JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Honestly, if my grandma was ever put in charge of something as inherently useful as a machine gun she'd just hang onto it. We'd find it carefully broken down and oiled and stored in a dozen Royal Dansk tins in the sewing room.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited November 2021
You see some ancient statue or coin or bust or whatever and someone is rocking a crazy -do. How did they do that?
Janet Stephens: professional hairdresser by day, history nerd by night. Archaeologists (rarely hairdressers) thought lots of women were wearing wigs. Stephens however, knew hair, and was able to figure out how a lot of these styles were likely created, which sometimes included hair being sewn with a needle and thread (as in the previous video). Ridiculous and elaborate? Sure, but these were the richest of the rich and most powerful of the powerful we're talking about here; the ostentatious decadent elaborateness was the point.
Just another element of life in history you may not have thought of before.
Mayabird on
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BlackDragon480Bluster KerfuffleMaster of Windy ImportRegistered Userregular
Originally posted these in the Job thread, whilst we were on a tangent focused on medical history (note: this be long):
Being a wannabe historian with a focus on Tudor/Stuart Britain, let's have fun with pre-modern, Galenic/humour based medical science by looking at the final few days of Chuck II of England.
On Feb 2. 1685 the Merry Monarch awoke after a restless night, caused by pain from an ulcer/open sore on his leg (he was known to have gout, cause the man drank like a fish and loved fatty foods, though he wasn't near Henry VIII huge. He also had more than 10 mistresses simultaneously, how he found the time, stamina, and staved off whiskey dick is anyone's guess) and prepared to have his morning shave. During his shave he screamed loudly and then experienced an apoplectic/convulsive fit, his complexion became sallow, and he lost the ability to speak. Whether it was a stroke or uremia from the gout is again unknown, but within 2 hours of symptom onset he had his entire Cadre of doctors and natural philosopers from the Royal Academy making a house call to the royal bedchamber.
He was being shaved a little after 7am and by the time noon rolled around the following had all been administered to him:
- was bled for nearly a pint from the right wrist
- cupped him (a process where heated glass cups/wine goblets were applied to exposed skin while they were heated, to try and draw bad humours out through the pores)
--given several different emetics/purgatives to the point he probably vomited up his toenails
- not to ignore the opposite end, he was given at least one enema
- had multiple mustard and caustic plasters applied to various areas of skin
- bled off another half pint or so
- given a compound of bitter powder and various herbs with anti histamine and anti inflammatory properties. A liquid 17th century aspirin and ibuprofen cocktail, basically
- after all that they finally let him just rest the remainder of the day
Day 2, Tuesday February 3, 1685
-soon after waking he had another seizure, so he was prescribed and given no less than 4 separate herbal tonics to be administered every 6 hours, some with actual medical value, most without
- about noon they drained another 10-12 oz of blood and more skin blistering plasters. After said plasters it was just two more doses of all 4 tonics the rest of the day.
Day 3, Wednesday February 4th, 1685
- he got a slight reprieve from his doctors and had a fairly pleasant day till late in the afternoon when it was another horseshit herb cocktail and even though he didn't have any convulsions that day they gave him a solution made from pulverized human skull dust, which was thought to help eplilepsy/seizures.
Day 4, Thursday February 5th 1685
-news reachd Whitehall that a fever of indeterminate origin had broken out in London and Westminster, so the crackpots went into full prevention mode and doused him with enough willow/Peruvian bark to make a year's supply of low dose aspirin and some more tonics, and even higher doses of skull powder tea, that Charles could barely keep down.
Day 5, Friday February 6th 1685
-this thankfully wound up being his final day on this earth. After the week from hell, he knew his body was simply and utterly fucked. But he always had a sense of humor and he apologized to his doctors for taking such a long time to die and politely asked his brother James (soon to be James II of England by the end of the day) to make sure that his favorite mistress (stage actress Nell Gwen) would have a pension and not starve since she wasn't high born and then he asked to be moved closer to the window to see/feel the sunrise one last time.
