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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

Mister Anemone said:
> Mods decide to ban ASB in PolChat
> Some, including me, argued various reason of why the ban is unacceptable (my reason is that it allowed user to exploit a loophole to post an ASB scenario that involved bringing an modern day nation to the past...which could cause some whining that could verge on issues that are relegated to PolChat).
> Then one user posted directly of Kick and Bans section of how restrictive it is, causing Cal to response to the post with...yeah, sheer hatred of ASB in the site that could have been purged years ago if it wasn't for various reasons.

So...yeah.
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This is a bad faith interpretation.
Here's Calbear's exact quote:
Without putting too fine a point on things, there is absolutely no reason that ASB should ever be in Chat, since it is current politics. Current Politics should also never be ANYWHERE but in Chat, simply because current politics tends to be somewhat... fraught and tends to be more personal than it acceptable outside of Chat (which is why Ian personally Moderates Chat, with rare exceptions) and also tends to give posters a lot more slack to play with than elsewhere.

Not all divergences that would occur in ASB are automatically current political in nature. If Barney the Dinosaur came to life and started hosting the Tonight Show it would be ASB (and weird as Hell), but it wouldn't be Current Politics. If Lizard People suddenly appeared climbing out of a ice cave in Antarctica it would absolutely be ASB, but it would only touch on current politics if it were used as a setup t talk about climate change or if the announced that President/Prime Minister XXX was one of them and that was why that political leader had done ABCD.

Actually BOTH ASB and Chat are ancillary to the Board's main focus. Neither appear on the forward facing Home Page, they are only available for members to view/participate/post, as is the case with several other Forums. Ian has explained in the past why those Forums exist (it boils down to allowing the AH Forums to stay on subject), but there is no true AH focused need to have any of them at all. They are provided to allow members to pursure them, that does not mean that ASB subjects should be allowed in what is designed to be discussion of real world events or that Current Politics (and the resultant Flamewars/Catfights) should be allowed outside of Chat.
 
LordInquisitorAl said:
Calbear needs to keep the political and ah chat sperate so he can ban anyone he doesn't like and use it as a excuse
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That's also a really, really bad faith interpretation. Most of the times he actions people for "current politics outside of Chat", those people were actually trying to start shit or at least blatantly flaunting the rules. None of them seem to have been motivated by a personal agenda.
 
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Terra Allias said:
You ever felt that somebody's modern headcanon for an alternate history mod is extremely milquetoast? Because for me that's any Kaiserreich headcanon that sees a return to not just the status quo before the war, but the status quo of OTL.
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Case in point, people seem to think that the US would be relevant for quite a while. The US regardless of victor in KR has literally just had a massive civil war. It is going suffuring the strain of constant guerilla warfare by the defeated factions for at least a decade and it taking just as long to get back to where it started in 1936. Because again: Civil Fucking War. They utterly wreck things. KR lets you deal with those quickly because if it didn't, it basically meant having a giant noose around your neck for entire play period of the mod. Not because it is accurate. There isnt really going to be an american sphere in a KR Cold War til likely the 80's. In all reality, its the China equivalent, just with a higher starting floor for what it could do. The Cold War factions are going to compete to get it on their side.
 
Somebody-Someone said:
This is a bad faith interpretation.
Here's Calbear's exact quote:
Without putting too fine a point on things, there is absolutely no reason that ASB should ever be in Chat, since it is current politics. Current Politics should also never be ANYWHERE but in Chat, simply because current politics tends to be somewhat... fraught and tends to be more personal than it acceptable outside of Chat (which is why Ian personally Moderates Chat, with rare exceptions) and also tends to give posters a lot more slack to play with than elsewhere.

Not all divergences that would occur in ASB are automatically current political in nature. If Barney the Dinosaur came to life and started hosting the Tonight Show it would be ASB (and weird as Hell), but it wouldn't be Current Politics. If Lizard People suddenly appeared climbing out of a ice cave in Antarctica it would absolutely be ASB, but it would only touch on current politics if it were used as a setup t talk about climate change or if the announced that President/Prime Minister XXX was one of them and that was why that political leader had done ABCD.

