Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
colorado.edu
colorado.edu
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…
The man who would prefer great wealth or strength
more than love, more than friends
is diseased of soulWe 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."
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.
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."
> the snark knight
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.
> Some seem to be doing fine, being assholes
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.
> People try and fit in publicly so that they’re seen to be good by their group
These statements are not in disagreement.
“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea [0]
Light 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...
I wouldn't be that quick to misjudge individuals by the prisme of shallow knowledge provided by history at whole societies scale.
Dunno if it would hold up today though
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".
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm surprised there's no Max Headroom VTuber right now...
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.
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
[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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
And then kde neon Just Worked.
although I have to say, Linux installations are a walk in the park these days ;)
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!"
So much is still lost and we rely on such tiny fragments or worse hearsay by other authors rehashing their ideas
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.
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.
So I feel "Eumenides trousers!" is a slightly better variant of the joke.