It was determined that what passed for science then did more to kill him than any infection or disease affecting him and if not for his doctors he had a strong enough constitution to probably not succumb to his final illness.
Fun little extra credit piece for the class. While all British monarchs after Henry VIII (even Liz II right now) have been the Supreme Governor/Head of the Anglican branch of Protestantism, Chuck II surprised his entire court the morning he died. While fleeing Scotland after his father Charles I was executed by Cromwell and the rump parliament in 1649 Charles II hid in the top of an oak tree for over a day and was found and smuggled to the coast by a Catholic priest. His brother James (soon to be James II) was a hard-core Catholic (primary reason he was ousted by the Glorious Revolution of 1688) and snuck the same priest, one John Huddleston, up a back stairway to the king's chamber at Whitehall and before losing consciousness the last time, Chuck confessed, was annointed with oil, and took a final communion in the Roman Catholic faith (he'd denied multiple attempts by an Anglican bishop to make him confess and take the eucharist before he died).
And a little taste of what Charles' ladies were like, specifically Nell Gwen:
There are a plethora of anecdotes about Nelly, some with contemporary corroboration, many without.
One of the verified ones was a time she was traveling through Oxford in a private carriage, when an impromptu mob began to surround the coach and her small escort. The mob was of an anti-Catholic mind and they had been told that the carriage was transporting the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles' Catholic mistresses.
Thinking fast on her feet, Nell decided to press her luck and stuck her head out the window (being a stage actress (one of England's first major female stars, as women on stage were only first allowed under James I in the 1610's) for years to this point, her face was known having been featured on many a flier for theaters in London) and declared to the couple dozen people baying for blood: "Good people, you are mistaken! I am a protestant whore!"
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Honestly, if my grandma was ever put in charge of something as inherently useful as a machine gun she'd just hang onto it. We'd find it carefully broken down and oiled and stored in a dozen Royal Dansk tins in the sewing room.
Did we have the same granny?
There was enough thread and fabric swatches stored in butter cookie tins to make about a half dozen quilts in my grandma's little work room. Can certainly understand the appeal though, those things were built like tiny Danish tanks.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Honestly the idea of walking through a dense forest and suddenly feeling a vibration in your stomach and then hearing a deep bass rumble through the trees from every direction at once is somehow more terrifying than the iconic Jurassic Park T-Rex roar.
Recreating Dino sounds with science will always been fascinating to me. We can see the bones and 3d model what we think they looked like but getting close to recreating what they sounded like somehow makes them so much more real.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited December 2021
IN the crypto thread, I talked about the Albanian civil war. If you don't follow the insanity that is crypto and don't want to get involved, that's good, because here's a podcast episode that details what happened when a set of pyramid schemes took over a country. If you don't have an hour and a half to listen, here's a short version:
Albania had just a few years ago been shocked into a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and specifically Hoxhaism, it's own very special hyper-isolationist system. The population was very naive about such things as "banks" and "investments" as they had spent much of their time previously building 170,000+ concrete bunkers.
These things are all over the place, because there are over 170,000 in a very small country.
At any rate, these people who don't know any better are suddenly sold this bill of goods that a market economy will make them as prosperous as Americans, even as all their factories shut down because they couldn't compete with outside goods. Enter: a whole bunch of scumbags, many of whom were literally the Mafia. They set up obvious pyramid schemes, promising increasingly grandiose guaranteed rates of return on people's "investments." 10%, 50%, 100%, 800%, sky was the limit. People put their money in, and then the numbers just kept getting bigger, so they'd talk everybody else into doing this. After all, this was perfectly legal, since the political system had never dealt with any of it. It's not illegal and it seems to work, so that must mean it's fine, right? Number printer apparently went brrr, and it went on for years, so even early skeptics got suckered in too.
The schemes went on for seven years, and eventually two thirds of the entire national population were "invested" in these pyramid schemes, and half the nominal GDP was locked up in them. At this point, having run out of suckers (the way all pyramid/Ponzi/etc schemes end), the whole thing was starting to come apart, so the mobsters etc. in charge cut and ran with all the money. All the half the GDP of the country. The entire nation of Albania was instantly made destitute. The government essentially collapsed, and though what occurred next is called a civil war, it's more like total lawlessness. Thousands dead, a refugee crisis, and the effects of the Albanian civil war ended up help set off the even worse conflict in Kosovo a year later.
