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Perfectly Ordinary Stones, Carried for 1,300 Years (2014)
- metalliqaz 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210430115236/https://ishimochi.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210430115236/https://ishimochi...
- mavhc 6y agoScroll down for the English translation, rather than read the autotranslated Japanese
- booleandilemma 6y agoI’d hate to be the guy that loses one of these things.
- AppleCandy 6y agoThe author tries to convince that these stones are so ordinary, ostensibly to argue that they will not be stolen. However, watch what happens as these stones start to develop a provenance and get photographed and documented along the way. Reading this I had a flicker of desire to steal "Lily of the valley", and likewise this desire to take hold of such a rare coveted object will grow in the hearts of man over the centuries. What gives something value is not always its intrinsic worth, but also how it takes hold in the public consciousness. Just look at worthless NFTs. And so starts the secret brotherhood of stone-keepers who will fend off the evil advances of those who would break the sacred lineage. Or, liars will introduce new stones to inflate the supply and claim to be sacred stone-keepers. So let's put a blockchain around this thing and be done with it.
- tnzm 6y agoHow would you ensure correspondence between the stone and the NFT though?
- tom_mellior 6y agoHow would you ensure the correspondence between anything and an NFT? You don't. That's why the parent called them worthless.
- smabie 6y agoYou can destroy the original meats pace version
- lapetitejort 6y agoDeconstruct the stone and reform it as a series of gates which can be turned on and off by applying electricity. I will leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
- criddell 6y agoCould you do something similar to how sports memorabilia is marked?
- trhway 6y agoyou can engrave the stone at specific depth inside (i.e. not on the surface) by using proton accelerator.
- pierrebai 6y agoMultiple secret societies, some protecting an obscure (but in reality, quite harmless and worthless) item, some protecting the first, some trying to infiltrate, some completely made up? Umberto Eco and Pynchon would be proud.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI'd guess they are lost already. Or in a drawer. Once the initial excitement is gone, ...
- Anther 6y agoI rather enjoyed the way that website loaded on my iPhone.
- jeffrallen 6y agoThis is an excellent project! I wish it success. I am taking one photo per season of one particular tree in my commune's forest. This woman has been taking self portraits once a year for 17 years, with last year's photo in this year's: https://www.ignant.com/2019/01/21/the-mother-as-creator-a-photographic-project-spanning-17-years/ https://www.ignant.com/2019/01/21/the-mother-as-creator-a-ph... We need more long, slow art projects.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- marmshallow 6y agoSomeone is gonna sell theirs on Ebay (or as it’s known 1000 years from now, Eblork).
- wgjordan 6y agoReminds me of the Stone of Scone, a perfectly ordinary stone carried for over 1,000 years and used in the coronation of English monarchs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_of_Scone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_of_Scone
- metalliqaz 6y agocarried?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- max-ibel 6y agoAnd don't forget the Scone of Stone! https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Scone_of_Stone https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Scone_of_Stone
- blackboxlogic 6y agoWhich will last longer, the stones or the website. Between ssl certs expiring, embedded google map, hosting provider, dns, etc... I'd bet on the stones.
- twic 6y agoThey should try to get the organists at St. Burchardi to look after one of them.
- jacquesm 6y agoPrediction: they'll be lost. Why? Because things that do not have intrinsic value tend to get lost at a very high rate and things that do have intrinsic value tend to get stolen, and then are lost. If it happened to 99.99% of all the works of humanity from 1300 years ago, including some very precious ones it will almost definitely end the same way for these none-precious stones. This is a study in provenance, especially because there isn't anything special about the stones other than being 'the ones', and I like the project as such but the cynic in me can't help but look around and fail to see even a single object from that long ago that didn't have a whole religious order dedicated to keeping it protected through centuries of upheaval and turmoil. That said, I wish the stone keepers the best of luck and I do hope that it will work, but the value for me is in thinking about the project and its consequences, not so much in the execution.
- bmmayer1 6y ago> Among the people there are non-Japanese I find it quaint the idea that where will be a concept of "Japanese" and "non-Japanese" in 1300 years from now. If you assume the rate of progress is fixed (which it isn't, as we know, it accelerates), you can get some sense of how farfetched this idea is. 1300 years ago was the year 721 CE. There was no unified Japan then[1] (nor likely even a concept of "Japanese" identity as most imperial practices were modeled from China), nor was there a "Europe," a "Mexico," or a "South Africa." There certainly wasn't the notion of national identity in the modern sense, as such concepts would have been alien to village-dwellers living under feudal lords. After many cycles of political consolidation and fracturing, it is unlikely in 1300 years there will be a unified Japan; but, more likely, the entire pan-Asian sphere will have been unified (probably under China), if not under the purview of a world government. Sino-Japanese languages will probably mix Australasian language groups, borrowing heavily from English, creating a dialect that would sound as alien to us as Chaucer does now[2]. In 1300 years, global warming will render a good portion of the planet uninhabitable without artificial climate controls, and new parts of the planet never before populated will experience a flourishing of new development. Major cities will develop in hitherto uninhabited land in Siberia, Canada and elsewhere, probably creating new power centers we can't even begin to contemplate. New nations will rise and challenge dominant superpowers for position. There will be at least one more major global war in the next millennium, which could result in a complete shift of power, or nuclear winter or annihilation of a good % of humanity. And they think some stones are going to survive. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nara_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nara_period [2]https://mypoeticside.com/poets/geoffrey-chaucer-poems https://mypoeticside.com/poets/geoffrey-chaucer-poems
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 6y agoOh, the stones will survive. It's just that nobody will care about those particular stones. And your observation about the long term effects of our actions (which themselves are accelerating in frequency and impact) on climate, the world in general and human structures and concepts is spot on, it is a special kind of delusional that declaring a couple of stones special will have a long term effect on those particular stones. At the same time, it did lead to some interesting insights so in a way the value has already been delivered, even if the stones are lost tomorrow.
- EGreg 6y agoLMAO! Anyone can claim to be carrying these ordinary stones, just like they can claim to be Anonymous, or that Bill Murray said no one will ever believe you. Also if someone loses the stones they can just pick up some new ones later...
- mitchdoogle 6y agoTheir names are listed on the website. It'd be hard to convince someone you've got the stone if your name isn't listed there
- EGreg 6y agoMaybe they can do like NFT stones. Or a merkle tree of stones. Maybe each person has to bring 3 new people into the stones society haha
- glxxyz 6y agoI like that they put all the table rows in for the next 1300 years. Reminds me of someone numbering a music collection and starting optimistically with 0000001 (they usually gave up at about 000005).
- irrational 6y agoLooks like the Mayor and the Buddhist Monk are already messing things up, judging by the chart at the bottom.
- vivekv 6y agoHave they started selling NFT on those stones yet?
- LasangaCode 6y agoThe mayor and the monk didn't pass the stone on after 5 years :/