37 replies
6d4h
My favorite play is the Herakles of Euripides, which ends on these lines:
The man who would prefer great wealth or strength
more than love, more than friends
is diseased of soul17 replies
6d5h
There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia
Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.
13 replies
6d4h
There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a warehouse).
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
7 replies
6d4h
All that survives is The Love Boat, and future humans will fashion their entire understanding of ancient American history, culture, and religion around this show.
2 replies
6d4h
That honestly doesn’t sound too bad.
1 replies
6d3h
Could be Jersey Shore...
0 replies
6d3h
At least Jersey Shore is anthropological in nature
2 replies
6d2h
There is a satirical (paper) RPG called "Diana: Warrior Princess" that takes its inspiration from this idea. The idea is it is a representation of the idea of 20th century culture as viewed from a millennium into the future, focusing on Princess Di who is depicted as a great leader who fights against Hitler and has advisors like Charles Darwin. It's mocking how "historical fiction" often takes great liberties with fact and mixes people who never lived at the same time together.
0 replies
5d3h
I am reminded of the Perry Bible Fellowship strip "Now Showing".
0 replies
6d1h
Upon seeing "Warrior Princess" I had first been expecting they'd given DFS an ambiguous (sororal or sapphistical?) companion:
In short, when I can tell you how I break the laws of gravity,
And why my togs expose my intermammary concavity,
And why my comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily
To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of Omphale),
And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's version,
And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon,
And why this Grecian scenery looks more like the Antipodes,
You'll say I'm twice the heroine of any in Euripides!
0 replies
6d3h
"On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as the Personification of Female Desire"
2 replies
6d1h
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first did something. But a complete record of everything that ever happened? I don't think so.
Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades.
Actually, I watch TV and movies done now that seem horribly dated.
1 replies
5d23h
I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."
0 replies
5d22h
I imagine our grandchildren will think of covid the way we think of the spanish flu - as a minor historical footnote.
0 replies
5d18h
We lost the entirety of MySpace, which was a significant cultural moment.
I know people who have almost zero photos of their entire childhoods because they were all digital and stored on computers/online and have been lost to the ether.
0 replies
5d4h
There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over . . .
Michael Bond deftly develops this problem in Chapter 5, "Paddington and 'The Old Master'", of the masterpiece "A Bear Called Paddington." [0] Even a read of the linked synopsis brings to light the combinatorial Ship of Theseus nature of all human-interpretation. The pathos brings tears to my eyes: Paddington's failure to recreate a present scrambled by a search for the past is victorious-by-proxy, despite the judges viewing it upside down--just as an artist might draw. [1]
0. https://paddingtonbear.fandom.com/wiki/Paddington_and_%22The...
1. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html
0 replies
5d15h
They didn't have to, several of the lines matched existing fragments.
Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
0 replies
6d4h
My understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the papyrus.
I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted, unreadable letters being guessed and so on.
So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and intuition than a database search.
0 replies
6d4h
I just hope there are good archival structures in place in society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they contain a list of their works (for example).
I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors / playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a few in interesting looking hills.
7 replies
6d5h
Euripides trousers, Umendades trousors.
5 replies
6d4h
Eumenides trousers?
4 replies
6d3h
Umendades trousors.
3 replies
6d3h
Essplain? Am lost.
2 replies
6d2h
Say it out loud - it's a play on words. "You rip a dese trousers, you mend a dese trousers"
1 replies
6d2h
'Tis true, but it's also true that Eumenides is an actual Greek deity (and The Eumenides is a play) that sounds the same (at least when pronounced by this monolingual English speaker.)
So I feel "Eumenides trousers!" is a slightly better variant of the joke.
0 replies
6d
Yeah, I thought that was a direction too. Slightly over thinking it.
0 replies
5d12h
euripedes nuts
4 replies
6d5h
As a Classics major in college and with continuing love for that decaying old grande dame of a discipline, this is pretty cool and I hope the identification holds up to scrutiny (because it would be a big deal).
Then there’s this:
The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.
Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.
I MET A TRAVELER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND…
2 replies
6d3h
"Sssh, love, go back to bed." ~Mary
0 replies
5d23h
Enough opium Percy, time for bed
0 replies
6d
This is how I find out they were married. Huh.
0 replies
6d3h
Obviously not decaying, but alive and well
4 replies
6d4h
I named my home server (that I mostly run machine learning experiments on) euripides, because I found a quote by him very insightful: “Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
2 replies
5d13h
I named my Linux box sisyphus because I had so many problems installing distros other than Mint that I became convinced I’d never succeed.
And then kde neon Just Worked.
1 replies
5d9h
haha, love it.
although I have to say, Linux installations are a walk in the park these days ;)
0 replies
4d19h
Yeah, it’s an old Dell desktop box from 2015, what can I say.