I wrote about it in the cryptocurrency thread originally since it's there's a frightening analogy to what's happening now. No value is being created. Numbers are apparently going up, so more and more people are getting sucked in, including the country of El Salvador. It will eventually, though it might take years, come down. The longer it takes, and the more people that get drawn in, the worse it will be.
Remember, with a little luck you, too, can go down in history as some kind of legendary scholar through the simple means of destroying the very thing you're claiming to have discovered!
The Lycurgus Cup is a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front. It is the only complete Roman glass object made from this type of glass, and the one exhibiting the most impressive change in colour; it has been described as "the most spectacular glass of the period, fittingly decorated, which we know to have existed".
The cup is also a very rare example of a complete Roman cage-cup, or diatretum, where the glass has been painstakingly cut and ground back to leave only a decorative "cage" at the original surface-level. Many parts of the cage have been completely undercut. Most cage-cups have a cage with a geometric abstract design, but here there is a composition with figures, showing the mythical King Lycurgus, who (depending on the version) tried to kill Ambrosia, a follower of the god Dionysus. She was transformed into a vine that twined around the enraged king and restrained him, eventually killing him. Dionysus and two followers are shown taunting the king. The cup is the "only well-preserved figural example" of a cage cup.
The dichroic effect is achieved by making the glass with tiny proportions of nanoparticles of gold and silver dispersed in colloidal form throughout the glass material. The process used remains unclear, and it is likely that it was not well understood or controlled by the makers, and was probably discovered by accidental "contamination" with minutely ground gold and silver dust. The glass-makers may not even have known that gold was involved, as the quantities involved are so tiny; they may have come from a small proportion of gold in any silver added (most Roman silver contains small proportions of gold), or from traces of gold or gold leaf left by accident in the workshop, as residue on tools, or from other work.
Nice cup
Broke as fuck in the style of the times. Gratitude is all that can return on your generosity.
The Visby lenses are a collection of lens-shaped manufactured objects made of rock crystal (quartz) found in several Viking graves on the island of Gotland, Sweden, and dating from the 11th or 12th century. Some were in silver mounts with filigree, the mounting covering the back of the lens, and were probably used as jewellery; it has been suggested that the lenses themselves are much older than their mounts.
It was reported by Otto Ahlström in 1950 that most have aspheric surfaces. The best of the lenses have low spherical aberration, indicating that their surface profile was optimized to improve image quality.
Nice orb
Broke as fuck in the style of the times. Gratitude is all that can return on your generosity.
I wouldn't recommend it as your first deep dive into the origins of civilization, as it's very much a response to mainstream academic history and assumes that you're already familiar with the ideas it's reacting against. As a result, it understandably glosses over some very important events and ideas that are well-covered elsewhere in favor of presenting counterexamples. And it's strongly arguing for anarchist political theories in a way that often seems to assume that it's already preaching to the choir.
With those minor caveats in mind, the book presents the development of various political and economic systems from a strongly indigenous and feminist perspective and spends a lot of time shitting on Jared Diamond, which is always welcome. Plus the narrator of the audiobook sounds a lot like the Kurzgesagt guy, so it all goes down real smooth.
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I'm currently reading a book on the history of Roman religion. It's rather dense and academic and not something I'd generally recommend unless you're really interested in the subject and have a fair amount of background in Roman history to begin with.
That said, there was a passage that completely caught me off guard with how surprising and different it was from my conception:
Roman temples were not independent centres of power, influence or riches in the republican period; they did not, with rare exceptions, have priestly personnel attached to them and they did not therefore provide a power base for the priests as opposed to other groups of society. Priests and priestesses operated independently from particular temples and the temples did not represent a concentration of economic power; we do not know exactly how temples were funded, but there is no sign they were regularly thought of as major landowners. They were essentially houses for the cult-statues of the deities and the altars in front of them provided the location where victims were offered.
