151 posts
Latest Posts by tragictaleofshikyou - Page 3
Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened
So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.
This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa
so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym
Think about the difference between a classical Greco-Roman statue and a roughly carved wooden mask. The Greco-Roman statue is both realistic and idealizing, rational, and dreamlike. Apollonian. The mask is rough and emotive, messy, affecting us on some level other than our rational mind... Dionysian. Statue = Euripides, Mask = Sophocles
listened to medea today and i gotta say. nietzsche's beef with euripides is truly crazy. like. i mean antigone was a good play but medea was a really good play. seems unambiguously to be an advancement of the art form. also idk, is it really meaningfully more apollonian and less dionysian than previous works. like. i means it not clear what he means by those words basically at all (i see this everywhere glossed as like "order" vs "chaos" and.... maybe that's part of what he means? it's clearly not all of what he means. well actually what he means is "of the nature of the narrative section of the play" and "of the nature of the chorus section of the play" but what that nature is...). medea is calculating but she's clearly passionate, and i feel like the way she takes everything from everyone has a very dionysian feel, the...abandonment of care, the willfullness. idk if this is anything. the chorus IS much more pedestrian and less spooky. so. he's right there
ANYWAY i think the most parsimonious explanation is "nietzsche hates slaves, and doesnt like that theyre portrated as people in this play" (he specifically mentions the centering of slaves as a bad thing! because he thinks it makes the play more pedestrian, i guess? but idk, it throw medea's otherworldliness into sharp relief! if the volume of eveyry character is turned up, you cant hear them in the din)
also, this kind of tautology prevents you from being able to have insight or perceive new aspects of the world. "art is what they put in galleries" is directly limiting you to your own cultural preconceptions and refusing to imagine them being totally wrong. If you have this attitude, you can't say stuff like 'wild bee hives/termite mounds are art because they have secret aspects that are not for practical use' (I just made that up) because they aren't in galleries or made by artists
the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this
it's interesting how Rose of Versailles makes the aesthetics of the monarchy and the revolution fit together in a coherent whole. IRL the revolutionaries didn't like the rococo stuff, but Ikeda has made it so that the rococo aesthetics have transformed to symbolize the intensity of revolution itself.
me when bara wa bara wa
everybody in WH is a villain
heathcliff is a villain but you also have to admit the racist, classist society kinda had it coming 🗿
The Nebra Sky Disk is actually like an emote!
This was made by Ranier Zenz for Wikimedia
forget stuff like Good Flag Bad Flag and all that discourse, the world's best flags are those banners carried by Chinese lineage/support associations that have fringed edges and writing
All Intellectual Property is evil
thinking about the time my local garden centre put signs up that said "propagation piracy is a crime" and explained that "propagation piracy" is when you pick up a leaf or a twig that's fallen on the floor and take it home and grow a plant from it. I came home and mocked this because it's obviously extremely pathetic and stupid, and my ex got salty and said they were right and I was just like. you literally call yourself a communist and you are defending the right of corporations to protect their hypothetical future profits by classifying it as a crime to pick up a leaf
needs no commentary to be appreciated
Snow Removal Grader
Nelly Dean has an aura of being a normal person looking in on the chaos, but she's pretty self-deceptive about how malicious she was towards Catherine. 'Oh, she was just sort of proud, so I kind of liked to humble her' and then she describes very manipulative and dishonest stuff she did to torment Catherine... She's probably one of the less malicious people but because she's the narrator we see a lot of the bad stuff she does.
Not using the terms bad person or good person because those terms aren't real and cause mind/soul decay
Skeptical inquirer subscribers when they fail to calculate the current directional taboo and walk right into the presence of a supernatural being:
I get the impression that Feng Shui isn't really about making predictions about reality, but is rather about value judgments and aesthetics. It's similar to how people see the Golden Ratio or classical architecture. If someone says, "living in a building based on classical proportion is more harmonious" we can recognize that there's a philosophical element which is not literally making a claim we can test, and that's fine.
I read somewhere that in Korea, there's a place where they tried to balance out a mountain range by building structures, and I think there's something going on there that is beyond a desire for material results and gain. It's a value judgment about how the world should be.
Of course, the reason Feng Shui is targeted is the result of cultural prejudice, but I think it has just become one of those idees fixes for skeptic community people where they automatically dislike it
I thought this was about Li Bai. I guess it really is commonplace.
a good poet never dies, he just oh my god he’s gone into the water, i can’t see him, i don’t think he’s coming up, does anyone have a rope or like a long branch we can throw, how does this keep happening oh my god
It's the Da He Ding! Chinese ritual bronzes should be contemplated while reading Bataille on sacrifice
I was always amazed by the elaborate surrealism in ancient bronze. The examples are not limited to this famous Square Humanoid Ding (人面銅方鼎). My friend calls it "Shang era TV-set."
Animalistic motifs are common in household items and especially ritual items of the Shang and Zhou eras. However, such Janus-like vessels were rare even in those good old days.
