|
JaucheCharly posted:One day about 2000 years in the future, at a lecture about 21th century milhist: Footage from (nsfw) 21th century swordfighting techniques. We found plenty of these phallic "swords" in the oceans, but do not know why they were deposited there. Corroborating evidence found in popular 21st century interactive story "Saints Row"-- could these weapons have had religious significance? Perhaps the footage represents not genuine warfare but rather a highly ritualized form of spiritual practice.
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 09:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 17:59 |
|
|
Rincewind posted:Corroborating evidence found in popular 21st century interactive story "Saints Row"-- could these weapons have had religious significance? Perhaps the footage represents not genuine warfare but rather a highly ritualized form of spiritual practice.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 10:14
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:These repetitive, highly stylized phallic images (NSFW) seem to support Prof. Rincewind's theory: often found in public spaces, these phalli can be compared to the Roman Fascinus. Stylistic evidence and medium date these particular examples to the late 20th/early 21st centuries, roughly contemporary with the footage cited above. Might the invocation of a "divine phallus" represent the "potency" of the warrior band? I think it's more likely they're related to the Hermes worship, either invoking his protection (perhaps this was a dangerous road for travellers?) or that this is not a secular road at all, but part of a cult location used only by his followers. Keldoclock posted:The reason I chose 4000 years is that would make us as distant in time to the future people as the Pharohs to us. They will have to judge us by our architecture, our monuments, the little things they find in the ground. We're less capable of second-guessing people from 4000 years in the future than the Pharaohs were of second-guessing us.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 13:10
|
|
|
Comstar posted:I doubt it. With DRM, encryption and the rate of change, we can't read data that was recorded 15 years ago (got any 3.5" disk drives laying around?). This is over-egging the pudding a bit. http://www.bigmessowires.com/ This guy for instance sells you an emulator right now that takes an SD card and makes it look like a disk drive to an Apple II (those are now as old as I am, at 38). If you can do that at a hardware level, you can do the reverse too. DRM and encryption are a concern I agree, but more with newer stuff right now than 15 year old stuff, and that's independent of how obsolete the physical media is. Fortunately, encryption tends to become documented/leaked/broken over time (DeCSS isn't stopping anyone from reading DVDs these days, for instance).
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 15:20
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:DRM and encryption are a concern I agree, but more with newer stuff right now than 15 year old stuff, and that's independent of how obsolete the physical media is. Fortunately, encryption tends to become documented/leaked/broken over time (DeCSS isn't stopping anyone from reading DVDs these days, for instance). It's funny to think that like a hundred or two hundred years down the line, there's going to be a Professor of 20th Century Hacking in the Digital Archaeology Department of FutureTech U whose sole job is to crack old encryption in dead coding languages.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 16:04
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Conversely, my archive has a series of government correspondence from WW2 related to the requisition of the castle. It was printed on cheap lovely paper and a lot of it is substantially worse-off than most of out 19th century documents despite being well cared for. I have always been under the impression that digital media would most likely not survive that long anyways. Unless it is properly stored and well taken care of, I bet there are so many things that could happen that would destroy them. I once made the mistake of leaving a HHD in my basement for a few years and when I tried to plug it again, it just wouldn't work anymore. I always suspected the high humidity to have hosed it up. CD's, dvds, blue rays could also be a problem. Very easy to scratch if one is not careful. Humidity will also get some of their layers to peel away. Even if all proper conditions were met, 4000 years from now, people might just look at those things and have no idea what they are or what they're for, let alone not having the proper technology to actually use them. What are your thoughts on that? Am I making any sense?