I've just always thought of ancient temples as... not too far off from modern churches (and I think this is a pattern I've frequently seen repeated in fiction). Which is something that I consciously recognized as wrong, but I don't think I'd fully conceptualized how wrong it was.
What's the name of the book because that's pretty succinct
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Religions of Rome Volume I: A History by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price
It's quite good, just dense (especially, I think, in some of its recounting of the earlier periods where there's slim evidence and a lot of conjecture)
Volume 2 is a primary source reference, for the record - there are a bunch of footnotes directing you over that way for further detail but I don't think it's strictly necessary (I've not been reading it, personally)
Mary Beard is a very good author when it comes to Rome. I've read her SPQR book and seen her on several different history shows at times. It's pretty impressive she finds time to work when I think she spends most of her time arguing with dusty ass old misogynist professors who get their tweed in a twist whenever she says something while also being female.
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Mary Beard came out with a great single-volume overview of Roman history a few years back. It's probably easier to track down than her older and more specialized books if you're looking for an entry point.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Yeah, SPQR is definitely a better entry point and more suited to the casual reader - I'd wholeheartedly recommend that one (although I disagree with her on the 212 thing but that's fine)
It wasn't a civilization suffering gradual decline due to general misgovernence or climate shifts, and it wasn't torn apart by internal strife or colonists knocking on the door. They just pissed off everyone on their doorstep, had a big battle and basically imploded overnight.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Yeah, SPQR is definitely a better entry point and more suited to the casual reader - I'd wholeheartedly recommend that one (although I disagree with her on the 212 thing but that's fine)
I was listening to a course on ancient religions a while back and there were some interesting bits on Greek religion.
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Each house had, in fact, at least two Zeuses: a Zeus Ktesios (“Zeus the Acquisitive” or “Zeus the Property Owner”), who protected the household’s property, stores, and treasure; and a Zeus Herkeios (“Zeus of the Fenced-In Area”), who was the Zeus of the entire area occupied by the house.
Were these petty Zeuses the same Zeus described by Homer or Hesiod? Would the Zeus of the Iliad—the mighty tyrant of Olympus—have cared about some petty family’s yard? Some scholars argue that these Zeuses should not be conflated with Olympian Zeus. They argue that some petty household god has usurped the Olympian’s name.
In ancient Greek religion, one turned to different and specific deities for varying purposes. Epithets served to distinguish one Zeus from another. Olympian Zeus would not be confused with Zeus Ktesios. And one individual’s Zeus Ktesios was not the same Zeus Ktesios that looked over the neighbor’s treasure. They dwelled in different houses. Yet they were both Zeus Ktesios.
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
You have to break out the christian monotheistic mindset to even come close to grasping it, I think
christian theology prior to the ecumenical councils (particularly the first council of nicea), and then after thomas aquinas were WILDLY different that what it is now
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I was listening to a course on ancient religions a while back and there were some interesting bits on Greek religion.
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Each house had, in fact, at least two Zeuses: a Zeus Ktesios (“Zeus the Acquisitive” or “Zeus the Property Owner”), who protected the household’s property, stores, and treasure; and a Zeus Herkeios (“Zeus of the Fenced-In Area”), who was the Zeus of the entire area occupied by the house.
Were these petty Zeuses the same Zeus described by Homer or Hesiod? Would the Zeus of the Iliad—the mighty tyrant of Olympus—have cared about some petty family’s yard? Some scholars argue that these Zeuses should not be conflated with Olympian Zeus. They argue that some petty household god has usurped the Olympian’s name.
In ancient Greek religion, one turned to different and specific deities for varying purposes. Epithets served to distinguish one Zeus from another. Olympian Zeus would not be confused with Zeus Ktesios. And one individual’s Zeus Ktesios was not the same Zeus Ktesios that looked over the neighbor’s treasure. They dwelled in different houses. Yet they were both Zeus Ktesios.
