The Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator, a British product from the 1920s, is a scroll-map navigator in the shape of a watch. It came with tiny interchangeable instructions that you scrolled manually to see which roads to take when driving.
People have been trying to invent the GPS for as long as people have been driving and I for one think that’s beautiful
A short list of things that probably would be funny to humans in any time ever:
objects shaped like dicks
funky dances
dancing badly to bangin music
dogs being stupid (we’ve had those idiots domesticated for 30,000 years)
teenage boys being stupid
slapstick
that video where the guy is singing/chanting while bouncing on a tree branch and it abruptly breaks under him
that video where two guys are trying to get their phone out from behind a fence with sticks and one loses his stick so the other climbs the fence, gets the stick, and ignores the phone
literally any video with animals acting like people
Now what I need is like a bunch of memes and funny shit arranged on a timeline showing the earliest time period where they would be funny/understandable.
Obviously you’d have a lot that’s based on really recent pop culture references, but by like, 2,000 BC…a lot of tropes our stories still use have been established, there are stringed instruments, people have pet cats and dogs…so much would be familiar you know…Ancient Egyptians would love funny cat compilations and you know this is the case and they would probably love the videos of people playing guitars for pleased or unimpressed pets.
Not to detract from joak but here’s what the camera looked like
It was 14cm diameter but the lens poked through a buttonhole in his waistcoat from where it was hanging around his neck, and he has a piece of string from that lever on the side to his trouser pocket to take the photos. (Also! It could hold six four cm photos, so viewing them on your phone screen is probably about full size)
Sure, the actual hiding might not be that great, but who would see that and think “ hidden camera ”. Who would have any possible frame of reference to be able to deduce “ that guy has a camera in his coat, that’s a thing that people do ”.
Tags:
#the first lifelogger necklace!! #history #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
So I’ve been working on writing Merlin fanfic and, like a moron, I decided I wanted it to be more historically accurate because the actual canon is a shitshow about that.
I start doing some writing, some researching, and discover that stirrups won’t arrive in Britain until the 10th century or so. King Arthur is like… early 500′s roughly.
So no stirrups. That’s not a big problem. Except it is argued that it might have been a major contributor to feudalism. Which, ok, good to know. So Arthur is pre-feudalism, got it. Shouldn’t change too much, right? (wrong)
Oh, what’s this that feudalism requires for those new wealthy landowners?
Fucking. Primogeniture.
(friendly reminder: this is the right of inheritance for the firstborn son. Like for land, or titles of nobility… or kings)
So if my research is right, King Arthur didn’t have an inherent right to the throne because he was the firstborn male heir. He was fucking ELECTED. (or maybe a lady in the lake threw a sword at him, who knows, this is all myth anyway)
But the fucking kicker?
The thing that DOESN’T EXIST in King Arthur’s time?? Because feudalism won’t show up for several centuries?
Fucking.
Knights.
In summary, the story of King Arthur is just modern day fanfiction from medieval/feudal Europe with rampant OCs, overpowered everyone, too much fucking drama, and like three different werewolves.
Also no stirrups.
this is how i learned young there’s no such thing as canon
King Arthur was ahistorical fanfic in the 12th century when the tales as we know them took shape, and in every retelling since then. It’s basically always been about projecting the author’s values backwards in time to an idealized past.
There’s literally a book exploring this and how modern retellings have continued the spirit of High Medieval versions called Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy. Because silk and potatoes, like stirrups, knights, and feudalism, were also not seen much in post-Roman Britain.
There really is no “historically accurate” way to write King Arthur. Even attempts to set the story in the 6th century are constructed ahistorical fantasies. You basically just have to decide which brand of anachronism you want to go with.
