Lothar The Barbarian

Am barbarian, love grog, hate royalty, simple as 34 yo

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[apas-95]

the year was Two Thousand and twenty-four. I took a puff of my Electronic-Cigarette, inhaling the vapours. my mobile terminal buzzed in my pocket, a flat slab of microchips and glossy touchscreen. I ignored it....... probably another Electronic-Mail

[blumineck]

I’ve got a lot of Thoughts(tm) about The Odyssey at the moment, but damnit Blum I’m an archer, not a film critic, so here’s something in my lane!

[lotharbarbarian]

I love this bit but he also leaves out the bit about the axes

Ancient greek (this is Mycenaean greek mind you, not classical) had axes made of cast bronze meaning it was cheaper and easier to make the like this than the axe heads youre used to

This is what odysseus had to fire the arrow through after stringing it

THROUGH TEN OF THESE

arrows wobble in flight, getting one to fly that straight isnt just a matter of accuracy, its strength, the arrow would have to be moving FAST for the wobble to not smack one of the heads even with perfect accuracy, odysseus was JACKED

[alexseanchai]

he's not leaving out shit, he's done a video on the axes before:

Post by @blumineck · 1 video

💬 40  🔁 3052  ❤️ 6843 · Looks like I won’t be marrying Penelope… Hopefully the upcoming film will have enough budget for the other 11 axes!

[lotharbarbarian]

Oh shit i stand corrected

[blumineck]

I’ve got a lot of Thoughts(tm) about The Odyssey at the moment, but damnit Blum I’m an archer, not a film critic, so here’s something in my lane!

[lotharbarbarian]

I love this bit but he also leaves out the bit about the axes

Ancient greek (this is Mycenaean greek mind you, not classical) had axes made of cast bronze meaning it was cheaper and easier to make the like this than the axe heads youre used to

This is what odysseus had to fire the arrow through after stringing it

THROUGH TEN OF THESE

arrows wobble in flight, getting one to fly that straight isnt just a matter of accuracy, its strength, the arrow would have to be moving FAST for the wobble to not smack one of the heads even with perfect accuracy, odysseus was JACKED

[sapphic-machine]

This is like lingerie for electronics

[ltsaradharkness]

Um I can get the purple shell for my steamdeck. Glorious.

[lotharbarbarian]

Send me the link you coward

[longscarydream]

lifehack: when you see a Take One candy bowl in a restaurant, wait until noones looking and shovel candy into your pockets. god may judge you but his sins outnumber your own

[zerofarad]

“God may judge you but his sins outnumber your own.” We really need to start collecting and sourcing these Potent Quotables.

[citrusgroves]

I’ve been doing this for years

It’s all on a google doc of mine (x)

[swoopingsilver]

“Kill me. Kill me and live with the memory. Then tell the stars that you won.” -fucking Warrior Cats

[aberrantemotion]

We live in a socie-

[lorkhansdick]

Wait wait you forgot the mushroom post “you can’t kill me in a way that matters” +the following uhhhh 1 sec

[lorkhansdick]

I find the mushroom post :)

[lorkhansdick]

sorry

sorry

[lorkhansdick]

Can we go ahead and add “one day you’ll decompose, and I’ll be there to watch it happen” to the list please

[vintageandroid]

i made a post like this before but I can't find it now. so. I'll just redo it.

What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?

It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.

My first news thing I remember is the OJ Simpson trial. I vaguely remember watching the news with my grandparents before that, but that's the first story I remember, in part because my second grade teacher had us go play so she could watch the verdict 😂

[absolutelynotclassicusernam-blog]

I remember walking down the street and seeing a sign protesting George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, so I think that.

[pommedepersephone]

1992 Los Angeles riots. My family was living in LA, we were actually just preparing to move so it's this weird mess of boxes and burning and my parents being outraged (not surprised) at the outcome of the trial. I feel like that being the first news story I can remember is very on brand since it was my parents who taught me how to protest.

[kayleefansposts]

Iran hostage crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

Mostly because it was part of the news, every night, for 14 months (444 days). And I remember when it ended, and they got to go home.

[vaspider]

I remember Diana & Charles getting married, bc I remember how big the train on her wedding dress was. I would have been... 3 or 4.