Actually BOTH ASB and Chat are ancillary to the Board's main focus. Neither appear on the forward facing Home Page, they are only available for members to view/participate/post, as is the case with several other Forums. Ian has explained in the past why those Forums exist (it boils down to allowing the AH Forums to stay on subject), but there is no true AH focused need to have any of them at all. They are provided to allow members to pursure them, that does not mean that ASB subjects should be allowed in what is designed to be discussion of real world events or that Current Politics (and the resultant Flamewars/Catfights) should be allowed outside of Chat.
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From what I understand, it just seems to be a side effect of the ASB and Current Politics portions of the website being treated as mutually exclusive, so the Moderation would rather just ask people not to do that rather get sucked into the potential morass of Current Politics getting drowned in ASB scenarios or ASB being used as a vehicle to launder political hot takes. I don't think it's a great solution, but I understand it.
 
Limabot said:
From what I understand, it just seems to be a side effect of the ASB and Current Politics portions of the website being treated as mutually exclusive, so the Moderation would rather just ask people not to do that rather get sucked into the potential morass of Current Politics getting drowned in ASB scenarios or ASB being used as a vehicle to launder political hot takes. I don't think it's a great solution, but I understand it.
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Most Chat ASB timelines from before the ban were of extremely low quality even by Chat standards, and many were basically flamebait.
 
Wait does this mean that "modern nation sent to past/fantasy world" timelines are now globally banned on the site, or just in PolChat but not ASB?
 
Yeah, looking at that statement that was posted, seem to be very reasonable split. "You want to do forum politics, stick to this forum. You want to do crazy stuff, go to this forum. Do not cross the streams."
 
I mean, I agree with you all im regards to the issue.

But the main problem is that the mods banned ASBs in Chat without ever consulting the users if they wanted to ban it or not. That, and there are people I know who are willing to portray the ASBs with seriousness instead of a wacky one that sometimes I agree with your assertation.

In general, I believe that this is a problem of people wanting to explore ASB ideas outside of the already tired scenarios...but there is no outlet for us to explore that desire we have. That's the problem.
 
Daedwartin said:
There isnt really going to be an american sphere in a KR Cold War til likely the 80's. In all reality, its the China equivalent, just with a higher starting floor for what it could do. The Cold War factions are going to compete to get it on their side.
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Personally, this is why I feel like they would be equal partners with Syndicalist Britain and France who would probably also be in shaky positions due to occupying at least half the continent after a bloody war.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
He's saying that users can't put ASB in PolChat. The two subforums need to stay separate whenever possible. Which seems rather defensible as rules go.
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Mandemon said:
Yeah, looking at that statement that was posted, seem to be very reasonable split. "You want to do forum politics, stick to this forum. You want to do crazy stuff, go to this forum. Do not cross the streams."
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Except that, IIRC, PolChat has also become the place where you post "political" timelines, i.e. stuff that is recent politics and maybe making a still ongoing political point. The reason being that they inevitably will lead to political discussion, for which PolChat is meant to be the quarantine forum (something CalBear explicitly says in the quoted statement). Now I could be wrong about that still being the case, but that is what I remember.

So, with that in mind, if I read this right, you couldn't post ASB "political timelines" in ASB, because they're "political", and you couldn't post them in PolChat either now because of that specific rule. If that first rule had never been introduced, that separation wouldn't be a problem, but with that rule in place, it seems to me it kinda is.

Also, it seems to me the statement kinda does reinforce the allegations that Ian and CalBear do not care for ASB or PolChat? Which is what started this tangent, the allegation about "the cold conflict between AH.com mods and ASB". Seeing as the statement includes:

Actually BOTH ASB and Chat are ancillary to the Board's main focus. Neither appear on the forward facing Home Page, they are only available for members to view/participate/post, as is the case with several other Forums. Ian has explained in the past why those Forums exist (it boils down to allowing the AH Forums to stay on subject), but there is no true AH focused need to have any of them at all.
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I.e., both would be closed down if they didn't serve as quarantine forums.
 
