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bob dobbs is dead posted:is charcoal burned? burned is a word for literally thousands of weird little oxidation reactions, the set of which is completely different at different levels of oxygen Yes but in a reduced oxygen environment. It can be made in a enclosed purpose built oven /kiln or in a throw wood into a ocean container light that poo poo up and close the doors way. I occasionally sell salvage wood as kiln sticks to charcoal burners. Grand Fromage posted:I hope that is legit, It’s been in the news on and off for years as a thing they have been trying to do.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:37
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God I hope it works. I don't know if this is true, it's been the sense I've been getting doing my ancient religion stuff, but it seems like for a lot of ancient texts we just have whole cultures where we have nothing or a few scraps. Then, a lot of the times, we find one bigass hoard and it becomes the source of 99% of our texts from that culture, and suddenly we know a decent amount? Like the Gnostics where, if all these books I'm reading on it are right, we had a little bit and mostly knew about them through the people who were against them, there were a couple individual books that'd pop up over the centuries. Then suddenly Nag Hammadi happened and now we got a lot about the gnostics in their own words. I feel like I got enough to be a practicing Valentinian if I wanted to, now. These are a lot of texts. So then I went looking into Canaanite religion and it seems like the same thing. We had the bible talking about them like they're savage monsters. But then there's the Ugaritic texts, another hoard, and that's I think almost all the stuff we got? So is that just how it goes? Since at a certain point ancient texts are so rare we often either have stuff from one place, or we got nothing? I went looking for Carthaginian stuff, see if anything had popped up, but there's nothing. Just some grave inscriptions, mostly. Seems so weird for such a massive, important culture. But then even for Rome I remember hearing we actually don't have a lot. So I keep hoping for someone in northern Africa to stumble upon a cave full of ancient Carthaginian scrolls that revolutionize everything. I'm actually open to suggestions on stuff to read, but I don't know how to word my questions. Like, the gnostic stuff, the ugaritic stuff, gonna read the Zoroastrian Avesta in a while, the Popol Vuh, the Rigveda, I've been trying to read the primary texts from ancient religions or niche religions or just important religions I wouldn't have otherwise read. There's obviously the Greek and Norse stuff, too, but that's not really the area I'm interested in. I wanna read all this stuff, but there are so many ancient cultures, most we probably have nothing of, so I have no idea what's out there for me to read. I only found out that the Ugaritic stuff exists and I can just go read the Baal cycle because it comes up in the old testament a lot and is clearly connected, I just imagine there's a lot more out there I could be reading but I dont even know it exists.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:50
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I’m holding out for a history of the etruscans
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Oct 13, 2023 02:51
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BrainDance posted:So is that just how it goes? Since at a certain point ancient texts are so rare we often either have stuff from one place, or we got nothing? Pretty much. Other than stone inscriptions there are very few pieces of original writing that survive from the ancient world. We have all the Greek and Roman texts we do because they were copied and maintained, largely though not exclusively by the Romans themselves and the Islamic world. I'm not sure but I think the Villa of the Papyri is the largest collection of original texts ever found. If they can all be read eventually that would be a big deal. Carthage is the classic example of an ancient culture that's just gone. We have essentially nothing from Carthaginians at all. A couple inscriptions. Everything we know about them is from archaeology or what other cultures, mostly the Romans, tell us. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 02:59
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BrainDance posted:But then even for Rome I remember hearing we actually don't have a lot. And this is true too. The Romans were around for ~2,200 years and were a highly literate culture for the era. It's entirely possible for you to read every single surviving word ever written by a Roman. I remember Patrick Wyman mentioning in a podcast that part of his thesis was reading every letter written in Latin. 99.999999%+ of Roman writing is gone and also the Romans are one of the best documented ancient cultures.
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Oct 13, 2023 03:11
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My understanding is that outside of the Egyptian desert, papyrus will only survive around 50 years, whereas parchment will survive basically forever if it isn't destroyed. So any books that made it to the parchment era made it to the present day but things written in the papyrus era are mostly lost
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Oct 13, 2023 03:25
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There's an account iirc from the time of Southern Song where, after an invasion, the court had to turn to Goryeo to get copies of a whole bunch of classical Chinese texts because they couldn't find them anywhere within China itself. Books can be so fragile. It's honestly remarkable we have as many ancient texts as we do. That we have at least some idea in historical accounts of what was going on in so many places even 2000 years ago.
