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[rotting bones]

flicky: I don't, but I'm mostly a lurker.

On timelessness in comedy: Aristophanes is funny, but when he injects his pious hopes into the play, it makes me feel like he doesn't quite grasp the true absurdity of the world. The earliest work I know of that goes all the way is Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk. Although it's less funny, Journey to the West does a better job than Aristophanes in that respect.

On video game characters playing video games: Umeume drove his greatsword into the green dragon's heart, lowering its hitpoints to a manageable range. Then it was the monster's turn. Dragonbreath engulfed the players, bringing the massive tank to his knees. "Ryuu, you're up." The rogue player had reached a limit break. He seemed to be everywhere at once, driving his dagger into all of the dragon's vital spots. The monster bent over and crumbled to ash.

The healer PrincessFluttershy said: "Where's the loot?"

Umeume: "Crap. Are we on level 3 again?"

Ryuu: "Wut?"

PrincessFluttershy: "He means we already fought this monster. We thought we are on level 2. But we are playing a video game to regain stamina on that level, meaning we are on level 3. To gain stamina, we have to beat level 3. We should be fighting the cyclops on Dream Island. Instead, we wasted stamina fighting a monster we fought before."

Ryuu: "I hate this game. Why are we playing it? Whatever. We have to play a video game to gain stamina. Let's go to level 4."

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I find the name "Ryuu" in that (even though I'm aware "Ryuuji" is an extremely generic name) oddly amusing for probably obvious reasons.

[rotting bones]

I find the name "Ryuu" in that (even though I'm aware "Ryuuji" is an extremely generic name) oddly amusing for probably obvious reasons.

It's not impossible that it came to me because I've seen your name here and there. I hope you don't mind.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I don't see any reason I ought to mind. There are dozens of anime and game characters called some variant of "Ryuu".

[Vijay]

I just associated it with the guy in Street Fighter.

unlikely to get a response

Please (but no, I don't remember you from the ZBB tbh).

[Ares Land]

On timelessness in comedy: Aristophanes is funny, but when he injects his pious hopes into the play, it makes me feel like he doesn't quite grasp the true absurdity of the world.

Oh, yeah, Aristophanes does come off as very idealistic.

(And I agree that it's hard to find a truly absurdist take before the 20th century.)

[zompist]

On timelessness in comedy: Aristophanes is funny, but when he injects his pious hopes into the play, it makes me feel like he doesn't quite grasp the true absurdity of the world.

Oh, yeah, Aristophanes does come off as very idealistic.

(And I agree that it's hard to find a truly absurdist take before the 20th century.)

I'm not sure about that; I think the same sentiments existed, but took a slightly different form.

Take Ecclesiastes, for instance-- you can't get much more depressed than "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit is there for a man for all the work he does under the sun?... All speech is tiresome!" True, he throws God in later, but here (as in Job and some of the Psalms) belief in God is compatible with a pretty bleak view of the world and no real belief in the hereafter.

Or take the Egyptian "Dialog of a Man and his Ba". The soul advises him that worrying about the afterlife is vain, and he should live for the moment; the man answers that his life sucks: his reputation is tanked, he has no friends, and he longs for death.

If you had a bleak temperament in ancient times, you were likely to write reams about how life is unjust and the physical world is nothing but torment; you might contrast that with a better life in another world. But not all texts were religious; there was for instance the atheist Lokayata group in India.

[Ares Land]

Good point! I'd somehow forgotten about Ecclesiastes.

[Linguoboy]

English Wiktionary's Word of the Day is "conlang": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page.

[malloc]

What is the real deal with pederasty in ancient Greece? Was homosexuality (even if rather different than our modern conception) exceptionally common there or merely disproportionately represented in art? Has the homoerotic dimension merely been overstated, whether by anti-pagan polemicists or LGBT activists?

[Moose-tache]

What is the real deal with pederasty in ancient Greece? Was homosexuality (even if rather different than our modern conception) exceptionally common there or merely disproportionately represented in art? Has the homoerotic dimension merely been overstated, whether by anti-pagan polemicists or LGBT activists?

Oh boy! So this is my understanding, but this history isn't my area of expertise.

