Serenes Forest's Teehee Thread

[Acacia Sgt]

I'm finally close to ending the one-shot I'm writing. Just like... 3-4 scenes left. Well, compared to how much I've written, that's close.

[Interdimensional Observer]

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/08/baten-kaitos-soundtracks-now-available-on-various-music-platforms

Don't need this b/c I already listen to it on YouTube, but having it officially released elsewhere is nice.

 

14 hours ago, Dayni said:

My guy's been driving 20 years

I'm envisioning Penelope as being stuck at home the entire time because it's a one-car household.

14 hours ago, Dayni said:

Interesting to hear that the religious tolerance of the period was so thorough, though I'm not so surprised with how much further this place was from Rome that there was less interest in pursuing alternate faiths, after all a major part of the Christian persecution in theological terms was it's monotheism.

The Roman Empire in its pre-Christian polytheistic pagan days was pretty tolerant. No problem with letting the people having options. -As long the worshippers don't oppose the Empire and the worshippers show Caesar the respect he deserves.

• There was the Greco-Roman pantheon of course, with particular reverence for particular deities like Jove, Apollo, Vesta with her virgins, and Bacchus with his crazy cult.
  • The related practice of deifying deceased Roman emperors.
• The Egyptian deities were respected in Egypt, and Isis established a prominent mother goddess cult in the wider Roman Empire.
  • There were attempts to syncretize the Egyptian gods. Hermes Trismegistus being a fusion of Hermes with Thoth, for example.
• Cybele was an Anatolian mother goddess who gained some popularity too.
• Sol Invictus "the Unconquered Sun" became an officially-venerated deity later on.
• The Mysteries of Mithras (ostensibly named after a Zoroastrian yazata, but the name it seems to modern scholars is the only thing the Roman cult shares with the Persian divinity) was popular in the Roman military.
  • I know one ritual purportedly involved standing beneath a grating, and letting a slaughtered bull's blood pour down upon you.

...These are various religious ways worshipped across a wider swathe of the Roman Empire, atop the local deities who were also all allowed.

It wasn't perfect toleration. A different article in a different magazine mentioned that Emperor Tiberius banned Egyptian worship, cracking down on Isis. -Ironic as they found a prominent relief in Berenike's Isis temple depicting Tiberius as holding up the sky (the Emperor is nominally pharaoh who is a god).- Though the ban wasn't entirely effective and Caligula his successor reversed it (evidence of Isis worship has been found at Pompeii).

And the Isis that Tiberius banned...

Spoiler

...Got a Roman makeover when she left Egypt.

In the same breath as banning Isis, Tiberius banned Judaism. -But the Roman Empire didn't always vocally hate the Jews, they allowed Jewish entities to manage certain legal matters like marriage and disputes within the Jewish community. Rebellious Jews would receive No Mercy, Only Brutality, but rebellious anybody was intolerable to the Empire. While Greek was permitted as the lingua franca in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, there were two things where it had to the native language of Rome, Latin- the government and the military. Law & legions, the foundations of the Roman Empire.

Before the Romans came in, the Greeks had issues with the Jews that I'm vaguely aware of (I recall seeing a Simon Schama video eons ago on the topic). The Jews' insistence on monotheism, their resistance to being thoroughly Hellenized, and what the Greeks saw as male genital mutilation. The Jews were stuck with the quandary of retaining their distinct culture or trying to blend in, like whether it'd be okay or not to think of YHVH as their Zeus. Supposedly, some very Hellenistic Jews went so far as to regrow their *snip*. -Although the Jews didn't hate Alexander the Great, the man who ushered in the Hellenistic period, it might've been a fictional encounter, but the Jewish community (I forget the details) did claim and proudly depict in mosaics, a meeting between him and the high priests of Jerusalem.

-I take it the early Christians, being a Judaism spinoff, initially inherited the suspicions the Jewish community were faced with. And I know they gained some new ones like cannibalism, incest (for calling fellow Christians brothers & sisters), and venerating an executed criminal. -But of course, things changed.

14 hours ago, Dayni said:

And finding a pet cemetery? Berenike does sound like a nice enough corner of the Antiquity to live in.

