Greatestgargadon - Hello.

At times, I'm depressed by the minuscule percentage of all the literature from Greco-Roman antiquity that's survived to the present day. (For example: of the roughly 120 plays we know Sophocles to have staged at the Dionysia, all of seven have come down to us intact.) At other times, though, I'm amazed that we have any ancient literature at all. Consider: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), one of the finest and most beautiful poems we know of from Archaic Greece, survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, which turned up in Moscow in 1777...in a stable.

and how many petulant letters embedded in well-designed structures?

This is the exact sort of passive-aggressive Rich Old Man Grumpiness I can get behind

if you've ever used the London Underground you might have noticed that it often gets uncomfortably hot. the reason for this is actually that its builders dug too greedily & too deep and as a result the trains are very close to the fires of hell. hope that helps.

the fact that pro-monarchy arguments have degenerated, over the past few centuries, from “the king rules by divine right and is accountable to nobody but god”, to “uhm the royals generate a lot of income from tourism” will never stop being extremely funny to me

Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):

He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.

He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox

He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths

He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace

He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process

He never figured out how to live without enslaving people

He never had a child

He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system

He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion

He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region

Arguably, wikipedia is the most peer reviewed source

The age of machines sneaked up on us. Steadily over the past century, the world has been increasingly shaped to the needs of machines. Farmland is designed for the tractor, millions of miles of road and acres of parking lots designed for cars, plus airports, shipping ports, distribution centers, factories, server farms... Everywhere we find spaces hostile to humans but welcoming to machines. Human beings relegate themselves mostly to apartment buildings, offices, and houses. We spend large amounts of time and energy powering and operating machinery. Meanwhile all over the planet the land, ocean, and sky is dominated by billions of metal and plastic amalgamations animated and set loose by human beings.

Our age of machines is not the classic Terminator apocalypse scenario, where an AI script gets out of control and destroys humanity. These machines are still physically operated by people, who are taking orders from other people. But it's pretty clear that the world is more welcoming to a person in a machine than one walking free on their own feet.

In the first years, herds of over a hundred pigs would sweep through the farms and homesteads of Indian territory in eastern Oklahoma, devastating the land and driving rural people into nearby towns. They quickly armed themselves and formed militias to fight the hogs, but progress was slow. Over the next decade they pushed herds out of open land and into more vegetated areas. The hogs found enough shelter and forage in the forests and shrubland to breed at still alarming rates. Hunting parties started regularly scouting open ground for any pigs daring enough to venture out of cover. Over time these parties became more systematic and economical, figuring out how to anticipate and capture entire herds. Although they still had no usable farmland, the people developed efficient butchering and processing techniques and found safe routes through the landmine fields to trade for Texan crops. Initially devastated by the hog invasion, the east Oklahoma nations eventually fought back and carved out a niche for themselves in the new American order.

The US government, hollowed out, has all but collapsed. The east coast states down to Georgia have mostly held together and still recognize the authority of Washington DC. California, Oregon, and Washington have formed an independent coalition on the west coast. Texas' influence captures the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of Texas by several hundred million people. The Great Lakes states have merged with Canada. And the Great Plains in the middle of the continent are overrun by feral hogs, and war.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Now a definitively answerable question: the egg. That’s how evolution works.

sapphic saturday