PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Historical Fun Fact: (USER LOSETH POSTYNG PRIVILYGES FOR FOUR AND TWENTY HOURS)

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drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

So my mom has been doing a bunch of family tree research lately, and it turns out we're direct descendents of Isaac Allerton, one of the 41 signers of the Mayflower Compact, and an important figure in not only Plymoth Colony but also New Amsterdam and New Haven as well(although admittedly his notoriety wasn't quite entirely for positive reasons)

Which is kinda surprising as I had before this point assumed my mother's side of the family didn't have anyone of note in them(while on my father's side I have a silent film era actor and director as a great grandfather, and I'm supposedly related to the Marx Brothers, although I'd have to ask my grandmother exactly what our degree of relationship was, also apparently her family's farm was one of the only one's not to be burned down or sacked by General Sherman during the later parts of the Civil War)

# ¿ Jan 23, 2018 10:32

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 09:16

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

DACK FAYDEN posted:

There's an Arthur C. Clarke story about this, told from the perspective of the head of state of the losing side of a space war that lost because they kept funding crazy new R&D and they just got conventionally outnumbered.

It's not explicitly a World War II parable or anything... but, well.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam does this too, the Principality of Zeon keeps coming up with all sorts of new robot designs(that are often extremely specialized), while the Federation wins the war partially because they focus development on only a couple proven designs that they can then throw at the enemy by the dozens at a time

# ¿ Jan 31, 2018 18:30

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Suspect Bucket posted:

With all the Maus and nightvision chat, you guys have read My Tank Is FIGHT! right?

I got my copy several years before I even started coming here

# ¿ Feb 1, 2018 20:59

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Krankenstyle posted:

I've changed my mind. They say in movies that you can't feel getting stabbed with a sharp knife, but if it's like a bread knife, that poo poo will hurt like a motherfucker. Also, it will cause more damage, cf. barbs and what-not.

I think a rough stone axe is more badass than a smooth one. Only chieftains and use smooth stone axes.

As someone who has been stabbed with a spoon before I can agree

# ¿ Feb 3, 2018 10:21

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Honestly I'll admit I do believe there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK, but I also firmly believe that Oswald was the lone gunman involved

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 09:41

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Thump! posted:

What a wholesome tale of war

I'm amazed it never got a Disney adaptation, it would be perfect for them

# ¿ May 24, 2018 21:47

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I remember reading about how an actor studied how medieval English people likely sounded a lot more like Southerners, so he ended up playing a Macbeth that sounded like Gomer Pyle.

Which reminds me of that episode of Gomer Pyle where he sings the song Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha which led to me finding out that Jim Nabors had an absolutely stunning singing voice

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 04:19

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Rumda posted:

There's this photo from 1900 or so

I'm reminded of that gag from Mulan where we see a portrait a guy had taken of him with the Emperor of China, at first you think it's funny just because he's making a really goofy face in it, but then you realize just how long it takes a portrait to be painted and then it becomes hilarious because he had to have held that face the whole time it was being painted

# ¿ Jul 13, 2018 00:21

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Bobby Digital posted:

George Washington was twelve stories high.

Made of radiation

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 04:05

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Crazycryodude posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foqOtlrPCN4

Someone post the JFK song, also the video on Sodom and Gomorrah, think there were a couple others that are thread relevant as well

# ¿ Jul 22, 2018 07:48

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Zopotantor posted:

They just added plaster, alum or worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieHi4PVMJU0

That channel is really great by the way

# ¿ Aug 3, 2018 21:44

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

steinrokkan posted:

Never trust a channel owned by Big Nutmeg

Not his fault that Nutmeg was ridiculously popular back then

# ¿ Aug 4, 2018 00:28

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Tashilicious posted:

He is not a dumb man. He literally took his weaknesses and turned them into his strengths and ran it until he was one of the lesser terrible republicans politicians.

His autobiography was a really interesting read

# ¿ Sep 3, 2018 19:53

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Arnie's gimmick is basically a circus strongman that he leveraged into stardom because it's a surprisingly versatile niche. Probably not a coincidence that his first role was Hercules. (in an amazingly bad movie, but still)

Calling him just a "circus strongman" is vastly underselling his achievements as an athelete and in the field of fitness

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 20:06

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Tunicate posted:

actually maybe goons can help me find a clip here

On TV right after the recall election I saw one of the paparazzi trying to ambush Arnold with questions. Arnold was getting into his car, and the guy bursts out and said

The guy yells at him "Mister Schwarzenegger, after you're done with the governorship are you going to be in another movie with a woman with three breasts?"

and Arnold just says "Maybe four."