Basically, yeah, in most parts of Classical Greece it was considered pretty normal to have sex with a juvenile boy. The younger partner wasn't supposed to be in it for the sex, and someone who enjoys being the receiving partner was considered pretty gross. And once a boy reached maturity it was considered unseemly. So basically the healthy, consensual gay relationships we encourage today would be the worst kind of gay in ancient Greece. There are other examples of physical intimacy between boys being pretty commonplace. For example in Sparta (we are told by non-Spartans) that wives would be dressed as boys on their wedding night to "ease" the young man into the process of heterosexual sex. As usual we have way less data about gay women, because the powers that be didn't seem to care much.

Are these stories exaggerated? Well, I think it's more that we see the Greeks as the gay ones for just having something that's pretty common outside modern Western society. We see man-on-boy sex acts as coming of age rituals in many parts of the world, like Papua New Guinea. It's possible the Greeks are just normal ancient people and we remember all the gay stuff because we're weird. The Greeks did the same thing to other people. Herodotus remarked that the Persians leave the room to pee, as if this was a really weird thing, but he ended up telling us far more about the Greeks than the Persians.

[Ares Land]

What is the real deal with pederasty in ancient Greece? Was homosexuality (even if rather different than our modern conception) exceptionally common there or merely disproportionately represented in art? Has the homoerotic dimension merely been overstated, whether by anti-pagan polemicists or LGBT activists?

Jocularly it might be said that the Greeks were so misogynistic they wouldn't even stoop so low as to sleep with women.

More seriously, it's a pretty difficult question.
One thing is clear: the homoerotic dimension hasn't been overstated. Generally earlier generations, who did admire the Greeks very much, tried to push the homoerotic angle in the closet whenever possible.
Generally, the Greeks didn't offer much explanation on what was obvious to them.

There are several elements at play. Pederasty seems to have occured as a rite of passage in various communities -- especially among the Dorians and especially so in Crete. (The Spartans were Dorians, BTW. So the jab at 'boy lovers' in 300 is wrong in every particular except the tone of disdain which is about right.)

The idea of pederasty-as-rite-of-passage spread to other cities. (Did the fad for all things Spartan and by extension Dorians play a role? No idea.)

In Athens there were I think several elements:
- Pederasty was a rite of passage.
- Men married late. (as late as their thirties sometimes if I'm not mistaken.)
- While we focus on young women as our ideal of beauty, the greeks focused more on the male body. This was a consequence of the pederasty rite, but also fed into it in a sort of feedback loop. On second thought, though, our own obsession with teenage girl is just as arbitrary!

It's not terribly clear (to me: someone more knowledgeable might be able to shed some light on it) whether some famous relationships were romantic or not: Achilles and Patrocles, Alexander and Hephaestion, Socrate and Alcibiades. (OK, I'm more certain the last two were lovers.)

All of these read as romantic to me. But these could have been strong friendships. (Frankly, I doubt it. But someone more knowledgeable might be able to shed some light on the matter.)

We should keep in mind that bisexuality is much more common than you'd think. The statistics in the Kinsey report are pretty high, and that was more than sixty years ago. In a more accepting society, bisexuality is even more common (I forgot the figure, but the number of teenagers identifying as bi is surprisingly high now). And, much as it pains the Philhellene in me, a good amount was probably non-consensual, at least by our standards. (These are teenage boys we're talking about.)

So, long story short: bisexuality was prevalent among the Greek, but not much more so than elsewhere; the thing is, it was celebrated instead of condemned.

[Ares Land]

The younger partner wasn't supposed to be in it for the sex, and someone who enjoys being the receiving partner was considered pretty gross. And once a boy reached maturity it was considered unseemly.

A small caveat to that, though, Socrates and Alcibiades seem real affectionate in the Symposium , and Alcibiades is a grown man by then.

To get back to an earlier question, there are anal sex jokes in Aristophanes -- Aristophanes himself seems divided on whether it's gross or enjoyable.

(A Roman example, not Greek, but at this point attitudes translated easily: Caesar was mocked for being the receiving partner, but it certainly doesn't seem like he lost respect over it.)

[Moose-tache]

The younger partner wasn't supposed to be in it for the sex, and someone who enjoys being the receiving partner was considered pretty gross. And once a boy reached maturity it was considered unseemly.

A small caveat to that, though, Socrates and Alcibiades seem real affectionate in the Symposium , and Alcibiades is a grown man by then.

