iltoroargento

It’s brutal, honestly. I mean some stuff I gave away or donated when I was younger, but having something I had intentionally kept safe like that stolen really hurt (it was stolen in a move when it was mistakenly put in a storage unit that was broken into within a week).

And it’s not something that I can ever actually replace because I’d only ever really care about the cards I collected with my grandpa.

Realizations like that are hard. I hope you can still find joy in the memories and sharing those experiences with others. It’s a tough journey (and I’m still pretty sore about my loss), but I’m hoping you can still enjoy your memories through emulation if it doesn’t still feel too sour/sore.

Edit: Also, the cost of replacing vintage anything from the 90s is so remarkably prohibitive lol (my collection was realistically worth $6-10k depending on how long someone would want to spend really finding buyers). It really made me feel negatively about the secondhand industries surrounding stuff like this if people are willing to just straight up steal and sell stolen childhood memories.

I’m coming back to this to say that I cannot stop narrating things in his voice, and at this point, I’m not sure I’d want to.

Within the last year, I had my vintage Pokemon card collection stolen without any leads. I completed that with my grandpa shortly before he died when I was quite young. It was my last physical connection to that time.

This meme hits pretty hard, unironically.

Mass Effect 1’s credit outro song led to a rabbit hole of me getting into electronic music over the next six months. It’s not even super dancey but it was enough lol

Iceland is an amazing place for both. I would consider Iceland to be more at the forefront of environmental science than Hungary, but I could be surprised.

Eastern Europe is a bit more wild and would be less my cup of tea, but if you’re mainly going for fun, that may be the better option.

Iceland is extremely safe and welcoming. Honestly, one of the coolest places I’ve been on the planet. Nothing else like it. The geography and ecology of that island is just cool as hell lol.

The people are all very kind and welcoming and it has a sort of communal vibe that is partly a mix of island and Scandinavian cultures. Awesome place and awesome people.

It is expensive. That is the only thing I would say is a drawback. For me, I think it is definitely worth it.

Feel free to use different sausage for preference as well. I like mild Italian or breakfast style for most of my gravies, but we have a couple people in my family who have gastro issues with spice from any actual peppers, so that’s a must for us lol.

We all blipped.

I just had a dude cut me off by barreling through three lanes of traffic with no blinker and then brake check me through the right turn in an intersection only to go ten miles per hour under the speed limit on the next street and hog the left turn lane.

Fuck cars. Fuck unsafe drivers.

Latin is really interesting in its history. While it was a very large part of Roman culture and certainly still influences other languages today, it was mostly an Italian thing during the Empire. Romans from the Italian peninsula and, later on, the provinces closer to Italy, were the primary speakers of Latin in day to day use. Outside of that, the language was quite widespread, but was more of an administrative language, as others have said.

With imperial Rome’s penchant for integrating/melding itself with conquered cultures, and the influence of Latin through the Roman Catholic Church in the middle ages, Romance languages of Europe can really be seen more as expressions of Latin through different existing linguistic traditions.

I have heard that in some ways, Spanish is one of the closer varieties to Imperial Latin as, between the Roman conquering of the Iberian tribes and the eventual invasion of the Visigoths during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was one of the most culturally and administratively stable regions of the empire with much of its population being quite proud to consider themselves a part of the empire. Two of the more famous emperors, Trajan and Hadrian were both from Hispania and the region was seen as somewhat of a model province. When the Germanic Visigoths took over, they were already dealing with a pretty strong linguistic tradition in the region.

French is sort of another Germanic take on Latin. The Franks really started picking up Latin in the middle ages. Like the majority of Europe, the Franks brought Latin influences in primarily through Christianization and Roman Catholicism’s power structure, prestige, and connection to the somewhat mythical days of the empire.

Both of these languages evolved from continual and persistent contact with a conquering empire and religious structure where Latin was seen as a connection to power and importance. Latin’s place in other European languages comes largely from those connections as well and I would say, the strongest connections come from the religious framework of the Catholic Church.

The Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire, by contrast, had already been leaning more heavily into Greek language and culture, even from the earlier days of the empire. This is mostly due to geography and preexisting cultures, but also due to the Eastern Empire’s ability to operate more like it had before the split. As they controlled the wealthier and more productive provinces, Byzantine rulers initially had more resources at their disposal and less of a need to create/capitalize on the mythological prestige of an old imperial language and religious structure to bring together disparate peoples.

Instead of promoting a more cohesive cultural/religious framework with outside civilizations, rulers in the East relied more on wealth and payment to pit rivals against each other or just bribe warlords to go away for a while. This would eventually lead to the slow retreat of Eastern borders and the conquest of important provinces by the more unified Arabs and Turks as allies became harder to find and the money ran out.

