, not only to mention him but to specify that the Third Mahdist War was fought over a Spanish attempt at Reclamation.
• ...and then had to revise Reclamation, where I'd called that conflict the Second Mahdist War instead.

 And so to bed.

This week in Andalusada, 11/3/2012

So here we go...

Tuesday, 10/30/2012

Only one thing was posted today: Seadling, and the several links to it.

• Evgeny the Old's writeup got cleaned up a bit. It incorporated the Regency that preceded him, about which I'll have to write more some day; it also found, for the first time, the term "polytechnical schools," which will also merit a page of their own someday.
• Which in turn required me to specifically mention the Technical Censors, the most important graduates of the polytechnical schools.

And so to bed.

This week in Andalusada: 10/28/2012

I'm not sure how to separate the editing from the original writing here, so fuck it, I'm lumping these together. Let's take it from the top.

Sunday

Sunday night was spent on gun porn: first and foremost, trying to fill out the details on Go-guns...

• ...but then writing in some details on skopetchkas too...
• ...and adding, and changing the layout very slightly, to derping more about 8.8mm, which was still disgracefully written as of when I signed off that night.

That's all I can honestly remember at this point.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 10/20/2012

Actual new pieces:

Monday: Since I've been on a GURPS trip this last week or so, GURPS Low-Tech has been getting attention from me as well. Since I've had the idea bouncing around in my head for quite some time, and had already written up the sansing last fortnight, I (for no reason other than to maintain a regularity of posting) spat out the other world-specific sword I'm aware of: the esbat.

Tuesday: Monday night was spent reading, trying to figure out naming conventions for things and discovering something interesting: the medieval Abbey of Grandmont. To that end, on Tuesday I introduced St. Matilda, the *Dominican equivalent of St. Clare.

• And when I was done with that, I introduced a fractious, squabbling order that provides the springboard for the Gonzalans: the Order of St. Stephen.
• And, building on something I haven't thought about until the night before, I introduced a brand name to Andalusada: ACP.
• And, once that was done, to one of the very few people I know nothing about in Andalusada: Guillermo I, the first fictional king of 11th-century Iberia.
• And once that was done, I started some historiography again, in the form of what was at first titled "Plebeian Cabralia." It's changed names several times since then, but as long as the url stays .../early-brazil.html it says everything that really needs to be said.

Thursday: Thursday saw me do the single biggest dot-connecting thing I've done in weeks: not just a post, but an outline of the Burning Thirties, and of course the dot-connecting that follows something like that.

• On a similar note, I created a page for something else that's been referenced enough to merit its own page: the Order of Saint Gonzalo.

Friday: Friday saw only one post worth mentioning: Go-guns, Andalusada's stand-in for the SMLE.

This fortnight in Andalusada: 10/13/2012

The fortnight since my last post was (forgive me) a hell of a week. If anybody actually visits this and cares, forgive me. I've had my reasons.

But it hasn't been entirely unproductive:

• The first post of the month was a biography, specifically of Sufyan, he of the thirty-odd kids and the family named after him.
• The next day or so was dedicated to cleaning up Urraca and, just as much, blogging about some things that I actually could write about substantially: real Iberian people.
• And then the Church of Hungary, partly to elaborate on what it is, partly to get down some thoughts on Hungary's history during the late medieval era.
• Tuesday last saw me increase my workload a fair bit (as if it wasn't increased enough by permanent changes to Mandarin) by a bit of simple cyphering of Polish orthography.
• Wednesday saw me make my last significant post, hammering out a character archetype that I've had bouncing around in my head for quite some time: the Taiping Princess.
• And, as a side effect of introducing her, defining what I mean by "skopetchka."

This week in Andalusada: 9/29/2012

It's been an incredibly bad day for me in a lot of respects, but at least I can save the work on this a bit: not only have I been awesomely productive with it, but I've also Pretty much immediately after I was done posting the last weekly review on Saturday, I started writing for this week, which is unusual - usually I try to take at least one day off.

• The first post was for Oskar Sansinger. I don't know much about him, but I do know his name; it's enough to start writing with.
• The second, also on Saturday, was the first post on the Scrapbook to have no tags at all: "Best Practices: tagging and titling." It's more of a note to myself (and an introduction to the insane mess of labels over there), setting some guidelines down for better writing in the future.
• Because I'd been furiously editing everything related to the House of Sansinger on Monday, and because the details of the war were scattered throughout several pages, I created a master page for the Axamallan Revolt that evening.
• After a discussion with Rob (in which he mentioned the role of the nebulous "Grand Princess [who?]"), I wrote a biography for her, settling on a name for the lady: Grand Princess Teresa.
• And because it was one of the few names that I'm aware of, and I'd mentioned the Cordoveros before, I wrote up a stubby biography for Don Musa as well, raising the population of named Andalusians to three.
• I skipped out on a social event Wednesday. Instead, I wrote some of the details into Teresa Maria's life, and in particular into one specific part of her life: the Christianization of Mexico.
• The last post this week was on Thursday, when (in keeping with other things) I posted the Greater Japanese Empire, allowing me to hyperlink everything else to it.

