Moscow was a hilariously minor player early on; IOTL it wasn't even *independent* until sometime after the Mongol conquest, wasn't particularly major for half a century after that, and then stayed up by playing well with the Mongol overlords (while very slowly expanding, sometimes by land purchase).

conveniently enough Arabic-with-harakat is also effectively an abugida, so perhaps the weird European thing would just be trying to write vowels as their own letters and not as part of the consonants where they obviously belong

the *actual* ~alphabetic scripts ~next door [which would have already existed by the POD] are the Khmer-Thai and Mon-Burmese script families (and the rest of the Brahmic scripts somewhat further out), though of course they're abugidas and not true alphabets like European Latin/Greek/Cyrillic scripts

fairly confident Hangul is strongly based on 'Phags-pa, which was IOTL invented for the Yuan/Mongol empire because it was controlling a lot of various nations and consequently some kind of an international phonetic alphabet was very useful

of course TTL!Song might end up going that direction anyway

[Or possibly a Catholic Novgorod with probably-Baltic-and-maybe-barely-White-Sea access, and a Bjarmaland that got merged with Norway in a pan-European-Arctic "Viking" state that also controls Iceland and Greenland.

What *would* have happened with the Greenlandic Vikings ITTL, anyway? Same as OTL?]

I think Vladimir would never have been part of Novgorod in the first place! IOTL it was part of *Kiev* until it declared independence.
Pskov or Beloozero, maybe...

A better question is whether we're looking at a single Novgorod-with-Bjarmaland, or separate Catholic Novgorod and Orthodox Bjarmaland.

words to live by

For a while the EBS project included several alternate versions of paths; I hadn't tried to search for that version on Wayback Machine yet.

I *think* the Github version of their project might be still extant (though locked).

Hmm, the EBS website definitely listed a specific claim. I'll try to check...

[after some googling and Wayback Machine checking]
...yeah it's got all the links. Phil Plait -> Henry C. Ferguson -> Robert J. Vanderbei -> Peter Fishburn -> Paul Erdos

web.archive.org/web/20171225...

Carles li reis (nostre emperere magnes) is also ~undeniably a historical figure (and AFAIK in his case there *are* many eyewitness sources on his existence), but just as undeniably extremely mythologized

it's not immediately clear from the narrative that Marsilie de Sarraguce is any less historical

To take a more religious example, Achashverosh is also almost surely historical (though the traditional identification of him with "Artaxerxes" of Greek sources is apparently mistaken), but AFAIK there's some fairly strong evidence that (most of) the story of Esther almost certainly didn't happen

I think a better analogy here is not "Alexander the Great is mythological" but "Iskandar Zul-Qarnayn is historical"

...after looking up the chronology and geography: not Great Perm but their predecessor Bjarmaland

Honestly I do kinda wonder what would the Northeast Passage situation look like ITTL. There'd pretty quickly be Chinese explorers telling everyone that the Asian coast continues eastward past Kamchatka

I did some googling and apparently it's now rare as a standalone word but still very common in compounds (including that one but also others)

AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong) that one is also used perfectly well in normal German, it just no longer means "country leader" but is still used for things like "car driver"

yet for some reason Pythagoras of Samos gets a pass despite being pretty clearly a mythicized posthumous reinterpretation *at best*

(caveat, we don't know if "Pythagoras of Samos" who reportedly couldn't box with the boys because he looked too girly, and then won in men's boxing, was the same guy)

the myths about Pythagoras [of Samos - the triangle guy] are only slightly less absurd (in some cases *more* absurd, I think) than the myths about Jesus, and actual historical evidence is microscopic if any, but for some reason approximately no one is denying the existence of a historical Pythagoras

AFAIK a couple of them are pretty close to being proven *not* historical to the extent that claiming their historicity is a seriously fringe view

Very strongly seconded on Pythagoras though.
Gilgamesh is an interesting case because IIRC some of his legendary friends *are* (just barely) attested

*looks up the chronology*

...if the battle of Al-Uqab (OTL 1215) still happened ITTL, the chances for any significant amounts of the Iberian peninsula still remaining Muslim-controlled are pretty limited. If things started to diverge too much before that point, the peninsula likely ended up split.

Hmm. What *would* the Reconquista had looked like ITTL? They have already advanced pretty far from the days of Carles li reis (nostre emperere magnes) by the time of the Mongol not-sure-if-still-conquest, and honestly even by the time of the Song heyday large parts of Iberia were already Christian.

the other six are definitely fake though

I think ITTL Novgorod would still be colonizing the northeast, and I'm actually not sure if there'd be an independent Orthodox state in the far northeast (~= OTL Great Perm?) or it would all be part of Catholic Novgorod

(or if that area would mostly be colonized from the south/southeast)

also now that I think about it this is set in ~Shakespearean times, where the orthography was much more shallow because people were just spelling things the way they sounded a lot; if the standartized orthography was ~Chaucerian...

...and now I'm imagining Orrm's spelling reform catching on somehow

hmm apparently it was invented for the Yuan but it's *plausible* that the same pressure to make something like that up might have existed in an actively-conquering Song state? hard to tell one way or another

I'm not sure if the creation of 'Phags-pa script would have still happened chronologically ITTL or was prevented by the sufficiently early POD

(if it still exists, I'm imagining it as the TTL equivalent of the IPA, and basically only used for linguistic research and ignored otherwise)

Honestly compared to Thai or Burmese, they're pretty sensibly spelled.

(Tibetan is even worse but I imagine that ITTL Tibetan is probably extinct)

the Russian side of that border nonsense, Kaliningrad Oblast, actually has one of those on its opposite side - Baltiyskaya kosa [a.k.a. Vistula Spit]

unlike the Lithuanian one, approximately nobody actually lives there (there's a small settlement near the strait, but most of it is a military base)

the usual term for that sort of thing is "exclave"

(sometimes it's referred to as "pene-exclave" or "practical exclave" to distinguish it from the more standard kinds of exclave)

a sign reading "fuck the Hamas" and "הפעם עד הסוף" (the second line is in Hebrew and translates to "this time until the end")

This sign became very common on Israeli streets after 7.10; I spoilered the image because of the swear word (...as "graphic content", because there wasn't a better-fitting option).

A few times I've seen an additional version mentioning Hezbollah (unfortunately I hadn't taken any photos of those).

Brave is the one with cryptocurrency stuff everywhere and/or LLM stuff everywhere? If yes, I'd stay away from it as much as possible.
(Also I vaguely recall it also requiring a subscription, but less confident on that part)

I use Firefox in incognito mode - might be the incognito they're picking on