0 replies
5d8h
I should name a server bureaucracy because it's the one word I haven't learned how to spell yet.
3 replies
6d4h
Euripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!
0 replies
5d23h
Euripedes fragments or Eumenides fragments!
0 replies
6d3h
Best comment on HN. As true in Euripedes' time as it is in ours.
0 replies
6d4h
it's a shame cartalk isn't still around. imagine how much fun they would have had with cybertruck
2 replies
6d2h
It's really a miracle that we have as much as we do from antiquity, but I'm still excited whenever something new comes uip.
1 replies
5d15h
It always makes me a bit sad though
So much is still lost and we rely on such tiny fragments or worse hearsay by other authors rehashing their ideas
0 replies
5d13h
Especially notes of Aristotle’s oral ramblings about others’ works, when we know those are wildly casual about accuracy when we can actually compare them to pieces of text.
2 replies
6d4h
Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine
I always love to hear about a school or organization that says "Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!"
1 replies
6d
It used to be distributed as a CD to university libraries, but these CDs were supposed to be surrendered when the online version came out. I have heard that at least one of these copies (perhaps “out of date” in terms of “new” texts added since the web version debut) exists on some sort of distributed distribution network.
0 replies
5d13h
TLG is pretty easy to get hold of. You also want Diogenes, an app that allows you to use that database. It’s very useful if you study Latin or Greek, even as a hobby.
1 replies
6d1h
Re: lost classics, I hope we can recover an intact work by Heraclitus from those burnt scrolls in Herculaneum, that would make me lose my shit.
0 replies
5d6h
It would be so insanely cool.
Such a strange situation too - they're right there in front of us, but we can't have them, and it almost feels too good to be true that we might be able to read them one day.
0 replies
5d18h
I only regret that several of my old Classics masters are no longer around to celebrate this.
0 replies
6d
How did they manage to squeeze 98 lines on 10.5 square inches? That's less than 68cm². For 5mm×5mm characters that area can fit 272 characters, so not even 3 characters per line.
0 replies
6d2h
Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon [1]
It's set after Sicily defeats Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Two unemployed potters decide to stage two plays by Euripides using the Athenian prisoners kept in the infamous quarry.
Really enjoyable tragi-comedy.
"Money can't buy you love but it lets you rent it by the hour" – Max Headroom (from memory)
I was born after Max Headroom aired, but for those of you that saw it while it aired, how was it?
Absolutely amazing. American TV was a desolate landscape with occasional stuff so good you couldn’t believe the oasis wasn’t a mirage. Max Headroom was in that category. And of course it didn’t start in the States.
Dunno if it would hold up today though
Personally, I don't think it has to hold up.
At least not necessarily in the way that this is generally meant, i.e., a timeless classic that more or less transcends the historical context that produced it and, probably most importantly, does not require the audience to know or grasp that historical context to appreciate it (even if understanding the context would add to the appreciation.)
However that doesn't mean it can be no less entertaining and interesting, just that it probably requires some context. This isn't an uncommon issue for popular media which, by definition, is a product of and for its time. Humor/comedy is especially notable for this. In my experience, very little comedy is truly timeless.
However, relevance can of course resurge (and I would make a distinction from more cyclical trends as is seen in fashion, for example.)
And thus I'd say Max Headroom was very much a product of its time and, aside from "ha-ha-old-tech!", you'd most likely need to have at least some knowledge of the social and political landscapes of the time to understand what and who it was satirizing.
But also, sometimes—often?—it's just capitalizing on the cultural moment.
This depends almost entirely on the type of comedy. Things like reference, satire, or shock are obviously dependent on the specific context of time in which they were made and of course become less meaningful as times change.
But comedy is not inherently less "timeless" than any other art. Who's on First is genuinely still funny almost a century later.
The little bits of surviving ancient comedy may seem trite but being simple does not make the jokes less "timeless".
Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.
That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!
One of my favourite lines is from Three men in a Boat: "George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physician way of putting things".
I dunno. The specific mechanism of a reporter uncovering some bad actions and spreading the word on TV, may not hold up so well.
Corporation creates advertisements with, uh, bad side effects, and their own employee calls them out on it. That seems, pretty modern.
A good chunk of it is horribly dated. but some parts seemed really fresh. I think I rewatched ~ 4 years ago.
What other stuff comes to mind?
Twin Peaks
It is happening again.
That gum you like is coming back in style.
Your description of American TV certainly holds up today.
not really, culturally the 70's was more desolate where the 80's was a rebirth.