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Oct 13, 2023 04:00
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cheetah7071 posted:My understanding is that outside of the Egyptian desert, papyrus will only survive around 50 years, whereas parchment will survive basically forever if it isn't destroyed. So any books that made it to the parchment era made it to the present day but things written in the papyrus era are mostly lost What is everything we have from Mesopotamia written on? I don't actually know what the deal is with that. We have ancient Sumerian stuff, right? But, what, did they go and write out the whole Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets? Do we even have a full Sumerian original of that? I know a lot of what we have seems to come from later translations that later people preserved. Though I don't know what that's written on either. Like is there a gap, where we have some stuff pre-papyrus, then post-papyrus, but papyrus is just gone? I hope we do a better job preserving ourselves. If m-discs werent so expensive I'd go and burn the entire z-lib database or whatever to m-discs, carefully pack them away in a safe box, and bury it up on a mountain or something. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 04:40
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Grand Fromage posted:Uwueni, uwuidi, uwuici. you son of a bitch
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Oct 13, 2023 04:55
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People poo poo talk papyrus but lots of our modern paper is just as perishable
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Oct 13, 2023 04:58
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BrainDance posted:What is everything we have from Mesopotamia written on? I don't actually know what the deal is with that. We have ancient Sumerian stuff, right? But, what, did they go and write out the whole Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets? Do we even have a full Sumerian original of that? I know a lot of what we have seems to come from later translations that later people preserved. Though I don't know what that's written on either. My understanding is that all surviving bronze age writing is either in stone or in clay. I believe the epic of gilgamesh was recorded on multiple stone monuments, and the various fragments allowed archeologists to piece the whole thing together. Clay generally doesn't survive well unless it's fired. A lot of surviving clay writing is the result of buildings burning down with all the clay tablets inside.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:01
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BrainDance posted:What is everything we have from Mesopotamia written on? I don't actually know what the deal is with that. We have ancient Sumerian stuff, right? But, what, did they go and write out the whole Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets? Do we even have a full Sumerian original of that? I know a lot of what we have seems to come from later translations that later people preserved. Though I don't know what that's written on either. Yeah it's all on clay tablets. Generally they would only fire (harden for posterity) the really important documents but stuff that was inside buildings when they burned down in various internecine squabbles was helpfully saved under the rubble. If they didn't harden the tablets they could be smoothed over and re-written on.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:32
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One consequence is a lot of the stuff from Mesopotamia isn't like historical works or literature that someone intended to save for posterity, it's business records and receipts and poo poo. The kind of mundane material that almost never shows up since nobody saves it.
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Oct 13, 2023 05:38
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Apparently all of the linear B tablets recovered from Crete record taxes and debts from a single year; the hypothesis is that at the end of the year, the totals would be transfered to papyrus and the clay tablets would be wiped clean to be reused for next year's business
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Oct 13, 2023 05:39
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cheetah7071 posted:Apparently all of the linear B tablets recovered from Crete record taxes and debts from a single year; the hypothesis is that at the end of the year, the totals would be transfered to papyrus and the clay tablets would be wiped clean to be reused for next year's business Which year was it
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Oct 13, 2023 05:44
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In the case of ancient mesopotamian works, one of our largest collections is the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal, which is for example where we found the Epic of Gilgamesh. The reason it was in any state at all for use was because the city it was in, Nineveh, was burned to the ground during the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. CommonShore posted:People poo poo talk papyrus but lots of our modern paper is just as perishable We actually have more than once moved to less durable paper, because we often have the same attitudes our ancestors had to our own writings: "this is worthless garbage, nobody needs this for posterity, I'll just throw it out, so it doesn't need to be written on anything durable." And of course there is the hypothesis of the Digital Dark Age - that the difficulty with long-term preservation of digital records means that some hypothetical future historian will encounter the 21st century as a rapid decline in sources (and may conclude as so many have that this means that there was a decline in literacy and QOL). Ultimately people are very bad at understanding what future people will find interesting and compelling, so I tend to find attempts to decide which things are worth archiving and which forms of data are disposable to be kind of a fool's errand.
