Sometimes I see notes that people replying to posts on this blog. Just FYI I haven't read anything reblogged here and I don't endorse any of the posts. They're here because I want to potentially read them later.
Recently managed to activate the most amazing infodump trap card.
I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."
As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.
Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.
A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.
As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"
Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.
You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.
It was not.
It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.
And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.
This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.
After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.
None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.
With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.
Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.
"Phyllis," said he.
The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.
"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"
Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.
Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.
Secondly, Sister Lucy always said when she died she wanted to come back as one of Phyllis's dogs because "mom treated the dogs better than us."
Why were the classical greek poleis worse at maintaining balance-of-power than early modern European states? Eventually the hegemon would find itself on the wrong side of a coalition of city states but Athens and Sparta both managed to alternately subjugate a lot of smaller poleis before that happened. Metternich would never have let that happen.
Interesting question!, albeit one I feel unqualified to answer on both sides. To take a stab at it off the top of my head, I would point to three most important factors: geography, the relative preeminence of the various contending city-states, and Persia.
Geographically, the features that led the Hellenic world to be divided into hundreds of mostly small city-states in the first place did not change once a few major poleis had risen to prominence by the early Classical period. Like, Sparta controlled the largest territory of any of them, and their direct control was only ever just "part of the Peloponnese". Corinth had a strategic location, Athens had the largest economy and maritime presence, Thebes had the best gays... You can see why these were the preeminent cities but you can also see why none of them were ever powerful enough to force the other cities into anything other than loosely subjugated alliance networks. That's pretty different from the great powers of Europe, who had deeper internal resources to draw on and were less dependent on a host of lesser powers for their power. The poleis were more vulnerable because it was much easier for rival cities to collapse their fragile webs of control. That vulnerability also made it harder for peaceful coexistence, since any rival could easily nucleate a coalition against you.
On top of this, the Classical Greeks were also next door neighbors with the largest state in history to date. And once the Persians had decided that conquering Greece wasn't worth the trouble, they were more than ready to play the different cities against each other. The Spartans took Persian gold to build a fleet to smash Athenian naval supremacy to win the Peloponnesian War, but they wouldn't be the last.
So the failure of the city-states to stably balance each other was always the likeliest outcome. None of them were *that* powerful relative to the Greek world as a whole (maybe if Syracuse wasn't halfway across the Mediterranean...?), and so all of them could only ever manage to build fragile power bases, which were repeatedly vulnerable to rival coalitions backed by an outside superpower.
That said, your question is clearly implying "did the Greeks just suck at statecraft" and it's hard to deny that they kinda did. Athens was profoundly stupid in how they handled their empire. Use a light touch! Be the stationary bandit! The speed with which the Athenians built a petty protection racket to gild the Parthenon is just deeply depressing. Maybe some of that is just the natural self-interest of a pre-modern democracy, but I'd also point to ideology and statecraft.
Ideologically, there just wasn't enough of a pan-Hellenic sentiment at the time to counterbalance the deep attachment people had to their cities. That simply was the natural unit for everyone to think of. City-states had been warring with each other and exploiting each other since before the return of literacy to Greece, and in a sense the Athenian Empire was just a turbocharged version of that. What are we gonna do, not rip off these other cities that are now in our power? Unthinkable. There was *just* enough fellow feeling to barely pull off victories in the Persian Wars but that was a massive existential crisis and it was still a very near run thing both internally and externally.
In terms of statecraft, we do see further "technological" development as we move from the Classical to the Hellenistic periods. The post-Alexander kingdoms were way closer, and more involved in internal Greek politics than the Persians had ever been. A much bigger threat in other words. And in response to that pressure, we do see the city-states gradually forming themselves into proper confederations, most notably the Achaean League, which covered most of the Peloponnese. These weren't just reruns of the Athenian Empire with a single hegemon, they were actual confederations (although they weren't above forcing cities in to their leagues at swordpoint). They were imo a genuine development in terms of both ideology and political organization, but much too late in history and so of course they got smashed by Rome. Sorry guys, shoulda done it in 480, your achievements would've been legendary instead of "trivia for people who read Plutarch".