The 80s spawned Cheers, LA Law, Hill Street Blues, Dynasty, Dallas, The Cosby Show, Murphy Brown, The Golden Girls, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, The Facts of Life, St. Elsewhere. I didn't watch all of them, but you can't sneer at so many shows with such tremendous production values, appeal, and staying power. A number of the actors have continued to be popular up to the present day.
and that's not even including my personal favorite, ALF. You want edgy? try making a show today with a star who eats cats
https://fanfest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Alf-Gif.gif
https://c.tenor.com/ELf9Bd2Ho94AAAAC/alf-cat-sandwich.gif
https://media3.giphy.com/media/PS89uO8ZFOXE4/giphy.gif
I enjoyed it a lot, though was a kid. It made a statement similar to the movie Network (1976), that I somewhat understood at a young age—they’ll do anything for ratings.
Add to this Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and you'll have a great movie night.
Great! It was inventive and dystopian. Many of the stories were lifted from classic sci-fi concepts.
Of course, it hasn't held up. The subtitle was "20 minutes into the future" so it wasn't designed to be timeless a la Star Trek or Star Wars.
Also, the trajectory of Max Headroom was great: started off as "the first digital talking head for commercials, i.e. not human _at all_, did commercials for Coke IIRC, music videos (Art of Noise), had a late night talk show, a TV series.
I still have a Max Headroom poster hanging in my fl-fl-flat.
Errr, I hate to be the person that breaks this to you but ....
Fake Digital Head !!
The tried but it was before CGI was really up to it so they fell back on a real actor, latex head covering, dropping frames in post production and other tricks.
It was Close (To the Edit) for it's time though . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=167KTppW8Yw
It taught a young me that advertisements can make your head explode, a lesson I carry to this day.
BLIPVERT!! That word came to me a couple days ago. Now I have made the connection.
https://youtu.be/PJP-Ilw_xaY?si=THvq0HE-5GisP7FG
That sound reminds me of the howl of a billion demons. Lovecraftian or Goetian or a forest full of screaming bugs or whatever.
Fun fact: the creators of Max Headroom were the creators behind the original 1993 Super Mario Bros movie with Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo.
The making of that film is a bit crazy. Part of the issue was, Disney bought the distribution rights shortly before filming was supposed to start, and demanded all these rewrites. Probably also demanded that the stripper scenes be cut. :P
Hoskins claimed that he and Leguizamo started drinking every day before, and between, takes.
Very fun facts :D
It was wild. It was literally like nothing else. A breath of fresh air.
I'm surprised there's no Max Headroom VTuber right now...
Excellent. I looked forward to it and enjoyed it.
The movie came first, “20 minutes into the future.” It’s on YouTube and very good, if you like art films.
I found it an absolute gem. Definitely a product of its time, but very enjoyable world and characters.
Wow, some things never change!
If you are a student of history, you realize that human nature has always been a constant.
We should teach kids in K-12 "Most people are crap, but some of the crap people did amazing things and there were also a few non-crap people out there, of varying impact."
And that you should strive to be a non-crap person because it is a valuable trait.
I guess allmost everyone tries that - it is just that our definition of "crap people" is quite different.
They don’t really. People try and fit in publicly so that they’re seen to be good by their group, whereas fitting in to any group at any level in any age requires accepting some things that you know are bad and when things aren’t visible people commonly indulge in a lot of bad that even their group would publicly object to often with the moral license they feel they’ve earned from the performative good they do in public. Being a truly good person by our own standards is hard to the point of almost being impossible.
"Being a truly good person by our own standards is hard to the point of almost being impossible."
My favorite trope, the snark knight.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSnarkKnight
Still, I don't think it is impossible. It just depends on the standards one sets. Some seem to be doing fine, being assholes. But I also suffer from setting my standards impossible high. But I cannot really change them without giving up myself.
I agree. I said "almost impossible."
This isn't snark, or self-righteousness. This view on humanity is merely a realization most religions and cultures have come to understand across human history.
Even if their standards are incredibly low I wager they are failing at them all the time, and if they don't admit it then they are lying to save face, lying to themselves, and making excuses.
These statements are not in disagreement.
> requires accepting some things that you know are badLight is the head that accepts one's own doing as "bad." Moreoften I think people face inner resistance stemming from the cognitive dissonance between the unknowable "own standards" and the very legible external standards.[1, 2]
0. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/548471-people-who-live-in-s...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
Crap people with initiative have done more good for the world that the non-crap people ever will.
Let's remember that at least half of what is to be contemplated lies in those who are judging what they see.
I wouldn't be that quick to misjudge individuals by the prisme of shallow knowledge provided by history at whole societies scale.
One of the biggest reasons I love Shakespeare (and other older literature) is that it really highlights how human nature hasn't changed. The good and bad of mankind, as well as the struggles we face, are largely the same as they were centuries ago. It really makes me feel a kinship with these people who died long before I was born, to know that they had to face the same kind of insecurities and challenges I do today.