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Yeah, Perry's whole thing was going out of the way to force Japan to stop trying to pretend the rest of the world didn't exist, and well, it worked. Honestly I'm more interested in how China got so dysfunctional and unable to effectively respond to what turned into open military conquest from Europe.
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Jul 24, 2020 14:47
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Silver2195 posted:Spartan pederasty was supposedly such a successful social institution that Spartan women started banging adolescent girls too. IIRC there's sources for basically all the greek city states mocking the others for pederasty.
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Jul 24, 2020 15:27
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:You forgot Canada fracturing into individual states but keeping together in a very complicated structure, losing nearly all the east coast but keeping a sliver of Maine and Vermont and calling this new body "The True United States under god" because the host of SNL agreed they were the real United States. You say this but it just sounds more plausible
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Jul 25, 2020 08:35
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I read somewhere that apparently Romans considered the colour azure blue to be cursed, but I can't find any source to back this up. Was this just some weird invention?
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Jul 26, 2020 14:40
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Ola posted:Definitely. But if you were applying for royal funding for your get-rich-quick scheme, you would also put some very pious stuff in the "reason"-box. This also helps the king defend some fairly speculative allocations of state funds, which even a dictator needs to do. Always reminded of how Scotland lost so much money on a completely failed colonial venture they sold the country to England to pay off the debts.
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Jul 30, 2020 09:20
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Came up before, but the Roman habit of appropriating, importing and renaming gods is endlessly interesting to me. The whole thing with the Romans basically importing Greek gods wholesale is pretty well known. Probably contributed to Christianity becoming so widespread and eventually dominant. Any particularly interesting aspects to Roman religions and imported gods that come to mind? The household and family gods are particularly interesting. Reminded of that Doctor Who episode (which is almost basically a crossover with Rome) where the Doctor and Donna become the household gods for a family- rather fitting for the personal experience they've had.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:20
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Libluini posted:South America also has huge, long and navigable rivers. There are also lots of mountains and stuff like rain forests that are really hard to cross. If you have that kind of terrain, wheels just seem like a bad idea. And without people making wheels, you never find out that wheels are good for lots of stuff besides transporting things. Transmetropolitan has a fun take on cryonics. Even in an almost best case scenario, you're waking up alone and completely out of your depth in a future that likely moved on long ago. Arglebargle III posted:Roman landscape art: I love the little bird.
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Aug 16, 2020 06:32
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:That's not a negative. My tomb gets robbed. I define a generation, a civilization even. Where's the downside? My dumbass dead guy opinions live on and my mouse from 2014 is stored in a museum. You wake up and then have to hang out with Ben Stiller
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Aug 16, 2020 13:45
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I think Romans definitely had their own cultural stereotypes and jokes about old and new money, which former slaves made good would by definition probably be. Came up earlier that educated slaves whose main job was being scribes and teachers were a pretty common thing, complete with slaves being bought and educated specifically for that purpose, wouldn't be surprising that they'd often do well when freed and would already be suited for jobs in government and bureaucracy as well as going into business. (And if on good terms with their former master, they'd probably have a good job reference)
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Aug 22, 2020 19:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:Apparently there's still a number of issues with domesticated foxes where they're still pretty far from dogs and cats, so we haven't fully figured it out yet. Also it's that domesticated foxes aren't really useful for anything besides vanity pets, iirc they intended to try to make it easier to breed for their fur but they ended up with the same thing as dogs where the more friendly ones exhibit neoteny and don't grow the kind of fur coats that they want. Compare that to pretty much any domesticated animal and most show at least some kind of use, even in the case of say, rabbits and doves just for food and eventually showing off. While various farm animals all have niches and multiple uses, dogs are extremely useful, and as the legend goes, cats more or less started hanging around humans on their own accord. And someone brought up zebras vs horses before. Might be key that zebras live in a continent with lions and cheetahs and other big predators, while horses iirc are generally native to the central Asian steppes and plains, nature's sensory deprivation chamber.
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Aug 23, 2020 08:29
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And I think nearly everything we DO know is usually the practices of the upper classes, middle at best, where marriages are often basically a property transaction.
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Aug 29, 2020 07:44
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How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored? I mostly remember the most detailed exploration of stoicism I've seen being Gotham, where Alfred talks about Thomas Wayne being into the idea of 'hiding your best self'.