Of course a stable pan-Hellenic confederation wouldn't have exactly been the "balance of power" you refer to - that specific geopolitical setup was probably always out of reach. But with a different mindset they could've come up with something stable, perhaps.
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
That can't possibly be right. Consider my hypothetical art project, I Poop On Your Doorstep, wherein I poop on your doorstep (and then if you clean it up, I complain that you destroyed my artwork, you philistine).
I Poop On Your Doorstep is subversive: it draws attention to the norms of proper social behaviour, and how artists get a broad yet partial licence to violate them. It's shocking and icky, especially to you.
It's perfectly reasonable for you to be against this work, not just in the sense of saying it's bad, but even in the sense of legally preventing me from doing it. This doesn't entail that you think subversion and shock are worthless, and Kinkade is the only good artist ever.
I Poop On Your Doorstep when it came out was praised as a challenging work of genius, that not only raised but forced questions about property rights and who in society has the right to practive biological functions and where. In a class where most well-to-do members claim to want "subversive" art, you can't actually shake the rich until you've made them physically uncomfortable, not merely mentally. How is pooping on the doorstep of the CEO of a company any different than that company running sewage output into the backyard of the pooper's neighborhood?
And let's talk about the title. The word is not "shit" or "defecation" but "poop", alluding to a childlike playfulness, rather than horror or disgust. The deconstruction of our boundaries must not be profane or desensitized, but a work of whimsical play.
---
A response to advocates of I Poop on Your Doorstep:
I Poop on Your Doorstep can only be considered "subversive" if it isn't cliche and predictable. In a world where tomatoes get thrown at old masters and our waters are befouled with pollution, there is simply nothing more predictable than leaving a doo on the capitalist's doorstep. What next, spraypainting their company motto with a dollar sign instead of the S?
I wonder what the first men of the church to find prehistoric bones thought. What went through their heads as they gazed upon bones that defied all reasonable expectations? Femurs the size of a man. Knuckles the size of a woman’s fist. Teeth the length of an arming sword. What else could such things be but
Holy?
Divine, biblical?
Some bones were attributed to monsters. To the Antediluvian Giants, or to the fearsome gauls that crashed against Rome, or to the serpents that God had to lay low. That last interpretation isn’t far from the truth: What else is a meteor if not an act of judgement, whether cosmic or ordained?
But some bones were closer to human than monster. Large, yes, and old, and heavy, and all these other descriptors, yes- but the knuckle of some great raptor looks remarkably similar to the knuckles of that peasant boy taken by a stray arrow. Put the two side by side after the crows have had their fill and you can almost imagine the knuckles belonged to the boy. Maybe, given enough time, and food, and space, and fervor, and, and, and- maybe he could become that which those men of the cloth believed they had found.
Saints.
It sounds comical, knowing what we know about the suspected shape of the creatures whose bones the soil turned skyward. Scales and feathers, razor teeth and wicked claws and vibrant colors garbed in church white. A halo suspended atop a gore stained head. Gold capped teeth set in the jaws of an apex predator. But what else could they think?
What else could these bones, these relics stained and fossilized and carbon dated by millennials of age be, if not.
Well.
I wonder if human is the appropriate word. After all, is not the goal of every saint a separation of humanity? To shed one’s flesh, to slough off sin stained and forgiveness scented skin in favor of wings? In favor of fire?
Did those first men ever ask themselves,
“Where are the wings? Where is the fire?”
“Why is it here?”
The church reburied the bones of these Newly Found and Hastily Named Saints in the graveyards and catacombs and holy sepulchers of worship and prayer. Right across from the peasant boy who no one remembered, killed by the pox that had ravaged his town, found gutted and naked by the side of the road. Was he a saint, in the end? Did he feel the presence of the Bone Saints, lying next to him?
Or was it all dark?
I wonder- if it all ends like they say, fire and brimstone and all that, will the Saints get one last chance to see the world?
There, look honey! It’s Saint Peter, right next to Saint Nicholas!
And Saint Stegosaurus!
And Saint Mammathus!
Would their halos fit their heads?
