Mastodawn

wafflewaffle Sep 11, 2024

Tilde Lowengrimm

I love reading ancient cuneiform tablets. Classics such as "Fuck you, this copper sucks." (Ea Nasir), "I should get more new clothes, my dad's employee gets new clothes twice a month and it's embarrassing.", and of course "The sesame harvest will die — let nobody say I did not warn you!", which is absolutely a set up for "Per my last clay tablet.".

Social media & email may be part of the problem. But if we're still like this when we have to carve our petty bullshit into clay then it's clear that we're the problem. It's us.

kaoudis Sep 8, 2024

@tilde getting the dirt! The really old dirt 😁

adam w.k.Sep 9, 2024

@kaoudis @tilde gives new meaning to the phrase “old as dirt”

Chris is.Sep 8, 2024

@tilde @glyph I am _absolutely_ going to try work “Per my last clay tablet" into my vernacular.

Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸Sep 8, 2024

@offby1 @tilde @glyph

"I hope this clay tablet finds you..."

💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱Sep 10, 2024

@corbden @offby1 @tilde @glyph
Dear {First_name}

Advanced Persistent Teapot Sep 9, 2024

@offby1 @tilde @glyph if you wouldn't be comfortable with it being discussed publicly 3750 years in the future, don't write it on your clay tablets

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial Sep 9, 2024

@http_error_418 @offby1 @tilde @glyph per my last long-term nuclear waste warning message...

Tim Hergert Sep 9, 2024

@gsuberland @http_error_418 @offby1 @tilde @glyph "Callout to Nuclear Semiotics" first thing on Monday morning wasn't on my bingo card today - yet - here we are.

Glyph Sep 9, 2024

@cjust @gsuberland @http_error_418 @offby1 @tilde good morning and welcome to the Fediverse

Tim Hergert Sep 9, 2024

@glyph @gsuberland @http_error_418 @offby1 @tilde

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

Advanced Persistent Teapot Sep 9, 2024

@gsuberland @offby1 @tilde @glyph

To: All Employees
Subject: Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair

Seth Hanford 🐡Sep 9, 2024

@http_error_418 @tilde Ozymandias is both part of my fortune file and my git commit message templates

Glyph Sep 9, 2024

@http_error_418 @gsuberland @offby1 @tilde already there chief

Fingel Sep 8, 2024

@tilde this hit me hard on my trip to Greece. Went to some museums with a local friend. Amazing thing about ancient Greek is the modern people can still read it. Anyway, there were some really old tablets and parchment and my fiend translated them for me. Just the most mundane and boring shit. Joe owes Jane 3 bushels of wheat, etc etc.

Kinda a let down.

Joachim Jablon Sep 14, 2024

@Fingel @tilde I find it nice to have a glimpse of how mundane life was like at that time. Time travel !

@tilde Some papyri aren't bad for this either, e.g. Oxyrhynchus 119:

Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won't take me with you to Alexandria I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you; and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand nor ever greet you again. That is what will happen if you won't take me. Mother said to Archelaus, "It quite upsets him to be left behind (?)." It was good of you to send me presents ... on the 12th, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now![

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Oxyrhynchus_119

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 119 - Wikipedia

BeeCycling has moved Sep 9, 2024

@AdrianRiskin @tilde Gotta wonder if this why GRRM used "Theon" for an entitled, spoiled brat of a character.

cwicseolfor (has moved!)Nov 28, 2024

@beecycling @AdrianRiskin @tilde Entirely possible. But I also wonder if maybe they had a hyperbolic sort of ongoing joke. If so, would that have been considered odd in their time and place? Or was it a fashionable mode of humor?

