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Since this is the borderline general history thread anyway: I'll be in London in a few weeks, are there any museums or exhibitions particularly worth checking out? I'd imagine the Museum Of London is worth a look, but apart from that?
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Feb 25, 2023 23:26
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Perestroika posted:Since this is the borderline general history thread anyway: I'll be in London in a few weeks, are there any museums or exhibitions particularly worth checking out? I'd imagine the Museum Of London is worth a look, but apart from that? The Imperial War Museum was pretty decent from what I recall, but it's been like a decade since I was last there. Unsurprisingly it's a military history museum, so yeah.
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Feb 25, 2023 23:38
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Okay important note the British Museum and the Museum of London are two very different things and you will probably be disappointed if you go to one expecting the other. e: do the British Museum, Imperial War Museum, and National Gallery. The Churchill War Rooms are worth a visit (that's the only one you'll have to pay for). Might as well do the Houses of Parliament while you are in a 5 min walking distance. Of course you shouldn't do any of that until you go to M&M's World. e2: Oh I almost forgot, the Science Museum, Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museums are out a bit further West. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 23:44
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Very nice, that ought to keep me well and busy, thanks! Also good call on the distinction between the British Museum and Museum of London, I 100% did mix those up. 
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Feb 25, 2023 23:55
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Perestroika posted:Since this is the borderline general history thread anyway: I'll be in London in a few weeks, are there any museums or exhibitions particularly worth checking out? I'd imagine the Museum Of London is worth a look, but apart from that? All of them. London has a shitload of museums, the vast majority are free, the vast majority are exceptional, what sort of thing are you most interested in?
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Feb 25, 2023 23:55
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There's HMS Belfast, of course.
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Feb 26, 2023 00:03
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Fangz posted:There's HMS Belfast, of course. This one is my highest recommendation. It's one of the easiest to access too since it's close to a bunch of tube stations.
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Feb 26, 2023 00:16
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Perestroika posted:Since this is the borderline general history thread anyway: I'll be in London in a few weeks, are there any museums or exhibitions particularly worth checking out? I'd imagine the Museum Of London is worth a look, but apart from that? You could spend a week in the National Gallery. The thing that Cameron does with the Seurat painting in Ferris Bueller I did like 5 or 6 times. Edit: The Imperial War Museum has the eagle that was on top of the loving Reichskanzlei: 
Phanatic fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 00:16
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Trin Tragula posted:All of them. Currently I'm probably most interested in late medieval and early modern periods, though certainly not exclusively. Exhibits staged like a particular situation/environment where you can sort of walk through and really immerse yourself in it are a particular plus. Fangz posted:There's HMS Belfast, of course. Oh drat yeah, that one's got me 
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Feb 26, 2023 00:39
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Perestroika posted:Currently I'm probably most interested in late medieval and early modern periods, though certainly not exclusively. Exhibits staged like a particular situation/environment where you can sort of walk through and really immerse yourself in it are a particular plus. I will say I remember when I visited the Imperial War Museum had a "WW1 trench experience" where you sat in a little bunker and ended up getting surrounded by the sounds and smells of being in the trenches. Pretty neat and sounds like what you wanted, though I don't know if it's still there or not.
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Feb 26, 2023 00:45
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Tomn posted:The Imperial War Museum was pretty decent from what I recall, but it's been like a decade since I was last there. Unsurprisingly it's a military history museum, so yeah. Perestroika posted:Currently I'm probably most interested in late medieval and early modern periods, though certainly not exclusively. Exhibits staged like a particular situation/environment where you can sort of walk through and really immerse yourself in it are a particular plus.