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Oct 13, 2023 12:40
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Tulip posted:And of course there is the hypothesis of the Digital Dark Age - that the difficulty with long-term preservation of digital records means that some hypothetical future historian will encounter the 21st century as a rapid decline in sources (and may conclude as so many have that this means that there was a decline in literacy and QOL). Well, looking at our educational systems and lifespans...
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Oct 13, 2023 13:10
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Fuschia tude posted:Which year was it 1997, weirdly
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Oct 13, 2023 13:23
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Tulip posted:Ultimately people are very bad at understanding what future people will find interesting and compelling, so I tend to find attempts to decide which things are worth archiving and which forms of data are disposable to be kind of a fool's errand. I expect the question most people are asking whe deciding what is worth archiving is not so much "what will my descendants be interested in?" but rather "what do I want my descendants think about me?".
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Oct 13, 2023 14:02
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Tulip posted:And of course there is the hypothesis of the Digital Dark Age - that the difficulty with long-term preservation of digital records means that some hypothetical future historian will encounter the 21st century as a rapid decline in sources (and may conclude as so many have that this means that there was a decline in literacy and QOL). But we are thinking about it, at least probably more than they did, and m-discs exist now. Though that's not the same as a stone tablet, I'm hoping we'll continue to work on the technology and get other very, very long term storage options. But then, we've actually already lost a lot of stuff from not even 20 years ago. I've been a part of some archival projects for basically 90s Internet stuff and games, it's already pretty grim. For my stuff, I dont care what they find interesting. I just care that it's about me so that my history ends up symbolizing an era. 
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Oct 13, 2023 14:06
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A_Bluenoser posted:I expect the question most people are asking whe deciding what is worth archiving is not so much "what will my descendants be interested in?" but rather "what do I want my descendants think about me?". Well, often what we have is just naked propaganda on behalf of the powerful. Its not even as open ended as "what do I want my descendants to think about me" its "how do I portray myself/patron in the most flattering light." Of course I think this has a bit of an irony to it: far more people know who Ea-Nasir is than probably any other Bronze Age Mesopotamian (well, Hammurabi), because his story is interesting. BrainDance posted:But we are thinking about it, at least probably more than they did, and m-discs exist now. Though that's not the same as a stone tablet, I'm hoping we'll continue to work on the technology and get other very, very long term storage options. I'm not at all in archiving or indeed in any way professionally involved so to me its just stuff I like to think about. Mostly because thinking about it gives me some increased humility and perspective on how I understand "what do we know about Ancient Rome" and such. As you mentioned its pretty interesting that we're already seeing a lot of history just slip through our fingers, somewhat like how a lot of early film just...vaporized. A part of this that I always find interesting is the deliberate destruction of history. Operation Legacy and the burning of Carthage are famous examples, but its also very interesting that we see this done for far more boring reasons (many episodes of Doctor Who were destroyed by the BBC on purpose just to save space/maintenance) or far more creepy reasons (modern streaming services restricting access to their libraries for greed). And of course in the case of games there's a real open question about how possible it even is to preserve some types of games. As has been pointed out many times, even if you could run World Of Warcraft on perfect replica hardware with perfect software, you can't recreate the social context that defined WoW in 2006 vs 2023. For a game that is defined so thoroughly by internal social networks, how can you say that is preserved at all? Of course I think that's just true of basically any study of history and we just kind of have to live with the ephemerality and uncertainty. Even if we stumbled upon a giant massive fantasy archive of first person diaries by helots, we still will be mostly guessing at what it was like to live in Ancient Sparta.
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Oct 13, 2023 14:47
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Eagerly looking forward to future techno-historians trying to explain the existence of WoW Classic
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Oct 13, 2023 14:58
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The Library of Congress does pretty well for archiving, doesn't it? And isn't our very forum archived in the Library of Congress?
