worldbuilding ⁽²⁴⁾

conspiracies of emotional laziness in feeling empowerless The thing about words like ideology or even narrative now, is the sense that some forces control us through them. For some among us, when a light goes off in someone’s head, when a truth/story is revealed/explained, they reject the world. But still they seek to world this feeling. So they find companions who enjoy meeting and…

So I return decades later to the same room. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished,…

Originally posted on substack.com 2023-09-30. Socius based studies go off the rails when they forget they were given the go ahead by their betters, or, by peeps deciding to better their betters. I’ll use socius to abstract away from the form/usage "society", as such it refers to methods where ‘structures’ are used to explain or change the world (control it perhaps),…

I was watching the youtube channel Religion for Breakfast on more recent scholarship on what the eucharist was, or represented, when remembering the last supper. The TL;DR or didn't-watch for this is that shared meals were a very common activity, which in the Greco-Roman world might be called a deipnon in the Hellenised eastern Mediterranean (at about 24 minutes in the…

Attic red-figured Pinax. Diameter: 19.5 cm Height: 1.9 cm. Attributed to Epiktetos by signature. Made in Athens about 520-510 BC; from Vulci, Etruria. Currently, London, The British Museum via https://www.flickr.com/photos/69716881@N02/7691738970/in/photostream/ Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022, ISBN 9780691240534) In large measure the book is composed…

I have just been reminded that Sargon was the first known ruler of the known world. This happened before empires were a thing. It was at a time when kingdoms were not yet available to be captured and incorporated. Imperialists had to make do with cities. This was in a post about Sargon's daughter Enheduanna by Historical Snapshots. Enheduanna being…