Tuesday, January 03, 2006

IVTIAHD; Luther's Excommunication, Apple's Incorporation

ALTERNATE HISTORIAN'S NOTE: It's International Visit Today In Alternate History Day! Just for today's post, the feed has been turned off in an effort to encourage everyone who reads us through one of the various feeds to come to the site so we can find out how many of you there are. While you're here, we'd actually like to encourage you to use the Feedburner feed on the side of the page to read us via the RSS feed reader of your choice. That way, we can have a clearer picture of how many of you there are. To sweeten the deal, everyone who comments on IVTIAHD on our Forums will be entered into a drawing to get their own alternate history entry! Thanks for participating in IVTIAHD, and the feed will be turned back on with tomorrow's post!
PS - we would really appreciate it if you nominated us for one of these.

January 3rd, 2006

in 47,391 BCE, after a year of walking, Telka the Speaker stands at the southeastern Asian shore and ponders a way across the ocean. Swikolay, her great-granddaughter and traveling companion, has an idea for going out into the waters. She hollows out a tree and they ride it into the South Pacific.

in 902, the wizard Atticus enters Merlin's place of power.

in 1521, German monk Martin Luther was excommunicated by Pope Henry VIII of the Holy British Empire. Brother Martin was disgusted with the corruption of the British Papacy, and nailed a series of theses on his local church door, enumerating and protesting the wickedness of the English Church. Pope Henry, who had never been one to tolerate protestants, excommunicated then executed Brother Martin.

in 1804, during the Irish War of Independence, Agent K’Tan’Jir of British Intelligence captures an Irish Mlosh agent, Pri’Kato’Mli. Although the Irish agent manages to escape, K’Tan’Jir has placed a tracking device on him, and uses him to find the base that he has been operating out of. With his young assistant, James Watson, K’Tan’Jir storms the base, only to find that he has been outfoxed – Pri’Kato’Mli had over a hundred rebels with him. The two British agents barely manage to escape with their lives.

in 1889, deep in the woods of Michigan, Mikhail von Heflin encounters a creature that the natives call a Wendigo. It is an extra-dimensional beast that can see what he really is and attacks him out of fear. He manages to escape from it, and flees to the south.

in 1892, the scholarly giant of modern England, John R. R. Tolkien, was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. At Oxford, Tolkien penned some of the greatest literary criticisms of the 20th century, delving into the mythic roots of Beowulf, the legends of King Arthur, the Germanic and Celtic influences in English literature, and dozens of other subjects. In recent years, his son Christopher published a few of the bed time stories Tolkien wrote for his children, of which the most famous are his Father Christmas stories. There has even been talk of making a movie of these stories, although no one really expects they would be very popular.

in 4620, Egyptologist and adventurer Luo Gan discovers the ancient tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, and its hideous curse. Over the next five years, he and the twenty members of his team die gruesome deaths. Although most dismiss this as mere coincidence, the Imperial Ministry of Antiquities has forbade further digging into ancient Egypt’s past.

in 1961, the Soviet States of America severs its diplomatic and economic ties with the Caribbean island nation of Cuba after it reorganized its economy along European lines and strengthened its ties with the Eastern powers. “The West cannot tolerate a reactionary nation so close to our borders,” Comrade President Rosenberg declared, “and so, we will take the steps necessary to punish those who leave the Community of Trade for the oppression of capitalism.”

in 12-17-10-5-15, Pachacamac, Incan musicians famed throughout the Empire, give their first performance before the emperor at Oueztec City. The music of the sweet mountains of their birth lofted throughout the court, bringing smiles and tears to the assembled courtiers. The emperor himself is so moved by their performance that he ennobles them all.

in 1967, Jack Ruby's cancer went into remission, allowing him to be placed on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. From the stand, Ruby spun a story of conspiracy, deception and treason, and the judge was forced to place a gag order on news from the trial. When the courtroom blew up the next day, it was blamed on a “gas leak” under the courthouse.

in 1977, the number one computer company in the world, Apple Computers, was incorporated by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in California. From humble beginnings as a machine for hobbyists, Apple computers soon made their way onto desktops in businesses and homes around the world with the introduction of the Macintosh line of computers. They might have stumbled in the 80’s when IBM’s operating system supplier, Microsoft, made a graphical interface to match the Macintosh, but a successful lawsuit against the company crushed that upstart.


Timelines in today's post: the Speaker, the Holy British Empire, the Mlosh, Communist America, the Chinese Empire and von Heflin.

Yet another AHN - today's post has something a little different about it. In addition to a link to a long-form entry and the real timeline source of 2 alternate entries, at the bottom of the post you will find links to the ongoing timelines that are written about in this post. This is extraordinarily time-consuming, so give us some comments about it to let us know if you would like us to continue doing that.

We still have our standard offer - everybody who donates $10 or more through our Paypal link will become alternate history entries on the site. When you donate, I will email you asking your preference for a day & timeline; if you don't reply to me, I'll place you in a day that seems to fit your name :) Thanks for your continued support!


The Forum lives again! My esteemed Co-Historian has brought the forum back to life, and in spite of the issues we've had with the forum in the past, we think that this time, it'll stay up!
Fresh New Poll - Shall we use future dates in our entries?


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Warp and Protocols still available; also, see the script I submitted for Bravo's Situation: Comedy. Speaking of which, the winning writers have been announced; not the ones I voted for, but you can see the one I did at http://www.marktreitel.com

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nah-uh - I just got here from reading the feed (I usually click on the title so I can read the posts on-site anyway). Whatever you did to turn the feed off must not have worked. I'm using the built-in atom feed from Blogger, if that helps any. Do they require a full blog republish to turn off a feed? That could be the problem...hmm.

Anonymous said...

Oh...and now that I've finished reading that I have some more feedback too: the links to other pages in the timeline are nice (clever, btw, using a search to do that, although a more time-consuming (to create, anyway) pictorial timeline would probably be easier to use).

Also, I like that you're including links to what actually happened now (makes it easier to follow along), but I think that you need a different way to show that...the links for longer entries show up the same way that links to sources do. Perhaps you could have the event in a regular font an then provide a link to what happened in our timeline right afterwards?

Alien Truther said...

Yeah, the Feedburner feed updated instantaneously after I posted this; that's ok, as I'm encouraging people to use that. If you're using something else, oh well - thanks for visiting, anyway :)

I might come up with a more permanent way to lead off to the recurring timelines, and just leave that on the site itself. I'll have to think on that.

As for the longer entries versus the real events links, the long entry links typically only consist of one line, so that's the main difference. I guess I could italicize them or something - I'll think on that, too.

Thanks for the comments!

TIAH Editor says we'd like to move you off the blog, if you're browsing the archives - and most people are - more than half of them are already on the new site. We need to be sure the new web site accomodates your archive browsing needs because we don't want to lose any readers. Please supply any feedback or comments by email to the Editor and please note the blogger site is shutting on December 1st.