Or is Saint-hood a “one-size-fits-most” situation?
In the religion I grew up under, there was this assumption that, when Christ returned and the dead were resurrected, it would be on a familial basis: You would raise your grandfather and his wife, and then they would raise their parents and siblings, on and on and on.
There was a great deal of fixation on the specifics of this. For example, the church discouraged cremation as it was assumed that the end was very near, and that lacking a body would task your descendants with building you a new one. This was considered a doable task (after all, there were plenty of other people with bodies that would simply be unrecoverable) but also a significant inconvenience that you should spare them, if possible. A politeness.
I like the idea of this mixing in with that. Of an old man going back into these tombs to retrieve the young boy’s bones, the young boy going back to retrieve his fathers, on and on and on. The Pharaohs would be resurrected first, with their ancient lines of well preserved bodies. More common folks would learn fleshsculpting to a high degree. Imagine whole Babylonian villages working together to try and recreate the one generation before them, each helping the previous before moving on to Kolob.
And then, as even those passed, we’d hit the blurry pieces. In the same way that you have to teach your grandpa how to use a computer, you might have to pass some higher thinking skills to hominid ancestors. It would be a grey line, not nearly as clean as this, but there is something charming about imagining a modern man having to teach an australopithecus how to work clay well enough to rebuild his father. And then that same australopithecus having to teach a rat the same.
And then one day, finally, a rat would sit upon the shoulders of St. Oviraptor, and struggle with all of its might to teach him how to carve the bones of his father. All while the hordes of heaven cheered, while God himself smiled, while the world itself was bathed in paradisiacal glory, we would watch a rat teach a lizard how to make a dinosaur.
And it would be beautiful.
Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”
there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)
there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while
Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?
I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.
Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.
People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.
If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.
In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.
People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.
It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.
I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.
Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.
There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.
Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.
The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.
As many as half of all priests break their celibacy vows, leading spiritually compromised lives. Inside the "don't ask, don't tell" policy o
So apparently the only study (afaik) that has actually engaged in quantitative research about how often Catholic priests have sex in general (there’s been multiple that only focused on CSA) was a 37-year stud from John Hopkins published in 1990 that ended up with a number of around 50%.
And I’ll be totally honest if the Catholic Church went up to me and was like “Memecucker tell us how to fix the ordination crisis even when we think it might be stabilizing the seminaries are just getting flooded with far-right lunatics!
…
We’ll pay you if it works and also translate whatever historical documents you ask”
Then in that case my advice would be that no matter how successful your marketing is, if the impression is that only incels need apply, then you’re gonna only get incels to apply. In heavily Catholic cultures people know that priests fool around even if they may not know which individual priest is doing Id still wager most people could name at least one auntie that was fucking a priest. I genuinely think at certain times and places Roman Catholic priests had more sex than married Orthodox priests
But nowadays you know how many people just assume a priest will get defrocked or excommunicated just for fooling around with a consenting adult? Maybe just try and nudge things so some insider info gets out a little like
“Hey if its WITH AN ADULT and the info isn’t public at all and as far as your bishop knows it only happened once, he’ll probably just tell you to confess and uh don’t do it again ok and don’t do it with someone connected to the church if that’s the case also. I mean compare ‘hey, stop that!’ to the penalties for a priest entering a civil marriage and refusing or being repeatedly fully open about fucking someone now thats the type of shit it takes to get kicked out of the priesthood but people don’t realize that! ”
like you guys don’t gotta make a press release saying that just like, you know how to let info leak out. Hell, the 1917 Canon Law code said a priest who attempts to enter a civil marriage gets automatically excommunicated which includes being defrocked but the 1983 code lowered the penalty to suspension from clerical duties and it’s only if the priest refused to leave the relationship does he get kicked out of the priesthood but doesn’t even get excommunicated! That was a step in the right direction like let people know you’re not in a position to be expelling priests for a thing a lot of them do anyway
Remind people that Donatism is a heresy and sinful priests are still valid sacramental ministers. Go around telling people that “hey breaking the vow of chastity WITH AN ADULT is still technically bad but you know what’s super duper really bad is when it causes “public scandal”” like hammer that home. Like one of the current things that results in automatic excommunication is a priest that grants confession to and absolves the sins of someone they’re having an affair with so you know, take a hint and maybe don’t fool around with religiously Catholic ADULT women that would feel that compulsion in the first place? God made non-Catholic ADULTS that wouldn’t care for a reason.