That's what I have to show for my week, and if that was all I did it'd be enough. It wasn't.

More below the cut:

This week in Andalusada blogging: 9/22/2012

No blogging happened for me until late on Wednesday night, when (powered by Concerta) I decided to forcibly reset my sleep schedule. There, in the twilight of it, the writing started:

• The first thing I posted was "Very Poor Introductions," linking back to the very first post I ever began on this (back when it was Ixbiliada.) It connected a few dots for me - in particular, I invented Annemarie Sansinger on the spot, because there was no plausible Bonaparte left to write Bonapartism: a Very Poor Introduction any more.
• Next up on the list, after some cleanup (about which more below), was a master page, keeping track of Andalusada's authors.
• The UCNA, the nation that is Moorish civilization as of Andalusada's present day, is a successor state. The third post of the week was the placeholder for what it succeeded: Umayyad Seville. Writing that (especially answering why?) was both satisfying and very, very instructive: I'm gonna have to revisit all of this later.
• And because I'd already introduced the "families" tag earlier, I decided to make "families" a bit more substantive by writing a substantive family to tag it with: the House of Umayya.
• Due to a terrible accident, a truly terrible post from I think May (regarding Ibero-Romance languages or something) was completely erased and lost. I took the opportunity to edit it a fair bit, turning it into something specifically about Moorish (the rest of Iberia be damned; I'm not even sure that Castilian is spoken.)
• And lastly, on Friday night, I finally posted an entirely place-holding page for the House of Sansinger, tying together a fair number of other assorted entries. I'm still editing it as of this posting.

If the writing was all I'd accomplished this week, that would've been enough. It wasn't.

This fortnight in Andalusada: 9/15/2012

It's been two weeks since the last time I blogged about Andalusada. I have an excuse: last week I was driving into (and then driving home from) Pennsylvania, suffering a cold, and generally not writing about Andalusada very much anyways.

So it's been another fortnightly update here, and a very Russian one at that.

• September 6th saw the first post, "Christianities of Andalusada." I'll spare you the list of what it's about, because it was mostly about lists. (See for yourself.)
• September 6th also saw a post on the Eugenian calendar, because it was relevant to the writing about Great Russia and stuff that was going on in my head at the time.
• Seeing that I'd mentioned him many times, and that he's a pivotal figure in Russian history, and that I'd been writing about his calendar so much, I created a placeholder for Evgeny I yesterday...
• ...and today saw me start a new taxonomy, of the collapse and schism of Russian Orthodoxy.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 9/1/2012

It's been a very Russian kind of week this week:

• The first post this week was the B_Munro draft. I haven't touched the map of Andalusada since at least spring, when the UMass libraries were open 24/7 and I could stay on with their awesome big screens for as long as I wanted - but the writeup for that map is still floating around.
• Last week's beverage was beer. This week's was tea and vodka, after some derpy thoughts from weeks and months before. (The question of what the Great Russian political parties are called is still kinda up in the air; I'm revisiting thoughts here as I go.)
• Wherever there is a revolutionary Russia, there has to be a commissariat. Thursday saw me (very briefly) define Commissars, and explain (in very sketchy detail) what they do besides, you know, be Russian and wear a commissar's cap.
• Because Great Russia's Commissariat is a liaison office between various brigades of the Russian Legions (or Guards?), the obvious next step was to do a writeup about them. It wasn't taken. The step that was taken was, instead, to write up Great Russia itself.

No significant editing was done this week, but I do have some forecasts for things that'll be upcoming in the next week or two:

• The derp about the Eugenian Calendar is going to get fleshed out a bit, and possibly reverted back to actually being about Old Calendarism (with a new post to introduce the Eugenian Calendar itself. [ADDED! -9/23/2012]) This is in no small part because of the other questions I've had in the last day or so...
• "What happens to the Russian Orthodox Church?" Under the tsardom of Tver, it's a strange beast: an Orthodox church that's not recognized or in communion with the rest of Orthodoxy. What happens to it under the Veche is really complicated; I have at least one post, and quite likely a series of posts, to write about the fallout of the fall of Evgeny the Old. Amongs these are:
• What exactly is the state of Orthodoxy in Great Russia at the moment?
• For the better part of 300 years, the Russian Orthodox Church didn't need to worry about its foreign ties; it was the single biggest Orthodox church on the planet. A lot of them backed the Tsarists, with all the consequences that entails - and now that their church has been, at the very least, wrested from them and reformed (if not completely disestablished), how is that Tsarist diaspora handling the breaking of its haughty power?
• What hay does the Papal State make with all of this?
• New World beer styles is still a work in progress. Last post was about the Ibero-Baltic styles; the next one is going to be, I hope, about the Northern (and very Brittanic) styles, to help fill it out.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 8/25/2012

For the last two weeks I'd sadly neglected The Andalusada Scrapbook. I stood convicted, enough so that this week I resolved to do better. The question is... what was there to write about?