Animals were for a different reason why Berenike (also spelled "Berenice", meaning "bearer of victory") was founded. When Al the Great went east, he encountered war elephants and found them useful. For his immediate successors, war elephants were all the rage. Ptolemy II wanted his Pachyderms of War 🐘, so he established a port city around 275 BC in inhospitable desert to get them, naming the city after his mother. Its distant location chosen b/c the Red Sea has predominant winds that blow in from the north apparently, so something closer to Alexandria would've been a drag to sail into.

-Ptolemy's elephants came from further south along the African coast though. It was the Romans who later discovered they could sail from Berenike to India and ship in the monkeys, and more importantly- black pepper (the famed Roman cookbook Apicius aka De re culinaria/coquinaria, contains 468 recipes, 349 of which call for black pepper). ...And I should add that it likely wasn't simply Romans going to India, Indians very likely came to Berenike. The island of Socotra right off the Horn of Africa (and thus along the trade route that could've taken you onward to Berenike or India), has been found to have of hundreds of Sanskrit inscriptions, but only two Greek and zero Latin. So perhaps it's the Indians who took the commercial initiative and discovered they could get to Egypt, and then told the Romans how to visit India.

14 hours ago, Dayni said:

And then they messed up it's running, partly because the organisation involved in it actually wanted ballroom dancing as it's preferred choice (handling both), but the IOC chose breakdancing and they weren't ready for that in qualifying and seemingly the event itself, judging by not showing the scoring after performance, which, *sigh.

...Ballroom dancing?😐 -Well again, it's already allowed isn't it? On ice.

14 hours ago, Dayni said:

Then again boxing's out of the next Olympics if the international body isn't changed (for corruption reasons, hooray /s), so there's always bad ways to handle things

Cutting boxing, really? Cut men's basketball b/c the USA doesn't need a free gold medal. But to make things fair, cut something like a diving event too, whatever China sleepwalks into a gold every single time.

 

10 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

"It's a Gundam! Gah!" *explosion*

 

*Sees the mech in the middle of the thumbnail*

...I've seen it on the Alpha Gaiden cover while listening to music. What happened to the golden v and why does this thing have an overcompensating mustache?🤨

 

1 hour ago, Armagon said:

I found the ultimate destination.

Surprised this wasn't the first thing you looked up.

Nice for you sake to see it exists. Think you'd be able to strike up a good conversation with the employees or fellow customers?😀

[Armagon]

>Los Angeles 2028 Olympics venue will only be accessible by public transit

>Public transit in LA

LA traffic is bad enough dawg.

11 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Surprised this wasn't the first thing you looked up.

At first i looked up the Doctor Who Experience thing. Limited time event every year. This year it's in........New Zealand. You know, the exact opposite direction of where i'm going.

But i looked up to see if there were any store that had Doctor Who merch. Turns out there's a whole store dedicated to it. They even got a museum inside featuring things they were able to acquire from the productions.

[Acacia Sgt]

11 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

*Sees the mech in the middle of the thumbnail*

...I've seen it on the Alpha Gaiden cover while listening to music. What happened to the golden v and why does this thing have an overcompensating mustache?🤨

Ah, yes, it's the Turn ∀ Gundam. Golden V? Admittedly, don't know why it has it. XD

[Interdimensional Observer]

30 minutes ago, Armagon said:

LA traffic is bad enough dawg.

So much for the sexproof beds being the worst part of the Olympics.

30 minutes ago, Armagon said:

But i looked up to see if there were any store that had Doctor Who merch. Turns out there's a whole store dedicated to it. They even got a museum inside featuring things they were able to acquire from the productions.

Maybe you'll able to lay thy hands upon relics of Time Lord Almighty?

 

29 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Ah, yes, it's the Turn ∀ Gundam. Golden V? Admittedly, don't know why it has it. XD

By the golden v, I was referring to the absence of one on that mech. Without that... well the design as a whole looks passably not like a Gundam.😅 It has the appearance not of lead unit, but something mass-produced that the hero blows up dozens of.

An upside-down A... maybe that's what the Stache That Outdoes Soulgain's is supposed to resemble?

Edited August 12 by Interdimensional Observer

[Acacia Sgt]

17 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

By the golden v, I was referring to the absence of one on that mech. Without that... well the design as a whole looks passably not like a Gundam.😅 It has the appearance not of lead unit, but something mass-produced that the hero blows up dozens of.

