The fun part is him already haggling down how much he needs to watch to become a "certified fan"

I may have found a business idea... /j

For proper certification please pay the necessary annual certification fees. I will get in touch with you for my bank data so you can be processed and we can send you a fan certificate "Akira Kurosawa, 2023". Please note certificates expire annually and must be renewed.

Don't claim to be a fan without proper certification to prove validity!

Your friendly fan certification service.

edit: Just realized, please provide proof you watched 24 of his movies and 4 repeat viewings each following year.

/s

lol, John Wick was great action because it was solely thought up by stunt coordinators.

The world building of it is laughable and only barely there to keep churning out sequels. It was never the point.

What's next? Fast & Furious revolutionized character drama?

Seems to be more about spirituality and culture and social conflicts than history per se.

But that would probably not controversial enough.

It is important that it was royal purple that was reserved. By the High Middle Ages at latest they knew how to mix other purple dyes, they just weren't made from such exotic ingredients and had a different tone so you could tell it was a different dye.

Same for royal red colors. There were other reds, but the price of the dye was part of the bragging rights.

There is a sadly not much mentioned/elaboration that Greek mythology directly refers to Ancient Greek fossil finds, e.g. mammoth thigh bones => cyclops/giants, dinosaur bones => hydra/gryphon. Aka that they had such things in temples as tourist attractions and used it as validation that their mythological age was real.

I found that quite fascinating proposition by a historian in a documentary years ago.

Reading an article? On Reddit? Nobody told me that was a thing! /s

This is assumed a specific kind of duel to settle a dispute by commoners/town people where a woman was defending her rights.

The hallmark of duels was that they were intentionally designed to equalize the combat so "God's will" was not distorted by something like one guy being a trained swordsman. Another was that (particularly if not of the knightly class) you actually wanted a lot of duels not to be to the death but until one side yields. Obviously depended on what this was about.

For that reason specific, weird looking fencing shields were common, too. Easy to defend, awkward to handle.

If they launch US astronauts to the ISS it would be a NASA mission though.

As a private company they just provide the product that allows this mission to be done.

I mean, borders are a bit complicated

Point remains that we have a general assimilation of more and more provincial elites until we have Roman citizenship apply to a wide breadth of people.

At the same time the title emperor to the Roman was never the same exclusive title it became in the Middle Ages and later so someone holding a title of imperium did not mean it needed to be someone from a specific bloodline. They always saw it in a more complex political organization, that is why we have emperors seemingly splitting the empire. To them this was obviously an office of high prestige, but it was an office with administrative and military power, not some blood right. And they never saw this as breaking the Roman Empire apart, but making administration or military organization easier.

With no relevance to the structure of the Roman Empire as a political Entity.

The entire point is: Yes, Cultural differences persisted, including between Illyria and Africa, Africa and Italy, Gaul and Spain, Spain and Greece.

And emperors and other high officials came from all those places.

The Senate was not a structure defined by the Western or Eastern Roman Empire, It existed within them. It also existed when Italy was ruled by the Osthrogoths and Lombards.

So yes, there was not only a Senate in the later Eastern Roman Empire, while East Rome controlled Italy, the Senatorial class of Italy and their Senate was also part of East Rome.

While the Roman Senate (Senate of Rome/Italy) itself disappears by the 7th century, East Rome retained its own senate for its own region.

Eastern Roman Empire is widely used by historians and Byzantine less favored today.

Our culture diverges from that 50 years before significantly.

Constantine himself was not Roman by origin, but of Illyrian descent with a Greek mother.

Roman was not a nationality by that point. Plenty of people up to the highest echelons could come from anywhere in the empire.

This idea that Romans ruled over non Romans was precisely not how things worked. As Romans settled through the empire after a few centuries they assimilated into their regional provinces and regional provincials assimilated into Roman elites. To the point to a whole row of Roman emperors coming from all over the place.

I don't think you know what the Eastern Roman Empire was or what Romans were. You also think 500 years of history are monolithic. Yes, Romans of 500 AD were culturally distinct from Romans 100 BC, including who could be Roman citizen and then even Emperor. It is still a continuation. That equally applied to all parts of the Roman Empire. Rome also never established hereditary dynasties so many people could gain Roman citizenship, even join the aristocracy and within centuries became Roman Emperors without having been born anywhere close to Rome.

Romans used Greek as the sophisticated language in the higher classes already in the republic. As such it was favored long before the "Fall of Rome" by Romans.

The division into West and East Rome was an administrative organization of the Roman Empire. As such East Rome was an uninterrupted continuation of the Roman Empire within its eastern administrative borders.

And that the Pope, who usurped imperial authorities or Germanic dynasties who grabbed territory did not accept Roman authority is somehow expected. Though even that is a simplification because apparently the West Romans did no see their empire fall when historians claim it did. They even complained about Justinians reconquest a as a needless civil war between Romans aka did not consider themselves under foreign rule.

also the reason to polish all that dirty paint off those marble statues and also medieval armor.

rearmament happened in semi normal ways via giving contracts to companies, allow bidding. Do not check the production processes. This was all still done under the blanket of a normal economy (though the Nazis incurred massive debt that necessitated a war)

Total war footing of WW1 and WW2 implied the military administration / Nazi regime taking over all means of production to gear everything for the war effort e. By 1917/18 that meant intentionally stripping the agrarian sectors of manpower and resources to fuel the army for a last push (which meant requisiting last horses, drafting formerly essential workers and prioritizing the army for food supplies over food for the civilian population). Which in the end caused famine and shortages and a collapse at the home front.

The Nazis were very afraid of such a thing happening if it looked like they would repeat that until late into the war so they tried to maintain a facade of supplying basic goods normally.

So one can say they were already funneling lots of money into the military before WW2, more than the economy could afford, but various levers were left untouched until somewhere after Barbarossa failed.

Case in point for Barbarossa they still ordered tanks and planes normally and did not press for elevated production numbers, thinking it would be over like France anyway.

So sure, Germany had a more militarized economy than the western allies before WW2, but it did not activate all available levers necessary a totalitarian regime has available (see Soviet Union) until after their invasion of the Soviet Union failed.

The same could be said about how he portrays European medieval culture.

It is the typical "Medieval Europe being brutish and unsophisticated" Well, in true medieval Europe you could be sued for that.

They are also the ones wanting space industry so particularly here it is a wash Because France wants arianespace to continue and finances both.

Imo what is missing is that physics makes contact impossible given rarity and how scattered across time they/we are.

So even if life is more abundant than believed physics might still put harsh boundaries to any contact and interstellar technology flat out not existing, together with all the other factors.

I am more interested in the moment those two merge millions/billions years later. Aka not expecting them to smash into each other on first pass.

I do not think I ever read about observation of binary galaxy cores, yet. or that galaxies harbor several super massive black holes as remnants of mergers.

Obviously time frame would be massive and beyond some single pass of of two galaxies in gravitational influence of each other.

Which is the misconception.

There would be few collisions. Galaxies colliding is not two cars smashing together, for lack of a better image it is on astronomical scales more like two gases mixing.

On a time scale of millions to hundreds of millions of years. Same for stray stars getting ejected.

The one interesting thing is what happens when two super black holes of two galaxy cores merge. How that would work over what time and how would this event happen?