stori3dpast.bsky.social
Harold Johnson. Maine (from away!). Bookseller. Pilgrim. Word Guy. Skeptic. History & Archaeology. Tolkien. Trek. Italy. Old English. Used to make YouTubes, now I make typos. 19th C antiquarian — Sideburns included! 🏺📖🧙🏻♂️
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I did wonder if these things ever jumped their bounds and caused more widespread damage. It's hard to imagine such a thing as a "safe" out-of-control underground fire.
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If not for the environmental nightmare, eternal hell-pit fires would be really interesting!
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There is apparently no economic & safe way to put out the fire. So on it burns. Decades ago Rt 61 was moved south away from the unstable ground.
The old Rt 61 became a pilgrimage spot for social media influencers until the state finally blocked the old road with hundreds of dirt heaps.
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The production notes ended up my favorite part of the plays!
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Terence's "The Eunuch" is exceptionally awful, & sadly also one of his better written plays. The title character isn't at all a eunuch, but a young man pretending, so he can access & violently violate a 16-year-old virgin. And he's lauded as a hero.
I didn't like it. I don't understand who would.
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Fortunately in Middle-Earth there was never any history of demagogues perverting religion & godly powers for fascist reasons!
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The apocalypticism and hyperbole on social media is not improving as time goes on. It's like being terminally online is a drug that requires ever higher doses.
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Right?? I mean even if people think they agree on everything, if you sat them down and asked them specifically what various pieces of doctrine meant to them, you'd get some really wild & maybe even uncomfortable divergences!
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It's possible. Especially as the mythical "bishop-fish" and the mythical "monk-fish" have kind of the same but also kind of different backstories.
I read that this was also the time of the "Jenny Haviner" -- a dried stingray or skate that was made to look like a person too. Weird times.
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Oh brilliant! I'd love to see that.
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Some fake it til they make it, some poast til they're toast.
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The Bishop-Fish craze actually happened, peaking in the mid 17th C when printed books spread its image all over. Here's one from Wikipedia, in a 1696 book by Johann Zahn. Same pose, almost certainly same source image.
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Not to be confused with the Bishop-Fish, who was inexplicably present in a lot of 16th & 17th C books. (no word how long they lived)
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Oh yeah, like you were saying earlier, sometimes even living with a few friends can devolve into chaos without rules! 250 was interesting as a hypothetical upper limit of people just doing the right thing because it was right, but I don't know if it's ever actually existed.
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I did read an interesting hypothesis that a society can function on a non-coercive basis up to about 200-250 people. The family ties and the social ties and just simply knowing everybody makes that possible. But beyond ~250, you need to start having rules, hierarchies, mechanisms.
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(Also, sorry, I'm kind of derailing the thread. But it struck me that you're right, every society has had some compelling force that maintains its stability. And it's fascinating to imagine a world where that isn't the case!)
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Yeah, for me that's kind of the heart of it. Like, on paper there's no need for scarcity in the developed world today, but it's there. And always has been. Yet in Star Trek land humans just find it absolutely natural to provide these things, without it being abused or resented. I'd love to know how!
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This is the big leap Star Trek has never explained. Somehow, humanity worldwide made this permanent, innate shift from needing either coercion or guilt/shame in order to do the right thing. It's lovely to think of, but it to me is the biggest fiction of all. I'll sooner believe in transporters.
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It's the rural bit of Northumberland around Hadrian's Wall. A really pretty landscape of fields & pastures and hamlets.
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There are a lot of bad community models. But 40 people united only by a vicious drive to do exactly what they want when they want, having to coexist, is probably the worst!
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It's funny that something that's so obviously bad-faith and so obviously unworkable keeps getting traction. It's this tedious "Every Man Is an Island" thing where nobody takes literally 2 seconds to game out what that actually looks like.
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Social media has primed us for this too. The lust for destroying a new person on social media, almost weekly, doesn't ever seem to be satisfied.
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I read this as Tynedale and my first thought was, "there is no bad time to be in Tynedale." Then I re-read & my bubble burst.
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I read too fast as "antichrist" and, well, still valid.
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Trotter the Wooden-Footed Hobbit had entered the chat.
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Vacation Cats are the best!
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The pizza has become self-aware and is questioning itself.
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Aging Basil.
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The beach was lovely though!
(It wasn't. But it wasn't 101 at least!)