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Feb 26, 2023 01:02
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Perestroika posted:Currently I'm probably most interested in late medieval and early modern periods, though certainly not exclusively. Exhibits staged like a particular situation/environment where you can sort of walk through and really immerse yourself in it are a particular plus. The three big ones on Exhibition Road (Science, Natural History, Victoria & Albert) would definitely be worth at least a partial visit and there's bound to be at least a few things you'll enjoy in every one. Aside from them; the Museum of London (don't get fooled by the name into thinking it's any more than "just" a museum dedicated to the history of London as a place) should have a lot of what you're looking for if they haven't hosed it all up. I'm not a massive fan of the British Museum, which I've always found to be too large, too full of tourists, and woefully under-curated, but it's big enough and important enough that you should probably go and have your own opinion about it. Some left-field suggestions: If the idea appeals of arms and armour plus a random collection of porcelain, some Old Masters, and whatever other stuff happens to fall down the back of a few aristocrats' couches when they aren't looking, all in the same place, I can very much recommend the Wallace Collection as an under-appreciated place that you can definitely see all of in half a day or less. If the idea of "a bunch of people's front rooms from Elizabethan times to the present day" appeals, then the Museum of the Home has also long been an underappreciated gem. The bequest that created Sir John Soane's Museum stipulated that his house be preserved as far as practicable in the state in which he left it. If you're going to do milhist then the IWM is a no-brainer but don't forget the National Army Museum, which last time I went I found to be a very odd place, but also worth going to have an opinion on it. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 01:04
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Perestroika posted:Since this is the borderline general history thread anyway: I'll be in London in a few weeks, are there any museums or exhibitions particularly worth checking out? I'd imagine the Museum Of London is worth a look, but apart from that? The Victoria and Albert Museum was my favourite. It's a pretty eclectic mix of artifacts, art, clothing, weapons, and so on from various cultures and periods. It's got a bit of everything, and I found it particularly interesting to see certain trends or technologies interpreted by different parts of the world. The museum is a little ways South of Kensington Gardens in an area packed with other museums so you can do a lot of exploring if you want.
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Feb 26, 2023 01:13
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Trin Tragula posted:
Honestly I kind of love it for that reason. If you avoid like three or four major things that constantly have a few tour busses worth of people around them (e.g. Rosetta Stone) there are huge swaths that are almost empty. I remember just kinda stumbling across the Vindolanda Tablets at one point and spent like an hour staring at them, alone except for a security guard. Also some amazing Celtic gold working that was similarly ignored by everyone else.
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Feb 26, 2023 02:12
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Victoria and Albert Museum was my favourite. It's a pretty eclectic mix of artifacts, art, clothing, weapons, and so on from various cultures and periods. It's got a bit of everything, and I found it particularly interesting to see certain trends or technologies interpreted by different parts of the world. The museum is a little ways South of Kensington Gardens in an area packed with other museums so you can do a lot of exploring if you want. Could you expand on what you mean by this? I don't have a particular axe to grind or nothing, it's just a turn of phrase that sounds intriguing.
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Feb 26, 2023 03:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:Could you expand on what you mean by this? Well basically you can find lots of examples of the same object, but produced in different places, or for a specific foreign markets. Much of the museums item's are decorative artisan goods, so everything is unique and very expressive. For example, there is a big collection of very fancy wheel-lock guns from different parts of Europe, and you can look at them side-by-side compare them to each other. In a similar vein, there's a collection of hand-crafted muskets from 19th century Iran, Turkey, India, and Africa. The most interesting items to me are the ones that could be decorated the most. The guns themselves had to take the same fundamental form, but the accessory powder flasks could be wildly different, in a way that you really get to see local preferences or trends. Though you couldn't be certain, because maybe it was just one artisan who liked to work a certain way. The museum's more mundane items were generally better contextualized, telling interesting little stories like how cabinet makers from Lubeck tried to imitate lacquered cabinets from Japan with local materials and sold those to the English. Even for stuff outside of context, everything tends to be very beautiful, and the randomness of what's made it to the museum (a collection of the highest-quality knick-knacks and imperial loot) is intriguing. Like, I was dumbstruck when I walked by this impossibly fine and intricate looking lockset on display and saw that it was made in the loving 1500s.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:31
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O word up. That's what I thought you meant. I'm big into that. I always like doing a nice thorough compare-and-contrast of like different cultures' wood-working tools, knives, agricultural equipment, the practical kind of day to day items. It's just really cool seeing how different people approached universal problems, how they're the same and how they're different.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:51
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The Wallace Collection's curator is a cool dude.