An upside-down A... maybe that's what the Stache That Outdoes Soulgain's is supposed to resemble?

Ah, I get what you say. It still has a V of sorts. Smaller and more of a light, on the forehead. But it has the V, heh.

I thought the Soulgain's stache was something Xenoblade's Vangarre's would resemble of. Okay, seriously, an upside down A would indeed be a V, wouldn't you say? Though the Turn A's is curved, the mustached sort-of makes the V shape too... well, it's more of a U, but still.

[Interdimensional Observer]

18 minutes ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Ah, I get what you say. It still has a V of sorts. Smaller and more of a light, on the forehead. But it has the V, heh.

I thought the Soulgain's stache was something Xenoblade's Vangarre's would resemble of. Okay, seriously, an upside down A would indeed be a V, wouldn't you say? Though the Turn A's is curved, the mustached sort-of makes the V shape too... well, it's more of a U, but still.

I think the head having a measure of roundedness to it is another thing that's peculiar to me? A Zaku has a rounded head, a GINN has a rounded head. Gundams are typically more angular.

I'd say it might also because God, Wing Zero, Freedom, Barbatos Rex- all from alternative Gundam universes, but the designs are instantly recognizable as resembling the RX-78 or UC Gundams? The Turn A looks like they tried to break some fundamental -perhaps overly conservative- rules of form that (a lead protagonist's) Gundams should have? -Not to say the Turn A breaks them all, it's as Gundam White as day. The eyes... they seem like a half-break with tradition, I can sorta see them as Gundam eyes, but they're unusually elongated?

-Question marks abound b/c I'm not sure if I actually think what I wrote. It's all guesswork at trying to explain a feeling.😅

Edited August 12 by Interdimensional Observer

[Acacia Sgt]

6 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I think the head having a measure of roundedness to it is another thing that's peculiar to me? A Zaku has a rounded head, a GINN has a rounded head. Gundams are typically more angular.

I'd say it might also because God, Wing Zero, Freedom, Barbatos Rex- all from alternative Gundam universes, but the designs are instantly recognizable as resembling the RX-78 or UC Gundams? The Turn A looks like they tried to break some fundamental -perhaps overly conservative- rules of form that (a lead protagonist's) Gundams should have? -Not to say the Turn A breaks them all, it's as Gundam White as day. The eyes... they seem like a half-break with tradition, I can sorta see them as Gundam eyes, but they're unusually elongated?

-Question marks abound b/c I'm not sure if I actually think what I wrote. It's all guesswork at trying to explain a feeling.😅

Hmm, yeah, I get what you mean. The Turn A is certainly a bit out of the norm. Perhaps there is a reason for it, but I haven't seen the series, and it's been long since I last played Alpha Gaiden to remember if they mentioned something there. Still...

There is still a resemblance to the RX-78 there, mostly the color scheme. In a way it's deliberate, since Turn A is meant to take place long after the Universal Century (with the Regild Century taking place even longer).

[Acacia Sgt]

LOL

 

[Codename Shrimp]

[Acacia Sgt]

Pillar Sommie?

[Sidereal Wraith]

2 hours ago, Codename Shrimp said:

 

[BrightBow]

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

3 hours ago, Codename Shrimp said:

-Made me think of this game.

 

14 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Still...

There is still a resemblance to the RX-78 there, mostly the color scheme.

Oh, definitely.😆

-I do kinda like the design deviations from the standard though? Distant future or alternative universe, the designs shouldn't have to be tethered to what UCG first conjured up, even if the results may seem weird. Though at the same time, Devil Gundam suggests to me that the Essence of Gundam is the head. Yet if there aren't any design commonalities, can something even be called a Gundam?🤔 Keeping the paint job yet modifying the head seems like it was an interesting attempt at this balancing act?

[Codename Shrimp]

 

😂

[Interdimensional Observer]

46 minutes ago, Codename Shrimp said:

 

😂

*Sees the very top line*

Spoiler

...Dunno if can laugh. I mean, I am smiling.😆 -But then another aspect of me is feeling more decidedly mixed about it (not this in particular, the whole which It is referencing part of I mean), probably b/c I'm a total lightweight.😅 -So, it is funny. ...But letting my mind dwell on an aspect of the ending still affects me in a 🙁 way, despite what time has passed.

