As a Classics major in college and with continuing love for that decaying old grande dame of a discipline, this is pretty cool and I hope the identification holds up to scrutiny (because it would be a big deal).
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…
shadowgovt 39 days ago [-]
"Sssh, love, go back to bed." ~Mary
1-more 39 days ago [-]
This is how I find out they were married. Huh.
globalise83 39 days ago [-]
Enough opium Percy, time for bed
greenhearth 39 days ago [-]
Obviously not decaying, but alive and well
lordleft 39 days ago [-]
My favorite play is the Herakles of Euripides, which ends on these lines:
The man who would prefer great wealth or strength
more than love, more than friends
is diseased of soul
_a_a_a_ 39 days ago [-]
"Money can't buy you love but it lets you rent it by the hour" – Max Headroom (from memory)
maCDzP 39 days ago [-]
I was born after Max Headroom aired, but for those of you that saw it while it aired, how was it?
KingMob 39 days ago [-]
Fun fact: the creators of Max Headroom were the creators behind the original 1993 Super Mario Bros movie with Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, and John Leguizamo.
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.
Obscurity4340 38 days ago [-]
Very fun facts :D
yanowitz 39 days ago [-]
Absolutely amazing. American TV was a desolate landscape with occasional stuff so good you couldn’t believe the oasis wasn’t a mirage. Max Headroom was in that category. And of course it didn’t start in the States.
Dunno if it would hold up today though
settsu 39 days ago [-]
Personally, I don't think it has to hold up.
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.
jfoutz 39 days ago [-]
I dunno. The specific mechanism of a reporter uncovering some bad actions and spreading the word on TV, may not hold up so well.
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.
shuntress 39 days ago [-]
> very little comedy is truly timeless
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".
jeramey 39 days ago [-]
Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.
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!
caf 30 days ago [-]
I tend to agree that Who's On First is a exactly the sort comedy that will lose its pithiness in time, moored as it is to the cultural context of baseball and contemporary English wordplay.
nzgrover 39 days ago [-]
One of my favourite lines is from Three men in a Boat: "George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physician way of putting things".
fsckboy 39 days ago [-]
>American TV was a desolate landscape
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
Your description of American TV certainly holds up today.
morsch 39 days ago [-]
What other stuff comes to mind?
finnh 39 days ago [-]
Twin Peaks
southwesterly 38 days ago [-]
It is happening again.
finnh 38 days ago [-]
That gum you like is coming back in style.
jackthetab 39 days ago [-]
Great! It was inventive and dystopian. Many of the stories were lifted from classic sci-fi concepts.
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.
defrost 38 days ago [-]
Errr, I hate to be the person that breaks this to you but ....
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.
I enjoyed it a lot, though was a kid. It made a statement similar to the movie Network (1976), that I somewhat understood at a young age—they’ll do anything for ratings.
speed_spread 39 days ago [-]
Add to this Cronenberg's "Videodrome" and you'll have a great movie night.
dr_dshiv 39 days ago [-]
The movie came first, “20 minutes into the future.” It’s on YouTube and very good, if you like art films.
andrepd 39 days ago [-]
I found it an absolute gem. Definitely a product of its time, but very enjoyable world and characters.
qingcharles 39 days ago [-]
It was wild. It was literally like nothing else. A breath of fresh air.
I'm surprised there's no Max Headroom VTuber right now...
dleink 39 days ago [-]
It taught a young me that advertisements can make your head explode, a lesson I carry to this day.
swayvil 39 days ago [-]
BLIPVERT!! That word came to me a couple days ago. Now I have made the connection.
That sound reminds me of the howl of a billion demons. Lovecraftian or Goetian or a forest full of screaming bugs or whatever.
invalidlogin 38 days ago [-]
Excellent. I looked forward to it and enjoyed it.
infotainment 39 days ago [-]
Wow, some things never change!
debacle 39 days ago [-]
If you are a student of history, you realize that human nature has always been a constant.
We 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."
bigstrat2003 39 days ago [-]
One of the biggest reasons I love Shakespeare (and other older literature) is that it really highlights how human nature hasn't changed. The good and bad of mankind, as well as the struggles we face, are largely the same as they were centuries ago. It really makes me feel a kinship with these people who died long before I was born, to know that they had to face the same kind of insecurities and challenges I do today.
psychoslave 39 days ago [-]
Let's remember that at least half of what is to be contemplated lies in those who are judging what they see.
I wouldn't be that quick to misjudge individuals by the prisme of shallow knowledge provided by history at whole societies scale.
doctorwho42 39 days ago [-]
And that you should strive to be a non-crap person because it is a valuable trait.
lukan 39 days ago [-]
I guess allmost everyone tries that - it is just that our definition of "crap people" is quite different.
nyokodo 39 days ago [-]
> everyone tries that
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.
adolph 38 days ago [-]
>> everyone tries [to be a non-crap person]
> 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]
> requires accepting some things that you know are bad
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]
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.
nyokodo 39 days ago [-]
> I don't think it is impossible
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.
debacle 39 days ago [-]
Crap people with initiative have done more good for the world that the non-crap people ever will.
39 days ago [-]
rwmj 39 days ago [-]
There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
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.
tivert 39 days ago [-]
> There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
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.
AdmiralAsshat 39 days ago [-]
All that survives is The Love Boat, and future humans will fashion their entire understanding of ancient American history, culture, and religion around this show.
jhbadger 39 days ago [-]
There is a satirical (paper) RPG called "Diana: Warrior Princess" that takes its inspiration from this idea. The idea is it is a representation of the idea of 20th century culture as viewed from a millennium into the future, focusing on Princess Di who is depicted as a great leader who fights against Hitler and has advisors like Charles Darwin. It's mocking how "historical fiction" often takes great liberties with fact and mixes people who never lived at the same time together.
