history

Went to a most inspiring talk last night entitled "Holy War, Religion and Violence" given by Keith Ward at Gresham College. I hope to get a copy of the transcript to post here but I learnt a lot and had a lot of thoughts implanted in my head including : <br>The Byzantine Empire was a remnant of the Roman Empire (which I knew) but far from being the glorious, free civilised image it liked to portray, the empire was in fact a dictatorship and when the Turks (Muslims) attacked they were seen by ma...

I have a recently rediscovered passion and interest for History, absorbing many tomes over the past few months, my favourite being brief surmises of 'all of History'. Possibly it's laziness or a fear of delving to deeply into specific areas of History so early into my enthusiasm, or perhaps a desire to get an overall picture of the state of the world before specialising. Whatever the reason Bill Bryson's infamous book that comes highly recommended from many sources is nothing to do with human...

The prester quest is a story of two men's present day retracing of a journey from Italy to Ethiopia made by a Papal Emissary in 1177. His mission to deliver a letter to a supposedly (and widely believed to be) real King of a fantastical Christian land in the heart of Islamic lands. I read a similar 'retracing the steps' book (Victoria Clarks, The Wayfarers) about a year ago, which was an amazing read, so this book had a lot to live up to. It starts slowly and doesn't really get going until abou...

Living within the European focussed world view that many of us have had instilled into us from an early age it is often hard to forget that there are and were highly developed civilisations besides the Europeans, and the Europeans weren't necessarily always the first to achieve or discover things. In 1421 Gavin Menzies sets out a believable hypothesis that the first nation to 'discover' and 'chart' the rest of the world outside of their own locality was the Chinese and not those who we're led t...

I loved this book and couldn't stop reading it, which was a pain as I mostly read before going to sleep. The book takes an era by era look at how the video games and movie industries have tried to collaborate together, and largely failed. The first few chapters were great research for my Chip Shop board game, covering such infamous tie-ins as ET, Indiana Jones, Tron, and a few you might have forgotten about. It was amazing how recent actual successful movie and game tie-ins were, with Tomb Rai...

It's taken moving to a non-English speaking country to realize how wide spread and common place the English languages is in the World. This has piqued my interest in learning about the origins of our bastard tongue and how it got to this position. The book was first written in the 1980s and was most recently revised in 2002, which makes it sometimes sound out of date in style. I would also say that since then English has become even more dominant, and some cultures less resistant to it. The f...

I haven't been to many meetups the past weeks as the beginning of October is traditionally conference season in tech, and as I look back through my [Timehop](https://timehop.com/) for the past years, pretty much every year around this time I am at a conference. This year has been the turn of Voxxed Belgrade (2nd time) and LinuxCon (also 2nd time). Both very different conferences and great in different ways. I'll tackle chronologically. ## Voxxed Belgrade 2016 Voxxed in Belgrade last year was by far on of my favouri...

\#UNIT runs regular meetups in Berlin aimed at those working in tech who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LBGTI), but with an overarching message of providing a space for speakers who you might not always see at more mainstream events. I personally don’t identify as any of these, but I always enjoy the diverse messages and fun atmosphere I hear at the meetups, and this was my second time attending the yearly conference.