Basically, by the time Latin resurfaced as a prestigious language in Western Europe, it had already been largely abandoned in the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. With less linguistic tradition of Latin in the region, the cultures that took over after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire did not need to engage with the language much past scholarly curiosity, and even then, most of the important works were already written in Greek to begin with.

I would argue that due to the nature of the Roman Empire, Latin struggled to spread (especially Eastward and Northward) even during its heyday and was largely resurrected as an administrative language in Western Europe due to Germanic warlords wanting to have a connection to past glories of the Roman Empire and the potentially lucrative economic system of the Roman Church. It really is amazing how far it has reached linguistically since then. We still collectively treat it with reverence in academic and legal contexts millennia after it was spoken in day to day usage.

At that time, (first century CE) there really were Latin speaking Romans in Jerusalem and administrating the region they called Judea. This is before the larger cultural and then eventually political split of the empire, so your average centurion would likely still be speaking Latin in order to communicate with his superiors and other troops.

Of course, they could definitely have spoken other local languages as well (depending on their personal history and length of stay).

Edit: Edited to add the date and also wanted to say that while your average centurion and likely a lot of the soldiery would be able to speak (or at least understand) Latin, the aristocracy and administration of the province would likely be able to speak Greek as well, or at the very least communicate through proxies in Greek and Hebrew.

I absolutely understand lol that is next level!

I invested in a set of hex about five years ago and I have never been more smug than when I get to pop those bad boys out. Even brought a set to work…

Chan/Zen to be specific. Honestly there’s a lot of crazy shit out there calling itself Buddhism, but starting with philosophy heavy texts is probably the best way to distill those practices and ideals.

I find more comfort in the real and tangible human experience. Most of us are caring and social creatures if we let ourselves be.

I think that framework encourages people to become compassionate and kind because they know it’s all we have.

At its best, religion adds a layer of coping which is not based in any reality. At its worst, it sets people on a path for alienation and seeing themselves and/or others as less than human (depending on the neuroses and likely trauma).

Dealing with no easy answers throughout your life can bring you to many existential questions and even depression at times but, as long as you have the strength/support/self care to keep and adapt your sense of self, you will be stronger for that introspection.

I choose growth.

That’s kind of how I was. I did go through a root beer kick in my 20s but that was still pretty tame and mostly just like sampling a couple different ones a week. I still have my favorites I’ll buy six packs of every couple to few months lol but, for the most part, it’s not something I seek out aside from that. I seem to like the less sweet root beers as well, so maybe that’s connected.

I feel like this is a reasonable response. Early childhood is an easier time to regulate sugar intake and definitely developmentally crucial so you don’t want any extra unhealthy foods complicating things.

I was raised similarly and have a pretty healthy relationship with sugar today. I just always worried about the kids whose parents freaked out about them having a soda at a birthday party when they were like 8 or something. I understand policing sugar up to maybe grade school, but past that definitely has a negative effect emotionally and can lead to kids bingeing when they’re cut loose.

I totally agree lol. Never been anywhere else like it. I’m surprised the hot pot let you down though. The only places I felt were middling were in Orchard Center.

Agreed. Singapore felt like Disneyland. There’s a place for that experience and I can only take it in doses lol.

I loved Shanghai. During that trip, we stuck mostly to the historical bits, which I was suuuuper fascinated by. We had a few days there and a few more in and around Beijing with some traveling in between.

Foodwise, it was awesome, but all very traditional fare (which I never grew tired of and would definitely go back). We were on our own, though, so we didn’t have the luxury of local friends and their preferences. Definitely got gawked at a bit more than in Hong Kong, but everyone was super kind. A bit more businessy, I’d say.

Lol the durian debate continues! Yeah, the variety is definitely true of London. It has more of an organic sort of variety that I would compare with San Francisco, New York, or Hong Kong.

I think what really hit me was the overt curating I saw in Singapore (which also has a chilling/freezing effect on the small restauranteur) All the restaurants I went to were completely amazing and, like anything in that city, way more costly than in any other country I’d visited that trip. Singapore, at times, felt a bit gauche and decadent with how great/polished everything was.

I also think it’s interesting to see what permeates these trade hubs in terms of food. I will say that I did not catch any Caribbean fare in Singapore, although I wouldn’t be surprised given its imperial past. International hubs for technology, finance, and pretty much anything else miss out on varied cuisines if they’re sufficiently culturally or geographically insulated (looking at Paris and Shanghai from my experience lol).