hypokeimena

[hypokeimena]

NDA stands for Non't Dalk Aboutit

[hypokeimena]

image: screenshot of a google search result. Text reads: AI Overview // In LGBTQ slang, a "gold star biseexual" typically refers to [highlighted text begins] a bisexual person who has only had sexual relationships with the gender they are attracted to, not the other gender they are attracted to. [highlighted text ends] This term is borrowed from [image cuts off]. /end ID

[hypokeimena]

Potentially hot take but one of the reasons we need art and music in schools is that, taught correctly, they are ideal avenues for teaching kids how to do something, kinda suck at it, keep going anyways and improve over time.

And THAT is one of the most valuable skill sets a human being can have. THAT is the skill set that unlocks soooooo many others.

A LOT of people I see with anxiety and depression do not have this skill set. To suck at something is a threat. Proof that they are doomed to suck at it forever. And then, often, that either THEY suck forever or the task must be stupid/useless/pointless (whence we get AI art fans who have decided actually making art is pointless and degrading the labor and skills of others is fine because these are useless skills).

Or you get the freeze- the inability to try things in case you fail. The sudden lancing shame and humiliation or hopelessness. The sense that anything you haven't learned by now you can't learn. Which is so heartbreaking and so untrue.

I just hate it.

"What if I write it and it's bad" "what if I draw it and it's bad" "what if I play it and it sounds bad" DOING IT BAD IS HOW YOU LEARN TO DO IT GOOD! You can't skip the process of leaning and the process is FUN if you let it be what it needs to be!

[hypokeimena]

at the my chemical romance concert loudly complaining that this isn't how you vote on a motion. they didn't even second it.

[hypokeimena]

a mildly irritating internet phenomenon is people who have a fairly thorough understanding of particular aspects of history but seemingly no grasp of historiography or the process through which that history has reached current understandings

like sometimes i see people criticising historical inaccuracies in fiction from 50+ years ago without acknowledging that they're completely in step with historiography at the time. (and i'm talking ideas about social and political structure, not small details of material culture, so things that often go through big shifts in interpretation.) that WAS the mainstream take at the time and it's what the author would have learned from research. just because we now recognise it as "wrong" doesn't mean that author didn't do research or care about the worldview of their characters. they were in fact trying to do that in the context of the information and interpretations available in their time.

a work of historical fiction from the 1960s tells you about two histories: the one it's set in, and the one it was written in. if you only focus on the first one and completely ignore the second, you are failing to understand the book and its context entirely

some of this is also that many people underestimate how recent a lot of historical discovery and historiographical argument is. they see an "incorrect" idea from the 70s and assume it would have been viewed that way in the 70s when in fact major academic pushback was in the 80s on (or whatever)

like, taking my interest areas of medieval celtic studies... this field is YOUNG. a lot of the current historical and literary consensus developed not only within living memory but in the working life of scholars who are still alive/working. some of the biggest arguments and dramas involved colleagues of people i now personally know. a lot of it went down *just* before i was born, but that doesn't make it distant memory at all. everyone writing in the 80s was writing before that happened

all of this is part of why i hold historical fiction from 50 years ago to wildly different standards than historical fiction published today (another element is the significantly greater challenges to accessing research materials from outside academia pre-internet)

[hypokeimena]

image: screenshot of text reading Part-Time Retail Associate Benefits:, followed by bullet point benefit: - Jar of craft salt every payday so you can cook and eat like a Sultan of Salt. /end ID

on craigslist you can find jobs offering the same benefits as the army of ancient rome

[hypokeimena]

People are having a normal one at Uchikoshi wrecking a transphobe on Twitter

[hypokeimena]

need

[hypokeimena]

need whatever he was snorting that night

[hypokeimena]

small potatoes – 4.20

[hypokeimena]

Im the guy who's getting all those pauses pregnant

[hypokeimena]

your brother is basically a classic person to kill

[hypokeimena]

i'm trying to decide whether to do my own pbta game reskin (takes million years) or use rosewood abbey, which is in theory a game about the exact thing i want to be doing. but which in practice makes lots of completely bonkers choices i disagree with and also is kind of dense in a way that i feel disincentivized to work through carefully in case i discover more bonkers choices within it.

in particular i'm really stuck on the thing where. so it's a murder mystery game about monks in a medieval european catholic abbey, and like many games with particular settings the book chooses a new name for the DM/GM that's more thematic. only this one goes with uh. "cantor".

