nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations
"it's all in your head" correct! unfortunately I am also in there
and i’m waiting for the bus, aka the poem that came into existence through my half-remembrance of the famous “eating croutons straight out of the bag” post
Wiktionary wrapped. that's it, that's what I need.
you looked up the etymology of a random English word that sounds kind of strange one billion times
you checked the entry for a very basic Latin word 87256 times *just in case*
you shamefacedly looked up modern Greek verb conjugations 30 times
you found out someone was completely wrong about what their name means 4 times but didn't feel like breaking it to them so you let them believe what it said on some shitty baby name website
Sometimes I see people from countries with public healthcare systems post videos that are like “This is the reality of socialized medicine. I had to wait in the ER with my sick baby for 4 hours.” “I had to wait 8 months to see a specialist. That’s egregious.” or “They didn’t have a bed for my loved one in mental health treatment.” and it’s like. Come to America babygirl. You can experience all of this and have your insurance deny it and pay thousands and thousands of dollars for it. Like I know healthcare systems in countries with public health can be bad but when I see someone imply they’re bad because the healthcare is universal, I want to jump through the screen and put my elbow on their throat. “The NHS is deeply flawed, therefore we should abolish it and go back to private healthcare. That will definitely make healthcare in this country better!” I am going to Kill You.
non sequitur ? uhhh ,i hope to be having a lot of seq uit her actually
How to say “World” in your own language?
by lingu.world/instagram
most of the Romance languages derive their word for “world” from Latin mundus
the noun mundus is a substantive of mundus the adjective, meaning “clean”, “orderly”, or “decorated” — this usage is based on the Greek κόσμος, which also first meant “order” or “decoration”
Romanian stands out as taking its word for “world” instead from Latin lumen, which means “light”. notably, nearby Hungarian világ and Slavic све̑т also mean “light”
09/03/21 • poem made from the handout for a lecture on the fragmentary historical sources and missing tomb of alexander the great
White leftists who say shit like "colonialism is a European invention" remember that China exists challenge lol. China was a colonial powerhouse back when Europe was illiterate and literally living in its own sewage. In your rush to acknowledge the horrors that were eg. the opium wars, some of y'all have circled all the way back around to completely denying the accomplishments - both positive and incredibly negative - of one of the most influential empires in the world, explicitly because you can't wrap your brain around that empire being non-white. Ask anyone living in any part of SEA if Chinese colonialism only began after European meddling in the region, and they'll laugh in your face. It's possibly the stupidest noble savage nonsense I've seen in any part of the discourse.
Making all the problems in the world and history the result of capitalism, European colonization and US imperialism is just the more of the same Western egocentrism and USAmerican exceptionalism. Please treat all humans equally and allow the rest of us the right to have been oppressive, genocidal twatwaffles as well. Don't make our humanity and right to determine our own futures contingent on being any better than you.
And like: does that sometimes make it tricky, given that there absolutely is (for instance) the historical fact that China was subject to imperial-colonial power from the European empires and the USA and remains part of the whole context of international power in which the remnants of those still have effects?
Yes of course it does! Welcome to actual human . . .everything. It's complicated, messy and ugly. Empires fought and fucked over one another as well as everyone else, powers and nations and cultures that spent time dominant and fucking up everyone else then spend time being fucked over, and then arise again; cultures that had been fucked over turn around, take power, and become the imperial colonialists, and then run headfirst into someone else.
The history and past of humanity is full of that shit. (And everything else). And then we have to figure out how the fuck to deal with all of that if we want a world that's going to be anything other than that dance, forever.
I will also add: this also isn’t a “cancel out” situation. The fact that China is one of the oldest and most consistent locuses of imperialism and colonial control of other places doesn’t make what the British did okay; doesn’t cancel it out.
The fact that US business interests swept into the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scenes and literally blew closed ports open to force “trade” on them does not mean that the subsequent imperialism of the Japanese towards their neighbours wasn’t brutal and evil; and that the Japanese were BRUTAL occupiers of China also doesn’t cancel out Chinese conquests and evils.
These things can provide explanatory contexts; they can teach us how maybe we can avoid the cycles that happen in the future. But they’re not exculpatory. This is not a situation where we tally up all the sins, subtract them from the suffering, and whoever has the higher net number wins.