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
That just makes me think of little cat-sized Zeuses prowling around the house and throwing little thunderbolts at the shins of intruders and getting into fights with the neighbor's Zeus in the middle of the night.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Yeah, SPQR is definitely a better entry point and more suited to the casual reader - I'd wholeheartedly recommend that one (although I disagree with her on the 212 thing but that's fine)
the 212 thing?
That's the year she ends it in, as the "end of the Empire," as it was the year that Caracalla made all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire officially Roman citizens
She acknowledges that it's an incredibly arbitrary date, for the record, and I do think it's an interesting and significant one, but it's an abrupt feeling ending
You have to break out the christian monotheistic mindset to even come close to grasping it, I think
christian theology prior to the ecumenical councils (particularly the first council of nicea), and then after thomas aquinas were WILDLY different that what it is now
I was listening to a course on ancient religions a while back and there were some interesting bits on Greek religion.
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Each house had, in fact, at least two Zeuses: a Zeus Ktesios (“Zeus the Acquisitive” or “Zeus the Property Owner”), who protected the household’s property, stores, and treasure; and a Zeus Herkeios (“Zeus of the Fenced-In Area”), who was the Zeus of the entire area occupied by the house.
Were these petty Zeuses the same Zeus described by Homer or Hesiod? Would the Zeus of the Iliad—the mighty tyrant of Olympus—have cared about some petty family’s yard? Some scholars argue that these Zeuses should not be conflated with Olympian Zeus. They argue that some petty household god has usurped the Olympian’s name.
In ancient Greek religion, one turned to different and specific deities for varying purposes. Epithets served to distinguish one Zeus from another. Olympian Zeus would not be confused with Zeus Ktesios. And one individual’s Zeus Ktesios was not the same Zeus Ktesios that looked over the neighbor’s treasure. They dwelled in different houses. Yet they were both Zeus Ktesios.
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
That just makes me think of little cat-sized Zeuses prowling around the house and throwing little thunderbolts at the shins of intruders and getting into fights with the neighbor's Zeus in the middle of the night.
Caracalla's Decree can indeed be considered a contributing factor to the empire's decline. Citizenship for service was a popular way to encourage joining the legions, which is now gone and encouraging folks to have serve for 20 years got a lot harder, and more expensive.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Yeah, SPQR is definitely a better entry point and more suited to the casual reader - I'd wholeheartedly recommend that one (although I disagree with her on the 212 thing but that's fine)
the 212 thing?
That's the year she ends it in, as the "end of the Empire," as it was the year that Caracalla made all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire officially Roman citizens
She acknowledges that it's an incredibly arbitrary date, for the record, and I do think it's an interesting and significant one, but it's an abrupt feeling ending
You have to break out the christian monotheistic mindset to even come close to grasping it, I think
christian theology prior to the ecumenical councils (particularly the first council of nicea), and then after thomas aquinas were WILDLY different that what it is now
Well don't stop
it was so massively varied it's not really possible to quantify in a single post, especially by me an idiot
I was listening to a course on ancient religions a while back and there were some interesting bits on Greek religion.
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Each house had, in fact, at least two Zeuses: a Zeus Ktesios (“Zeus the Acquisitive” or “Zeus the Property Owner”), who protected the household’s property, stores, and treasure; and a Zeus Herkeios (“Zeus of the Fenced-In Area”), who was the Zeus of the entire area occupied by the house.
Were these petty Zeuses the same Zeus described by Homer or Hesiod? Would the Zeus of the Iliad—the mighty tyrant of Olympus—have cared about some petty family’s yard? Some scholars argue that these Zeuses should not be conflated with Olympian Zeus. They argue that some petty household god has usurped the Olympian’s name.
In ancient Greek religion, one turned to different and specific deities for varying purposes. Epithets served to distinguish one Zeus from another. Olympian Zeus would not be confused with Zeus Ktesios. And one individual’s Zeus Ktesios was not the same Zeus Ktesios that looked over the neighbor’s treasure. They dwelled in different houses. Yet they were both Zeus Ktesios.