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Feb 26, 2023 08:43
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Siivola posted:The Wallace Collection's curator is a cool dude. Seconding this, the Wellcome Collection also has a good permanent collection (it's about medical stuff.) The temporary exhibitions used to be great but I feel like they've fallen off a bit, less interesting to the general public and more museum/art curator circle jerky
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Feb 26, 2023 08:54
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I just recently got around to checking their second Youtube series where he, Tod Todeschini and a bunch of craftspeople make an armour and shoot it with arrows. It's fun watching the arrows go sproing off the plates. https://todtodeschini.com/youtube-projects/arrows-v-armour-2/
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Feb 26, 2023 09:03
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Hi guys, another goon told me you might be interested in this. My grandfather, a German who was born in 1925 and conscripted for WW2 in 1943 wrote his war memoires a few years before his death, it's just 8 pages but I've found it to be fascinating reading, as horrific as some of it is. He was conscripted and sent to the russian front as replenishment for the 6th army which was destroyed in Stalingrad. I uploaded it to a text paste and translated it to english with deepl, it seems okay to me. I only changed a few last names due to my family still using them. Also content warning: death and other horrors of war are topics, though it's mostly just a personal account without graphic descriptions. https://rentry.co/f4568t If there's anything wrong with it please let me know! Son of Rodney fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 16:00
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Son of Rodney posted:Hi guys, another goon told me you might be interested in this. My granfather, a German who was born in 1925 and conscripted for WW2 in 1943 wrote his war memoires a few years before his death, it's just 8 pages but I've found it to be fascinating reading, as horrific as some of it is. He was conscripted and sent to the russian front as replenishment for the 6th army which was destroyed in Stalingrad. Thanks for sharing,that was a fascinating read
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Feb 26, 2023 16:12
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Yes thank you.
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Feb 26, 2023 16:15
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Jesus christ that's a hell of a read.
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Feb 26, 2023 16:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:Jesus christ that's a hell of a read. In related news, I'll have you know that the diaries* of Adolf Hitler have now been digitized and uploaded to internet by public broadcaster NDR!  *as imagined by Konrad Kujau
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Feb 26, 2023 18:35
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Yeah that's a cool read, I've often wondered how soldiers might actually go about surrendering if they sensed things were really not going well; interesting that there would basically be some "come surrender here" places in an overrun area.
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Feb 26, 2023 18:46
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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That was certainly something. Wow.
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Feb 26, 2023 18:58
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Son of Rodney posted:My grandfather, a German who was born in 1925 and conscripted for WW2 in 1943 wrote his war memoires a few years before his death, it's just 8 pages but I've found it to be fascinating reading, as horrific as some of it is. That was fascinating, thank you for sharing it. It was interesting to see that from his perspective he described the US declaring war on Germany, when it was the other way around. Although FDR had been about to declare war on Germany after Pearl Harbor, Hitler beat him to it. Your pessimistic great-grandfather was right about the Nazis' chances in the war, but luckily he was wrong about your grandpa's chance of survival. Seeing him talk about picking up a Kalashnikov threw me. I wonder if he meant a PPSh or PPS, or maybe a captured StG-44.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:08
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Chamale posted:
I'm pretty confident that it was a PPSh/PPS of some flavor, especially given that he also describes it as an SMG: quote:Nun habe ich mein Gewehr weggeworfen und mir seine Maschinenpistole (eine neue Kalaschnikow) You run into this kind of thing with memoirs all the time. In the intervening 60-80 years between experiencing that and writing it down the AK became ubiquitous and a synonym for pretty much any fully automatic, russian made, personal defense weapon. Meanwhile this probably wasn't some kind of gun geek or weapons expert, just a kid serving in a military who, through experience, knew the basic difference between a LMG, a rifle, and an SMG. Something similar I've seen is American vets talking about German "grease guns." They don't mean the M3, they're almost certainly talking about some flavor of MP38/40, but the gun they had that looked and functioned similar had that name so it's what you get.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:36
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Chamale posted:That was fascinating, thank you for sharing it. It was interesting to see that from his perspective he described the US declaring war on Germany, when it was the other way around. Although FDR had been about to declare war on Germany after Pearl Harbor, Hitler beat him to it. Your pessimistic great-grandfather was right about the Nazis' chances in the war, but luckily he was wrong about your grandpa's chance of survival. It's quite likely that he misremembered, as he wrote this just about 60 years after the war ended. He hadn't talked about his war experience for decades, only opening up very occasionally, and just randomly mentioned it one day which is how we got a copy of it. We assume he felt the need to get it out of his system after suppressing it for so long.