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Aug 31, 2020 15:55
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I think the idea is that it can be applicable but wasn't necessarily so. The Gauls are as likely to treat the Romans as neighbours as they are enemies (and to an extent vice versa) depending on the story they want to tell. Rome is usually a strutting bully that gets taken down a peg or two, though.
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Sep 3, 2020 09:36
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Maybe we need a Chinese history thread, because it seems underserved and fascinating. Feeling particularly interested in what the medieval Chinese army looked like, given there seems to be extensive literature on it.
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Sep 6, 2020 14:27
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What was life like in Roman territories, Greece and Egypt in particular? I'm aware that the idea of the Emperor's divinity was created/played up to get legitimacy with Egyptian subjects who were used to that kind of thing.
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Sep 7, 2020 07:43
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The way we treat language is actually a bit different from history; it's not that long ago that say, French was the official 'language of diplomacy' among most of Europe, which people who didn't speak it natively would use to converse with each other, mostly ruling class folks. Hence, 'lingua franca'. English of course often serves a similar role today. For the Romans it'd probably be Greek. And of course, it's not uncommon for a society's ruling class to be from conquerers who speak a different language than their subjects. It's quite well known that it's very easy for young children to learn multiple languages when they're raised around people speaking them, as pretty much anyone you meet raised in a multilingual community can attest.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:57
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I feel like much with any other science, good medicine needs a central body of information, study and experimentation, hence why you see it in major stable powers of the time- Egypt, Rome, the Middle East at its height. The scary part is how easy it is to backslide and how hard it is to discredit quackery. The Game Boy derail comes to mind as a funny example of economies of scale since even at the time it was considered underpowered, but pretty much all of Nintendo's handheld competitors had the same problem; making a higher-end device with better graphics and more powerful hardware but struggling to attract games people wanted for it and having a much higher price point, and much worse battery life, especially in the early days. Things only turned around with the smartphone and tablet revolution completely changing the game, hence why the Switch is basically the console people have been trying to make for decades. (Remember that one thread with the Razer gaming tablet that was considered completely absurd?) To roll it back, it's like how the Greeks and Romans didn't industrialise with the steam engine; they didn't have the required technologies to support it as anything more than a novelty.
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Oct 8, 2020 04:41
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PawParole posted:shouldn’t she be beheading Poseidon or Athena, not the guy who mercy-killed her? It's extremely on-brand for corporate wokeness that it's not anyone with actual power.
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Oct 10, 2020 17:19
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Reminded of the old British comp school genre with all its casual abuse, rote memorisation and generally making an effort to beat every piece of independent thought and empathy out of its students. Seems a common thing in general with empires, you need your future colonial enforcers to be uncreative and brutal. Having a facade of meritocracy that doubles to lend legitimacy to the perpetuation of the ruling class also helps.
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Oct 19, 2020 06:46
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I don't know a ton about the Tang Dynasty, but I do know that the Tang poet Li He was supposed to be a child prodigy, and went off to write the Imperial Examination aged 20, but was prevented from doing so at the last minute because his father's name was too similar to the name of the exam. He then went home, wrote tons of well-regarded but super angsty poetry (much of which his mom threw down a toilet), and died of tuberculosis at age 27. Sounds like a rock star, complete with dying at 27.
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Oct 19, 2020 12:10
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Power Khan posted:Same with Conan the Babarian in english. Schwarzenegger has a laughable styrian accent that makes him sound like a barking yokel. Unsurprisingly they completely overdubbed him in the german version, greatly improving the film. This reminds me of how Goku's Japanese voice is meant to sound like a mountain hick. Accurate English equivalent would be like, Appalachian.
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Oct 28, 2020 08:09
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Elissimpark posted:I'm aware of the existence of scales, but that doesn't negate the fact that units of measurement can share a name but vary in magnitude, depending on where and when you are. BTW, that's what Son Goku's name is based on. Gohan also means rice. There's a lot of themes following on from that.