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
That just makes me think of little cat-sized Zeuses prowling around the house and throwing little thunderbolts at the shins of intruders and getting into fights with the neighbor's Zeus in the middle of the night.
Then one day you find out your stone garden gnome is pregnant.
I was listening to a course on ancient religions a while back and there were some interesting bits on Greek religion.
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Each house had, in fact, at least two Zeuses: a Zeus Ktesios (“Zeus the Acquisitive” or “Zeus the Property Owner”), who protected the household’s property, stores, and treasure; and a Zeus Herkeios (“Zeus of the Fenced-In Area”), who was the Zeus of the entire area occupied by the house.
Were these petty Zeuses the same Zeus described by Homer or Hesiod? Would the Zeus of the Iliad—the mighty tyrant of Olympus—have cared about some petty family’s yard? Some scholars argue that these Zeuses should not be conflated with Olympian Zeus. They argue that some petty household god has usurped the Olympian’s name.
In ancient Greek religion, one turned to different and specific deities for varying purposes. Epithets served to distinguish one Zeus from another. Olympian Zeus would not be confused with Zeus Ktesios. And one individual’s Zeus Ktesios was not the same Zeus Ktesios that looked over the neighbor’s treasure. They dwelled in different houses. Yet they were both Zeus Ktesios.
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
That just makes me think of little cat-sized Zeuses prowling around the house and throwing little thunderbolts at the shins of intruders and getting into fights with the neighbor's Zeus in the middle of the night.
Then one day you find out your stone garden gnome is pregnant.
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Enter the hair-style archeologist.
Janet Stephens: professional hairdresser by day, history nerd by night. Archaeologists (rarely hairdressers) thought lots of women were wearing wigs. Stephens however, knew hair, and was able to figure out how a lot of these styles were likely created, which sometimes included hair being sewn with a needle and thread (as in the previous video). Ridiculous and elaborate? Sure, but these were the richest of the rich and most powerful of the powerful we're talking about here; the ostentatious decadent elaborateness was the point.
Just another element of life in history you may not have thought of before.
Being a wannabe historian with a focus on Tudor/Stuart Britain, let's have fun with pre-modern, Galenic/humour based medical science by looking at the final few days of Chuck II of England.
On Feb 2. 1685 the Merry Monarch awoke after a restless night, caused by pain from an ulcer/open sore on his leg (he was known to have gout, cause the man drank like a fish and loved fatty foods, though he wasn't near Henry VIII huge. He also had more than 10 mistresses simultaneously, how he found the time, stamina, and staved off whiskey dick is anyone's guess) and prepared to have his morning shave. During his shave he screamed loudly and then experienced an apoplectic/convulsive fit, his complexion became sallow, and he lost the ability to speak. Whether it was a stroke or uremia from the gout is again unknown, but within 2 hours of symptom onset he had his entire Cadre of doctors and natural philosopers from the Royal Academy making a house call to the royal bedchamber.
He was being shaved a little after 7am and by the time noon rolled around the following had all been administered to him:
- was bled for nearly a pint from the right wrist
- cupped him (a process where heated glass cups/wine goblets were applied to exposed skin while they were heated, to try and draw bad humours out through the pores)
--given several different emetics/purgatives to the point he probably vomited up his toenails
- not to ignore the opposite end, he was given at least one enema
- had multiple mustard and caustic plasters applied to various areas of skin
- bled off another half pint or so
- given a compound of bitter powder and various herbs with anti histamine and anti inflammatory properties. A liquid 17th century aspirin and ibuprofen cocktail, basically
- after all that they finally let him just rest the remainder of the day
Day 2, Tuesday February 3, 1685
-soon after waking he had another seizure, so he was prescribed and given no less than 4 separate herbal tonics to be administered every 6 hours, some with actual medical value, most without
- about noon they drained another 10-12 oz of blood and more skin blistering plasters. After said plasters it was just two more doses of all 4 tonics the rest of the day.
