#Galley

[vintagehomecollection]

Mimi Klein lives and works in her Munich apartment, designed by herself and Stefan Wewerka. As witty as it is practical, a tiled panel, reading like a minimalist mosaic, defines the understated galley kitchen. The counter on the right doubles as a bar. Black and white and red... are the color themes that recur throughout the space.

Rooms by Design, 1989

[acrosscenturiesandgenerations]

▪︎ Automaton in the form of a galley.

Date: 1626

Artist: Georg Burrer, (turning) (worked in Stuttgart 1598/99-1627), Georg Ernst, (turning work) (died after 1634), Christoph Schorkfel (mechanics)

Medium: Ivory, brass, linen, silk; Movement: iron

[smbhax]

From "Part 4 Battle!" in Fantastic Four #5, July 1962. Stan Lee script, Jack Kirby pencils, Joe Sinnott inks, Stan Goldberg colors, Artie Simek letters.

[fuckyeahmeikokaji]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) in Female Convict Scorpion: Grudge Song (女囚さそり　７０１号怨み節), 1973, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe (長谷部安春).

[racefortheironthrone]

Do we know anything about the historical context that allowed Venice to come up with something like the Arsenal? Most accounts kind of treat it as this de Novo idea to mass produce ships, but I feel like history never actually works like that, and Carthaginians were doing that 1,500 years earlier. Were there trends going on elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean world that contributed to this industrial breakthrough? Do we know anything about the specific administrators who had to plan this seeming quantum leap in production out? Did a bunch of folks immediately see what the Venetians were doing and copy it? If not, why?

I'm going to take a slightly broader take on this question: the assembly line is not an invention, it's a discovery. So it's not about who did it first, because you have lots of cases of independent discoveries happening in wildly disparate times and places.

I remember quite vividly a talk given by Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low when he first arrived at UCSB, where he argued that the assembly line was first discovered in China...during the Bronze Age. As early as the Shang and Zhou dynasties around 1000 BCE, we have evidence of assembly line techniques being used in the production of bronze and pottery, because the pieces were inscribed on the bottom with indications of which worker did which parts of the process and which quality inspector signed off on the piece as good enough for sale - so that if the thing broke, officials could figure out exactly who to blame for shoddy work.

So it's not that Venice was the first to ever adopt the idea of assembly line manufacture of ships, but rather that they did it more consistently and devoted more resources to it than anyone else, and iteratively improved on the techniques to get production times down to a single day per galley.

The Arsenal of Venice was an enormous complex, roughly 15% of Venice's landmass, surrounded by a two-mile long defensive wall, and employing some 16,000 people. In addition to standardized pre-fabricated parts, the Arsenal also emphasized division of labor with workshops devoted to producing everything a warship might need in-house - rope, rigging, masts, planking, sails, nails, guns, etc. Organizing these supply chains, what we might call vertical integration, was an incredible logistical feat in and of itself.

In terms of technology, the Arsenal pioneered frame-first (as opposed to hull-first) construction, a moving assembly line whereby galleys were floated down a canal to different stages of the production process, new forms of firearms, and new kinds of ships llike the galleass and galleon. Galileo was a major consultant to the Arsenal at the height of its power.

In addition to the technical advancements, all of this required a lot of money - roughly 10% of the Republic's entire budget - and what made Venice truly unique was its ability to devote those kind of resources on a regular basis at a time when even powerful empires like the Ottomans and the Spanish were still using the yo-yoing methods of medieval fleet construction.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OUR FATHERS WEREN'T THAT STUPID

You can thus gradually work your way into their confidence, and maybe charge for premium features. What do they have to go pretty far down the list, and indeed, no one is sure where the end is. From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and IBM could easily have gotten an operating system elsewhere. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is cheap to run, you become a member of an institution. And yet all those people have to be even faster, and more efficient. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them. If you plan to get rich, and this essay is about how to make money by inventing new technology. But maybe not. It's a smart move, but we didn't do it because we want their software to be good. Maybe it's not a coincidence.

When I was running a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay. Structurally, the list of n things is in that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, how much is outside of our control. Or rather, any client, and if you try to make it as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most would walk by without giving it a second look. But why should people who program computers be so concerned about copyrights, of all things? And no one can stop you. It's not for the people who make things. It was written by just three people. Ultimately you always have to guess. It's not something you face and read to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress would-be startup founders but to students in general, because we'd be a long way toward explaining the mystery of the so-called real world. Otherwise their desire to lead you on will combine with your own desire to be led on to produce completely inaccurate impressions.