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Oct 13, 2023 14:59
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Tulip posted:Well, often what we have is just naked propaganda on behalf of the powerful. Its not even as open ended as "what do I want my descendants to think about me" its "how do I portray myself/patron in the most flattering light." This is just my thoughts while reading it, I'm not proposing this as an actual historical theory. I don't even think this makes sense going by modern theories about the books, but as part of my big ancient religion primary texts thing I read the bible. Genesis, to me, gave off the vibe that Abraham is a rich guy who hired someone to write a biography justifying everything he did by saying god justified it. "I lied and said my wife is my sister, but that's just how it's supposed to be" that got edited and edited into something seemingly more nuanced. That was just the vibe I got from a lot of different parts of it. Also, near every bible translation translates el shaddai as God Almighty. I guess because that's how the Septuagint did. Like Exodus 6:3 I am pretty sure that's not what it means, like there's no etymology for that besides "we just decided". I am pretty sure it's "El of the mountain." The Canaanite El lived on top of a mountain in a tent, at the source for all the world's water BrainDance fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 16:14
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I think you're wrong about Abraham writing a flattering biography of himself. What seems more likely is that it was a formalization of a clan ancestor or something. I do think it's held from a textual-analysis perspective that early Judaism held more to "we worship only this one guy, and he's the strongest god, but there are other gods, they're just bad gods who we are forbidden to worship" rather than the stricter monotheism we are used to.
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Oct 13, 2023 17:20
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Yeah the early stuff is very clear that there are many gods, Yahweh is just the only one you're allowed to worship. The idea of there only being a single god comes later. One of the earliest retcons I can think of.
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Oct 13, 2023 17:30
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The Bible depicts the actual process of it too. 2nd Kings 22-23. King Josiah decides to renovate IHVH’s temple. In the process the priests and scribes happen to turn up the book of IHVH’s law, which they present to Josiah who has a moral crisis and realizes that all Judah’s problems are because they didn’t strictly obey the law, but worshiped other gods in addition to IHVH. With the help of a prophetess, however, they discern that now that Josiah has realized the seriousness of the situation and humbled himself before IHVH, things will be better as long as they behave themselves. There follows a catalog of how “behaving themselves” includes trashing and murdering every other religious institution in the country.
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Oct 13, 2023 17:40
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And much later than the popular image of Judaism would have you believe too. I was surprised to learn (when listening to Tides of History) that the shift to hard monotheism as it were only really happened in the 5th Century BC after the Babylonian Exile was over. e: ^^^ and later than the Biblical narrative would have you believe too apparently, though not by all that much. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Oct 13, 2023 |
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Oct 13, 2023 17:40
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:And much later than the popular image of Judaism would have you believe too. I was surprised to learn (when listening to Tides of History) that the shift to hard monotheism as it were only really happened in the 5th Century BC after the Babylonian Exile was over. The story of Josiah is quite believable (at least, by Bible standards). The key to it is that Josiah was highly unusual. It’s easy to miss this given the Bible’s ideological bent that “well actually he was just reinstituting the traditional and perfect practices of our distant ancestors Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Jehoshaphat, Uz the firstborn and Buz the brother of Uz”. But this kind of spin wouldn’t have been necessary if the Judahites actually were a bunch of monotheists. If you look at the rest of the book of Kings, Josiah is both preceded and followed up by a bunch of stories of later kings who didn’t adhere to Josiah’s practice at all, and that’s implicitly why you, the Hebrew-literate elite reading the book, are currently grab-assing around in Babylon instead of living it up righteously in the land IHVH promised you. In other words, even by the Bible’s own argument Josiah was an extremist on the throne whose program of religious purity found no wide support in his own time, like Akhenaten or Julian the Apostate. The difference is that those guys ended up without political or religious heirs, whereas through a tragicomical series of antique coincidences, the monotheistic absolutism of Josiah and his advisers ended up at the root of the principal religious heritage of half the planet.
