I will be off-line for the next few days so I would like to take this opportunity wish one and all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday. ML4E (talk) 16:43, December 24, 2019 (UTC)

I come onto the site after a weekend of being too busy to do so and find dozens of rogue edits which TR and ML4E have had to undo, new categories which should not exist, all with him glibly explaining his reasons after he's done his deeds. Reasons that don't hold water, as he well knows, or should have known. All because he got his hands on some anthology that's been out of print for nearly fifteen years, and is just a reprint of obscure-ass stories that had been out of print for even longer than that before 3xT had its moment in the sun. It's not like he's making contributions which are urgently needed, which would make dealing with his bad behavior worth it.

I'm just really fed up with him. We tolerated similar behavior from Jonathan for years, finally rid ourselves of that pest six months ago, but it feels like he never left. I don't think MBS is a Jonathan alter ego, but I really don't care. He adds almost nothing of value to the project, shows contempt for the way we do things, and is just exhausting to have around.

I think it's time to discuss whether he's still welcome here.

Matthew has proposed we create a category (and attendant templating) for the AMND characters appearing the Laura Frankos story "A Late Symmer Night's Battle"

On the one hand we do have a number of those characters, and we do have the Hamlet category. On the other hand, several of them originated in legend long before Shakespeare's time, and the Hamlet category is made up of redirects.

A third way may be to do away with "Hamlet Characters" and "AMND Characters" and simply create a catch-all "Characters from William Shakespeare" or something like that.

Thoughts?

I finished up On the Train a week ago, but in recent days, work was hell, nor was I out of it.

Both stories are charming little fantasy pieces about living on a giant train that crosses some fictional world where all manner of fantasy and science fiction tropes exist. As Rachel's story did about as much world building as her father did, articles will incorporate references form both halves. They aren't directly related, though--they are two discrete tales set in the same world involving unrelated characters who never interact.

Years ago, I proposed incorporating articles from Laura Frankos' works. We skipped it at the time, because we hadn't grown that much. Years later, we have a substantial number of articles, and we have Rachel's sole published work that intertwines with her father's, AND we have access to some of the works Laura published in the "Chicks" books.

So I'd like to again propose that we create a portal to include Laura and Rachel's respective works (and any other Turtledoves who publish). I've had a chance to read a few of Laura's stories. She's primarily a fantasy writer, but she has done a few historical pieces. (Obviously, we don't have to delve too deeply into her various books on Broadway musicals.)

After chastising Johnathan numerous times for creating categories without first discussing the need, he seems to have learned the wrong lesson. I just noticed he has added an "Aquinists" cat to four character redirects for MFCiTDE that are members of the organization but did not create the category. See here. This means the creation of the cat doesn't show up on the edit log but the cat exists anyway.

What he should have done was start a Forum discussion on this or perhaps used the Character Cat Talk Page. Instead he used this stealth approach. I am tempted to remove the cats from the character redirects except I support the creation of such a category. This would be analogous to the Sons of Liberty cat in T2G. Thoughts? ML4E (talk) 18:24, October 15, 2018 (UTC)

I've completed all of the substantive articles possible for Powerless, save for the countries.  We know that the WCPDR is CA, OR and WA, and we can say a few things about it overall, but it won't be much.  We also have the NESSR, which would mostly be a copy-paste of the Unnamed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the NESSR, and then the Southern Confederate People's Republic, which we know has VA, but anything else is a guess. So it would be three really tiny articles with no growth possible.

We also have various fictional countries in TDE in the Sunset Lands and parts of Asia.

I'm of the opinion that now is as good a time as any to begin a "Minor Fictional Countries" page. (Not necessarily that title.) Ideally, it would be for both fictional countries on Earth AND the minor little fantasy and sci-fi places.

I'm going through the stubs category and marking all the one-sentence wonders for deletion.  I just don't see any value in keeping all these stubs on, e.g. the Opening of the World, when many of them haven't had any movement in years.  Since restoring them is easy, deleting them will cause no harm.

In the interests of fairness, I won't delete anything if we start seeing forward momentum.  So if anyone is going to go great guns on any of the marked pages, I'll give it until the end of the month.  

I'm putting this here since its about multiple categories and templates.

