I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
At long last, The Chosen One has been discovered. Working as a cashier. With no interest in doing anything even slightly more difficult.
yeah because there is nothing more difficult than retail
tbh anyone who works/has worked retail would see the chance to go around saving the world in ways that could potentially kill them as a welcome vacation
“Does the position of Chosen One offer health benefits of any kind?”
“Well, our ragtag gang of world-saving underdogs has a doctor on-team.”
“Do I have to pay her out of pocket, is what I’m asking.”
“Gosh no! She’s an idealist, you don’t pay her at all!”
“Oh! That’s nice. But then I guess there’s no paycheck.”
“I mean, the secret cabal that dispenses our orders does make sure we have enough money to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our secret lair and such.”
“Hourly?”
“Hourly what?”
“Like have you guys ever had to punch a time clock?”
“We once had to dismantle a sinister time-freezing device in the shape of a clock….otherwise no.”
“Sold. Off we go.”
“do i have to be nice to people who are yelling at me?”
“we’re the good guys, you can’t kill random civilians just because they’re mean!”
“kill?? no, i mean, can i tell them off.”
“well, sure, of course.”
*rips name tag off shirt and tosses it over shoulder* “i’m your huckleberry.”
Today in “the sentiment is a good one but under the circumstances the punctuation could potentially cause confusion”: just to clarify, the story in question does not, repeat, does not involve a romantic relationship between Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft.
well not with THAT attitude it doesn’t
I mean, if you WANT it to have meant that….there’s always…fanfiction.
the large movement of bdsm kinksters trying to prove that fifty shades of grey is not a representation of what bdsm is in real life and how bdsm is normal and healthy complete with quirky bdsm comics
people making fun of the sexy wife volcano in the lava movie before inside out, which quickly turned into people saying that the volcanos were based off of Hawaiian singer Kamakawiwoʻole and his wife (they weren’t) and that making fun of the volcano designs is racist
art of the clock from dhmis but instead of him being a clock he’s a sexy and dapper human and is shipped with a human version of the notebook
that one comic of the 50s lady eating ribs and being messy
copious amounts of disney vs dreamworks discourse well into 2015 revolving around facial diversity and snow physics in frozen
people arguing the tumblr update that put reblog additions into boxes instead of indenting them to the side made the site look uglier
attack on titan being an unavoidable force of nature
a lot of art and au versions of the purple fucker from five nights at freddies
the persona fandom and kanji/naoto discourse before persona 4 got milked to hell and the game’s regressive writing was acknowledged
“reblog this…..if youre not homophobic!”
christina hoff summers
the coding on the website freaking out whenever anything updated
people making up stories about things that happened to them in the sims or skyrim for notes
discourse on if meghan trainor and by extension nicki minaj’s anaconda was progressive or not
that one month everyone reblogged south park photosets from the pc principal season
crave that mineral
feel free to add to this
you just made me viscerally relive 2014 and 2015 and im fucking suing, OP
theclumsiestninja 