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Oct 13, 2023 18:06
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sullat posted:Yeah it's all on clay tablets. Generally they would only fire (harden for posterity) the really important documents but stuff that was inside buildings when they burned down in various internecine squabbles was helpfully saved under the rubble. If they didn't harden the tablets they could be smoothed over and re-written on. That's not entirely true, you can only smooth over and re-write a clay tablet if you are regularly applying water to the clay to keep it moist. Mesopotamians would do this sometimes, such as in schools, but most of the time, clay tablets were allowed to harden in the sun, which doesn't take very long in the hot, desert climate of the region. Most tablets that we have today were never in buildings that burned down (although some were). A clay tablet that has simply been exposed to the hot Mesopotamian air for a few days will harden enough for it to become solid and durable, and most tablets we have today are ones like that. We have tablets from lots of archaeological contexts other than fire. Many come from trash heaps. In fact, air dried clay tablets become so solid that they were sometimes used as bricks. Some of the surviving Sumerian literary manuscripts that we have come from benches, furniture, and even the walls of buildings. If you have a big pile of tablets sitting around that you don't need anymore... well those are blocks of hardened clay in uniform rectangular shapes, which sounds a lot like a brick, and it saves you the trouble of needing to make purpose-built bricks. Sometimes in modern times ancient clay tablets are fired in order to help preserve them though.
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Oct 13, 2023 20:54
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When talking about digital archiving and societies having no idea what people will want preserved, a modern example I can think of is the SA 9/11 thread. In one of the few examples of live online reactions to the event, the thread pops up in various publications. As I'm sure you've seen, large amounts of the thread were wiped in real time, presumably to make it easier to read or same arcane technical reason. Some mod even deleted specific posts that they deemed useless.
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Oct 17, 2023 10:09
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A question about writing. Phoenician is written right to left but some of its descendants, like the Greek and Latin alphabets, are written left-to-right. Do we have any clues as to why this happened? It seems like a heck of a big change.
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Oct 21, 2023 09:20
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Tree Bucket posted:A question about writing. Just wait until you learn about boustrophedon.
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Oct 21, 2023 10:04
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Tree Bucket posted:A question about writing. There was no universal orthography in practice. Boustrophedon writing (ie, left on one line, right on the next) was once more common in Greek, and there are many inscriptions in Greek and other languages written this way (the Lapis Niger for an Archaic Latin example). It makes a kind of intuitive sense in that it allows your gaze to move smoothly throughout the text without jumps, but otoh trying to read anything this way gives me a headache. In the classical period we start to hear about conscious attempts to reform orthography, for example by Eucleides of Athens. The sources are concerned with regularizing spelling and the inventory of letters between regions, but standard directionality might also have been involved. Certainly you don’t find boustrophedon writing having pride of place in Roman-era Greek, or Roman-era Latin for that matter. It has been suggested that the change to a standardized left-to-right orthography pertains to the spread of writing in ink. If you are right-handed like most people, there is a clear advantage in writing ink from left to right—if your right hand brushes the writing surface, it will hit blank page or at worst the previous line, where if you write right to left, it will hit the wet ink you just put down. Messy, frustrating, probably going to get you a talking-to from the chief scribe. This would have not been so much of a problem if you’d become a stone carver instead. Then again, Arabic or Hebrew go right to left and it’s hardly the case that they are famous for a lack of ink writings. tl;dr no one knows, ʞɿowƨƨɘυϱ bɘnɿɒɘl Ɉɿɘƨni
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Oct 21, 2023 10:19
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I read the Nag Hammadi texts, the Ugaritic texts, some other misc early Christian stuff, Enuma Elish, reread Gilgamesh, other misc Sumerian stuff. Don't doubt at all that they whole heartedly believed in dragons anymore. There are apparently verified sightings by hundreds of people of the phoenix being reborn, it's scientifically proven that peacocks never rot when they die (and that this is why your liver has to digest peacock meat), salamanders actually do live in fire. So dragons aren't even that wild. As you get further back in time, you get to a point pretty quickly where there arent too many other things for the ANE that are easily accessible and translated. My only real option was to get myself a copy of all 3 volumes of "The Context of Scripture" which just seems to have a whole shitload of random ANE stuff translated and explained. So that's coming now. But I got this problem. With Rome I can easily imagine being there. There's so much Rome media that it's whatever, just watch the HBO show. But with all this I have no idea what it was like to live in, like, Uruk or something. Were they busy, complex, active cities with all kinds of things going on and all different kinds of people trying to do well? Or were they too small for much of that. Was there social mobility and people trying to climb the ladder? Was there recorded political drama? Do we know what people did for fun other than Gilgamesh's ball game that dropped down to the underworld? Or do we not even know? Are there any media representations of life in any of these cities out there anywhere? Besides, I'd imagine, religious bullshit for ancient Israel. BrainDance fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Oct 28, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2023 07:20
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The single source that gave me the most (not necessarily best because...fiction) feeling for what it was like to live in the ANE is the video game Nebuchadnezzar. Which I have quite a lot of complaints about1 but TBH I find that even moreso than any movies or shows, a video game can give you a 'feel' or attachment to a time and place. I can think of one other game but even mentioning what video game it is qualifies as a really loving obnoxious spoiler so I'm giving myself a headache trying to figure out how to recommend it. There's an isekai set in ancient sumeria but I can't even remember the name e: If you want a book that gets into a lot of the stuff about just how people lived one of my absolute favorite books of all time is https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...ommunityReviews 1 the campaign is set up to portray a teleological development of the class system where the higher classes are developed to solve problems that result after centuries of cities with no stratification, which...mostly bothers me because the class system of ancient sumeria seems to exist before we have any history (yes we have archaeological data, no those are not history), and also it models the transportation of items as incredibly important but the transportation of people is utterly effortless, they just kind of teleport across any distance to their workplaces.