Both “sides” can be fundamentally wrong. Both sides can be guilty of atrocities. All sides can be invader and invaded in different interactions.
What’s far more important is “where is the horrific death toll happening RIGHT NOW and what can be done to best stop it AND avoid a new death till later.”
human beings love to be like 'heres a thing with a finite number of variations' & then sort it into categories. & theyre always wrong. everything is multitudinous & unfathomable & theres nothing you can do about it. but the human desire to make sense of the universe is also boundless & inexorable & theres nothing you can do about that either.
i overthink….therefore….i overam….
ok highly irrelevant but I wanted to see if I could translate this “back” into Latin (like cogito ergo sum)
and my first thought was the word supersum which means various things to do with “over-” being, such as remaining alive / surviving something, and existing in excess or as support
as far as I know though there isn’t a “supercogito”, however there is excogito which means to invent or make things up, which I actually think could be a pretty good translation of overthink
and if you put those together to make excogito ergo supersum it doesn’t really work as a translation of the original post, however it does mean I create therefore I survive
so, yeah
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol
I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”. (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.) She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.” “Why would you think that, ma’am?” “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me. See?” They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle. When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.
So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.
Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.
A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.
She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.
Okay, I greatly appreciate the discussion here about the need for interdisciplinary work in academia, and the need to reach outside of academia and talk to specialists when looking at the uses of tools, but somehow people always have to turn this into a “gotcha!” where the stuffy academics get shown up (even though this very thread shows some archeologists reaching out to craftspeople to ask about how tools are used because they recognize the need for that knowledge and expertise).
“A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.”
Did they? Did they really? The archeologists all laughed at the plucky hairdresser and then she proved her theory by simply recreating the styles?
See, what actually happened is that Janet Stephens (the hairdresser/hair archeologist in this post), who published an article about her theory in The Journal of Roman Archeology in 2008, spent about 6 years of research pursuing her idea that perhaps Roman hairstyles were sewn hair and not wigs. She did both hands-on experimentation sewing the actual hair, and more traditional research reading through a ton of sources. This is coming from an interview done with Stephens herself:
“Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.”
“I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.”
Wow, so people in the Classics/Archeology department and at the art museum sent her articles and clippings and HELPED her with her research as opposed to laughing at her in their gentleman’s club! It’s almost like people working the archeology/art history these days aren’t all stuffy old white guys from the 1950’s!
Stephens also presented her work at the Archeological Institute of America Conference, and according to the interview I cited above, it was apparently well received: “It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!”
Like, there’s plenty to be said about the ivory tower and the need for interdisciplinary work, and the racism/sexism etc. that newer researchers are working against, but framing this story as “hairdresser totally shows up the archeologists with her common sense!” is needlessly shitting on the academics involved here (and the humanities in general have been struggling to maintain funding at many universities in the US, they don’t need to be further attacked), as well as greatly over-simplifying and downplaying Janet Stephens’ achievement. I think it’s more respectful to acknowledge the six years of work that she put into the project than to tell the story like she just sewed some hair and then all the archeologists’ monocles popped out.
white dude in this horror movie : *translates old arabic text* *somehow it rhymes perfectly in english*
Now I really wanna see a horrible faltering translation from one of these movies, like “Whomsoever enters this room, they shall… well, this word is like… literally it means ‘unbecome,’ but it was used as a euphemism for death, pooping, and—wait, when was this carved? was it 15th century? Cuz it was a euphemism for sex too in the 15th century. This is either a cursed crypt, a bathroom, or a royal bedroom. Who wants to roll the dice?”
“You guys, I’ve gotta be honest, okay? This thing’s written in some kind of weird localized dialect, and I’ve only ever studied the standard form of the language. I mean, this part right here…I can’t even tell if it’s some kind of error, or an obscure slang phrase…whatever it is, I have no idea what the fuck it means.”
starting tomorrow i will be a real person in this world
oh! i forgot to do this. okay starting tomorrow i will be a real person in this world and i actually seriously genuinely properly truly mean it this time
um. well
i dont know if theyre gonna like the answer to this one
thank you convictedsodomist, im glad this post has made its way to the pederasty fans of tumblr
i mean the actual answer is generally no, not really, symposia were adult male social milieus. a man might bring his eromenos in the context of the sort of social introduction that was sort of the whole point of the pederastic exchange (IN ATHENS. ALL OF THAT IS SPECIFIC TO ATHENS WE DON'T KNOW HOW THEY DID IT IN OTHER PARTS OF THE GREEK WORLD) but typically no one was, like, fucking right there at the dinner table (as it were. no one ate at drinking parties either). you're actually more likely to see female entertainers, some of whom might have doubled as sex workers.