What are people doing now, using inadequate tools, that shows they need what you're making? Visiting Sand Hill Road. A startup is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. That is a liberating prospect, a lot like a charity in the beginning. It does help too to feel that you're late. Facebook. But in fact if you narrow the definition of beauty to something that works is by trying things that don't. Mainly because it's easier than satisfying them. SLAC goes right under 280 a little bit south of Sand Hill Road precisely because they're so boringly uniform.

And there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems. Anyone can adopt Don't be evil. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation. My Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about the easiest thing in the world. Microsoft, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job a myth, but I suspect that if you can't raise the full amount. The other students are the biggest advantage of going to work for a company, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a very real element in the valuation of companies. I would rather cofound a startup with a friend matters.

Imagine an American president saying that today. They just represent a point at the far end of the world. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own are enormously more productive. The situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten I had. The worst case scenario is the long no, the no that comes after months of meetings. In the late 90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't get grad students, because all the undergrads were going to change something, all the hackers I knew were either writing software for the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing as an experiment that we might call off at any moment. The thing about ideas, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that. Wealth is what people want. But galleries didn't want to start a startup. The best place to meet them is school. Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. I knew the founder equation and had been focused on it since I knew I could see using something like that.

[memoryscan]

woman (name unknown) smoking while cooking in the galley. I’m assuming she was the resident cook on the ship at the time (which is actually how my mum and dad would meet roughly 15 years after this photo was taken.) I’m not sure which vessel this is, as my father worked on and captained many trawlers throughout his career, but I think it’s a great photo.

[reubenyeoart]

Commission - Ship's Cook

A Rendered illustration commission for a client, of their TTRPG Wizard pirate character in their galley!

[male-us-prison-experience]

Just to draw your attention to another new blog I have just started, about serious slave labor, I give here the first part of its introduction.https://www.tumblr.com/blog/serious-ancient-slavery

ANCIENT SLAVERY: A STRENUOUS LIFE OF CHAINS, SHACKLES, SINGLETAILS, SWEETING BODIES AND SEVERE PUNISHMENT

The scene is of unprecedented intimidating intensity. Dozens of muscular male slaves below deck in the depths of the hold of the galley, three next to each other, but each with his own oar, for long periods chained with one of their ankles to their rowing bench, dressed only in a grubby loincloth. Their naked torsos thus will be completely exposed to the soon-to-be merciless whip of the slave overseers on their back, the latter already supervising them from the raised central path, with the feared flogger in their hand.

For the sequel:

[grayrazor]

Episode 4 of the Shogun remake is a good showcase for a specific development in the history of warfare. When galleons, made to survive the rougher conditions of the Atlantic, went up against galleys and small boats made for seas, the ancient tactics of boarding and fighting hand-to hand didn’t work anymore because they were just too tall.

There’s one story of a galleon sailing into the Mediterranean and getting attacked by quinqueremes and galleasses, and when one tried to ram her like it was the Peloponnesian or Punic Wars the galley just crushed herself against the side of the galleon, doing no damage.

[mapleicedlatte]

Found this boat just fuckin parked up at the jetty today?? Hello? 👀

[serious-ancient-slavery]

SLAVES FOR ARABIA

THE TALE OF STUDENT ALEX TURNED INTO ROWER Q 167.

At the end of this entry you will again find the the cover of the first part of my slave-trilogy, a historic fantasy, transmitting the past to the present. You can get it for your e-reader on Amazon for just $7,99. The preface, containing my ideas about the apparent attractiveness of old style slavery in film and fiction, and about the conception of my novel, you can read there for free. As I already announced, I will regularly publish the next few paragraphs from the text of that preface here each time. If you don't want to wait for that, you can go to Amazon for the rest of it straight away, as for the book itself.

PREFACE TO THE HORNY AND EXCITED READER

EPISODE 2 (for EPISODE 1 see further down)

Slavery nowadays is illegitimate, forbidden. But the forbidden is attractive, or at least: being forbidden is not always an obstacle for being attractive. Also in modern, civilized society, cherishing its values of freedom, equality and peaceful interhuman relations as an ideal, in the dark corners of the human mind there often is to be find slumbering - and not always just slumbering - a desire for the crude and cruel, for the bloody and brutal, for the unequal, for the violent, for the abuse of power. For all those things we better don't practice in daily life, if we wish to live happy together. For all those things that not without reason are liable to punishment, or at least would infringe the social rules and make you an outcast. But that apparently never is or has been a hindrance for indulging those forbidden needs in fiction.