William Pietri Sep 8, 2024

@tilde That historical consistency is part of why I treasure this Ea Nasir tablet reproduction a friend made me. Four millennia of people being people! I find it comforting. "It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

Tilde Lowengrimm Sep 8, 2024

@williampietri Heck yeah Tarfon! What words to live by.

adam w.k.Sep 9, 2024

@williampietri @tilde that’s awesome. is this 1:1 size reproduction or has it been scaled down? would love to acquire something like this

William Pietri Sep 9, 2024

@sabbatical That is actual size. The British Museum published scans, so you can 3D print one. https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1bclxi2/did_yall_know_you_can_just_download_a_3d_scan_of/

adam w.k.Sep 9, 2024

@williampietri @tilde oh sick! though i'd much rather it not be made of plastic. hah, still... i suppose i could invert, print a mold, and then use it with actual clay!

𝙲:\𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚣𝚎𝚗> █Sep 9, 2024

@sabbatical @williampietri @tilde do it ! and be sure to post pictures !

adam w.k.Sep 9, 2024

@trkzn @williampietri @tilde will do! i’m not a printer myself but i may rope a friend into it.

William Pietri Sep 9, 2024

@sabbatical It's rounder than you might think, so you might have to experiment a bit to get the mold right. But it'll totally be fun to try!

If you're not familiar with the work of Irving Finkel, you might enjoy it as part of the project. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90

How to write cuneiform with Irving Finkel and @preservethings I Curator's Corner S4 Ep9

YouTube

adam w.k.Sep 9, 2024

@williampietri ahh yes, havent seen this video but do know finkel via that talk/doc about their recreation of noah's ark based on cuneiform tablet description and so on. that was super interesting! (so much so that i incorporated elements of the story into a book i'm working on)

guenther Sep 8, 2024

@tilde the problem is the shitty copper and the way he treated the employee, not the complaint

Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Sep 8, 2024

@tilde I'm sure I remember reading about hieroglyphs in the pyramids written by workmen that were banging on about "Young people today do not want to work, they merely drink and sleep all the time..." Erm, 'plus ça change....'

Mike Sep 8, 2024

@bytebro Those damned kids - Hammurabi

Mans R Sep 9, 2024

@bytebro @tilde Let's not forget the Romans.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-61594029

Lewd Roman insult found on stone near Hadrian's Wall

Specialists found its true meaning would have left its recipient "less than amused".

BBC News

Dianora (Diane Bruce)Sep 8, 2024

@tilde "Recentcy Illusion"

Angie Sep 8, 2024

i love a man in cuneiform

gnate Sep 10, 2024

@angiebaby
Big fan of the triangle torso?
@tilde

Asbestos Sep 8, 2024

@angiebaby
Do you really read them?
One of my anthro professors had done some work with some guy who spent decades in the Iraq and there were some pretty funny stuff that they dug up. One was a string of writings ordering wine and on the same tablet there was also an ongoing argument about how this guy was being overcharged by prostitutes at the other guys place.

Misuse Case Sep 8, 2024

@tilde @paninid Someone I know was studying clay tablets from a school for young scribes and “sloppy attempts at the same character multiple times that eventually devolve into doodles or just randomly stabbing the clay multiple times because the writer got bored” was a common pattern.

Misuse Case Sep 8, 2024

@tilde @paninid Also if y’all think meme culture or thirstposting is new, may I introduce you to Classical Japanese poetry? LOL

@MisuseCase @tilde @paninid oh please give us some examples.

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@Dany @tilde @paninid One of the ways Japanese nobility communicated was by sending each other short poems called waka (imagine Tweets but also with a required syllable structure). They also had a bunch of poetic conventions drawn from old poetry anthologies, native mythology, and Chinese classics that they were all expected to know and use.

/1

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@Dany @tilde @paninid So with this particular form and poetic conventions, they’d write love poems, jokes (lots of puns), and commentary on current events.

They would also riff off each other’s poems. Like, a poem that was particularly trendy or considered particularly bad would become a meme template for a while - like that “plums in the icebox” poem we all know.

And yes people would get roasted for bad/inappropriate poems.

/2

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@Dany @tilde @paninid There are a lot of examples in the classical Tale of Genji where people would write parodies of each other’s poems. And since it’s about a romantic hero there is a lot of suggestive or erotic poetry.