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 17:15
|
|
|
Dalael posted:Even if all proper conditions were met, 4000 years from now, people might just look at those things and have no idea what they are or what they're for, let alone not having the proper technology to actually use them. It's dumb because we're actively on a) maintaining access to original recording media and b) transferring large amounts eternally onward from format to format. Sure, maybe the man of 6015 can't read the floppy disk but the floppy disk was probably transferred onward to holocube by like 2200 and into neural implant charges by 4000. Tons of writing we have from 4000 years ago was recopied multiple times and we definitely have never seen the originals after all. And digital has the bonus that computers are a lot less sloppy with copying than human scribes. Also worrying about scratches is missing the point, we're not storing media in Vaults Of Your 6 Year Old Brother where they're going to be randomly thrown around unprotected.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 17:22
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:probably e: the big flagship archives are one thing, but a hell of a lot of archival material exists outside of a National Archives or Library of Congress - very often unique material. That's the stuff I'm worried about.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:It's dumb because we're actively on a) maintaining access to original recording media and b) transferring large amounts eternally onward from format to format. Sure, maybe the man of 6015 can't read the floppy disk but the floppy disk was probably transferred onward to holocube by like 2200 and into neural implant charges by 4000. Surely a lot of what is being saved now will be lost anyways due to lack of resources? If I remember well, one of the issue that Oberleutnent was facing at his work was the inability to digitalize everything he has access to due to lack of funding and (from my understanding anyways) lack of caring from the owner of the archive. I can only assume the same thing can happen with digital media. There will be so much information, that they will not be able to sift through all of it and possibly will not have the ressource and/or time to convert everything into the new media form of the day. I mean, that is just what I can think of, but I am in no way an authority in this field.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 18:01
|
|
|
Dalael posted:Surely a lot of what is being saved now will be lost anyways due to lack of resources? If I remember well, one of the issue that Oberleutnent was facing at his work was the inability to digitalize everything he has access to due to lack of funding and (from my understanding anyways) lack of caring from the owner of the archive. I can only assume the same thing can happen with digital media. Yeah but if it's on paper it's also probably not going to last 4000 years without extreme effort to preserving it too, you dig? Oberleutnant posted:A lot happens around that word. In my opinion you have an extremely over-optimistic view of the permanence of archival storage, and also of the care and attention that's given to documents before they come into contact with archivists - a lot of damage is done in that time. I don't, I really don't expect say random Joe Smith's home videos to be preserved. But the big archives are getting all about preserving all kinds of stuff from Twitter to literally this site. And it's so much easier to preserve digital things by their nature, by the fact that making copies when it's old doesn't require hours and hours of labor like sorting through physical documents, scanning or copying and so on. To say nothing of how easy it is to transfer from one media to a newer media, which is really what you need to be doing when you're planning to keep things available for thousands of years.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 18:07
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:Yeah but if it's on paper it's also probably not going to last 4000 years without extreme effort to preserving it too, you dig? While copying digital media to digital media is not as labour intensive, there is still the factor of cost involved and any archive will be limited by their budget. I'm positively sure that a lot of stuff will not be copied due for lack of time to look at what it is and if its actually worth coping, while other stuff will not be copied they do not have the budget to do so. Thankfully, digital storage is getting much cheaper and nowadays, we can get a lot more space for the amount of money involved. Over 4 thousand years, I bet a lot of it will end up being lost or remain in vaults (assuming nothing cataclysmic happens) and still be on older types of media.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 18:15
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:It's dumb because we're actively on a) maintaining access to original recording media and b) transferring large amounts eternally onward from format to format. Sure, maybe the man of 6015 can't read the floppy disk but the floppy disk was probably transferred onward to holocube by like 2200 and into neural implant charges by 4000. But, but, those people in 4000 will never know that Han shot first. 
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 18:56
|
|
|
Not only they'll know it but saying otherwise will have a mob calling for your blood by day's end.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 19:08
|
|
|
All this talk of preserving digital media for a long time makes me want to play the Talos Principle again.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 21:15
|
|
|
All this talk of preserving digital media for a long time makes me want to find a cure for Aspergers.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 21:27
|
|
|
I was digging through some drawers at my parent's house and found some old history homework from when I was 10 or 11. It was about some Roman coins that were found in Iceland and asked students to theorize on how they ended up so far away from Rome several centuries after the fall of the empire. Now most likely they were already really old when they got here and someone just picked them up when trading somewhere else in Europe but the answer I wrote was that the Romans were obviously trying to find America but took a wrong turn and ended up in Iceland. I was the Daleal of my class.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:03
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:I was the Daleal of my class.  Can I please have ointment for that?