   Why have horror movies become so popular, as have been horror books - the famous 'gothic novel' - in the 19th century?

   Why could the nearly never ending American television series Game of Thrones, being all crude and cruel, bloody, brutal, unequal, violent and full of abuse of power, during those eight years from 2011 to 2019 boast on so many fanatic spectators? All moral values it did contain were completely at odds with our modern values. Anyone who would behave and act in our real world like one of those popular heroes in this screen-fiction-world, we would hope to see summoned soon to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. And indeed, a mighty emperor like Charlemagne - nowadays sometimes presented as the patriarch of the European Union - would have landed there because of the often Game-of-Thrones-like methods he used to convert the Saxons or to subdue other peoples twelve centuries ago.

   Nevertheless even contemporary politicians sometimes in their speeches referred to the series. Where they, deep in their heart, jealous of all those kings and queens and warriors, who could just do what they liked, who didn't bother about good manners and regulations and troublesome contradicting colleagues, till they collided with somebody more powerful than they themselves?

   And then, let's not forget one crucial point regarding our subject. Also in this television-fiction-world, inspired by our own western ancient/medieval/early-modern past (it was a mix of all), slavery was self-evident. It was present and a, in a moral sense more or less neutral, never questioned aspect of social relationships in those fictional warrior-societies: the logical fate of those who lost a battle. Those who were enslaved after such a lost battle just had a run of bad-luck, they should have better cared for not losing it. Were there really plenty of spectators, among the millions looking to the series, to mourn about their fate at that moment?

   Or let's take another American tv-drama-series, called Lost, broadcasted just before the former, during six seasons from 2004 till 2010. The subject as such was modern: it was a fictitious story about the survivors of an airplane-crash on some mysterious island in the Pacific. But inserted in the as a whole rather artificial concept - with flashbacks of a far-away past of several of the main characters - was a strange episode called 'Ab Aeterno'. In that episode one of those main characters turned out to have arrived on the spot already in the eighteen-sixties, as an inhabitant of the Canaries, who, because of being accused of murder, was sold as a slave to be transferred in chains to the New World on a dangerous trip by an old slaver.

   Apparent this rather inveracious side-story was thought by the screenwriters to be an exciting element that would enhance the delight of the spectators. Because of introducing slavery into the narrative?

To be continued.....

[screencapt]

The Magic Christian, by Joseph McGrath, 1969.

The ship’s machines

[racefortheironthrone]

You already guesstimated how much it would cost to maintain a man-at-arms in Westeros, but what about ships? Like longboats, the Iron Fleet's small galleys, the true galleys and dromonds from the Redwynes and the Royal Fleet and the Summer Islands' swan ships; how much would it cost a lord to build, crew and maintain any of these?

You don't ask much, do you? Only a whole bunch of math and research into three different kinds of costs of four different kinds of ships. That comes across a little bit demanding, a little bit entitled.

Tell you what, I'll do it just for a true galley.

Construction Costs

Thankfully, the English fiscal state has fairly good records when it comes to paying its bills. So for example, the so-called "Pipe Roll" records of 1295 have data on the construction costs of building eight galleys of 100 oars. These galleys tended to cost an average of £223 (roughly evenly split between materials costs and labor) - which works out to about 178 golden dragons.

Crew Costs

There is a long and ugly history of galley slaves that wouldn't be allowed given Westerosi prohibition on slavery, so we have to look for historical wages for oarsmen in periods where free wage laborers were used in galleys.

So for example, in the 1530s the Spanish galleys paid 11 reals per month - which works out to 2.75 shillings a month, or £2.75 per year, which works out to 2.2 golden dragons a year per oarsman. With a galley of 100 oars, you're looking at minimum crew costs of 220 dragons a year in oarsmen wages alone (because running a galley requires food and drink, cordage and chandlery, wages for the sailors and the marines, etc).

Maintenance Costs

So I managed to find some Genoese sources on maintenance costs for galleys - in 1528, Genoa was spending about 5,000 ducats a year in maintenance per galley. That works out to £500 a year, which works out to 400 golden dragons a year.

Conclusion:

In total, that suggests that a lord would have to spend 178 dragons to build a galley, and at least 620 dragons to operate that galley for a year.

[rainbow-hunters]

Art exhibit 🩷🩷🩷

[odysseyek]

Home Bar in Miami An illustration of a large, modern galley wet bar with marble countertops and a brown backsplash.