There’s none that are perfect, but there are strengths and weaknesses.

I use WordPress.com and I have some significant annoyances with it (mostly that it sticks a lot of useful features behind the relatively high-end paid accounts), but it’s much better for writing and editing than Tumblr. 

I think Tumblr is better at growing your audience than WordPress, because it’s got a lot of people using it to read stuff (I get the sense that WordPress is used for writing more than reading) and the tag system puts your stuff in front of a lot of eyeballs. Its writing and editing software is not as good – there’s no auto-save, for example, which has meant a lot of my posts getting eaten. 

Haven’t tried Squarespace or WordPress.org (much), and I had a bad experience trying to do a multi-author live-blogging with live comments with the latter. 

goodqueenaly:

racefortheironthrone:

opinions-about-tiaras:

Wait, it has? My impression was that some of the peripheral islands had
been taken, and that they’d made a landing or two, but that the Arbor
proper remained largely unoccupied. Frankly, I don’t think Euron has the
men to occupy it; the Arbor is a large island with a large interior and
probably a whole lot of castles. The Shields it ain’t.

racefortheironthrone:

Yes. 

“The Redwyne Straits were swarming with longships, as they had been warned in Tyrosh. With the main strength of the Arbor’s fleet on the far side of Westeros, the ironmen had sacked Ryamsport and taken Vinetown and Starfish Harbor for their own, using them as bases to prey on shipping bound for Oldtown.“

I don’t know about the interior, but Ryamsport, Vinetown, and Starfish Harbor are definitely on the main island. 

Not Ser Jon Cupps! What will Leyla Hightower do?

I’d say drink wine, but that’s a bit insensitive. 

opinions-about-tiaras:

Wait, it has? My impression was that some of the peripheral islands had
been taken, and that they’d made a landing or two, but that the Arbor
proper remained largely unoccupied. Frankly, I don’t think Euron has the
men to occupy it; the Arbor is a large island with a large interior and
probably a whole lot of castles. The Shields it ain’t.

racefortheironthrone:

Yes. 

“The Redwyne Straits were swarming with longships, as they had been warned in Tyrosh. With the main strength of the Arbor’s fleet on the far side of Westeros, the ironmen had sacked Ryamsport and taken Vinetown and Starfish Harbor for their own, using them as bases to prey on shipping bound for Oldtown.“

I don’t know about the interior, but Ryamsport, Vinetown, and Starfish Harbor are definitely on the main island. 

The major factor was significantly higher mortality rates due to many people living in the same place with poor sanitation – no sewer systems, many unpaved streets, lots of domesticated animals – and poor public health. Even in the absence of major epidemics, people died of disease a lot. 

Basically, if it wasn’t for the fact that people kept moving to the cities in large numbers, they wouldn’t have grown at all until really the 19th century. 

Well, my professional work as a historian is on 20th century U.S public policy, so I don’t use it much. 

But when I do ASOIAF stuff, I try to keep it in mind, and remember back to my Art History classes as an undergrad, where they emphasized how the ideals and beliefs of a religion are written into its art – medieval art had figures of different size on the same plane not because they didn’t understand perspective at all but more because larger figures = closer to God – and architecture (how neo-Platonism got woven into the proportions of cathedrals, for ex.). 

Yes. 

Well, copper and bronze for smaller denominations were also used. 

The economic impact would be a sudden collapse of capital as previous stocks of currency are wiped out. 

Today the Swiss Guard are trained to use modern weapons like machine guns, so I think the halberds are mostly for show.