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Oct 28, 2023 07:44
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It’s funny you’re asking about this, I’m in the same boat coming from a different direction. I just read two volumes of a fantasy series - by a historian - that jams several names-filed-off actual Bronze Age civilizations next to each other. The slice-of-life stuff, including Mesopotamian bureaucratic graft, also got me also wanting more books or media along the same lines of daily life in the era, I’d never encountered anything like it. Age of Bronze series by Miles Cameron.
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Oct 28, 2023 13:52
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With management games like that there's definitely always balancing immersion and accuracy vs actually being fun to play, there's a lot of complaints about agent-based city building games turning into 90% extremely tedious fiddly traffic management.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:35
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Was it the pharaoh/caesar games where the optimal traffic management ended up being 'you must make your roads a single continuous loop with no intersections'
Tunicate fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Oct 28, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2023 18:15
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BrainDance posted:Were they busy, complex, active cities with all kinds of things going on and all different kinds of people trying to do well? Or were they too small for much of that. Was there social mobility and people trying to climb the ladder? Was there recorded political drama? Do we know what people did for fun other than Gilgamesh's ball game that dropped down to the underworld? There were definitely busy complex urban areas, and even small towns and villages have people trying to make wealth and jockeying for social position, though very little gets recorded and survives for smaller locations. Someone else can attest to specifically what has survived about Uruk specifically, but the cities were definitely energetic places with lots of things going on and a good number of travellers moving through, even if most were not as gigantic as Rome or a modern major city. As far as quiet entertainment, there are a number of games that have been unearthed going back around 5000 years, and there are strong indications that games have been played as far back as humans had any sort of society. Board games date back a long way, they've uncovered games like the Egyptian Senet and Babylonian Royal Game of Ur that date back to around 2600 BC and evidence of other games before that. There is evidence that they were not just an upper-class pasttime, for example there is a surviving graffiti drawing of a Royal Game of Ur board that was probably used to play by someone without a physical copy. A lot of the older board games (including the two that I named) had a lot of religious and mystical significance tied into them; while the game rules are relatively straightforward, the symbols on Senet represented the journey of a soul to the afterlife in Egyption mythology, and there's reference to the symbols of Royal Game of Ur were used for fortune telling (what spaces you landed on while playing gave pointers to your future). There is written evidence of gambling on the outcome of the games too, and not just simple victory but hitting specific squares or other conditions. Different rule sets have bound found that match each game, so it seems that play evolved over time and that there were both simple (game is basically just a race of who can get pieces to the end first) and complicated (have to get pieces to certain symbols and different symbols have different effects and different scoring) versions of the rules. There's also a variety of dice and evidence of dice games being played, not just as an adjunct to There are modern reproductions of some of these games around at normal prices, I have nice repros of Senet and The Royal Game of Ur that I got from Amazon, so you can actually acquire and play them if you want to get your hands on them. You'll want to google for rule sets as there are a lot of variants. I found it really neat to play something that old, and people that I played with found them fun too, they seem like something you could play on road trips, not just some boring old thing you'd only mess with for history class.
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