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Lady Gaga's performance of "Paparazzi" at the 2009 VMA awards for me. But also the Roman empire. I just finished making a table. Whole time I was wondering how

by 1-more 3y ago

Lady Gaga's performance of "Paparazzi" at the 2009 VMA awards for me. But also the Roman empire. I just finished making a table. Whole time I was wondering how the hell anyone without cast iron base plates on their power tools could ever make such a thing, and that for sure included the Roman empire. What was life like for a regular guy back then who wanted a table? Crazy. Once you throw in all the things before (Roman kingdom, Roman republic, who the heck were the Etruscans anyways, things of that nature) and after (who was the last person in what's now Spain to think of themselves as a Roman subject? Holy Roman empire: pretty wild huh; is there a through-line of kin based organized crime to the classical era?) you've basically got the last 2000+ years of history. So it's easy to count just about everything as "the Roman empire" with the level of handwaving I'm comfortable doing. This isn't to say I'm stuck there. Pre Indo-european Europe is wild. The Tang Dynasty is wild. People settling high up in the Andes or Rockies or Himalayas is insane to me. So there's a lot to think about!

flkiwi 3y ago
What I love deeply about this reply, is that the "you think about the Roman Empire?" people would absolutely gesticulate wildly, then point, and breathlessly exclaim "SEE? I DO NOT DO THIS!" I mean, I get you. I just watched a youtube video about the first normal person in history whose name we know unambiguously, and it was this delightful dive into the fact that people just like us were keeping track of beer a few thousand years ago and that stuff just makes me fizz. I love it. I want my life to be long and free enough for me to learn at least a little bit about the pre-Indus Valley culture that brought some absolutely unique cultural features to the culture of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan that cannot be traced to anywhere but that one geographic location. Or Basque language -- why did it, and no other, pre-Indo European language survive? My brain is consumed by this, and so it is statistically likely that I'm going to stumble into the Romans here and there. This is fundamentally different than some of my acquaintances who think about Rome disturbingly often because, I think, they believe they could be emperor someday and would do a better job of it than this democracy nonsense.

by 1-more 3y ago

flkiwi 3y ago

What I love deeply about this reply, is that the "you think about the Roman Empire?" people would absolutely gesticulate wildly, then point, and breathlessly exclaim "SEE? I DO NOT DO THIS!" I mean, I get you. I just watched a youtube video about the first normal person in history whose name we know unambiguously, and it was this delightful dive into the fact that people just like us were keeping track of beer a few thousand years ago and that stuff just makes me fizz. I love it. I want my life to be long and free enough for me to learn at least a little bit about the pre-Indus Valley culture that brought some absolutely unique cultural features to the culture of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan that cannot be traced to anywhere but that one geographic location. Or Basque language -- why did it, and no other, pre-Indo European language survive? My brain is consumed by this, and so it is statistically likely that I'm going to stumble into the Romans here and there. This is fundamentally different than some of my acquaintances who think about Rome disturbingly often because, I think, they believe they could be emperor someday and would do a better job of it than this democracy nonsense.