• Well, first things first there was beer. I'm still writing about it, still cleaning it up, but it was so long in coming that it needed to be posted before I forgot about it.
• The next thing to go up was a glossary of the Scottish New World. It's something that R. and I had been derping about extensively, on and off, for the last week or so; and while this isn't exactly a blog post the way the others are, it was an infodump that merited posting. Not least because it introduced things like Scotland-Norway.
• One of the things that's bugged me about the history of Scotland-Norway was the tangle of religious politics that resulted from trying a Catholic-*Protestant dynastic union. Last week, in a Barnes & Noble book I'd never read before (and haven't read since, because I'm not gonna pay for it), I discovered that the medieval Scottish church was awesomely corrupt. The same night I posted my Scottish New World glossary, the dots connected, and I gushed my thoughts to Engel about this. They were posted on Wednesday, as "The rise and fall of the Ryal Kirk."
• Up to this point, most of the nations I've posted on ABC have been ones that don't exist IRL, and so need some introducing. What I haven't done much is write about the pasts of nations, especially the Great Powers. So on Thursday, for want of better thoughts to write, I introduced the first writeup of a nation in an era: the ubiquitous, regularly-mentioned Dystopian Catholic France. Watch your tongue.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 8/18/2012

I confess before you, almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have neglected the Andalusada blog, in thought and in deed, in what I have done and what I have failed to do; and I ask you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God. Or words to that effect.

In my last post, I was excited about a few things that I was gonna post. I managed all of two of them:

• The first of them was the one that I had the least excuse for: the Meammosiran Cossack Host. It was, like everything else, late. (Tony Jones provided an excuse, but the fault is mine.) Truth be told, it's still being expanded upon.
• The second of them was, as promised, the Grand Principality of Brazil. Also a work in progress.

There was some updating going on as well:

• Most of my nations have a "INSERT NATIONAL NAME HERE Today" section where they should go. At present, it includes an entry or so about the nation's languages, government structure, and national economy. This week, after the G.P. of Brazil was written up, I added in a fourth section, on foreign relations. Expect that to be added to everything by next week.

There is also, it should be noted, something relevant I discovered: a limited-edition Samuel Adams beer that may, in fact, be relevant to the long-promised, long-awaited discussion of New World beer styles.

That is all, alas.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 8/4/2012

The Andalusada Scrapbook has had, as of when I started writing, 1666 hits; it's rapidly closing on this blog itself, several years its senior. (Lesson from there: post more regularly.)

So let's start with what's new:

• "The only new stub that I have to announce," I said last week, "is about Mahdism... It's going to be up first, because it's relevant to a lot of things later on down the line." For the first time in the history of announcing upcoming stubs, I was right. The first post of the day, on July 30th.
• I really love posting nations, especially New World nations. Also on the 30th, I introduced Axamalia, or Axamalla, or whatever the hell it's called. Hispano-Baltic Texas.
• Hispano-Baltic Texas (hereafter HBT) didn't just form itself. First, it had to break away from Mexico - one of the giant, space-filling empires that I've acknowledged but never actually written anything about before. So on the last day of July, I posted the G.P. of Mexico.
• On the next day, 8/1/2012, the first of August, I introduced what (thematically) should have been posted on April 5th: the state that almost the entirety of Andalusada was building up to. I posted the Umayyad Caliphate of New Andalusia. It's the stubbiest of my national posts by far, for the simple reason that it's such a big topic, and I didn't manage to get anything else done that day because I was so busy searching through the blog and linking it to every post that mentioned it already.
• After some really big-stroke posts like that, I started to write another fluffy one. At that point, though, I stopped - and, seeing how I'd already blogged the Great Realignment and several of the nations that came out of it this week, went on to write one of the few wars whose details I was really certain about: the Mexican Liturgical War.

