#HIstory

[blumineck]

On a scale of Dark Souls to Devil May Cry, how fast are two-handed swords?

As always, more content, Tutorials and art refs over on Patreon

[destiel-news-channel]

[Image description: The Destiel confession meme edited so Cas says I love you' and Dean answers 'A lost Maya city has been found in the forest in Mexico' End ID.]

Archaeologists from the USA and Mexico have found a previously unknown Maya city by studying LiDAR data from a 2013 forest survey.

It is located in the state of Campeche, and the researchers named it Valeriana after a nearby lake.

The city had over 6600 structures, and at its peak (750 to 850 AD) it may have housed over 30 000 people. The density of the buildings is second only to Calakmul.

Source links:

The Guardian | BBC | CNN | Smithsonian Mag

[memories-of-ancients]

Frog amulet/seal, Egypt, Late Period, 1069-664 BC

from The Louvre

[classicalcanvas]

Corner of the Apartment (1875) by Claude Monet

[ephemeral-gremlin]

all the best and most interesting archival materials i've worked with have been used, written on, stickered, marked up in some way

you learn a lot more from the patterns of wear and use than you can from something pristine and untouched. also the little scribbled notes have actual *personality* which in my mind is what makes history worth studying - people are people no matter what era they lived through, and the best history is fundamentally about people

A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.

[prokopetz]

this is a stupid question but i'm young enough to not know this: i've noticed that baldur's gate 3 has picked up a lot of the same level of both broad acclaim and fandom presence as the Bioware games did during the 7th generation. were there western RPGs in the decades before then with about the same level of success both commercial and critical? if so, what were they?

That's one of those "yes and no" deals.

The critical thing to understand is that home Internet service only became a thing in 1994; prior to that point, video game fandoms not only didn't have the same kind of reach, they tended to be geographically regional owing to the lack of online distribution, so what commercial and critical success looked like was very different.

To a large extent, the popularity of Baldur's Gate owed less to anything about the game itself, and more to the fact that it was simply a major production from a major brand which happened to debut at the same time that home Internet service was in a phase of rapid expansion. You can see this phenomenon occurring in other formerly regional genre fandoms that had major titles drop around that time; for example, JRPGs with Chrono Trigger, and later, Final Fantasy VII.

That said, with the understanding that what being a critically and commercially successful video game franchise looked like was a fundamentally different proposition in the pre-Internet era, the king of Western computer RPGs was undeniably the Ultima franchise. Indeed, failure to fully understand the possibilities of the post-Internet era is arguably a big part of why the Ultima series lost its crown – which is ironic, given that Ultima Online was the first truly popular graphical MMO, but somehow they just couldn't stick the landing.

[strategypillar]

Older than history itself

What if the oldest vampire was a Neanderthal girl 🤔

[animentality]

[a-meh]

[qsycomplainsalot]

AI people: we're just as much artists as you are, you gotta be so observant and go through so many correcting phases for the picture to look good uwu also AI people:

[that-bluesybitch]

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[taibhsearachd]

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL CHILD WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME? Because they're all I've been thinking about when I'm sad for the past few days. Their existence makes me less sad.

[tinagodiva]

Fall in New England 🍁

[toliveforthehopeofitall626]

Im getting really sick and tired of living through major historical events