Day 3, Wednesday February 4th, 1685
- he got a slight reprieve from his doctors and had a fairly pleasant day till late in the afternoon when it was another horseshit herb cocktail and even though he didn't have any convulsions that day they gave him a solution made from pulverized human skull dust, which was thought to help eplilepsy/seizures.
Day 4, Thursday February 5th 1685
-news reachd Whitehall that a fever of indeterminate origin had broken out in London and Westminster, so the crackpots went into full prevention mode and doused him with enough willow/Peruvian bark to make a year's supply of low dose aspirin and some more tonics, and even higher doses of skull powder tea, that Charles could barely keep down.
Day 5, Friday February 6th 1685
-this thankfully wound up being his final day on this earth. After the week from hell, he knew his body was simply and utterly fucked. But he always had a sense of humor and he apologized to his doctors for taking such a long time to die and politely asked his brother James (soon to be James II of England by the end of the day) to make sure that his favorite mistress (stage actress Nell Gwen) would have a pension and not starve since she wasn't high born and then he asked to be moved closer to the window to see/feel the sunrise one last time.
It was determined that what passed for science then did more to kill him than any infection or disease affecting him and if not for his doctors he had a strong enough constitution to probably not succumb to his final illness.
Fun little extra credit piece for the class. While all British monarchs after Henry VIII (even Liz II right now) have been the Supreme Governor/Head of the Anglican branch of Protestantism, Chuck II surprised his entire court the morning he died. While fleeing Scotland after his father Charles I was executed by Cromwell and the rump parliament in 1649 Charles II hid in the top of an oak tree for over a day and was found and smuggled to the coast by a Catholic priest. His brother James (soon to be James II) was a hard-core Catholic (primary reason he was ousted by the Glorious Revolution of 1688) and snuck the same priest, one John Huddleston, up a back stairway to the king's chamber at Whitehall and before losing consciousness the last time, Chuck confessed, was annointed with oil, and took a final communion in the Roman Catholic faith (he'd denied multiple attempts by an Anglican bishop to make him confess and take the eucharist before he died).
And a little taste of what Charles' ladies were like, specifically Nell Gwen:
There are a plethora of anecdotes about Nelly, some with contemporary corroboration, many without.
One of the verified ones was a time she was traveling through Oxford in a private carriage, when an impromptu mob began to surround the coach and her small escort. The mob was of an anti-Catholic mind and they had been told that the carriage was transporting the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles' Catholic mistresses.
Thinking fast on her feet, Nell decided to press her luck and stuck her head out the window (being a stage actress (one of England's first major female stars, as women on stage were only first allowed under James I in the 1610's) for years to this point, her face was known having been featured on many a flier for theaters in London) and declared to the couple dozen people baying for blood: "Good people, you are mistaken! I am a protestant whore!"
~ Buckaroo Banzai
E: Okay yeah on viewing it on desktop definitely, and vaguely remember her mentioning it. Will definitely have to ask about that next time I see her
Did we have the same granny?
There was enough thread and fabric swatches stored in butter cookie tins to make about a half dozen quilts in my grandma's little work room. Can certainly understand the appeal though, those things were built like tiny Danish tanks.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Recreating Dino sounds with science will always been fascinating to me. We can see the bones and 3d model what we think they looked like but getting close to recreating what they sounded like somehow makes them so much more real.
Lookin torn dude
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Albania had just a few years ago been shocked into a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and specifically Hoxhaism, it's own very special hyper-isolationist system. The population was very naive about such things as "banks" and "investments" as they had spent much of their time previously building 170,000+ concrete bunkers.
These things are all over the place, because there are over 170,000 in a very small country.
At any rate, these people who don't know any better are suddenly sold this bill of goods that a market economy will make them as prosperous as Americans, even as all their factories shut down because they couldn't compete with outside goods. Enter: a whole bunch of scumbags, many of whom were literally the Mafia. They set up obvious pyramid schemes, promising increasingly grandiose guaranteed rates of return on people's "investments." 10%, 50%, 100%, 800%, sky was the limit. People put their money in, and then the numbers just kept getting bigger, so they'd talk everybody else into doing this. After all, this was perfectly legal, since the political system had never dealt with any of it. It's not illegal and it seems to work, so that must mean it's fine, right? Number printer apparently went brrr, and it went on for years, so even early skeptics got suckered in too.