And on the sixth day, today, I'm not posting anything; I'm just going to go back through the last week or so, clean things up and expand on them.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 7/28/2012

The Andalusada Scrapbook has been quite busy this week, writing in a few things like so:

• The first thing that merited writing about in Andalusada was prompted by my own comment, discussing the thought of regular Andalusada blogging, which mentioned that I'd derped more about the existence of Polish-Ruthenian parerga than the existance of Poland-Ruthenia itself. So, on Monday, I fixed that and introduced the most steampunk society in the verse.
• The next post I was planning to write out was one on gun porn, but after I was finished hyperlinking the previous comments to Poland-Ruthenia, it occurred to me that I'd also mentioned "Technical Censors" before without explaining the concept further. (Which is inexcusable, because they're a critical force in Andalusada's future dieselpunk turn.) So, the next day, I explained who the Technical Censors are and why they matter.
• I have a big blind spot concerning Andalusada's last major-power war cycle; while I know it was an epic on par with the Great Realignment, I don't know that much about how it actually played out, at least when it doesn't involve the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. So, also on the 25th, I wrote about the one war I can write about - or at least as much as I could.
• Wednesday was a dead day on the blog, because I was so busy writing about the gun porn I mentioned earlier. On Thursday, though, I finally completed my technical derping enough to post it without needing an immediate revisit (as happened to my first post on gun porn.) Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Warsaw School.

There is some editing that's going on too:

• By far the most significant edit was an expansion of the Russo-Japanese War. In part, this is because Meammosirsk is still getting love and attention from me, towards its posting on August 13; but another, and a bigger, part of it was actually spelling out its flow, and explicitly stating how important Japanese espionage was in the Easter Revolt.
• The Miramoline got a bit of cleanup too; initially it was simply tagging her "gender," but when I realized that she didn't actually address gender in any way, I had to explain her significance.
• Towards the forthcoming post on Mahdism, which has become too long to finish in the time I have today, I amended the Great Realignment to note a very, very important date in Moorish history: 1786.

Looking back on previous weeks, it occurs to me that whenever I mention things that I'm going to be posting about in the next week, it pretty much guarantees that I won't write about them. This is going to change, because most of the things that I've written about now have convenient lead-ins (or at least tie-ins.)

• The only new stub that I have to announce is about Mahdism. It's going to be up first, because it's relevant to a lot of things later on down the line.
• "An allohistory of vodka" is going to go up at some point after that, now that Poland-Ruthenia has been introduced. Baltic influence on New World beer styles, though, is going to take a lot more time to do, because there are a few Baltic-style republics that need writing about (at the very least, the G.P. of Mexico, G.P. *Brazil, and Hispano-Baltic Texas) - and some spelling out about what Baltic republican thought is and looks like.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 7/21/2012

Well, more like this three weeks. One totally wasted week, and one week away on vacation, kinda crimps my regular writing routine, which is something I should work on more... somehow. But no more on that; this is, I think, one of my best three weeks blogging here to date.

On the one hand, it's been a really unproductive three weeks; I've got precious little to show for myself at only eight complete posts. On the other hand, it's been an enormously productive one too; the posts I've written for Andalusada are some of the consistently longest I've done to date, because they're setting in print a lot of old, established concepts and stuff that goes back months (if not years) but has never been formally set down until now.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 6/30/2012

Last week was Chinese week on Andalusada. This week is much more French:

• A little bit about bewbs;
• A lot about booze;
• A short, thoroughly self-contained work about speaking Korean badly;
• An introduction to a place that doesn't exist;
• And Gallo-Moorish fandom for books you aren't familiar with.

Not an enormously productive week, because I was busy blogging here instead.

And only a few small edits:

• Oliver Farrell got an edit, to clearly indicate that he has two Bibles to his name and to cross-reference it with the Opus Transtulit.
• Farrellitism got a bit of a cleanup too, to spell out "Romandy" a bit more.

Thoughts for next week:

• Some extended derp about the Farrellite Biblical canon may be in order. Or not. Depends on whether anybody cares.
• Because I started touching on the chansons de geste (and the cantar de gesta tradition), you know what else may be in order? Actually outlining what Rodrigo Diaz does all the way back there at the beginning. That sort of thing is going to have a literary impact, to say the least.
• I started derping out a little bit about Korea; should I write some further thoughts on the emergence of the Korean Orthodox Church?

...and there are other further thoughts, had I the sleep last night to think them. I pronounce this week reviewed.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 6/23/2012

In this last week there have been all of five new posts:

• On Taiping pneumatology and such;
• On Taiping handguns;
• On Taiping literature and historiography, and Chinese translations being horrid;
• On Taiping gender presentation;
• And oh yeah, on the *Renaissance too.

Four guesses where my attention was this week.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 6/9/2012

In the beginning, I wrote "Not much killing this week." That was wrong; this week was when, to the best of my memory, I first seriously discussed the Thousand Days, which more than decimated Sweden. But the most important things I wrote about this week, I feel, were about writing:

• About the single biggest thing in the history of Moorish Islam;
• About a brütal Bible;
• About somebody real;
• About something that won't exist for another 800 years, nor matter for 5d6 after that;
• About words not meaning what you think they mean.