This raises an important point. We're REALLY bad at reading the difference between homoromantic and homosocial behavior in our society. In ancient Greece, two men could hold hands and sit on each other's laps and it would never occur to anyone that they're boning. Hell, you could get away with that today in some countries without being seen as gay. But when Socrates explicitly talks about homosexuality, it does seem that the Greeks had plenty of intolerance to go around for certain sex acts that we would consider normal, healthy homosexuality.

[Ares Land]

A very good point indeed.

We are really bad at reading male displays of affections in earlier works, even as late as the early modern era or the 19th century.
I can't remember where I read that, unfortunately, but there's a real case to be made about us really being kidding ourselves (or really earlier generations of scholars really being kidding themselves.)
I'm inclined towards the 'we're kidding ourselves, they were totally boning' explanation myself, but there is certainly a case to be made for a different view.

Condemnation of homosexuality in Plato is hard to explain. It could have been a genuine reflection of attitude, or in the same vein as the weird utopian schemes of the later dialogues.

[Raphael]

Unrelated: I thought about bringing this up in the Capitalism Thread, but decided that it wasn't closely enough related to the topics discussed there. I've noticed something I find a bit interesting about the packaging of various consumer products. That is, mostly chocolate-related things and other types of sweets. Specifically, even when those products are cheap, or, if not cheap, then at least perfectly affordable for the average customer of a supermarket targeting the middle class, they are often sold in packaging where things like font selections, color schemes, other graphic design elements, and sometimes even the spelling of specific words, were apparently designed to create the impression that the product is sold only to the richest of the rich.

Does anyone else find this interesting or, if you think about it, a bit weird? Is it a specifically German thing, or does it happen everywhere where supermarkets sell preprocessed food? Does it have any interesting psychological or sociological implications? Any comments?

[Travis B.]

Unrelated: I thought about bringing this up in the Capitalism Thread, but decided that it wasn't closely enough related to the topics discussed there. I've noticed something I find a bit interesting about the packaging of various consumer products. That is, mostly chocolate-related things and other types of sweets. Specifically, even when those products are cheap, or, if not cheap, then at least perfectly affordable for the average customer of a supermarket targeting the middle class, they are often sold in packaging where things like font selections, color schemes, other graphic design elements, and sometimes even the spelling of specific words, were apparently designed to create the impression that the product is sold only to the richest of the rich.

Does anyone else find this interesting or, if you think about it, a bit weird? Is it a specifically German thing, or does it happen everywhere where supermarkets sell preprocessed food? Does it have any interesting psychological or sociological implications? Any comments?

Here in the US, I notice this with the kinds of chocolates one gives for someone's birthday or Valentine's Day or like, whereas I don't notice this with the kind of candy one sees right by the checkout, which seems aimed at getting little kids to beg their parents to buy it at the last moment.

[Pabappa]

To me there is kids' candy and grownups' candy. I dont partake much of either these days because of heartburn .... but kids' candy absolutely does not look gourmet at all, because any kids spending their allowance money would avoid something that looks like that, and most adults who buy something for their kids would not likely be so generous as to buy them gourmet chocolates.

adults' candy is mostly chocolate, and while some of it is likely very similar to the kids' chocolates, most people would not mistake one for the other even given a blind taste test, so there's more to it than just appearance. (as an aside, some people would say that the term "candy" excludes chocolate, but we always find chocolates in the candy aisle, not the confectionary aisle, etc, so I just call it all candy).

[Linguoboy]

Does anyone else find this interesting or, if you think about it, a bit weird? Is it a specifically German thing, or does it happen everywhere where supermarkets sell preprocessed food? Does it have any interesting psychological or sociological implications? Any comments?

It's not specifically German. You see the same thing in North America. Chocolates fall into the same "affordable luxury" category as coffee drinks or moisturising soap.

I've always been amused by this particular Lindt campaign, featuring perhaps the least convincing chocolatier ever depicted in any medium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70FFS9P-wVw

[rotting bones]

A small caveat to that, though, Socrates and Alcibiades seem real affectionate in the Symposium , and Alcibiades is a grown man by then.

Once you remember who Alcibiades was, you begin to wonder whether his character was meant to exemplify normal or desirable behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRLkjBUgB2o

On second thought, though, our own obsession with teenage girl is just as arbitrary!

I'm almost certain the basic female body type is a blob: lots of fat to nourish infants with. How did the absurd pattern of being extra chubby in the top and bottom halves and spindly thin in the middle come to be interpreted as "curvy"?