He has a good sense of humor

Also now I want to hear him read the Grimsby parts of Ariel's Got Legs and I'm sad that will probably never happen

# ¿ Sep 13, 2018 02:01

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Catboy Autonomist posted:

Speaking of tall people, in 19th century France, some freakishly large bones were discovered in a Bronze Age burial site, and it was estimated based on the size of the bones in proportion to the rest of the body that the person they belonged to would have been roughly 3.5 metres tall, or over 11 feet (for comparison, the tallest ever verified person, Robert Wadlow, was 2.72m at his peak). This of course would've been well after the emergence of modern man so for all we know, they may very well have belonged to the tallest human being to ever have lived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_of_Castelnau

From what I remember apparently there were dozens of cases during the 19th century of giant skeletons being found, but for whatever reason they always ended up being lost or destroyed

# ¿ Sep 25, 2018 21:58

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

ChocNitty posted:

Is the Angry Samoans song true. Did they save Hitlers cock?

No idea about Hitler's, but I do know that Rasputin's is preserved and it's rather apparent why he was Russia's Greatest Love Machine

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 09:09

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

It's a shame no one picked up on the Boney M reference I used

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 18:03

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Godzilla is lame.

You have had some bad opinions over the years mate, but that might just be the worst yet

# ¿ Mar 10, 2019 08:25

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

If you guys want to read about a goofy conspiracy theory(that would nonetheless make for a good RPG or movie or videogame with some tweaking) look up The Saturn Death Cult someday

# ¿ Apr 13, 2019 00:30

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Your Gay Uncle posted:

Don’t forget the two cops who returned a physically beaten and drugged 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone To Jeffery Dahlmer’s apartment where he was promptly murdered. They even missed the decomposing body of a previous victim in the apartment . They punished one of the officers by making head of the police union for 5 years!

Yeah that was screwy, though I do hear that partially happened because Dahmer could be scarily persuasive and charismatic when he could be bothered to put the effort in

Also anyone hear who hasn't read the graphic novel My Friend Dahmer, you should do yourself a favor and go read it right away, as it's amazing

# ¿ May 11, 2019 11:15

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Going to second that; Derf never tries to make excuses for him and doesn't try to humanize him either. It's literally just "I was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in high school before he murdered anybody. This is the story. Make of it what you will."

Kinda depends on what you mean by humanize, one of the most important things is that Derf makes it clear that he separates the Dahmer he knew and the murderer he became, he definitely humanizes the former, but is clear that he has pretty much no sympathy for the latter beyond the fact that he used to be the former

# ¿ May 14, 2019 07:57

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Tashilicious posted:

That implies Dahmer changed, instead of having a public face and a private face. One that is nice and charming, and one which is a serial killer.

They are the same person. But he just kept the serial killing secret.

Well I was talking about before he actually murdered anyone(and thus most of what the comic covers), prior to that he was just a disturbed weirdo

# ¿ May 14, 2019 11:49

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Aphrodite posted:

Isn't that what happened with Hamilton?

He decided he had to accept for his honor but publicly claimed he would be throwing the duel? Presumably expecting Burr to do the same.

What he didn't realize is that Burr was just that big of a choad

# ¿ May 16, 2019 20:57

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Something about that is extremely

And yeah, a lot of the people thinking guns automatically ruin fantasy settings really aren't aware that guns were around for centuries along with knights in plate armour and probably Shakespeare, they just sucked. And it wasn't even guns that made knights obsolete, it was pike formations.

And if we extend that to all gunpowder weaponry then we have the Chinese using them(especially rockets) even longer

Really one of the things to keep in mind is that black powder could have potentially been discovered at pretty much any point in history if certain factors had collided just right(indeed it's possible that we could have never discovered it at all for the same reasons)

# ¿ May 20, 2019 19:11

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

dee eight posted:

Wasn't the high voice a clue that supported the supposition that Abe suffered from Marfan syndrome?

As an aside to that, I enjoy reading or hearing about historical forensics such as: A guy put together a clue from Mozart's diary and a description of the symptoms leading to his death and figured ol' Wolfgang died from trichinosis. Another was a med student who deduced that he was reading the post mortem report of Edgar Allan Poe and concluded that Poe most likely died of encephalitis caused by rabies, not, as is widely believed, from extreme boozification.

I imagine Poe's booze habits probably didn't help though

Similarly if Lovecraft were alive today I'm sure psychologists and psychiatrists would have a field day sorting out the various mental illnesses and issues with his brain chemistry that he must have suffered from(which is part of why despite his many faults of character I've never been able to hate him like a lot of people these days do)

# ¿ May 21, 2019 09:11

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Tunicate posted:

Lovecraft had a pretty tragic upbringing, and seeing his dad go violently insane from tertiary syphilis at an early age explains an awful lot.

Yeah that and his aunts were such awful people and terrible influences too

# ¿ May 22, 2019 22:20

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

System Metternich posted:

https://twitter.com/shutupandrosky/status/1140427545055117312?s=21

There's a point where something stops being Punk and just becomes Douchey and that definitely crosses the line

# ¿ Jun 17, 2019 21:54

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Alhazred posted:

Pretty much. And historians did this a lot. One historian wrote about how Claudius' wife would go to brothels and hold contests about how many men she could service.

