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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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They're pretty inefficient with 99 but they make up for it with 100!
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past@stori3dpast.bsky.social |
870 followers 172 following 5609 posts
Harold Johnson. Maine (from away!). Bookseller. Coin seller. Pilgrim. Word Guy. Skeptic. History & Archaeology. Tolkien. Trek. Old English. Used to make YouTubes, now I make typos. 19th C antiquarian — Sideburns included! 🏺📖🧙🏻♂️
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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They're pretty inefficient with 99 but they make up for it with 100!
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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There's an ad that runs a lot on YouTube about Google's AI "Gemini." It comes with a song clip that says "Allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is..." And it makes me laugh, that Google's first AI rollout, of Bard, in 2023 was so bad that they had to rebrand the thing & hope no one would notice.
0 replies 1 reposts 2 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Language & placenames hold on so long to their history. Cumbria in NW England is the same root as "Cymru," the Welsh word for Wales. The "wall" in Cornwall is the same word as Wales -- Old English for "strangers." All over western Britain there are still today memories of Britons battling Saxons.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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No time like the present!
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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That'd be a great start. And Cornwall, which held out til the 800s. Another instructive one woukd be Brittany. After the Romans left & before the Saxons, *something* got bad enough in souther Britain that tens of thousands migrated away, over into Brittany. What did Brittany offer?
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It's not 5:00 yet, but my have-to's are done and it's summer. So it's Mint Julep O'Clock.
1 replies 0 reposts 8 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It would be really enlightening to see if there are places where that new reshuffling of power survived. It did (we think) in Britain for maybe 2 generations before the power vacuum got too enticing and the Saxons said "Yoink."
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I think you've mentioned that book before, and I *really* need to dive into more of Le Guin's stuff.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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And it's funny what can make people unhappy in the game (and maybe in real society too) -- a lack of *anything* that some other group in the town has, causes festering resentment. Whether it's access to olive oil or to a temple.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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The old game Caesar III did such a good job of showing this. Early in your town, everyone's poor, there is no class distinction, and your town doesn't even need any kind of police or security force. But as parts of town grow richer, other parts are comparatively poorer, and crime/unhappiness set in.
2 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Bibles like these can be fun detective work. This one is undated. But there are two clues: the Pope is Leo XIII and the local Philadelphia archbishop who approved of the Bible was James Wood. Leo XIII rose to the papacy in 1878. Wood died in 1883. That's a pretty tight & decent window!
0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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When I think of the Roman era, I think "what then-current governing system gave the most people the most joy, opportunity, & freedom?" Jury's out. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live in the Roman Empire. But also pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted to live in pre-Roman Britannia or Gaul either!
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Right? I want one.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Some of the pots were kind of adorable!
1 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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In some Medieval towns there was a time of evening when everyone had to cover their hearths to prevent fires breaking out while someone was asleep. There were actual pottery covers for that called "couvre-feu"s to let a fire lightly smoulder til morning. It's where we get "curfew" from!
3 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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"My robot vacuum just went by and I patted it on its head" is not a sentence younger me ever would have expected to say.
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Clasped Bible polishing up nicely. Not bad for 140 years old!
0 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It's amazing how Palladian styles spread. And yeah, they don't exactly seem homey!
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I think I both love & hate huitante.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It also makes me happy that the French word for seventy is "sixty-ten" and eighty is "four-twenties."
3 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It'll always make me happy that "eleventy" actually existed as a functional English word for at least some 500 years.
2 replies 1 reposts 15 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I hope they've had the time of their life.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Right? Classic rock will always stop at 1979.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I mean, sure, my big memory of the GooGoo Dolls is that they were on Beverly Hills 90210 celebrating Steve's birthday. And Ian Ziering, who played Steve, turned 60 this year. But still, bite me!
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I just heard GooGoo Dolls on the classic rock station. Bite me.
2 replies 1 reposts 13 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Suddenly reminded of "The Creative Song" on YouTube.
0 replies 1 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I love it. Yeah a lot of people out there get real touchy about the Dark Ages (or "Dark Ages"?). I miss the American Chopper meme, you might have just brought it back!