Drop the hints, like “Hey are you Catholic and also don’t see yourself getting married until middle age? Try out the priesthood why not!” maybe suggest you’re “thinking” about making laicization easier after a few decades in the priesthood like you don’t need to do it just have it leak out so young dudes can go “well if it doesn’t work out I can just marry at 45 or something”. Do ad campaigns with messages like “Priests are humans too!” “Monks are the ones that are super duper serious about vows like specifically monks are the ones that are supposed to be held to higher standards chastity specifically monks”
Do some back channel stuff and encourage TV shows to also give hints you know, make priests look sexy like “oh man if priests *did* fuck they’d have no trouble fucking other consenting adults! oh wow he only got a warning I thought the penalty would be way worse” Maybe some medieval dramas where it’s like “oooh look how religious these people are they’re so much more religious back then and zealous but there’s lots of priests that lowkey fuck isn’t that crazy they didnt even have cars that let them drive to another city first wild huh it’s like secretly normalized weird huh”
Everyone knows that people cheat in relationships but hey if you’re a priest it’s not like there’s a wife that’ll potentially blow up at learning about a one night stand or investigate suspicions it’ll just be a superior saying“stop it” it’s not like the police are gonna get involved in a relationship with another ADULT person
After watching the price of oil for the past month+ I expect an apology and public confession of error from everyone who has every said that prices are driven by supply and demand, we have empirical proof now that prices are based solely on vibes and the feelings of the capitalist class.
If you're doing any kind of trading on a market, it's very helpful to have good pricing information, and there are price reporting agencies that do the work of aggregating the data and selling subscriptions. S&P Global (of stock index fame) is one of them, and Platts is their subsidiary that focuses on energy and commodity pricing.
Back in 1976, the Brent oil field opened in the North Sea. In the 80s, Platts started using the Brent price as their benchmark for the oil price in the North Sea. Brent became the dominant benchmark because at the time, much of the oil market was under state control (not a free market), but the North Sea was entirely private. Since then, they've added a bunch of other oil fields to their benchmark (up to 6 as of 2023). It's still a pretty small percentage of the overall oil market, but Dated Brent (the actual name for the index) is basically Platts' best estimate for the price of a barrel of oil in the North Sea.
It should be noted here that not all barrels of oil are created equal - depending on the physical properties of the oil in question and the location in which it's produced (and thus the logistics costs for getting it to buyers) impacts the price of oil, and Platts tries to "normalize" the benchmark to the lowest price in its basket. This benchmark is really useful to the oil market, and contracts to buy oil will often trade relative to the Dated Brent price - "we'll buy/sell this oil for Brent + $5" etc.
There is also ICE Brent, which is an oil futures index. Basically, a futures contract is a contract saying that you will transact oil at a certain price at a future date. Producers and consumers use these contracts to hedge against uncertainty - let's say you want to sell 100 barrels of oil. You need to make $10,000 to keep producing. The current futures price is $110, but in the worst case, you think oil could drop to $90 a barrel, leaving you $1000 short. So you sell a (purely financial) futures contract for 50 barrels of oil at $110 - if the price drops to $90, you make $20 * 50 = $1000 on your futures contract, so you don't have the $1000 shortfall you were worried about. Conversely, if the price goes up to $130, your sale makes $13,000, but you lose $1000 from your futures trade, so you only make $12,000 overall - a sacrifice you made to hedge.
So Dated Brent is the physical price (as determined by aggregating prices from six physical oil streams) and ICE Brent is what the market thinks the price will be in one month (as determined by what oil futures are trading at). Under normal circumstances, these are pretty tightly coupled.
You can see the problem here for pricing in the Iran War - Brent is the price in the North Sea. If oil there can't get to refiners in SEA in a reasonable amount of time, the full severity of the spike due to Hormuz won't show up, because the massively-inflated oil prices that consumers dependent on Gulf oil are paying don't make it all the way there.