I'm increasingly unhappy with how the {{Authors of}} templates look in the infoboxes.  Moreover, I notice Category:Authors of Non-Fiction is getting pretty large.

So I'm definitely going to redo the templates, but before I get going, should we consider breaking down "Non-Fiction" into subcats, like "Memoirists", and "Biographers", and "Technical Writers", etc?

(We could also do that with the Authors of Fiction, but that's not a big category, and there aren't really as many varieties of fiction Novelist, short story writer...that's it.)

I haven't read the Werewolf story yet, but it's definitely another Jerome K Jerome pastiche.

So, as we're getting ready to start developing categories, I guess we should probably come to title for the stories as a whole. I realize everyone else is at a bit of a disadvantage, since we can all listen to 3M&V, but I'm not sure who might have access to 3M&W.

Jonathan proposed "Jerome Stories". I find this title to be a little too vague. Yes, these are Jerome pastiches, but there are other characters in the HT bibliography named "Jerome". Plus, the point of these stories is as much about melding Jerome with the supernatural.

My (admittedly biased) vote goes to "Three Men and the Supernatural"; at the end of "Werewolf" the characters say something about no more supernatural.

Even if we don't do this direction, at a minimum, I think we should incorporate the shared title of "Three Men and...". That could be a title in and of itself: "Three Men and...Stories".

Creating this thread for spoilers for Armistice, since TF has secured a copy early, plus we're starting to see the opening pages available at Penguin Random House, and it will probably become searchable via Google books in the coming weeks.

So this will be a controlled safe place to drop little nuggets we might come across.  I don't expect TF to answer questions.  He said he's got other things on his plate, and since the book hasn't officially dropped yet, I don't mind waiting.  

Jonathan created the "Minor Fictional Characters in "Death in Vesunna"" last year. The Admins put a stop to it, since we haven't ever discussed creating an MFC page for short stories.

We'd begun a discussion here but reached no resolution. With some time since that event, and since I just stumbled on to the Vesunna page, I'd like to review the question.

We do have some articles that really are minor characters. They really didn't contribute that much to the overall piece. They didn't participate in the main events of the story, didn't help or hinder the protagonist or antagonist, and had no more depth than U.S. Soldier Who Wanted Confederate Tobacco on Page 145 of The Grapple. Consequently, their articles are a few sentences and are of dubious value or quality. So I am willing to consider a single page for minor short story characters is a worthwhile idea.

What I would propose, though, is a much large catch-all "Minor Fictional Characters in Short Stories" page, akin to the Minor Fictional Characters in Crosstime Traffic one, rather than pages dedicated to each story. We're still dealing with short works, and even a ruthless culling may yield one or two minor characters from each story. We would leave out POV characters, even if they are one scene wonders, and focus on those characters we'd reckon as minor in a much larger work.

In addition, I'd still like to float the idea of a page dedicated to all characters in the really short works, such as "The Mammyth" or "Half the Battle", where the characters just aren't that developed, even if they are the protagonist. Other candidates would be the stories that appeared in the "Probability Zero" section of Analog, which are all two-pages at most. Other candidates might be stories where a whole bunch of characters are involved, but they all do essentially the same thing, like "In This Season", where three families all meet a golem, and then take a boat to neutral territory, but aren't doing anything really unique on an individual basis. Redirects would be left in place, but otherwise, all pertinent info would be on e.g., "The Mammyth Characters" page.

Silver sent an e-mail.  Harry joined Twitter last week.  You don't need a twitter account to read what's been posted.  

And what has been posted is pretty interesting right off the bat.  He's submitted an AH novelette set in 1920s Alaska for publication (not clear as to whom, though).  1920s AH is a good thing. Alternate Alaska can be a good thing, though I hope not a Russian Alaska. That would be more cliche.

A short story called "Zigeuner" will be published in Asimov's soon, but the exact issue isn't clear.  Snap internet research informs me that Zigeuner is a German word for a Romani person, that is, a Gypsy. While this may be a WWII work, the fact that HT hasn't delved into the Romani perspective heretofore does pique my curiosity.

Uchronia has linked to an New Yorker article from 2011 on AH.  This included some analysis of HT himself, GotS specifically, and a quick acknowledgment of our little project here.  So yeah, we've been acknowledged in print.  