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:37
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:I was digging through some drawers at my parent's house and found some old history homework from when I was 10 or 11. It was about some Roman coins that were found in Iceland and asked students to theorize on how they ended up so far away from Rome several centuries after the fall of the empire. Now most likely they were already really old when they got here and someone just picked them up when trading somewhere else in Europe but the answer I wrote was that the Romans were obviously trying to find America but took a wrong turn and ended up in Iceland. They were actually trying to find Atlantis 
|
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:40
|
|
|
Or Bolivia.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:44
|
|
Kurtofan posted:Or Bolivia. Same thing. 
|
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:45
|
|
|
One of these days, I'll stop being lazy about it and actually create an effort post about the subject. It'll be a new thread so we don't poo poo on this one, but I think the discussion could be hilarious. If you think the Bolivian theory is crazy, you have not seen nothing. After spending a lot of time reading about the subject, I came to the conclusion that some people are seriously hosed up and make the Ancient Alien guy look like a serious academic.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:54
|
|
Dalael posted:One of these days, I'll stop being lazy about it and actually create an effort post about the subject. It'll be a new thread so we don't poo poo on this one, but I think the discussion could be hilarious. If you think the Bolivian theory is crazy, you have not seen nothing. After spending a lot of time reading about the subject, I came to the conclusion that some people are seriously hosed up and make the Ancient Alien guy look like a serious academic. Oh god please do it. Just don't expect to convince anyone because Bolivian Atlantis is kinda dumb.
|
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 22:56
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:Oh god please do it. Oh don't worry, I don't expect to convince anyone of anything. I just think its an interesting theory. Compared to a lot of other people, the guy who came up with it put a lot of effort and his own money into this theory, which I think kind of cool. He stated himself that one of his main reason for doing this is to get people more interested in South American culture, especially Bolivia. Its an idea I can easily get behind. The altiplano has a lot of ruins that have barely been studied mostly from lack of interest and lack of money. The only ones that have been studied in depth are Pumapunku and Tiwanaku temple complex. There are a lot of evidence of buried ruins elsewere throughout the altiplano but no serious research has been done. Fortunately, ever since this theory came up (and a documentary was made), a lot of people have been pushing for more digs in the area and tourism has picked up quite a fair bit. It goes to show that some good came out of it. If I ever do this effort post, I'll try and talk about the many different theories including the craziest one. Some of them fit right there with that ancient alien crap. E: Pre-Columbian South American culture seems cool.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2015 23:42
|
|
|
Squalid posted:I find the evolution of early colonial identities into the more developed racial systems of the 19th century a really interesting topic. For example Peter Silver in Our Savage Neighbors describes the development of wider Indian identity forming in opposition to the expansion of European colonists, before there could even be said to be a unified white identity. Cortes' expedition against the Aztecs is an interesting example of this that doesn't get discussed enough. The Aztecs' enemies saw the Spanish as a new ally and enlisted their help in defeating them. There were something like 20,000 native warriors fighting alongside the Conquistadors. From the power politics perspective of the native powers Cortes and his men were more or less hired mercenaries who showed up one day on their doorstep. Then the pandemics started and the previous societal organizations started going to pieces and the Spanish took advantage of the power vacuum to take over. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:05 on May 3, 2015 |
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 00:02
|
|
|
Nintendo Kid posted:There are optical discs made of reflective stone http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/ This is the "almost" exception to my Almost no media. The trouble is that nobody uses them (except for archivists). HEY GAL posted:dear future historians. if you can read this, this (NSFW) was a central element of our culture Link rot. I think the real solution to protection of digital media is by, like, building some kind of p2p botnet and just storing a small archive piece by piece on all of the unsecured devices on the Internet. Use those devices to find more devices and build more copies, and update it when we hit ipv8. Retrieval would be hard but that's not our problem.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 01:56
|
|
|
Keldoclock posted:Link rot.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 02:07
|
|
|