They should make a third quarantine forum for those types of scenarios then.

They should name it the Immaterium.
 
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Alternate History .com has undergone a noticeable dip in quality. I primarily blame this on a new generation of history "fans" who consume historical events as content in shit like YouTube videos rather than books.

You just can't get that magical type of pre-internet nerd anymore.
 
Hot take but skibidi toilet is just the natural evolution of 2000s lolrandom internet humor in the post-irony era. It's no different from other cheesy gmod machinima except for the fact that it's a longer-running bit with continuity. The only reason anyone makes a big deal about it is because Millennials see it and cringe at our own repressed memories of bad Newgrounds videos.
 
Dab master said:
Alternate History .com has undergone a noticeable dip in quality. I primarily blame this on a new generation of history "fans" who consume historical events as content in shit like YouTube videos rather than books.

You just can't get that magical type of pre-internet nerd anymore.
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Is this a joke? You know you could make this same argument of previous generations especially lets be really really honestly, most of the great or influential AH stories were basically really simple, sometime even less simple than Youtube videos or of just a similar low effort oh what if x happened instead of y.
 
I know people here are probably fed up with it but my vote goes to Footprint of Mussolini. Being lectured about the history of your country while an irish guy insists that Albanians and Lybians were happy under Mussolini is weird.

Granted, the Axis of Evil TL aged like milk forgotten under the sun in the last month too.
 
Even if these are drowned out by the flood of other amateurishly-written TL's, I can name at least five TL's that I can easily claim as having god-tier research, plotting — and even writing itself — within that site for "this period in time":
 
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Nobunaga's Ambition Realized is solid, even if it took a while for it to get into it's own and needed some touch ups as far as feeling went, It helps it's author is very consistent too. But even things such as a Sea of Blood, Sea of Ice, or A Horn of Bronze are showing a willingness to be more experimental. Especially when most TL's in general learn towards Western Europe and the U.S, be it pre or post 1900.
 
Susano said:
I was about to point out the same but then I thought, hell, with that PoD Ostrogoths shouldn't exist.
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It's a timeline where Genghis Khan still creates a Mongol Empire at the exact same time as OTL, except didn't invade Persia because they bribed them off. The Suebi still settle in Lusitania, all of the middle east has been thoroughly Hellenized (The Semitic peoples are assimilated save the Peninsular Arabs, Carthaginians, some Jewish folks in the desert and the city of Uruk), while nothing has changed in Hellenic Egypt in nearly two thousand years. The Seleucids & Achaemenids are still around, too.
 
I mean the charm that the AH.com before the change and controversies is its amateurish writing in the TLs - especially the ones that outright use TL format.
 
Dab master said:
Alternate History .com has undergone a noticeable dip in quality. I primarily blame this on a new generation of history "fans" who consume historical events as content in shit like YouTube videos rather than books.

You just can't get that magical type of pre-internet nerd anymore.
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Yes, thank you, you described this perfectly, especially the term "history fans" to describe young people who, although genuinely interested in history, read zero actual scholarly material on it, books or otherwise. They mainly get their history knowledge from youtube videos or wikipedia.

The way they interact with history is especially more so like how a "fandom" interacts with a work of fiction. You see this in how they treat certain historical figures like Huey Long or Urgen-Sternberg.
 
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Nerdorama said:
Hot take but skibidi toilet is just the natural evolution of 2000s lolrandom internet humor in the post-irony era. It's no different from other cheesy gmod machinima except for the fact that it's a longer-running bit with continuity. The only reason anyone makes a big deal about it is because Millennials see it and cringe at our own repressed memories of bad Newgrounds videos.
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NOO, the youth are weird and different and strange and when I was young we definitely didn't do anything cringe!
 
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