We've kicked around various ideas about how to handle those off-the-cuff references to historical figures and events that HT makes in his works. These people aren't characters in any sense-they don't appear directly nor are they contemporaries. Most died long before the POD. The clearest example is the murder of Thomas Beckett and Henry II's role in it: we have articles for both, but they are broad literary comments.

I think the model we've used for the lit references (and music and movies references) can be applied to historical people and events. We could eliminate some of the articles of dubious value that tell us nothing substantive about the TL, but maintain the "annotative" purpose that likely prompted the article in the first place. It would also help eliminate some of the more dubious bits of categorization. For example, the Andrew Jackson article is justified by his role as Governor-General of the North American Union; even as a quick posthumous reference, it says something about T2G. However, there are subsections dedicated how both Jake Featherston and Joe Steele paraphrased Jackson's line: "Judge Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." Those subsections have led to Jackson's inclusion in the Southern Victory Characters and Joe Steele Characters categories, which is rather overstating his role in those works.

If we create the historical references page, then the Jackson page would lose all info pertaining to JS and 191 (including templates and categories), the subs-sections would be edited and moved to the new page, and a "see also" would left at Jackson's article.

Thoughts?

I've just finished the two short works set in the Typecasting universe.  They are "ok": both feature Bill Williamson doing photo ops, first with the Yeti Lama (referenced in Typcasting) in "Visitor from the East" and then 30 days later, another photo op with Nobuo Fujita (this guy) who led a different post-war life from OTL.

Neither is particularly deep or anything. There aren't any conflicts to speak of, just some world building to illustrate that Jefferson is kind of a different place, and that sasquatches are able politicians, too. Collectively among the three stories, we will have a surprisingly nice bump in our historical count.

Now, for purposes of our little project: since these are all set in the same universe, I think we should just collectively categorize and template them as we've done with e.g., the Justin Kloster Stories and a couple of other short related pieces. My question is: what shall we call this? My first impulse is to further establish a pattern with "Bill Williamson Stories" as he is the sole POV and main protagonist in all three works. However, HT's approach to this TL is feeling rather similar to Atlantis, i.e. a couple of short works released before announcement of a trilogy of novels, so I was thinking maybe HT will be doing a novel about the founding of Jefferson at some point? Based on that interview from April, HT isn't necessarily planning on it, but AiA was published in 2005 and OA was published in 2007, so who knows. Thus, another possibility might be "State of Jefferson"

Anyway--I'm putting up to a vote: "Bill Williamson Stories" or "State of Jefferson"? Or is there any third option anyone wants to submit?

In my attempts to find any more info about Typecasting, I stumbled upon this interview from April.  

https://bookwraiths.com/2016/04/20/interview-with-harry-turtledove/

Important to our little project here: Vol 3 of THW is tentatively entitled All the King's Horses and; "Coming next year from Tor is an alternate history called GOD WILLS IT!, set about now in a world where Islam developed science, technology, and enlightened government and Western Europe became a cultural backwater dominated by fanatical religious obsession."

Jonathan has recently suggested on the Mexican War talk page that we create a redirect for the analog war in T2G. I don't think that's appropriate since we know very little about the details of the war, other than the NAU (and/or the British Empire?) defeated Nuevaesapnola (and/or the Spanish Empire?). Frankly, I'm not sure that we should include that section in the Mexican War article at all, so I feel now is as good a time as any to propose a catch-all fictional wars page for the wiki.

For a handy model, see the List of Wars in Disunited States, which could easily be expanded to a catch-all, actually. It would be divided into work/timeline, and then list each war and what we know about them. We'd create redirects as necessary.

Wars that would be eligible would be wars in which some crucial piece of info for good articles is missing--dates and duration of the wars, the belligerents, the cause, the outcome, etc. Using the T2G war, we're pretty sure it took place in roughly 1848 or so, and Nueva España lost territory to the NAU. I can't recall if either of the respective mother countries (Britain and Spain) were involved, and it took place over a century before the novel's setting. Those random details wouldn't be enough to sustain a viable article. Another example is the British-American War in GoTS. We know the causes and the belligerents, and even know what year the war began, but we don't know the outcome.

Gents, maybe some of you can answer me a puzzlement...would you say that in any given series (trilogy and above) HT kills off two characters per book? Thanks in advance. Looking forward to Fallout.