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Nov 28, 2020 17:23
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Koramei posted:Oh yeah, there was a talk a few weeks ago on representations of ancient history in games* where that got brought up a bit; like you'd get a board game about making the wonders of the world where you have to direct your economy towards it but every single role shown would be e.g. men mining in a quarry, men making tools, men doing construction etc, kind of implying women had no part in them getting built. Ancient queens get glamorized a fair bit, but more mundane roles are often forgotten. Age of Empires II comes to mind as at least having male and female workers, though everything else is exclusively male. Discworld is a lot better on this, pointing out that women are working just as hard in agricultural industries, and 'entire economies have been built on the backs of little old ladies working in fields'. galagazombie posted:This is one of those things where it becomes an issue of trying to map ancient cultures 1/1 onto modern ones. We tend to think think of Patriarchy and Sexism as being like upper class Victorian England, where women were supposed to do literally nothing and hold no positions whatsoever. But the forms of patriarchy are as varied historically as anything else. In reference to your talk about spiritual status, we often think about patriarchy in this sense of how Christianity in the West during the Middle Ages and then especially in the early modern period attempted to remove Women from any kind of participation in religion. But that doesn't mean that other times and places were the exact opposite and full of powerful female Pope equivalents. Take Rome for instance. You had the Vestal Virgins and lots of other female priesthoods, but far from being a sign of women's liberation they just as much part of the patriarchal system as anything else. Kinda get the feeling that early industrial periods tended to cause patriarchy to double and triple down on oppressing women when they previously couldn't afford to, while retroactively rewriting history to make that the expected default. Also reminded that Joseon Korea apparently made even Victorian English sailors think their women had it rough.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:52
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Isn't the soleus just the walking around muscle I think anyone in GiP can tell you that's a very good sign of a career soldier.
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Dec 7, 2020 08:30
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CleverHans posted:Never before has weirdo joke "It's not paranoia if they're really after you" been so applicable. It seems like a pretty common theme in ancient (and modern!) history; when you're ruled by the last paranoid bastard standing after a constant game of real life Crusader Kings, it explains a lot about poo poo getting wild. JonathonSpectre posted:Jesus loving Christ, starving a newborn for days. Yeah, there's a point where being a child of the upper class really sucks because they're the most concerned with whatever loving wild ideas that people calling themselves doctors have come up with, whether it involves animal poo poo, arsenic, mercury, bloodletting, opium, leeches... which might also explain a lot about the ruling class.
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Dec 12, 2020 15:42
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I'm at Herculaneum (what) I'm at the Taco Bell (what) I'm at the time travelling Herculaneum Taco Bell
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Dec 30, 2020 10:53
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Grand Fromage posted:Right, I'm not saying you can't analyze the OT, it's just that the type of material we have for early Christianity is often quite detailed. OT history is archaeology, NT history is... history. I am reminded of one history course that cited some OT passages as references when talking about the Assyrians, presumably mainly to drive home how goddamn ancient the history they're talking about is.
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Jan 1, 2021 18:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Japanese basically has chunks of the Chinese writing system embedded into it and used in tandem with their phonetic alphabet. That makes it more complex than either a normal alphabetic writing system or just a pictogram system, and that's before you get into their propensity to sometimes scatter english in roman characters as well. Much like with English, people tend to be aware of the quirks of the language they speak and use it for jokes at every opportunity. 'A man walks into a bar' and all that. Carillon posted:Given all the alphabet talk I was curious about number systems as well. I know a lot of the world has adapted the so called arabic numerals, but how many other approaches are still commonly used and are there any other common ones not based 10? From what I remember in schools, once you get into the mindset, Roman numerals clearly have their own uses, especially with how they work like tally marks. A lot better at smaller increments, but it's larger specific numbers that become incredibly unwieldy and where Arabic numerals become so much more useful.
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Jan 3, 2021 08:40
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galagazombie posted:You know theres a thing I've always mused about, and obviously by it's nature no one would have written it down, but I wonder how much and how many of historical head shavings were just compensation by dudes with male-pattern baldness. Everything from Samurai topknots to monk tonsures to those weird ponytail things some european "barbarians" had to the Qing queue. I wonder how many of the were big specifically because it was an excuse for powerful men to soothe their egos by forcing everyone else to be bald too. No one can know you've gone bald at 30 if everyone is required to shave their head after all. I know before modern hygiene there are benefits to not having a bunch of hair for lice to live in and whatnot, but some people seemed to take it a little extreme. Wouldn't be surprising, though a lot is also probably simply comparable to modern standards of formal dress and grooming. Equivalent to a short crew cut, along with a suit and tie, and so on. A tonsure also makes sense when it's specifically supposed to be a distinctive and modest haircut, and also one that is still recognisable when you're old and going bald. Combovers aren't new, Julius Caesar had one.
