Re: New Reality Seeds
 

You'd turn Freddie Mercury into Edward Said. Wow you're mean!

As for the painting. Those who can read Arabic (unlike the painter) can read the writing on the wall behind the audience. The painter was interested in showing Europeans and Americans the human reality of Near Eastern peoples. Edward Said never had any use for anyone else's human reality.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Try this, Andronikos III was a singularly destructive and self-destructive Byzantine Emperor. Have him die as a child, a illness or and accident, whatever, you'd get several more years of his more stable grandfather and probably a few years of his father as well. Byzantium would still be doomed, but the collapse could be delayed for a generation or two.

If the mobile-type printing got to Byzantium before the fall of Constantinople, then a larger potion of Classical Greek, Byzantine Greek, and Latin texts might survive and be transmited to the West and the modern world. You can go many places from there.

In fact, for a dangerous adventure in a glamourous local, manipulating who gets the Byzantine throne is hard to beat.

If you want a chance for Byzantium to continue into the present, find a way to eliminate or divert Enrico Dandolo who hi-jacked the Fourth Crusade and gutted the Byzantine state.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Well, he was both blind and around ninety years old at the time, so it's not like it would be implausible for him to die before that point.

Let's see. The Fourth Crusade started in 1202, instigated by Pope Innocent III. At the time, Dandolo was the 42nd Doge of Venice, having taken office in 1192. Suppose he becomes ill during one of the intervening winters (anyone know where we can find records of how severe the winters, or weather in general, were during specific years in 1190s Venice?), and dies. In OTL, he was succeeded by Pietro Ziani, but that was after Ziani participated in the Fourth Crusade, and so he might not win an earlier election.

Meanwhile, the knights of the Fourth Crusade would probably still end up stranded in Venice, unable to pay for the ships they commissioned. A different Doge might not be so eager to 'take the cross', nor so interested in Zadar. Depending on who becomes Doge, the Fourth Crusade might well be stillborn, or be dependent on another patron, with another direction in mind (perhaps even the one the Crusade was intended for in the first place).

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

After WWII, computer programming was seen as an appropriate field for women who still wanted to work but didn't want to take jobs from "those boys coming home." The US government liked the idea of 1: getting women out of industrial work to keep employment and wages up for men, and 2: making use of the 50% of the population not classically employed. As a result, public information campaigns advanced the idea of computers as "women's work" over the next decade.

By the '70s, computerization is really moving...

I feel that the end result is an even more highly-computerized society than OTL. Perhaps even a retro-cyberpunk world of CRT-screen loaded hacker dens, with megabyte-sized databases and a certain amount of "hardware hacking" involved in many operations.

I wonder how far and how long such a heavy-handed change can have obvious effect. The only reason I could even imagine it working is if the sexist '40s can brand computer programming as a kind of "secretarial" work. If so, I think it could stick for quite a while, possibly long enough to get entrenched by having impressive names in the field.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Um, PTTG...that's what actually happened, historically. Software and operation (not hardware) was "women's work" through the 70s until the early 80s. What killed it was the rise of the PC; people would spend a few hundred dollars to buy one for their son but not their daughter. By about '83 you have a cadre of new college students where the boys have 6 years experience with the things and the girls don't...and 6 years after that, you have the idea fairly well entrenched that girls can't program. It was a startlingly quick change.

To make it otherwise, you have to seriously screw with the PC revolution. Either you halt/screw up patents somehow, so progress comes to a screeching halt but prices come down so that people will spend the money on their daughters too; or you restrict them, declare them too dangerous to give to someone under 18 (or most private parties, but still let schools, companies etc have them). Either of those decisions will be hard to get to and have negative side-effects.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

It's a dead certainty that the Venetians would have done a good deal to keep the Fourth Crusade from attacking Egypt, the city of Venice had too good a trade deal to easily allow that. And by that period in time, Egypt was the place to attack if you really wanted to conquer and hold the Holy Land.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I'm reading The Riddle and the Knight, a work about John Mandeville. And two interesting possiblities for cross world travel popped up in Chapter nine.

First, Sir John seems to have left an apple preserved in cyrstal to Canterbury Cathedral. This long lost relic could be several different things. First, Sir John says he never visited paradise, but maybe he brought back a souvenir? More than one crossworld faction would want this relic, the Cabal being by far the most obvious. But what if the cyrstal is a hologram and Sir John's Travels an account of his journeys in a world more technologically advanced than any other known to either Homeline or Centruum?

The second item left by Sir John, to St. Albans Abbey was a large Saphire ring which sounds a great deal like this ring. Given the fact that the Doctor's ring seemed to be a fairly flexible technological item, it could be an interesting thing to get hold of. It could be that the Second Doctor could have lost the ring and Sir John found it, or maybe the two traveled together for a while, the hypothetical season 6b. Either way, if the ring leads to a Doctor Who Mythic parallel it's big news for the crossworld war.

The ring could also be a magic ring giving the wearer Worldjumping abilities. A quick way to introduce PCs into the Infinate Worlds setting.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Hmm. So possibly a stillborn Fourth Crusade?

OTOH, suppose that something about the new Doge leads to the Crusaders going to a different city? Italy had a number of other port cities, many of which, IIRC, were in competition with Venice. How many had both ships to charter, and no good trade deals with Egypt?

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

Genoa hated Venice. Mainly because Venice was always richer and no one conquered Venice until Napoleon. Genoa, because she lacked Venice's natural defences, was never able to build herself up like Venice did. Venice could also stay aloof from Italian politics, if she wanted too.

But more interesting than sacking Genoa, what if the Egyptians had a foe other than Byzantium? Someone worth taking down.

Re: New Reality Seeds
 

I actually meant 'the Crusaders don't end up in Venice due to something possibly related to the new Doge; instead, they end up in another Italian city, and this changes the direction of the Fourth Crusade.'

So, if the Crusaders chartered ships in Genoa, but still ended up in debt, how might the Genoese have handled it?