Hunan Provincial Museum (湖南省博物館) collection.
Photo: ©老猪的碎碎念
If you like Dorohedoro I think you would like the novella "Yellow Mud Street" aka "Huangni Street" by Can Xue
Yellow Mud Street is more dreamlike and has less of a lucid story arc, but the immersive grossness and beauty of the world is quite similar. I am not finished reading it yet, but I think it would appeal to those who value that kind of powerful imagery and the view of society it connects to
Maurice Chédel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This picture of a 'shanty town' in Peru looks quite similar to the Barracks Settlement in Yume Nikki! Especially how it is located in a desert. This lines up with the other Peruvian references in Yume Nikki, namely the Paracas style art and the Inca motif on Madotsuki's character design.
There is so much CONTENT in the world! We can't eat it all easily... It's amazing!
I'd interpret this as: Ancient Greek aesthetic values still retain such a hold on our culture that we feel like Ancient Greek writing is good whereas the Hebrew Bible doesn't appear well written
(That being said, there are also aspects of Greek aesthetics that feel foreign to us)
so i'd read that the greek intellectual sphere had a pretty negative reaction to the *style* of the bible, when compared to the greek traditional religious works (i mean. obviously homer is not like the bible. but it is the closest approximation), which i assumed was some subtle poeticness i couldnt get without speaking ancient greek. but after listening to the odyssey, it makes a lot more sense. the odyssey is like...well written! its a good work of literature! and the bible just isn't that, at all. the bible is not that kind of work. obviously there are good *lines* in the bible. but at most there are good paragraphs. there are no good pages of the bible, where the whole thing is well written. its really like, 95% clunky. so if im an ancient greek, and im used to like, homer and hesiod, and then these guys come around touting their holy texts, and it poorly written, i would find it a pretty tough sell!
I wonder if 'drug user' was an unnecessarily technical-sounding translation of, like, 'addict' or something. "She had so many drugs, like an addict" is a sentence with good flow
She had so many drugs... like a drug user.
really interesting concept. I feel like if you grew up in the universe where daemons were commonplace, this wouldn't feel like a big deal though. It would be as natural as saying, "we have to make sure the actor has the same face as well as the same body type of the character/historical figure."
Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.
Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?
The approaching battle in aesthetics is between the reactionary/essentially right-wing movement against AI and slop/mass aesthetics
Anti-AI is based on the economic interests of small business owners (comm artists are small business owners) and has conservative values as a result. These include measuring the value of art based on the ‘hard work’/‘effort’ that went into its creation, and discomfort with art that is not made under the domination/control of a specific individual. This merges with the explicitly right-wing hatred of modernism, abstract art, etc.
Mass slop aesthetics are based on mass participation in consumption, absence of the cult of the creative individual, maximalism. It’s not obvious, but I think it also includes a culture of mass participation in art through its rejection of aesthetic hierarchy and standards
Let’s sink into the tide of slop forever
Getty Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (photographer is John Beasly Greene)
One of the colossi of Memnon. His set of photos were the first taken of these statues
Aesthetically I am on the side of 'slop' will elaborate later
the flood of sludge and corrosion, Ten Thousand Years.
this is a photo of Guarino Guarini's church, Santissima Annunziata dei Teatini, before it was destroyed by the Messina earthquake in 1908.
Because the image has colour, it's interesting to pretend it's current day but just blurry. It looks like something you could encounter in your daily life
from the wikipedia page of Guarino Guarini. I like how in that era, their culture was about being a polymath and intellectuals were expected to speculate on so many different topics. It would be interesting if it were like that today. Athanasius Kircher must be the ultimate example of this.
Maybe 'living life as art' is a reincarnation of this ideal.
This blog is how I get recs for new UTAUs to listen to
Sakebi is really good, I hope there are more synths out there with quirky concepts like screaming
Sakebi-chan! Managed by 狼少女21号, her voice provider (according to VocaDB) is 衣川狼.
Releasing April 2nd, 2012, Sakebi-chan is a voice bank made entirely from high pitched shouts. She's a demon, she has no known age, and her favorite thing is Girls.
There's not really a lot to go off of with ol' Sakebi, at least in English, she's just a weird little guy. Her official site is still up surprisingly, and her download link (I believe, take this with a grain of salt) was updated in 2017, but I think that might've just been because the original link was broken and so the uploader fixed it. She's also no longer on the UTAU fandom wiki for some reason?
I love her a lot, even if I don't get to use her much, her voice is very situational.
Also I just learned, Sakebi was designed by Matsuda Toki. It's a small world ig.
I think there's horror media that's really similar to this, where the character is 'guilty' of something but from an external perspective it was not really bad. In the story, it makes their situation feel more inevitable and helpless
I think a fun revivalist genre would be like, overbearingly didact medieval morality plays but with absolutely incomprehensible morals. like here's a heavy-handed fable about how if you use the past tense too many times while talking to your nieces, all of your milk will spoil