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Random Thought Thread


InfestedKerrigan

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8 hours ago, Raindog said:

My wife witnessed a man buying twelve heads of kale. When the sale was complete, he exclaimed, “We are saved!”

No one family can eat that much kale before it goes bad and I am pretty sure kale won’t save you from the Coronavirus.

You'd be amazed how many heads you can consume after using industrial equipment to pulverize them to a pulp.  

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The Greeks called everyone who wasn’t Greek a “barbarian,” and the Athenians kicked it up a notch and called other Greek tribes and city-states “barbarians” if they weren’t sufficiently Athenian-like (such as Epirotes, Eleans, and Macedonians).

Once Rome rose to primacy, they started calling everyone who wasn’t Roman or Greek a “barbarian.” And after Augustus, it wasn’t uncommon to find Romans referring to even the Greeks, Egyptians, and Carthaginians (who at this point had ruling classes of Greco-Roman descent) as “barbarians.” 

Of course, all of these “barbarian” cultures all had their own derogatory words for the Greeks and Romans. They also had their own special terms for their own group.

Although many modern day nincompoops who like to dismiss all of Europe as one homogeneous blob of generic interchangeable “white people,” the idea that everyone in Europe belongs to one singular “race” or “culture” is an extremely new idea. Eighty years ago, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, and their contemporaries would have been aghast at the idea that Germans, Britons, French, etc. were all part of one “race.” Thirty years ago, Tatcher, Gorbachev, Franco, etc., would certainly been shocked to learn they were all part of the same “culture.”

Heck, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkle have spent the better part of the last decade as figureheads for an extremely bitter argument over the idea of their being a single European culture!

 

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2 hours ago, Ish said:

Heck, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkle have spent the better part of the last decade as figureheads for an extremely bitter argument over the idea of their being a single European culture!

According to my mum (ex-pat Brit), the UK isn't even a part of Europe geographically. It's its own continent.

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7 minutes ago, andy said:

According to my mum (ex-pat Brit), the UK isn't even a part of Europe geographically. It's its own continent.

Pretty sure it's part of the Eurasian tectonic plate. But truth is subjective these days.  And I'm not a geologist. And continental drift from riding plates isn't the same as saying plates and continents are synonymous.

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“Continent” is a bit of a fuzzy word, with even geologists and geographers arguing about exactly what it means. Europe and Asia are, conventionally, considered to be separate continents despite being one continuous landmass... Madagascar is generally counted as part of Africa and New Zealand is generally counted as being part of the Australian continent, but both are actually on separate tectonic plates.

Colloquially, the people of the British archipelago have always thought of “the Continent” as a separate and distinct grouping apart from themselves. An Irishman, a Cornishman, an Englishman, and a Scot might all see the others as different than them... But the blokes on that side of the channel were even more different. Me against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the guys in the next village; and so forth...

Napoleon Bonaparte is often (apocryphally) quoted as saying “Geography is destiny.” in the context of geography shaping military campaign strategy and individual battle tactics. But it’s a pretty apt “rule of thumb” when studying human history in general. Islands, rivers, mountains, and oceans have an undeniable impact on the way human societies develop.

”My band of monkeys on this side of the river must be different than the band of monkeys on that side of the river; But even that band of monkeys is more like me than those freakish monkeys that live on the other side of the mountains; and don’t even get me started on those truly alien monkeys that live out on that island! Why, I heard they don’t even pray to the same Giant Sky Monkey that we all do!”

To tie this all back to something a bit more geeky, this is often something that makes or breaks a fictional setting for me. Compare and contrast the myriad distinct cultures of Howard’s Hyborian Age, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, or even Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (especially in the early years when Rick Priestly was still “showrunner” for the setting) against things like Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms, Paizo’s Pathfindrr, the world of the Warcraft franchise, or GW’s Age of Sigmar.

These later settings either have cultural and social distinctions with little to no logical reason for the separation or they have no cultural and social distinctions at all, when there are massive reasons they should be distinctly different. No, sorry, the fact that humans living in the Realm of Fire prefer to dye their clothes a different color than the people living in the Realm of Shadow (and vice versa) doesn’t count as distinct cultures, Gee Dubs.

Arrgh.

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18 hours ago, InfestedKerrigan said:

Any of our frequent fliers have a recommendation on language primers?

Depends on how in-depth you want to go on the language.  I used Rosetta Stone to prep for moving to Mexico and found it lengthy but effective for preparing for immersion.  They have also changed their pricing model so now if you purchase any language you get all languages (at least so says my wife).  They also include additional features like online community and weekly exercises online if you want to get into a subscription model.

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3 hours ago, Duckman said:

Depends on how in-depth you want to go on the language.  I used Rosetta Stone to prep for moving to Mexico and found it lengthy but effective for preparing for immersion.  They have also changed their pricing model so now if you purchase any language you get all languages (at least so says my wife).  They also include additional features like online community and weekly exercises online if you want to get into a subscription model.

Yeah, I'm seeing that.  Pretty sweet deal, $200, get full access.  I may go that route.  French is what I'm looking into, but having access for basic travel primers for Russian, Portuguese, and Mandarin would be wonderful, too.  

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Currently in the process of changing the family internet plan to something with faster speeds. ISP pricing bears no resemblance to anything predictable by either free-market capitalism, feudal mercantilism, nor socialist controlled economic models.

If Lewis Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft, and Franz Kafka collaborated they could not have created something more nonsensical, madness inducing, and bizarrely counter-productive.

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