[hypokeimena]

try not to unlearn all your shame in case there's something good stuff in there that you can sexualize

[hypokeimena]

i broadly agree with this addition, and certainly don't know enough about christianizing ireland to comment on that, but i would like to gently push back against specifically the perception of herodotus as some guy who just made stuff up and wrote it down. he gets a lot of this, and my impression of how non-specialists discuss classics makes me think he sort of gets lumped into a loose category of "classical guys who said a lot of wrong stuff" with, like, pliny's (much later!) statements that men and women have different numbers of teeth, or whatever - lazy authors getting something obvious wrong, that should have been easy to check and confirm.

herodotus was a historian from a greek city (halicarnassus) under persian control in anatolia (now turkey); his histories are largely stories about individual polities, their mythological origins, various wars and conflicts they have involved themselves in, and occasional anecdotes describing peculiarities of their lifestyles. he is the oldest greek prose author*; the style of historic writing he produces was a broader literary tradition that had existed before him, but which unfortunately we do not have other examples of. this historical style was largely supplanted by a more rhetorical, strictly-literary style primarily originating with thucydides (an athenian historian writing a generation later).

most of the historical sources that disregard herodotus, call him the father of lies, etc. are athenian, and had their own reasons for finding herodotan historical accounts questionable: stylistic, generic, and nationalist (or "nationalist" - a major component of herodotan history is that it in many ways it was an early expression of panhellenism, which would not have been especially appealing to athenian rhetoricians). athenian playwrights poked fun at the fact that herodotus presented the founding myths and justifications for warfare not only of greek states against each other, but also those of persians and other non-greek people. this is another place where who is writing history and why becomes an extremely important question to ask. yes, herodotus writes down mythological events as if they were historically true, but he does so in part to present non-greek people as having human histories and motivations.**

many of the things herodotus wrote down are untrue, incorrect, or, as you describe, function more to differentiate self from Other (e.g. most of what he says about egypt) than to accurately represent a different people's way of life - but herodotus based his reports on things he had seen personally and oral histories he collected, and a number of his claims have been confirmed through secondary and archaeological scholarship (in fact, a number of his claims are closer to archaeological than historical!***). his writing is definitely an example of historical writing that modern readers don't quite know how to respond to, in part because he uses narrative style to render history comprehensible - but many modern historians do the same thing.

i guess tl;dr, many of the criticisms levied at herodotus by readers are similar to the criticisms the original post here brings up: the category of "history" meant something different when herodotus was writing - and, all that aside, he did the best he could to arrange and present what he considered to be factual or likely-true information, including how different people conceived of themselves and their polis' place in the broader hellenistic world, with the information directly available to him. which is not really just making things up, even if he was sometimes - or often! - wrong.

a mildly irritating internet phenomenon is people who have a fairly thorough understanding of particular aspects of history but seemingly no grasp of historiography or the process through which that history has reached current understandings

like sometimes i see people criticising historical inaccuracies in fiction from 50+ years ago without acknowledging that they're completely in step with historiography at the time. (and i'm talking ideas about social and political structure, not small details of material culture, so things that often go through big shifts in interpretation.) that WAS the mainstream take at the time and it's what the author would have learned from research. just because we now recognise it as "wrong" doesn't mean that author didn't do research or care about the worldview of their characters. they were in fact trying to do that in the context of the information and interpretations available in their time.

a work of historical fiction from the 1960s tells you about two histories: the one it's set in, and the one it was written in. if you only focus on the first one and completely ignore the second, you are failing to understand the book and its context entirely

some of this is also that many people underestimate how recent a lot of historical discovery and historiographical argument is. they see an "incorrect" idea from the 70s and assume it would have been viewed that way in the 70s when in fact major academic pushback was in the 80s on (or whatever)

like, taking my interest areas of medieval celtic studies... this field is YOUNG. a lot of the current historical and literary consensus developed not only within living memory but in the working life of scholars who are still alive/working. some of the biggest arguments and dramas involved colleagues of people i now personally know. a lot of it went down *just* before i was born, but that doesn't make it distant memory at all. everyone writing in the 80s was writing before that happened

all of this is part of why i hold historical fiction from 50 years ago to wildly different standards than historical fiction published today (another element is the significantly greater challenges to accessing research materials from outside academia pre-internet)

[hypokeimena]

wrote a like 5 paragraph defense of herodotus because someone writing about a completely different topic threw herodotus in as a one-off "historians who didn't write good history" drive-by attack do i post it or not