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Feb 6, 2021 05:12
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They probably had a baggage train for carrying polearms and other unwieldy supplies long distance as most armies do.
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Feb 10, 2021 07:33
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yeah I found this passage in the Anabasis: Always gotta keep in mind that you can't really have much in the way of warfare without logistics, and while certainly a lot of armies would pillage and loot their way through sometimes even friendly territory to stay fed, it's not sustainable in the long run. That passage is significant I'd imagine since it's specifically the army abandoning their logistics train to take to guerrilla warfare, since in hostile territory it'll rapidly become a liability as they can't expect a peaceful resupply. Sun Tzu was around 2500 years ago and his works also go into detail about the importance of logistics, supply lines, organisation and infrastructure. A well equipped army makes sure the troops are well fed, well rested, and equipped and trained to deal with any scenario they might reasonably encounter.
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Feb 11, 2021 14:02
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Fish of hemp posted:I mean, have you seen footage of New York before 1990's? I do remember reading that banana peels became a slapstick staple because you couldn't show horse poo poo on screen.
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Feb 21, 2021 17:06
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Economics hasn't been a science for over a century.
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Feb 27, 2021 07:55
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Not the best analogy given for most people even in the 'modern' world they still face the anxiety of everything they have going up in smoke from the slightest mistake or misfortune.
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Feb 28, 2021 12:52
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If you just know Rome from pop culture, you probably don't see much Augustus. If you study even a bit of Roman history, or more historical-based drama than just movies and Asterix, you can't escape Augustus.
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Mar 3, 2021 10:21
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:There was a woman who wrote a comic about a Roman bath architect time travelling several dozen times through arcane bath portals into and from modern Japanese baths and eventually getting stuck in Japanese times and starting a relationship with a Japanese woman romaboo Thermae Romae, and it was super popular in Japan to the point of getting a live action movie
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Mar 5, 2021 10:46
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Don Gato posted:Honestly the Imperial Family during the Sengoku era is fun to read about due to Kyoto burning down and being sacked early in the era. My favorite factoid was that at one point the Emperor was reduced to selling calligraphy in the streets because every other thing they could sell had already been stolen, so for a few dozen ryo you too could get your family mon drawn by the literal emperor of Japan. Not sure what the rest of the Kuge aristocracy was doing but presumably not much better, even as they looked down on the samurai as mere uncultured country bumpkins. I do remember hearing that when Europeans finally got to have a good look around Japan, they initially took the shogun for a king and the emperor for a pope. (and that frankly might be doing a disservice to the pope) Stable central rule seems one of the most key things to resisting colonialism, I get the idea that China wasn't able to avoid European predation at least in part because of decentralised control and the difficulty of getting any real information in and out of the Forbidden City, where emperors had to basically establish their own dedicated spy corps to get reliable information that wasn't just what people thought the emperor (or dowager) would want to hear.
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Mar 6, 2021 08:17
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I was thinking that sounded like Aku, and wait, that IS Mako.
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Mar 25, 2021 07:17
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Pretty sure that much like bushido, most of the actual codified values and ideals of chivalry were a post facto invention made up long after the warrior class had become irrelevant to justify their ancestral pillaging and/or because it made for good entertainment. Arthurian stories in particular are much like comic books and movies where there's tons of different takes on the same set of characters and old stuff blended with new. Look at like, the old Donald Duck comics from like 80 years ago now and compare to the recently concluded DuckTales reboot, and ponder what that kind of thing is going to look like to someone 200 years from now. I think Gawain's attempts to politely deflect the Green Knight's wife's advances are basically trying to balance not being a jerk- and worse, a bad guest- by sleeping with his host's wife, but also not trying to look unmanly for not wanting to have sex with an attractive woman. Either that or the other thread's interpretation where the Green Knight is angling for a triad.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:07
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King Arthur and his knights are to actual feudal knights what Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and Scrooge McDuck are to modern wealthy people.
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Apr 3, 2021 08:31
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