[cleolinda]

I vaguely remember the Iran-Contra scandal being on TV a lot when I was about 7-8, and it was like, I'm pretty sure I don't have to know about this yet. But somehow I kinda knew about it anyway.

[rosslynpaladin]

Falling Berlin Wall. The news was part of something passing over my head as the adults talked.

[lotharbarbarian]

Rigged question; we didnt watch news when i was a wee lad so the first thing i remember is 9/11

But like i already had opinions and shit at that point, for example like a year or two earlier my school had a mock election (bush or gore) to teach us about political system and i specifically refused to participate because i knew i didnt know anything about the candidates and couldnt in good conscious “just pick one” like the teachers kept telling me to do

[fibro-memes]

[lotharbarbarian]

Me when my bak hurts

[beardedmrbean]

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.

[lotharbarbarian]

when I was a kid they had restrictions on what books you could read, so I was too advanced to read the star wars books and not advanced enough to read lord of the rings, so I couldn't check them out from the library

so I stole them

[briarwulf]

I laminated a paper towel

[sookybrat-deactivated20221020]

why does this have 31 thousand notes

[glitterorgy]

You made it useless but also prevented it from the end it was predestined for.

[heckyeah-horseshoecrabs]

But wait this is actually freaking me out though, it raises so many questions about the otherwise incomprehensible meaning of life as a collective whole versus personal sustenance and longevity

Imagine if one day you were given a choice: Become immortal and indestructible for eternity, unable to be harmed by anything ever again, and get to live forever.

However, in order to achieve that you must give up whatever your purpose in life is. Whatever it is that you were always meant to do, what you were supposed to contribute to the overall scheme and future of the life of the universe, your purpose… the whole reason you were even created, even born in the first place. You must give that up. You don’t know what that is. You’ll never know; But, regardless, you say yes.

Perhaps you assume you wouldn’t have made any sort of significant difference anyway. That butterfly effect theory or whatever they call it? Nah, you call bullshit. It doesn’t matter - you don’t matter, at least not to anything outside of your immediate connections - and it’ll all be fine, and you’ll just live forever with minimal (or maybe even no) consequences.

So, yay! You’re now immortal. You’ll never die or get hurt ever again. Wee!

But then, centuries and centuries later (not to mention that by this point you’ve gone through horrible heartbreak and misery and despair because every loved one you ever had, every friend you ever made, ever person you barely got to know, has passed away, died as you lived on long without them, helpless to do anything for them as you watched them perish, unable to ever go with them or ever see them again. But I digress), now, you learn you actually were important in the grand scheme of things. You were supposed to be a key factor in the world’s survival, long ago; but, because of the choice you made (immortality over individual purpose), you were never given the knowledge or awareness or resources or ability to save the world that you were always supposed to obtain, before you unknowingly made the wrongest choice to ever wrong.

Needless to say, you’ve fucked up big time.

The entire universe as we know it is destroyed soon after this horrifying revelation. It implodes, collapses in on itself, essentially forming a massive black hole or something. Stars, nebulae, galaxies, solar systems and planets, worlds and worlds of living people and things, and light-years of time and space and life, all sucked up into absolute, indefinite nothingness.

But you remain.

Just you. Floating amongst, spiraling around, rocketing through, suspended in… nothing. With a feeling of such unbelievable loneliness that your feeble brain can hardly perceive, can’t possibly hope to comprehend. Not only are you the only living thing left, you don’t even have one inanimate object to keep you company. You have literally. Nothing. And you are literally nowhere. I mean, technically, you are now the universe - if it would bring you petty comfort to think about it that way. You. Only you. With nothing, no one, nowhere. Forever. And ever. And ever.

All because you thought you didn’t matter. That you had no real, meaningful purpose. That you could never possibly make a difference.

But you did. And now look what you’ve gotten yourself into, you silly nugget. You’re gonna be pretty bored and lonely for that eternity, huh?

Or maybe it was out of selfishness. Maybe this wasn’t because you felt useless, but because you simply only cared about prolonging your own life and nothing else. Hm.

The moral here? Be selfless, and always know and remember that you matter.

Or else, one day, you might destroy the universe. And be left to suffer, and be tortured horribly and endlessly by the void of nothingness that has consumed you. With no way to escape. Ever.