082349872349872 39 days ago [-]
Upon seeing "Warrior Princess" I had first been expecting they'd given DFS an ambiguous (sororal or sapphistical?) companion:
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!
"On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as the Personification of Female Desire"
whythre 39 days ago [-]
That honestly doesn’t sound too bad.
mystified5016 39 days ago [-]
Could be Jersey Shore...
klodolph 39 days ago [-]
At least Jersey Shore is anthropological in nature
adolph 38 days ago [-]
> There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over . . .
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]
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
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.
mmcdermott 39 days ago [-]
I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."
bawolff 39 days ago [-]
I imagine our grandchildren will think of covid the way we think of the spanish flu - as a minor historical footnote.
qingcharles 39 days ago [-]
We lost the entirety of MySpace, which was a significant cultural moment.
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.
iosonofuturista 39 days ago [-]
My understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the papyrus.
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.
romaaeterna 38 days ago [-]
They didn't have to, several of the lines matched existing fragments.
Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
Cthulhu_ 39 days ago [-]
I just hope there are good archival structures in place in society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they contain a list of their works (for example).
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.
bjornsing 39 days ago [-]
I named my home server (that I mostly run machine learning experiments on) euripides, because I found a quote by him very insightful: “Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
dmvdoug 38 days ago [-]
I named my Linux box sisyphus because I had so many problems installing distros other than Mint that I became convinced I’d never succeed.
And then kde neon Just Worked.
4gotunameagain 38 days ago [-]
haha, love it.
although I have to say, Linux installations are a walk in the park these days ;)
dmvdoug 38 days ago [-]
Yeah, it’s an old Dell desktop box from 2015, what can I say.
INTPenis 38 days ago [-]
I should name a server bureaucracy because it's the one word I haven't learned how to spell yet.
alexpotato 39 days ago [-]
> Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine
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!"
baruz 39 days ago [-]
It used to be distributed as a CD to university libraries, but these CDs were supposed to be surrendered when the online version came out. I have heard
that at least one of these copies (perhaps “out of date” in terms of “new” texts added since the web version debut) exists on some sort of distributed distribution network.
laichzeit0 38 days ago [-]
TLG is pretty easy to get hold of. You also want Diogenes, an app that allows you to use that database. It’s very useful if you study Latin or Greek, even as a hobby.
mtsolitary 39 days ago [-]
Euripedes fragments, Youpayfordes fragments!
adgjlsfhk1 39 days ago [-]
it's a shame cartalk isn't still around. imagine how much fun they would have had with cybertruck
dudeinjapan 39 days ago [-]
Best comment on HN. As true in Euripedes' time as it is in ours.
39 days ago [-]
mandevil 39 days ago [-]
Euripedes fragments or Eumenides fragments!
39 days ago [-]
loughnane 39 days ago [-]
It's really a miracle that we have as much as we do from antiquity, but I'm still excited whenever something new comes uip.
lmpdev 38 days ago [-]
It always makes me a bit sad though
So much is still lost and we rely on such tiny fragments or worse hearsay by other authors rehashing their ideas
dmvdoug 38 days ago [-]
Especially notes of Aristotle’s oral ramblings about others’ works, when we know those are wildly casual about accuracy when we can actually compare them to pieces of text.
gadders 39 days ago [-]
Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon [1]
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.
Re: lost classics, I hope we can recover an intact work by Heraclitus from those burnt scrolls in Herculaneum, that would make me lose my shit.
kombookcha 38 days ago [-]
It would be so insanely cool.
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.
peterclary 39 days ago [-]
I only regret that several of my old Classics masters are no longer around to celebrate this.
persnickety 39 days ago [-]
How did they manage to squeeze 98 lines on 10.5 square inches? That's less than 68cm². For 5mm×5mm characters that area can fit 272 characters, so not even 3 characters per line.
codeofficer 39 days ago [-]
Euripides trousers, Umendades trousors.
nescioquid 39 days ago [-]
Eumenides trousers?
hk__2 39 days ago [-]
Umendades trousors.
_a_a_a_ 39 days ago [-]
Essplain? Am lost.
bennyg 39 days ago [-]
Say it out loud - it's a play on words. "You rip a dese trousers, you mend a dese trousers"
noelwelsh 39 days ago [-]
'Tis true, but it's also true that Eumenides is an actual Greek deity (and The Eumenides is a play) that sounds the same (at least when pronounced by this monolingual English speaker.)
So I feel "Eumenides trousers!" is a slightly better variant of the joke.
_a_a_a_ 39 days ago [-]
Yeah, I thought that was a direction too. Slightly over thinking it.
ruined 38 days ago [-]
euripedes nuts
Rendered at 13:36:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
https://c.tenor.com/ELf9Bd2Ho94AAAAC/alf-cat-sandwich.gif
https://media3.giphy.com/media/PS89uO8ZFOXE4/giphy.gif
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
I'm surprised there's no Max Headroom VTuber right now...
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.
We 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."
I wouldn't be that quick to misjudge individuals by the prisme of shallow knowledge provided by history at whole societies scale.
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.
> People try and fit in publicly so that they’re seen to be good by their group
These statements are not in disagreement.
> requires accepting some things that you know are badLight 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...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
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.
[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.
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/
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
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.
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.
Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295543/ferdia-lennon
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.