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Feb 26, 2023 20:06
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I'm surprised his officers would be okay with him tossing his rifle and swapping for a SMG like some kind of FPS protagonist.
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Feb 26, 2023 20:42
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Fangz posted:I'm surprised his officers would be okay with him tossing his rifle and swapping for a SMG like some kind of FPS protagonist. What are they going to do? Ship him to the Eastern Front?
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Feb 26, 2023 21:09
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Seems at that point they had bigger things to worry about. Also seems with him being an enlisted soldier at a regimental staff he probably didn’t have too much supervision compared to being in a line unit
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Feb 26, 2023 21:16
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They were in a pocket, at that point you are just trying to keep everyone marching in the same direction.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm pretty confident that it was a PPSh/PPS of some flavor, especially given that he also describes it as an SMG: It's a normal human error and that's still the most likely cause, but it's worth keeping in mind that DeepL isn't actually a very good translator. It's slightly better than Google Translate, but both are a pile of clown shoes compared to an actual human translator. You know how ChatGTP is good at pretending to make something that only fools people who don't know the topic? Machine translation via neural networks is an evolution of parallel models and has all of the same problems. It doesn't actually "know" either language and is just doing a poo poo ton of math based on correlations between words to fake the appearance. Not being lovely to Son of Rodney, it was the best tool to hand, but debating anything about the translation is like the parable about the blind men identifying an elephant. Machine translation just has garbage fidelity.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:28
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I think that's a reasonable translation for "eine neue Kalaschnikow" EDIT: Anyway my theory would be a PPSh-41 with the curved box magazine. There's a visual similarity there for someone who isn't a gun expert. 
Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 26, 2023 |
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Feb 26, 2023 21:31
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Fangz posted:I think that's a reasonable translation for "eine neue Kalaschnikow" Yeah, it'll do proper nouns*. The point is to keep in mind that anything you build off of that would be like building a house when the architect eyeballed all the dimensions. *only applicable to languages that use roman characters.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:Something similar I've seen is American vets talking about German "grease guns." They don't mean the M3, they're almost certainly talking about some flavor of MP38/40, but the gun they had that looked and functioned similar had that name so it's what you get. See also "tommy gun" being used often in Korean War accounts, or even some Western-written stuff of the Russians in World War II, which is almost certainly describing the PPSh with a drum mag.
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Feb 26, 2023 21:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's a normal human error and that's still the most likely cause, but it's worth keeping in mind that DeepL isn't actually a very good translator. It's slightly better than Google Translate, but both are a pile of clown shoes compared to an actual human translator. Sure, you're 100% right about that, but I'm kinda going off the original German that was also provided and which I quoted above: Nun habe ich mein Gewehr weggeworfen und mir seine Maschinenpistole (eine neue Kalaschnikow) genommen Dude called it a Kalashnikov in the original, and further stipulated that it was a Maschinenpistole, which matches 1:1 with "SMG" in English. There's a slight edge case here - it could be that the Russian was walking around with a captured StG44, and grandpa here took it back, and with a poo poo load of distance in time conflated THAT with the visually similar (compared to a K98k or a PPSh) and far more commonly known AK. Personally I think that's fairly unlikely, but it's not impossible.
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Feb 26, 2023 22:00
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Fangz posted:I'm surprised his officers would be okay with him tossing his rifle and swapping for a SMG like some kind of FPS protagonist. Dudes pick up all kind of gear, unless it’s actively stupid and detrimental his officers definitely had bigger fish to fry.
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Feb 26, 2023 22:33
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