There are a separate set of Platts oil benchmarks for Dubai oil also, but these benchmarks are now heavily distorted by the reduction in traffic. They used to track five grades, but they're down to two due to the other three being trapped behind the Strait.
And this weird sense of unreality gets much worse when you look at the futures market (which is normally tightly coupled with the physical price of oil, this divergence is what collapsedsquid is talking about in the op). The big futures market in the Middle East is located in Oman, and (unlike Brent, which is purely financial) they actually guarantee physical delivery of the oil if you want it from the Oman oil terminal. This did cause the price of oil futures to spike at the start of the war (up to $162 at one point), but now they're back at $90, since the next delivery period is in June. There are two ways of reading this price - one is "the market thinks this will mostly be resolved by June", and the other is "the market thinks the oil scarcity will be so bad that refineries will close and demand destruction will bring the oil price down to $90 by then".
Remember how Ptolemaic Alexandria had a large population of Hellenistic Jews that rivaled if not exceeded Jerusalem’s own Jewish population and they lived there along with Greeks and Egyptians and since Greeks were in charge they were like “hey everyone check out this thing we invented its called Plays!” and Egyptians were like “Hey cool just a heads up though we’ve been doing that for over two thousand year just so you know heh, guess we shouldn’t expect you guys to know that, like they’re closed ceremonies in temples maybe if we also made it a public thing… hey this is pretty neat” and Jews were like “whoa drama is really fun! Uh, we dunno if we’re supposed to attend this it’s kinda like a religious ceremony dedicated to Dionysius… ah who fucking cares fucking try and stop us Judas Maccabee we’re in Alexandria we literally built a Third Temple while the Second one was still around so we could do sacrifices here fuck King Joshia! The Greeks let us use some old Temple of Bast and while it’s smaller than the other one check out this view” and Egyptians were like “cool yeah it’s nice”
And then there was this dude Ezekiel the Tragedian who is the earliest known Jewish dramatist and he was like “Hey the Greeks use their own religious stories to make these great epic plays why don’t we use own of the stories from the Torah… oooh I know the perfect one!” and he made the Exagōgē a dramatization of the Exodus story up to the escape from Egypt and he was like “yeah I’m changing parts of the story for dramatic license, am I allowed to do this I dunno it’s in clear ‘imitation of idolators’ but also what you gonna do Maccabee this is Alexandria” like God is a character in the play with a speaking role bc why not he had a cool scene as the burning bush where they used a burning bush on the stage while a voice off stage speaks and says “For it is impossible for a mortal to see my face, but it is possible to hear my words, on account of which I have come to you” bc God has to explain to the audience why he can’t actually appear on stage so Greeks don’t start being all “idgi is the crane broken a god is speaking where’s the person being lowered from the ceiling” and the play starts off with Moses calling Egypt a bunch of tyrannical oppressors and Egyptians were like “hey uh, we’re cool right?” that enslaved the Hebrews and Egyptians were like “huh? We kept you guys as slaves? What Dynasty does this take place in?” and then Pharaoh orders the firstborn Hebrews be killed and Egyptians were like “Ok hold on what is this what the fuck is this we don’t do that the fucking Greeks kill kids they don’t want like just look outside the city us Egyptians find that horrorific and rescue them why are you saying we and wait a minute didn’t you guys also do that one ritual that other Cannanites did where” and then Egypt is hit by the plagues there’s an original scene where Moses has a vision in a dream where God hands him a scepter and lets him sit on a heavenly throne above the whole world bc yeah that thing you associate with Moses being the World-Emperor I guess and the Plagues happen and Egyptians are like “no really what is this” and the Egyptian priests are defeated by Moses and Egyptians were like “. ……..?” and Pharaoh lets them go but then attack with an army that’s “one million” strong and then th sea gets parted and its portrayed like Aeschylus’s Persians where a lone surviving soldier is like “oooh nooo we Egypt is ruined our might empire lost by so much we’re such fucking losers we were so arrogant to think we could defeat those cool Hebrews they’re so awesome and they’re even led by Moses the biggest badass ever how foolish we were to oppose Moses” and Egyptians were like “NO SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THE POINT BEHIND ALL THIS” and the play ends with like a massive giant bird with red and gold colors showing up to the Hebrews and symbolism and Greeks were like “oh cool! That’s our thing that’s a phoenix” and Egyptians were “THAT IS A BENNU THAT JS THE BIRD OF RA ITS OUR THING WE CAME UP WITH IT FIRST WE CAME UP WITH ALL THIS SHIT FIRST”