The schemes went on for seven years, and eventually two thirds of the entire national population were "invested" in these pyramid schemes, and half the nominal GDP was locked up in them. At this point, having run out of suckers (the way all pyramid/Ponzi/etc schemes end), the whole thing was starting to come apart, so the mobsters etc. in charge cut and ran with all the money. All the half the GDP of the country. The entire nation of Albania was instantly made destitute. The government essentially collapsed, and though what occurred next is called a civil war, it's more like total lawlessness. Thousands dead, a refugee crisis, and the effects of the Albanian civil war ended up help set off the even worse conflict in Kosovo a year later.
I wrote about it in the cryptocurrency thread originally since it's there's a frightening analogy to what's happening now. No value is being created. Numbers are apparently going up, so more and more people are getting sucked in, including the country of El Salvador. It will eventually, though it might take years, come down. The longer it takes, and the more people that get drawn in, the worse it will be.
Remember, with a little luck you, too, can go down in history as some kind of legendary scholar through the simple means of destroying the very thing you're claiming to have discovered!
Nice cup
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Nice orb
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I wouldn't recommend it as your first deep dive into the origins of civilization, as it's very much a response to mainstream academic history and assumes that you're already familiar with the ideas it's reacting against. As a result, it understandably glosses over some very important events and ideas that are well-covered elsewhere in favor of presenting counterexamples. And it's strongly arguing for anarchist political theories in a way that often seems to assume that it's already preaching to the choir.
With those minor caveats in mind, the book presents the development of various political and economic systems from a strongly indigenous and feminist perspective and spends a lot of time shitting on Jared Diamond, which is always welcome. Plus the narrator of the audiobook sounds a lot like the Kurzgesagt guy, so it all goes down real smooth.
Oh wow, that guy looks like Ephemeral Rift. I was surprised he took up History.
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That said, there was a passage that completely caught me off guard with how surprising and different it was from my conception:
I've just always thought of ancient temples as... not too far off from modern churches (and I think this is a pattern I've frequently seen repeated in fiction). Which is something that I consciously recognized as wrong, but I don't think I'd fully conceptualized how wrong it was.
It's quite good, just dense (especially, I think, in some of its recounting of the earlier periods where there's slim evidence and a lot of conjecture)
Volume 2 is a primary source reference, for the record - there are a bunch of footnotes directing you over that way for further detail but I don't think it's strictly necessary (I've not been reading it, personally)
Oh, man - I had to read some of Beard's stuff back in college, and definitely kept the books. She's a great author.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
This one was interesting because
the 212 thing?
What with population centers being more distinct and separated, it makes sense that there would be distinct thinking and traditions associated with the worship of the gods for different localities. But what if thinking was even MORE local? Like, for each house? What if each house had its own Zeus? What if it was even MORE local and each house had a couple of Zeuses?
Where these regarded as many different facets of the same Zeus? Maybe.
Also, there were family specific gods with family specific traditions and worship passed down paternally. A lot of gods hanging around.
You have to break out the christian monotheistic mindset to even come close to grasping it, I think
christian theology prior to the ecumenical councils (particularly the first council of nicea), and then after thomas aquinas were WILDLY different that what it is now
That just makes me think of little cat-sized Zeuses prowling around the house and throwing little thunderbolts at the shins of intruders and getting into fights with the neighbor's Zeus in the middle of the night.
That's the year she ends it in, as the "end of the Empire," as it was the year that Caracalla made all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire officially Roman citizens
She acknowledges that it's an incredibly arbitrary date, for the record, and I do think it's an interesting and significant one, but it's an abrupt feeling ending
Well don't stop
To the Pixarmobile!
that's an... interesting choice for an endpoint
it was so massively varied it's not really possible to quantify in a single post, especially by me an idiot
Then one day you find out your stone garden gnome is pregnant.
And a swan.