A story from Byzantium that's supposedly true is that Harald Hardråde, leader of the varangaian guard, had a crush on empress Zoe and once asked for one of her pubes.

Apparently that is an incredibly ancient warrior tradition that appears in many different cultures, and still showed up as recently as WW2

Or at least that's what someone explained to me when a similar thing appeared in a Sci-Fi novel I read once

# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 19:07

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

It originated when Gimli Gloinsson requested the hair of Galadriel Lady of Lorien

Apparently that was Tolkien referencing that trope

# ¿ Jul 22, 2019 19:20

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

That porcelain stuff is very interesting, I remember seeing a documentary a couple years ago about what was basically the first workshop in Europe to make true porcelain and it was really fascinating, I'll have to see if I can find it again

# ¿ Aug 11, 2019 22:59

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Trabant posted:

The Bavarian Pissdress sounds like it could be an experimental punk band.

Or a Team Fortress 2 cosmetic

been reading most of this piss conversation in the voice of the Sniper from TF2 and it makes it all like twice as hilarious

# ¿ Aug 24, 2019 15:20

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Alhazred posted:

A giant wolf's head from the Pleistocene era was recently found in Siberia:

Cue the Bloodborne music

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 03:11

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Carbon dioxide posted:

Image gallery https://imgur.com/gallery/DcRXrl3

From the comments section;

# ¿ Nov 20, 2019 08:03

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

chitoryu12 posted:

I travel a lot and there are parts of the country where there really is nothing out there. Miles and miles of highway with occasional small turn-offs leading to some distant farmhouse that you can barely see, and out west in places like Utah and Nevada you don't even have those. Or cell service!

This is why we say "dirt doesn't vote" when Republicans show maps with a ton of red to "prove" that the US is actually filled with right-wingers. Those swathes of red across the country have literally no people in them. Wyoming has a lower population than just the metro area I live in, and my city isn't particularly huge.

Hence why the electoral college is a terrible idea these days

# ¿ Dec 1, 2019 20:15

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Phy posted:

In the Aubrey-Maturin series, author Patrick O'Brian crams five or six years worth of sea voyage and character development into six historical months of 1813. For an earlier book, he suggested that its events take place in a notional 1812a and 1812b. What a shame that the Napoleonic Wars did not last another thirty years...

(Also he had no idea when he wrote the first few novels that he'd be writing boat fight adventures right up until he died, and these first ones involved some large time skips that could have been used rather more efficiently, if he'd known)

I've been meaning to read those books, I've heard that they're pretty good

# ¿ Dec 2, 2019 00:05

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Former DILF posted:

have we covered the whole Dispater/Eu Pater/Jupiter & Divvus/Zeus angle yet

Stuff regarding the hypothetical root Indo-European religion can be wild, as well as stuff like the Horned God and the Triple Goddess

# ¿ Dec 3, 2019 01:13

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Donkeys will go through water. They aren't as susceptible as horses to being influenced by pain and tugging to walk through poo poo they don't want to walk through, especially with a lazy ape or a bunch of its bags on their back. But if convinced they are way better at making their way cleanly and carefully through a ford or any other difficult terrain than a big dumb horse.

e: just in general donkeys are the smarter and superior animal to horses in my experience. That's why breeding donkey + even the dumbest horse gives us a smart, cool animal still useful today, that is big enough to carry us and our poo poo around on its back in harsh conditions, while horse + better horse gives us violent shitlords that will run headlong into gunfire and cannot survive if they ever trip.

The donkey fights for its rights and knows its limits. The horse is a trash animal fully dedicated to slavery.

Or to put it another way, a Donkey won't think of ants and die

# ¿ Dec 9, 2019 04:26

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Daikloktos posted:

Sorry to bother you guys; what's the title reference?

It's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reference

# ¿ Feb 13, 2020 12:17

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 09:16

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

WITCHCRAFT posted:

What non-body smells were prevalent in ancient/historical people? Like body odor doesn't smell good but it bothers me way less than people that inexplicably smell like they live in a 5'x5' room filled with:

-cigarette ashes
-spaghettios
-fried food
-chicken noodle soup
-unwiped poop smeared butt

When I worked at a gas station I had a regular customer that smelled like delicious, pungent salami. He didn't work at a deli, he worked in a factory that made doors. Why did he smell like he lived in a room full of cured dangle hams??? This bothers me far more than a person that smells like sour sweat and the cumin twinge of human body microbes.

Anyway, what did say, a leatherworker or a blacksmith smell like, fresh off the job? I guess that a better analogy there might be modern road workers that smell like molten asphalt and diesel exhaust? What did ancient working people smell like.

edit: as a joke haha i would like to smell them

They probably smell like the chemicals and other substances they're exposed to, kinda like when I had a summer job at a pool supply store 2 years ago I'd often end shifts smelling like chlorine

# ¿ Feb 18, 2020 08:56

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