And then Egyptians like, they didn’t write plays but they were like “ooooh just gonna fucking… make up bullshit… fucking… we can do that to” and they wrote history books and this dude named Manetho was like “one day there was a Pharaoh named Amenophis and he built a giant fucking leper colony with 80,000 lepers working a stone quarry and the stupid miserable lepers we’re joined by other impure degenerated who fell under the sway of sn evil renegade priest of Osiris named Osarsiph who was like “hmm I can do something with this and cause some chaos” and started giving them a new set of laws to replace Egyptian ones and it wasdescribed as inverting Egyptian laws so Osariph was like “hehehe stop worshipping stupid Egyptian gods! Dont offer intense at temples or anything actually go forth kill the stupid animals that stupid Egyptians view as sacred like cows and bulls let’s kill those stupid sacred animals of Hathor and Apis hahaha those stupid Egyptians not killing cows because they give milk and Hathor is nurturing! I say killing cows is awesome we should even kill them just to kill them make it a ritual and we’ll do it by setting them on fire so not only do we not get milk anymore but we aren’t even getting meat ahaha yes my depraved army of lepers kill and eat all their sacred animals eehehehe kill them and eat them yess slaughter them all and devour all those the cats, baboons, herons, crocodil-” and Jews were like “Wait we don’t ea-“don’t care” said Manetho “anyway don’t forget to * never* eat pigs even though they’re an excellent calorie efficient source of meat hehehe we think pigs are sacred! Yes fucking sacred because they’re beloved by the one true god! But not as sacred as donkeys which btw we also don’t eat! And also we should hate everyone that isn’t an ugly smelly falling apart leper… except for these guys! And he summoned their Cannanite allies the Hyksos who are a bunch of nomadic desert savages that had already once ravaged Egypt in the last and Jews were like “wait is that word.. fucking who???” and Manetho was like “and then Osariph’s miserable leper slaves and the Hyksos barbarians spent years committing atrocities and desecrating temples and committing massacres and eating baboons and leaking pus on scrolls of Thot and Pharaoh was exiled to Ethiopia but then he came back and Osariph was like actually my real “btw name… is Moses!!! And we worship the one god… Set who is the true god ahahhaa yes it’s Set Fuck Yeah God of Murder and Chaos!!!! Who else could it be other than Set wanting to murder Osiris for good now! Im going around spreading fucking plagues because what other god would do that other than Set The Egyptian Murder God That Hates Egypt who also likes pigs and donkeys! and then Pharaoh returned with an army and defeated the miserable lepers and barbarians in an epic battle where Egypt kicked ass and won so yes Egypt won like Egypt used to win a lot back in the day and then the asshole leper slave barbarian stinky degenerates fucked off to make their shitty desert temple city in over in uh Syria I guess I dunno who gives a shit”
And then Greeks were like “so… you guys uh, both cut off your foreskins huh? That’s wild.”
My general plan: Finish up notating the rules for the algebra of Bayes nets in terms of blackbox rewriting rules for monoidal category string diagrams. Use category theory to find any rules JSW might have missed. Use even more category theory to figure out where any useful universal properties fall out, like his sense of isomorphism. Use yet more category theory to talk about this stuff in full generality, not just for Bayes nets, and probably even get cleaner or stronger proofs.
Some keywords that came up: Morita equivalence, Petri net, virtual double category, formal category theory, Lawvere metric spaces
Violin strings are weird! Instead of oscillating (approximately) harmonically, like guitar strings, they exhibit this kind of motion: a sharp kink propagates back and forth.
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