I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
A lot of people dislike The Fellowship of the Ring because it spends so much time faffing around in the Shire, but that’s precisely why it’s my favorite. The whole series is a lot more enjoyable when you remember that Frodo spent years sighing melodramatically and thinking he was some poor tortured soul who must leave home in secrecy and solitude for a mysterious fate…. but literally all of his friends knew he had a secret evil ring and made all his travel plans for him behind his back.
Like. He paced around going “woe is me! such a burden I must carry!” so obviously that his whole squad accepted the fact that they’d all go on a dangerous international adventure with him because Frodo the Drama Queen could not be expected to take care of himself.
I love Hobbits.
Also they accomplished it via the Power of Gossip and the only reason Frodo himself didn’t pick up on it is because he vastly underestimates the intelligence of every single other hobbit he knows bc he thinks he is Special he’s such a condescending ass and I Love him
Frodo: “I must confess… I have some bad news for you. I have not been totally honest. I can’t tell you everything, but–”
His entire social group: “Is this about how you’re the new bearer of the One Ring and need to take it out of the Shire to be destroyed? Yeah, dude, we know. We’re all packed and ready to go whenever.”
Frodo: “But but but but but! How did you know? How could you EVER figure out my SECRETS?!”
His entire social group: “Gee, Frodo, I don’t know… maybe you’re a pretentious dumbass and we aren’t the bumbling fools you think we are?”
And the best part about this technology is that it’s open source, meaning you can build one yourself from the blueprints that are available for anyone to download.
There’s a kind of beauty in tacky lesbian fashion because yeah some of it may be ugly but? The confidence behind it. Infuriates straight men. Like you’re not sexually available to me AND you look weird in an off-putting way that doesn’t appeal to me? They can’t stand it and I find that hilarious and support my tacky lesbians
Wait this is meant to be unattractive? Straight men think this is unattractive? Did I miss something or is this look actually v. hot. Is it only hot to wlw?
wayne enterprises almost certainly has clothing as one of their retail subsidiaries and i like to imagine it getting really profitable just because bruce spends so much time listening to models bitch at parties. all of their product lines have names like “It Has Real Pockets” and “Not See-Through” and “Full-Length Sleeves” and “Secret Elastic Waist”. the marketing department is like “okay obviously these are all working titles” and bruce is like “no. leave it. that is what it’s called.” and they try to talk him out of it but he owns a helicopter and you can’t argue with a man who owns a helicopter. they sell so fast. the women of gotham are well-dressed and comfortable and always have somewhere to keep their phones.
The amazing thing about this is that in the newsreels Bucky is played off as a ridiculous sidekick to hide the fact that he’s out there brutally killing people, and Steve is literally sitting next to a professional killer and STILL acts like his complaints are adorable.
we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
Not many jnſtances of Punctuation – but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly – ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie – and the long S – ſ – vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes – & the short “s” vſed only at the end – as with the U and V, and the I and J – but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” – Y may be vſed in the place of TH – but only ſparingly – and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences – ſeeminglie without end – a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.
today on the radio they were talking about how clowns cant get jobs lately bc of the new IT movie resurfacing peoples fear of clowns and the dude was like “the clown economy is in shambles” and thats really not a sentence i ever wanna hear anywhere but this awful website
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