There’s also an older lady of the court in the story who writes a poem on her fan like “The grass in this mountain pass is long, for no man comes to mow it…” which is a thirst post.

/3

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@Dany @tilde @paninid And historically there were lots of love poems written between women! The imperial court of Kyoto back in the day was a hotbed of Sapphic romance.

Also yes there were letters and poems that were the equivalent of “U up?”

/end

pandabutter [I have moved]Sep 9, 2024

@MisuseCase The Pillow Book is wild. It's like... analog MySpace, maybe? The paper version of people who just tweet a running commentary of their lives? IIRC she totally takes some digs at Murasaki (been a few years since I read it). Turns out the Heian court had the same general social structure as a modern US middle school.

(Not literally ofc, but like... they were so cliquey. They wore 15+ layers of robes that had to be color-coordinated according to seasonal styles that changed every few weeks...)

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@xelle The cliques are reflected in Genji too, since he’s part of one political faction and his father’s most powerful wife (not the Empress!) is in the opposing faction. And there were all the rivalries between different Imperial consorts and their retinues, between the Empress and the Priestess of Ise, etc.

And yeah, OMG, the *clothes.* The narrative in Genji is fixated a lot on the clothes, haha

pandabutter [I have moved]Sep 9, 2024

@MisuseCase I read somewhere that the modern Japanese name for those outfits (literally "twelve-layer-robe") came about in part because the layering got so absurd that it had to be legislated down to 12 layers max. I'm guessing at least one person died of heatstroke before that.

Misuse Case Sep 9, 2024

@xelle Maybe. But there was also stuff like people wearing more layers than the Empress, occasional attempts to cut down on the court budget, and the fact that you had to be unusually tall for the time to pull off wearing more than 12 robes (so not everyone could do it and it might cause resentment).

I’ve heard of at least one movie set in the Classical Era where they went way over budget just because of the clothes.

@MisuseCase @xelle I only now got to read this entire thread. Thanks for this very amusing peek into this particular part of Japanese culture.

Wayne Werner Sep 9, 2024

@MisuseCase @Dany @tilde @paninid CRANKING HAWGS LIBROLS but in Japanes poetry 🤣

Joachim Jablon Sep 14, 2024

@MisuseCase @Dany @tilde @paninid « That we all know »

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Average Familiarity

xkcd

Bill Seitz Sep 9, 2024

@MisuseCase @Dany @tilde @paninid https://media.tenor.com/JiuAzd3XvMwAAAAM/shaka-star-trek.gif

🪬🍄🌈🎮💻🚲🥓🎃💀🏴🛻♓🧿Sep 8, 2024

@tilde there it goes, my last shred of respect for humanity...

Emily 🏳️‍⚧️🐧🎲🏳️‍⚧️Sep 8, 2024

@tilde don't forget the classic: "Bribery and corruption are common, children no longer obey their parents, and everyone wants to write a book."

Joanna Holman Sep 8, 2024

@tilde @futzle there’s a great book by Tom Standage called Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years which is about how the ancient world often used very social media like communication methods using analog tools

Tilde Lowengrimm Sep 8, 2024

@joannaholman @futzle My experience of this is mostly the Talmud, which one thousand percent reads like Reddit or Twitter.

Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸Sep 8, 2024

@tilde "This meeting could have been a clay tablet."

MasterMischief Sep 9, 2024

@corbden @tilde "We've been trying to reach you about your chariot's extended warranty."

2xfo Sep 9, 2024

@MasterMischief @corbden @tilde
"I hope this clay tablet finds you well..."

MasterMischief Sep 9, 2024

@corbden @tilde

"We would like to talk to you about an exciting opportunity to invest in a new technology of the future called...currency."

Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸Sep 9, 2024

@MasterMischief @tilde https://open.spotify.com/track/1rm3aoImJKt5gW1pet7Vat?si=DmJ5P1AxRIaFIKlQmUItew

Currency

Song · The Black Angels · 2017

Spotify

@tilde @MasterMischief @corbden it’s just a piece of paper it will never catch on