Hello, I have a doctorate in medieval English literature and am here to tell you: Arthuriana was always fanfic. What’s more, they’ve always been EXACTLY like BBC’s Merlin – a mash-up of time periods in their setting, but ‘modern’ (for each rewriting) in their tone and priorities and in-jokes – plus, of course, a dash (or a whole lakeful) of “It Was Better Back In Those Days”. Exactly which days “Those Days” were changes from century to century – by the fourteenth (Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc) they were mostly looking back to the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine if they were specific at all. In Eleanor’s time, which we tend to think of as the golden age of chivalry, Arthurian authors (Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes) were looking back even further (and there’s some wistfulness for a lost pre-Norman England there too); in the fifteen century, Sir Thomas Malory (who gave us what ebcame our definitive English-language collection of Arthuriana for later centuries) was looking back from the vantage point of years of civil war to the glory days of the mid-fourteenth and Edward III’s court.
And Geoffrey of Monmouth (who, yes, is a character in Merlin) is the 12th-century historian that @star-anise mentions who was the first person to popularise these obscure Celtic and British and Welsh myths by pulling them together into something that looked like history and writing them up in Latin AS part of his “history of the kings of Britain” – a work which is itself heavily nostalgic for pre-Norman times – and, incidentally, deciding on a “date” for them to have happened.
But yes, Arthurian knights always had stirrups and were feudal because that was true of the times in which they were written and 100% of Arthurian writers agree that JOUSTING KNIGHTS ARE FUN and that is important. Actually, a lot of them also wore the high fashions of whatever day their stories were written in, because what better way to convey “this fairy queen was unimaginably beautiful and wealthy” than to have her wearing amazing exotic textiles and colours and jewels you’ve only just heard of from far-away lands?
the battle of the frogs and the mice! it’s an ancient greek parody of the iliad (some ancient sources even claim that homer himself wrote it, which is impossible but also incredibly charming to imagine)
the plot is that crumbsnatcher, the prince of the mice, stops for a drink of water and meets the king of the frogs, who offers him a tour of his kingdom. but when crumbsnatcher is riding the king’s back through the pond, a snake appears! the frog king goes under the water to avoid it, drowning crumbsnatcher in the process, so the mice declare war on the frogs
it features all the things you’d expect in an epic (epic language, scenes of putting on armor, and even an aristeia for the mice), and it has the most delightful conclusion when zeus prevents the mice from killing all the frogs by throwing a thunderbolt at them and, when that doesn’t work, sending crabs to scare them
sententia antiquae has a delightful translation of it here!
“the roman empire didn’t really end until the 13/15th century” is a huge cop out imo. sure, technically, whatever. if you want to tell me that the united states is going to make it until 3200, when the final state of Refederated American Samoa surrenders to the Neo Hawaiian Laserkings, I’m gonna say bullshit, the united states ended in 2300 or whatever
The Eastern United States continues for another 500 years afterward from its capital in Seoul!
I mean, my favorite answer for ‘when did Rome fall’ is actually 1917.
But the 1453 date would really be more like ‘American fell in 3200 when the Pacific State (who never stopped calling themselves ‘America’) were conquered by the Neo Hawaian Lazerkings, who then spent the next hundreds trying to convince everyone they were the real Americans now
Isn’t this the lore of Code Geass?
Tags:
#Rome #history #home of the brave #Code Geass #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(probably it would be even funnier if I’d actually *seen* Code Geass) #(I know there was a group watchalong recently but their timezone and my sleep schedule don’t quite line up)
the internet is so cursed, when people look back on the history of covid-19 it’s going to look so different from the history of the plague because we will have left a trace of quarantine playlists all featuring toxic by brittany spears
You are Docetism! Docetism (literally, “to seem-ism”) is the belief that Christ only seemed to be human and that his physical body was an illusion. Because he did not possess a physical body, Jesus’s death on the cross could not really have taken place, and his apparent suffering was also illusory. Another variety of docetism held that Jesus was a normal human being but that Christ was an immaterial spirit who entered his body at his baptism, gave him the power to perform supernatural acts, and then abandoned him prior to the crucifixion, perhaps by switching bodies with Simon of Cyrene. Docetist Christology was criticized by a number of early Christian theologians, and was definitively condemned by the Council of Nicaea.
Hell of a quiz…
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the quiz itself not the post) #meme #Christianity #history
Brinens and Things 