…d smells of London’s docklands on the first night, when warehouses full of rum, paint, rubber, pepper, grain, sugar and tea went up in flames: tea fires, it seems, are ‘sweet, sickly and very intense’ (25). Then there was the woman seen by one special constable tottering down the street, holding an umbrella and singing ‘I’m Singin’ in the Rain’: but ‘The only rain coming down was the incendiary bombs’ (44). Of course there are also many stories, s…
…shion (as in flight and, more especially, cabin crew), food, interiors and design (as in corporate branding and aircraft colour schemes). The changing fashions are predictably outrageous — my favourite would have to be the all-denim look of Denim Air (yes, really) — and the food options intriguing — I’ve never been an airline food hater, and as Lovegrove explains, making more or less palatable food options for hundreds of passengers to be served h…
…amage (and even that is probably too high). I also made the night training rule non-optional, and made most sides Forming the RAF This is another nice rule which I like a lot, but felt I needed to tinker with. Basically, the British player can pay a penalty in MP and declare that the RAF has been formed, which gives them certain advantages in stacking and purchasing bombers. But, historically, the RAF’s formation was not a rational process of deci…
…and mountain climbers, the effects of aerial loops, spins and dives on the human body was much less well understood, let alone the effect on the human mind of the constant switching from relatively comfortable lodgings to combat patrols. While Hamilton-Paterson shows that the infamously raucous mess parties were much rarer than depicted by early Hollywood, and were usually a response to the loss of a fellow airman, he also argues that alcoholism w…
…istorians have nothing to learn from walk-around artefacts. This might be true for RN cruisers (among the best documented of ships) so long as you are a historian of warship construction, but speaking as a professional historian who is a historian of control rooms, actually being able stand there and work out where they could put the phones (etc) is useful. Interest in a subject is not a fixed resource to be quarried – it’s something that can be d…
…er hex hash or some combination of [0-9]s, ?s, =s, and &s); these ones are human-guessable and human-hackable too. The code will be open sourced; the bleeding-edge version is already available. There’s even an OS X dashboard widget if you’re into that kind of thing. A low-traffic discussion group gives a flavour of plans for future features, such as linking in mentions in Hansard of place names to Google Maps. (Actually, that’s a feature that was…
…plify Terence’s epigram: ‘Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto’ — I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me. A fellow Melburnian, but also clearly a citizen of the world. William Turkel of Digital History Hacks: because his posts on applying digital history methods always make me think, ‘Why the **** aren’t I doing that???’ The rules for the Awardees can be found at the thinking blog. Basically, you have to select five more blogs whi…
…literal example of naval theatre — was an imperative, imploring Britons to rule the waves or else be slaves, so too did the Edwardian aerial theatre warn them to now rule the clouds. Or else be vanquished. Flight, 4 September 1909, 532, 533. [↩] The Story of the Air League 1909-1959 (Sidney-Barton, 1959), 5. [↩] The Times, 7 June 1910, 12. [↩] Ibid. [↩] Quoted in New Zealand Herald (Auckland), 20 September 1913, 4. [↩] Andrew Horrall, Popular Cult…
…s to have escaped accusations of fraud during her career, the same is not true of Price. And I have no independent verification that the transcript published by Price and scrutinised by Mr. X after the inquiry was in fact the same one sent to the Air Ministry just after the crash, or indeed if it was sent at all. Or, if it was, whether anyone paid it any attention. However, a Major Oliver Villiers of the Air Ministry did participate in Garrett’s l…
…same thing. Instead they overlap. Simulations are very similar to ludic (structured, rule-bound) games, except they aren’t necessarily fun. (Clearly they can be, even the extremely detailed ones: witness the popularity of flight simulators.) And of course games are not necessarily simulations, even the ludic ones (what does noughts and crosses simulate?) So it was probably unwise of me to use the word ‘games’. On the other hand, fun is in the plea…