-I don't mean to rain on your parade.😅 It's just an odd blend of feelings.😆

 

Edited August 12 by Interdimensional Observer

[Armagon]

This art thing's pretty fun.

[Acacia Sgt]

Hmm...

This has potential...

 

[Dayni]

 

Operation "Lightning Bolt your way to vengeance" was successful.

8 hours ago, Armagon said:

You guys know how I'm going to the UK in October?

I found the ultimate destination.

A Whovian stop if ever I'd seen one.

6 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Animals were for a different reason why Berenike (also spelled "Berenice", meaning "bearer of victory") was founded. When Al the Great went east, he encountered war elephants and found them useful. For his immediate successors, war elephants were all the rage. Ptolemy II wanted his Pachyderms of War 🐘, so he established a port city around 275 BC in inhospitable desert to get them, naming the city after his mother. Its distant location chosen b/c the Red Sea has predominant winds that blow in from the north apparently, so something closer to Alexandria would've been a drag to sail into.

-Ptolemy's elephants came from further south along the African coast though. It was the Romans who later discovered they could sail from Berenike to India and ship in the monkeys, and more importantly- black pepper (the famed Roman cookbook Apicius aka De re culinaria/coquinaria, contains 468 recipes, 349 of which call for black pepper). ...And I should add that it likely wasn't simply Romans going to India, Indians very likely came to Berenike. The island of Socotra right off the Horn of Africa (and thus along the trade route that could've taken you onward to Berenike or India), has been found to have of hundreds of Sanskrit inscriptions, but only two Greek and zero Latin. So perhaps it's the Indians who took the commercial initiative and discovered they could get to Egypt, and then told the Romans how to visit India.

Ah yes, the classic "Name it after your mother". Ptolemy II clearly had a favourite parent.

Course, if they didn't expect they could get to India along that route course they wouldn't try it on a whim when they don't know how they'd stop along the way for fear of getting it wrong. Makes me wonder how they knew to sail the other direction and do so successfully enough to get the elephants.

Scotora is also a place I'd heard about for it's ties to Axum, so realising it has much of an Indian connection that far back is interesting.

6 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

The Roman Empire in its pre-Christian polytheistic pagan days was pretty tolerant. No problem with letting the people having options. -As long the worshippers don't oppose the Empire and the worshippers show Caesar the respect he deserves.

• There was the Greco-Roman pantheon of course, with particular reverence for particular deities like Jove, Apollo, Vesta with her virgins, and Bacchus with his crazy cult.
  • The related practice of deifying deceased Roman emperors.
• The Egyptian deities were respected in Egypt, and Isis established a prominent mother goddess cult in the wider Roman Empire.
  • There were attempts to syncretize the Egyptian gods. Hermes Trismegistus being a fusion of Hermes with Thoth, for example.
• Cybele was an Anatolian mother goddess who gained some popularity too.
• Sol Invictus "the Unconquered Sun" became an officially-venerated deity later on.
• The Mysteries of Mithras (ostensibly named after a Zoroastrian yazata, but the name it seems to modern scholars is the only thing the Roman cult shares with the Persian divinity) was popular in the Roman military.
  • I know one ritual purportedly involved standing beneath a grating, and letting a slaughtered bull's blood pour down upon you.

...These are various religious ways worshipped across a wider swathe of the Roman Empire, atop the local deities who were also all allowed.

Well, syncretism was very much part of the Roman state's attempt to keep faith with it's non-Roman subject, so this isn't surprising to me at all.

17 hours ago, Codename Shrimp said:

Crying in joy with the realisation that their god walks among them?

3 hours ago, Armagon said:

This art thing's pretty fun.

This could be my groggy state, but I'm reminded of 90's PC gaming with this image, could be in some adventure title.

The background based off anything in particular?

[Armagon]

4 hours ago, Dayni said:

The background based off anything in particular?

Barcelona

[Interdimensional Observer]

Water found on Mars!💧

...10-20km/6-12 miles underground. (Good luck drilling for it.) Found thanks to the studying of marsquakes.

[Acacia Sgt]

So you're saying... it's The Waters of Mars?