Other moral because I got sidetracked from my initial point - all things considered, would you choose longevity over purpose? Immortality over meaning? 

OR, IDK, MAYBE SOME IDIOT JUST LAMINATED A STUPID PIECE OF PAPER TOWEL FOR NO GOOD REASON

AND MAYBE I SHOULDNT BE LOOKING FOR THE ANSWERS TO THE MEANING OF OUR SHORT, FRAGILE LIVES IN

A LAMINATED

PAPER

T OW E L

IDK MAN,

I D K

[bluejinxx]

Write. A. Book.

[heckyeah-horseshoecrabs]

What if I did write a book

and the pages of that book

were made out of

laminated

paper towels

[roman-rory-fallen-angel]

I WASNT GONNA REBLOG UNTIL THAT LAST COMMENT

[shorthistorian]

Odysseus: Our age of bronze is collapsing.

Me:

[lotharbarbarian]

The Late Bronze Age Collapse was possibly a direct consequence of the events in the Iliad-Odyssey! For a long time (far too long IMHBUCO) historians believed the whole thing was entirely bullshit, but it turned out a while back that Troy (called Ilium by the Greeks at the time, hence "Iliad" or "The Song of Ilium") was in fact a very real place! This city in Anatolia (modern turkey) was very much a rival civilization of Greece, and shows right around the beginning of the late bronze age collapse total destruction in ways that match the description in the Iliad. First off I want to preface this by saying that "cause" here is like the guy flicking a cigarette "caused" your house to burn down, the fact that your house was filled with gasoline soaked rags and fireworks are what actually did all the damage. Lots of things "caused" the bronze age collapse, but I believe that this was the triggering incident. So here's the rundown: During much of the bronze age two things were essential, copper and tin, these were how bronze was made obv. Copper was relatively abundant, however tin was hard to get, there were a handful of places which tin was extracted from in the eastern mediterranean (where the seats of power were during the bronze age, like greece, crete, and egypt) which made it a necessity to buy tin from remote sources, the fabled "tin land" or "tin islands" which everyone at the time knew about and knew where they were so obviously they had no reason to write it down which meant for some solid 3000 years no one knew where the hell this "tin land" was. until someone did some chemical analysis on the bronze artifacts recovered and traced the isotopes and makeup to a series of tin deposits in europe, with the most prominent one coming from Cornwall in the united bloody kingdom of all places. That's right the british isles were the number one place to get tin back when doing so would have taken years to get to and from.

as you can see from this lovely map the trade route probably went from Britain, through modern day France, Italy, Sicily, and Greece before it was disseminated through the rest of the bronze age kingdoms. but check that out, Greece was probably the number one buyer and seller of tin in this trade network. They were a sea faring people, many islands among them meant that they had more boats and sailing experience than almost anyone. This would have made them ideal as the merchants who did most of the trading for tin along the tin roads. NOW around this time a series of things happened, notably a volcano called Hekla erupted, this likely caused an 18 year cooling period and would have made growing crops, even in the Mediterranean harder, leading to famine, possibly also causing droughts in Egypt. This of course might have all been survivable had it not been for 2 points. The first point is that almost every major kingdom in the bronze age had mountains, pastures, and remote areas filled with people that the rulers of those kingdoms didn't give one red shit about. Abandoned and treated like garbage these mountain folks very much did not like the people in the low lands. Second, and this is the triggering event here, EVERY SINGLE SHIP AND WORKING AGE MAN IN GREECE WAS SUDDENLY DIVERTED TO FIGHT A TEN YEAR LONG WAR. While this siege was happening Greece probably either stopped or slowed down it's tin trade, a trade which had formed a road and network which was nearly a thousand years old at this point, MANY people depended on that tin trade and it was suddenly disrupted. we never hear about the collapse of those people because they probably didn't build sick temples and have clay pots with naked men wrestling, but there were there and they were people and their lives mattered to them as much as yours does to you. So what do you do when you find yourself the last leg of a trade network with so much tin and no one to sell to? you've traded away crops and valuables for this tin which you were going to sell to the Greeks who seem to have been missing for ten years. Your world is now over, the other legs on the trade network fell apart 3-4-5 years ago. There's only you, your starving family, and a handful of fishing boats. My friend you pack up your family, and you sail to where you know there's food and resources, you sail for Greece. When you arrive you find a series of islands and a peninsula with almost no combat capable men and lots of free (read not nailed down) shit, so you take it, you take ALL OF IT

