3 ms·

> they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the fanfic of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and over again. You can be certain of exac

> they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the fanfic of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and over again. You can be certain of exactly nothing when it comes to those myths. This is super important to emphasize. In its first hundred years, the printing industry made much (if not most) of its profit off of what were essentially trashy paperbacks, pumped out as fast as they could acquire them because there was no concept of copyright yet. The authors tasked with writing that content took all the old history books - most of dubious historicity to begin with - and wrote wild fantasies based around them. The King Arthur legend is one of the most popular ones, probably as widely read as the flood of translations of the classics. Since this coincided with a large increase in literacy, these fiction books calcified the fiction into legend and pop culture.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
That's a sobering thought right there: that one people's mythos, the foundations of their culture, could trace back to... a bunch of randos in the early printing era, who figured out they can get rich quick by flooding the world with slop.
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  I wouldn’t expect any mythos to be perfect, because they have often been constructed quickly and hastily due to external pressures for national unity. Various countries that saw a surge for independence during the 19th century age of nationalism, often based their mythos on Romantic-era poetry that sometimes has aged well (e.g. the Kalevala), and sometimes has aged quite badly (a few Eastern European countries).
- globalnode 2y ago
  change "printing era" to "ai era" and you might be onto something!
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Not really. "AI era" is adding a flood of new crap to the world already drowned in slop. The last couple decades marked the time where everyone could publish books, videos and music, and a lot of people did, creating more content every day than any human could consume in a lifetime. And that's discounting the orders of magnitude more useless garbage that advertising industry has been mass-producing for like a century now. Adding AI to the mix makes zero actual difference at this point.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

That's a sobering thought right there: that one people's mythos, the foundations of their culture, could trace back to... a bunch of randos in the early printing era, who figured out they can get rich quick by flooding the world with slop.

PrismCrystal 2y ago
I wouldn’t expect any mythos to be perfect, because they have often been constructed quickly and hastily due to external pressures for national unity. Various countries that saw a surge for independence during the 19th century age of nationalism, often based their mythos on Romantic-era poetry that sometimes has aged well (e.g. the Kalevala), and sometimes has aged quite badly (a few Eastern European countries).
globalnode 2y ago
change "printing era" to "ai era" and you might be onto something!
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Not really. "AI era" is adding a flood of new crap to the world already drowned in slop. The last couple decades marked the time where everyone could publish books, videos and music, and a lot of people did, creating more content every day than any human could consume in a lifetime. And that's discounting the orders of magnitude more useless garbage that advertising industry has been mass-producing for like a century now. Adding AI to the mix makes zero actual difference at this point.