stuff probably got sexier later in the night once everyone was drunk, but like as not by that point it would have devolved from symposium to komos, and we're sort of dealing with a different thing. and yes, sexuality was pretty open, but these were like... relatively polite insofar as typically no one's dick was out while they were trading poems and debating philosophy.
so like. could you bring your teenage son? idk, i don't see why not exactly. people hosted these things in their homes, and probably did all kinds of shit, most of which we never hear about. it probably did happen, though it's not exactly typical of the ideal image of the symposium. in terms of the symposium as we see it in the philosophical dialogues, probably not, these were places for fairly adult homosocial interaction where the participants were at least nominally peers. the Youths were out raising hell and doing nonsense. alcibiades showing up to try to fuck socrates in the symposium is portrayed as, like, pretty wild. and as far as bringing one's younger pederastic beloved, again, i'm sure it happened and i don't see why not--they WERE parties--but it's not the sort of prurient situation that people in the notes of this post seem to be imagining.
like, don't get me wrong: that probably happened too. people fucked at parties. people also fucked in exchange for invitations to parties. people fucked after parties, probably while still hanging out in the host's dining room and/or in the back alley outside his house. who knows. but there are also lots of situations where that would NOT be the scene.
sorry to do nuance on your fun "remember how the athenians had a whole complex thing involving age-differential male-male homoerotic relationships as part of their elite social structure" post tho
thank you for adding actual context to my quippy post because definitely a lot of people in the notes are wrongly suggesting that a symposium was some kind of pederastic orgy!
i think the jokes are somewhat valid because even though it wasnt a space for having sex, the symposium was an erotically charged space: e.g. both pederasty and heterosexual eroticism are major themes of sympotic poetry and art, and the practice of dedicating your turn in kottabos to your lover shows that some erotic feelings between symposiasts were expected.
i also think it's worth pointing out that yes, almost certainly, adolescent boys (as eromenoi or not) were often present. in xenophon's symposium, callias brings along his eromenos autolycos as well as autolycos' father lycon to the symposium, and there's another boy there too. theognis' poetry is usually read as implying that youths were brought to symposia to learn proper elite behavior. painted vessels depicting sympotic scenes show young boys. i think it's hard to look at all that and think of the symposium as an adults-only space.
thank you for the correction! i appreciate the citations. i've mostly read about the symposium in the context of broader discussions of commensal and/or drinking practices in greece and am definitely not an expert in specifically symposiastic depictions in art or poetry.
yeah, someone in the notes mentioned--correctly--that the line between "adult" and "child" in classical greece is... much foggier than it is today! so i guess part of my objection was to drawing a hard line between "this is an adult occasion" and "there were adolescent boys there" if that makes sense. both can be true. young adults are still adults, even if they're younger than we would really be comfortable classifying as 'adult'. i guess it comes down to, like, whose terms of 'adulthood' are we applying.
one of us probably should go reply to that poor guy, huh.
anyway yeah, this sort of homosociality is often homoerotically charged to some extent. (for a crosscultural perspective, there's a great book about early modern iran by afsaneh nadjmabadi which has a chapter discussing homoeroticism in homosocial contexts during that place-time!) "pederastic orgy" not so much but you're 100% right that there was, like, a horny vibe to a lot of it (both hetero- and homoerotic). as always i'm poking at the places where erotic and sexual meet and diverge, which annoyingly makes me the "okay but they weren't ACTUALLY having sex" guy a lot when it comes to greece and i often forget to clarify that like, there's still a lot of eroticism going on.
so yeah like. happy for people in the notes to go on making jokes about greek homoeroticism but i maintain that no one was fucking as like, the main thing happening at a symposium, sexiness was Not Really The Point but rather a byproduct of the situation, and one was probably not bringing their eromenos for sex, but rather because of the sex, ie. that sort of social introduction and mentorship was a significant element of the pederastic exchange. which doesn't mean it wasn't horny! it often was! but like! nuance!