I don't know what other thread to ask this in, so I apologize but, is it true that Shakespeare actually invented words? Or is he just the first recorded person to write those words down? Or is there some other thing that happened.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 02:17
|
|
|
Given how many words first appear in Shakespeare, he probably just made up words to fit the meter, like Dr. Seuss did for his rhymes. The difference is people kept using Shakespeare's made up words. So they transformed into "real" words. Making up new words is not uncommon. You just need to be famous/popular enough for people to keep using the new nizzards and hakken-kraks until people who haven't read the books understand what schloppity-schlopp means. EDIT: Guess not. But I still think we should incorporate more of Dr. Seuss' new words into the English language. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 02:39 on May 3, 2015 |
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 02:34
|
|
|
Kanine posted:I don't know what other thread to ask this in, so I apologize but, is it true that Shakespeare actually invented words? Or is he just the first recorded person to write those words down? Or is there some other thing that happened. Short answer: No
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 02:35
|
|
|
Thanx for the clarification. Here's a neat comic I saw posted on Tumblr about the Byzantines if anyone is interested.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 02:55
|
|
Kanine posted:I don't know what other thread to ask this in, so I apologize but, is it true that Shakespeare actually invented words? Or is he just the first recorded person to write those words down? Or is there some other thing that happened. Actually yes, contrary to the above, but not necessarily in the way you'd think. He wasn't significantly more innovative when it comes to total number of words invented than a number of other writers. But the ways in which he innovated often created very dramatic effects - for example, Shakespeare liked to convert nouns in to verbs to use in novel ways: 'godded' is a famous example. Shakespeare's use of grammar was also very innovative. But no, he didn't invent the word 'puke'.
|
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2015 11:13
|
|
|
Though he did invent the word 'gullible'.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2015 01:36
|
|
|
Kurtofan posted:So nobody knows about how spiders were perceived by Romans? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne Comrade Koba posted:"During the early years of the third millenium, we begin to see the emergence of a strange cult seemingly devoted to the worship of the common horse (Equus ferus), a steppe-dwelling herbivore that was first domesticated prior to any now existing historical records. This religious society crafted and distributed stylized images of these animals, often painted in whimsical pastel colours and inscribed with what we assume are highly symbolical names alluding to certain aspects of the human psyche and its relation to the natural environment, such as "Sparkling-Twilight", "Dashing-Rainbow" and so forth. Due to the high occurence of sexualized and erotic themes in these images, we can only conclude that this was some form of ancient fertility cult that revered the innate divine aspects of common draft animals." The Hittites were down with horse-loving, no joke.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2015 01:53
|
|
|
Kanine posted:Thanx for the clarification. It's not as pro-"Byzantine" as I'd like, but I enjoy it.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2015 01:54
|
|
|
The resolution on the letters is really low in some of the first and last panels making it pretty uncomfortable to read. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 02:56 on May 4, 2015 |
|
#
?
May 4, 2015 02:50
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:The resolution on the letters is really low in some of the first and last panels making it pretty uncomfortable to read. Yeah, I had to download the images real quick and read them as a set of .jpgs on my computer so I could zoom in and out.
|
|
#
?
May 4, 2015 08:17
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:Someone please post the xbox live screengrab of someone going "your so gay you even kiss girls" Was browing the openbook thread, stumbled across it. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3305372&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=10#post376975585
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2015 03:03
|
|
|
cheerfullydrab posted:It's not as pro-"Byzantine" as I'd like, but I enjoy it.  What would something more 'pro-byzantine' be? Remove kebab with some text alterations and an oversized picture of Justinian's face in mosaic?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2015 04:56
|
|
|
Ofaloaf posted:
Well it pretty much ends in the 700s and doesn't cover the resurgence in the 900s-1100s or its dealings with and influence on Eastern Europe / Russia
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2015 05:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 17:59 |
|
|
'Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily' by Joseph Deer was a pro-read of my undergraduate days. Fascinating kingdom that used Byzantine and Islamic tropes of kingship. Which is hilarious since the Norman kings of Sicily were raiding both Byzantines and Muslims. Including Porphyry tombs, because not just the Baselius gets to claim he's from the purple! 
|
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2015 12:45
|
|