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Just gonna leave this old one here. Which I may or may not still consider my best work.
1 replies 2 reposts 25 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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I love the quirks of languages. Things like the French term for railroad meaning literally "street of iron." And how in Italian, to talk about, say, the 1300s you say "trecento" which literally means the 300s but everyone knows means the 1300s.
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Mark Walters
@mark-walters.bsky.social
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I was just watching the latest Sky at Night episode & had to go and take a look at the furthest known galaxy from us in the James Webb Space Telescope JADES program data known as JADES-GS-z14-0. Formed 290 million years after the Big Bang it must be about 13.5 billion years old 😲 Discovered May 2024
0 replies 2 reposts 7 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Yah I think the horror of Marius-Sulla, then Caesar-Pompey, then Augustus-Marc Antony stayed in Roman minds a long time. I don't mind that emperors were obnoxious, or even emperor-divinity cults. Keeping 10s of millions of people from turning on each other was hard! We're still working on it today.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Once the average Roman soldier became more loyal to the emperor/gold-giver than to the state, the facade broke down & the disaster that was the 3rd C followed.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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When it worked, it only did so on the honor system -- emperors promising to put the state above themselves & their armies. At least nominally. Septimius Severus is the one who killed that. Twice he doubled all soldiers' pay, made them more important than civilians, & poisoned the system.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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This show also interviews people with spectacular names. There's one, Secondo Amalfitano, whose name (I think) translates as "Number Two Amalfi Guy." Another guy's last name is Cinque, Five.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Another controversial one: some coastal towns in Italy are kind of pretty. (Yes I should be working so am instead watching a series on "Hidden Italy.")
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Hot take -- Andrea Palladio was a pretty good architect
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It's enough that you know it's there! I have a button-up shirt whose cuff undersides have a print while the outside is simple pinstripe. When I roll up my sleeves and reveal the print underside, what a rush.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Yeah certainly possible. But that could backfire if 300 years later people are saying "Why couldn't we beat these guys??" There's also evidence that the 4th C troops on the Wall were way down on the social scale, like the Wall was by then a place to dump problem soldiers away from society.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Lucius must have been so jealous when he saw his neighbor Publius putting in a hypocaust.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Our first home in Maine was an old farmhouse in the country. When we remodeled the kitchen, I lobbied hard to add a Roman-style mosaic floor. I lost. :)
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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After Roman Britain collapsed, every villa died. (Sometimes literally, as post-Roman burials in ruined rooms often show!) Not every farm died. So villas were more than farms. They were an idea, clearly supported by a complex economic network that didn't survive the ending of the empire in Britain.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Sometimes obvious villas are obvious. 20 rooms, mosaics, bath suites, underfloor heating, workers' lodges, yada yada. But sometimes there's just a rectangular building with a few signs that the owners made it look nice. Is that a villa?
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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What's fun (not fun) about Romano-British villas is that no one can agree exactly what a villa is, so there's either 400 in Britain or 2,000! A villa was more than a farmstead. Villas were self-contained economic engines & trophy homes. Trouble is, making that distinction in archaeology ain't easy.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It's fun that no one in Middle-Earth seemed to know what to make of dwarves, and that includes Tolkien himself.
2 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Including York in my post muddied the waters. Really my point was that throughout its whole history the northern border region of Roman Britain remained a staunchly military zone & that the observable niceties of prosperous peaceful civilian life just never showed up.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Someone pointed out that contested edges of empire are seldom hotbeds of economic activity & prosperity. Which, of course! What gets me is that Hadrian's Wall remained a contested edge of empire for 3 centuries. The Romans never found a way to make peace with the free peoples beyond the Wall.
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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It looks like the farthest north proposed villa is on the Tees at Ingleby Barwick. But even tho they dug some outbuildings, they never excavated the supposed villa house itself. And the outbuildings are odd. The farthest north that a proper mosaic floor is known appears to be Beadlam, N Yorkshire.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Right, my point exactly. The North never got there, in 3 centuries of the Romans trying (or maybe not trying?). It's fascinating.
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Stori3d Past
@stori3dpast.bsky.social
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Chaotic Neutral tipping toward Chaotic Evil
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes