When you or a close girlfriend are planning to get married, one thing you must include in your plans is one last wild and crazy girls’ night out. For those of you planning bachelorette parties Austin has a number of great options to help you make this party the most memorable one ever.

One party theme that is becoming more and more popular in recent years incorporates the latest dance and fitness craze. Gather all of your favorite girlfriends and host an exotic dance party! You’ll all learn to pole dance from a professional teacher, and you’ll gain new moves you can perform later on for that special someone. Any party is more fun when there’s a planned activity, because it’s a great icebreaker and gets everyone laughing and having a good time. Just remember to provide plenty of drinks to hydrate everyone after this great workout – or you can all indulge in a few pre-party cocktails to help you lose any inhibitions.

Many people dream of one day purchasing their own castle. This fantasy is no doubt linked to the abundance of fairy tale stories told over and over again in books and movies. In fiction, castles are huge, beautiful homes fit for royalty. In reality, however, a castle would actually not be a fantastic place to live without spending millions doing extensive renovations.

There are a number of medieval castles that are actually on the market today. Prospective buyers are probably not really considering living in them as a primary residence, though. Most of the time they are bought to serve as museums, or because the investor simply enjoys medieval history and wants to own a tangible piece of the time period.

If you did live in a castle, you’d soon realize that royalty back in those days didn’t have any advantages over you today. In fact, you’d probably find their lifestyle quite primitive and feel like you’re camping out most of the time rather than living in the palace of your dreams.

Castles are notoriously cold, drafty, and impossible to heat. Sure, there’s a fireplace in almost every bedchamber, but it doesn’t go far to heat those cold stone walls. And unless you spent a fortune on carpeting all 50,000 square feet of your abode, you’d wake up to frigid stone floors every morning. Castles are damp, too, so you might face mold poisoning and or be dismayed to find mildew all over your possessions. There would be no electricity, and you’d have to carry around a candle at night.

Possibly the most inconvenient feature of all would be the lack of running water. Imagine having no hot showers, working toilets, or running water in the kitchen. You’d have to empty your chamber pot outside and fetch water from the well just to cook or bathe. To take a bath, you’d have to run back and forth to the well dozens of times and then heat your water by the fireplace. Once again, you’d end up spending a huge sum of money to retrofit your castle with plumbing and bathrooms, and you’d probably ruin its floorplan and unique history in the meantime.

Next time you fantasize about living in a castle, remember that not all fantasies play out in real life the way they appear on television. After considering a world of chamber pots and tepid bathwater, a small modern apartment probably sounds a lot more like home.

Most of us spend a lot of time talking or thinking about war, due to its constant on the news. Everyone has an opinion on whether the current wars should even be fought, or if the United States should just keep its nose out of everyone’s business. One of the main points brought up is that wars are bloody, gruesome affairs. This is certainly still true, but the nature of how wars are fought has definitely changed a lot over the centuries.

In medieval battles, fighting was mostly done through hand-to-hand combat. Before guns were invented and widely available, men ran into battle armed with swords, axes, and sometimes even just simple farming tools. Archers also rained arrows down onto opposing forces from a distance, and these were nearly impossible to avoid since they fell from the sky by the dozens or even hundreds. A simple shield didn’t do much in this type of combat, but warriors used whatever help they could get. If you were unlucky enough to be injured, you might not be “fortunate” enough to die right away. Some warriors were wounded with severe, deep slashes in their bodies, and yet lived for days or weeks afterward. In that case an agonizing infection might finally finish you off.

Later, of course, guns and canons were used. At first, firearms were not always very accurate and you had to fire at your opponent from a fairly close range if you hoped to actually hit him. The American Civil War was extremely deadly partly due to advances in weaponry that allowed greater accuracy from a longer range. The twentieth century brought with it semiautomatic weaponry which allowed for a greater number of shots to be fired in a shorter amount of time, eliminating long and risky reloading times.

Now, of course, we have bombs and drone strikes that are largely engineered from a distance. While these methods are deadly to a large number of people, there is less risk on the striking armies since they are not literally running across a battlefield toward one another. It’s easy to imagine a day in which wars are fought through computers, across an ocean, without either of the opposing armies ever setting foot in one another’s countries.

If you’ve ever dreamed of ruling your own kingdom, now there is a game created just for you. In this medieval strategy game you will start with a certain amount of land, and how you choose to develop and rule it will be up to you. Part of the challenge is to discover your land’s undeveloped natural resources, and then you decide how to prioritize developing them. Depending upon what type of kingdom you want to rule, you can choose to create different infrastructures which will lead to building a bigger and better country for your people.

As you rule your citizens, you will also have the opportunity to develop an army. By unlocking different challenges you can build your army bigger and better, and then take them into nearby kingdoms and attempt to conquer new territory. You’ll encounter other players and develop your strategies in response to the demands of the game. If you’re interested in strategy games and medieval history, this is the game for you.