[Hrothgar777]

On 8/11/2024 at 8:44 PM, Interdimensional Observer said:

Before the Romans came in, the Greeks had issues with the Jews that I'm vaguely aware of (I recall seeing a Simon Schama video eons ago on the topic). The Jews' insistence on monotheism, their resistance to being thoroughly Hellenized,

As I understand it, in the first century the line between Jew and non-Jew was incredibly blurry. Whereas today it's largely considered an ethnoreligion, back then it was open to proselytizing. One estimate has it that Jews may've numbered as high as 7-10 percent of the empire's population during the New Testament period. Given that they were native to a small sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean and were never great conquerors of surrounding regions, this can't be explained by natural demography. My guess is that so-called Hellenistic Jews, who adopted Jewish practices to varying degrees of faithfulness, with probably a bigger emphasis on festivals like Pesach/Passover than on observing the minutiae of the Mosaic Law, vastly outnumbered indigenous Hebraic Jews who lived in Israel (though not locally, of course). This process had likely been ongoing for some 250 years before, since the LXX had been translated into Greek by Egyptian scribes as early as the mid-3rd century BC.

It was mainly this demographic that supplied the earliest batches of converts to Christianity. One of the reasons Hellenistic Judaism collapsed, alongside the bloody revolts of the 1st and early 2nd centuries and their aftermath, was because they were absorbed into the church. Which, in turn, proved to the rabbis that gentile converts and their customs weren't compatible with "pure" Judaism, and the religion started to close its doors to the outside world.

On 8/11/2024 at 8:44 PM, Interdimensional Observer said:

But the Roman Empire didn't always vocally hate the Jews, they allowed Jewish entities to manage certain legal matters like marriage and disputes within the Jewish community.

It's interesting to consider the Herodian dynasty like a vassal state which governed the local population and extracted taxes from them on behalf of Rome. It draws parallels to modern arrangements like the Eastern Bloc or the old banana republics that were beholden to the United States.

But related to the above, by the 1st century Jews had spread far beyond the bounds of this one vassal state. There were many of them in the city of Rome itself, including a fair number of locals who converted, and this was the cause of a moral panic (see Tiberius's and Claudius's expulsions of them from Rome, and the later fiscus judaicus, which was meant to discourage prospective and prior converts). As has often been the case, then, the Romans both feared and were fascinated by the exotic other. Which is fair, because Antiquity was both a dangerous and boring place.

 

(Don't know what the point of this was, I just like rambling about history.)

Edited August 13 by Hrothgar777

[Armagon]

4 hours ago, Acacia Sgt said:

So you're saying... it's The Waters of Mars?

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

Reading about wild blueberries- 😋. Doesn't matter that I don't like blueberries.

Reading right after a vivid description of a hippo's castration- 🤢.

----

@Codename Shrimp Random question. You've been to Egypt several times you said, ever have the national dessert- Umm/Om Ali? -Not trying to make you hungry if you have, I just happened to learn about it today.

 

5 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

As I understand it, in the first century the line between Jew and non-Jew was incredibly blurry. Whereas today it's largely considered an ethnoreligion, back then it was open to proselytizing.

I thought I might've heard something about that because of one apocryphal text I learned of? -Good point.

6 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

One estimate has it that Jews may've numbered as high as 7-10 percent of the empire's population during the New Testament period. Given that they were native to a small sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean and were never great conquerors of surrounding regions, this can't be explained by natural demography.

Digging up the one article I read in the past year on the Jewish catacombs of Rome, the first Jews arrived in Rome in the 2nd century BC, and Greece the same time or about a century earlier. Apparently, Cicero wrote disapprovingly of their presence in Roman assemblies and politics. A synagogue in Ostia has been found, dated to the 1st century AD. At the time, Rome's Jewish community may have numbered 40,000-50,000, or about 5% of the city's population. In the Villa Torlonia catacomb (late 2nd century AD), 75% of the inscriptions are in Greek, the rest are in Latin, with just one in Hebrew (which I know at the time was dying (if it wasn't already dead) as a nonliturgical language). The catacomb inscriptions suggest that at the time, Rome had at least 11 synagogues.

5 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

This process had likely been ongoing for some 250 years before, since the LXX had been translated into Greek by Egyptian scribes as early as the mid-3rd century BC.

Forgot about the Septuagint.😅 Wasn't quite sure of when it originated/who it was for. -I admit this is era/topic is something I probably afford to brush up on historically.

6 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

(Don't know what the point of this was, I just like rambling about history.)

Not a problem. -You see me doing it.