The mountain folk, people from northern Greece and wide open pastures and basically anyone who didn't like the status quo saw their own chance and attacked at the same time, the net result was a refugee crisis, likely spurred on by people like Odysseys. Something they usually leave out in the movies is that Odysseys raided coastal cities for supplies, cities that had nothing to do with the war. This implies it was such a normal thing to do that he (if he really existed) was almost certainly not the only one doing it during this ten year long war. The refugee crisis would have spread from there, with Greeks landing in Anatolia trying to get help and in desperation consuming everything. The people from the sea who had attacked Greece in the first place would have landed there next, with their hodge podge of weapons and armor that they've been pilfering along the way. Every civilization they landed on would have already been weakened by the years of famine, the lack of proper tools from the decade without good tin trade, and the attack from all sides at their own hill an pasture tribes joined in the fight. They then would become a new wave of refugees to land on the shores of the next place. By the time the waves of sea peoples hit Egypt they had heard what was happening from messengers and prepared. Hiring tribes of mercenaries to defend their borders. They were one of the few civilizations that survived the collapse, though they were severely weakened. Near the end of the collapse, when the raids were becoming less common and things were settling down, they decided that they didn't need to pay some of those mercenary tribes, and a group of them likely split off and went off into the east. Where they met a tribe of people who belonged to a group called the canaanites. Where some mingling happened with one of those tribes some gods were exchanged who would eventually be consolidated into a single god (thanks to some influence from the midians) and would write down a lot of nasty shit about egypt because they got stiffed on a paycheck

so yes Exodus is possibly a direct result of The Iliad. please note that most of what I've typed here is still under my own research and might be mistaken or outdated, research is hard now that demons pollute everything in human knowledge, for example the dorian invasion of greece is hotly debunked racist bullshit that google's AI gladly vomits up, but dorians exist and writing styles changed, and there WAS an invasion and attack by SOMEBODY which just don't know who exactly. Most of the invasions could have been low movement-high energy, like a wave traveling though water, the water isn't really moving all the much, it's displaced and then wiggles back and forth. Every wave of refugees invading might have stopped once they took someone elses land, and those displaced peoples went off to do the same to someone else, hence the wildly changing and varied descriptions of armor, clothes, and hats. also due to the extreme amount of historical influence of Christianity it is very hard to actually get the full origins of the Israelites, however genetic and archeological evidence shows that they were almost certainly a tribe of canaanites and that someone in egypt left and went east towards them, alot of this is speculation. but in history this old and poorly documented, very little isn't speculation.

[pedroam-bang]

Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)

[lotharbarbarian]

Binface challenging farage

[embroiderycrafts]

Luteal rage stitching by wasraelx on reddit.

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[copperbadge]

I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.

[lotharbarbarian]

I have spent my entire life trying to explain to people that i am not learning stuff in order to make money, i am learning stuff because it is the best thing ever and i love it

[7777777awawawa7777777]

sorry everyone we won’t be seeing any men today they’ve all been bricked into their enclosure

[m1dori-eyes]

The Masc of Amontillado

[unpossiblycromulent]

@copperbadge

[copperbadge]

I honestly expected to see "What trying to tell a man anything is like" under the image and then "The Masc of Amontillado" took me out at the knees.

[lotharbarbarian]

For the love of god @copperbadge

[reddherring777]

I think its funny that people used to demonize Wikipedia for being managed and updated by people. Which is bad for information, something famously managed and updated by people.

[rodserlingofficial]

"Who better to be the shepherds of knowledge than thousands of people just like you and me?"

[hustlerose]

[hustlerose]

[hustlerose]

i have been informed by literally every french speaker on earth that “une pipe” is slang for blowjob

[lotharbarbarian]

Dude french speakers think everything is sexual innuendo you should have seen the look on this girls face when i told her (using google translate) that i was reading a book on the no hair theorem, apparently “black holes have no hair” means something else in French