#classics Timeline

1y

💕 Artist: #KennyRandom (Andrea Coppo) in City: #Padua Italy 🇮🇹 2019 - Title: untitled - #Art #Streetart #Mural #Artist #Barbapapa #Classics #Sprayart #GoodMorning ! ☕

Streetartwall. A mural showing a little girl painting a house wall was sprayed onto a gray house wall. Black spray paint and stencils were used to depict the silhouette of a little girl in a short dress with a paintbrush in her hand and a cat next to her. The painting that the girl is painting is a well-known pink cartoon character called "Barbapapa". She is an elongated, almost oval blob of color with a friendly face. Barbapapa holds a flower in one hand and raises the "middle finger" of the other hand.
Info: Kenny Random is a cult artist who has been working on the streets of Padua since the 1980s. His works have long hung in museums and with wealthy patrons. No tourist visit is complete without a selfie with his art. Unfortunately, his works in public spaces are often quickly destroyed by crazy idiots.

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1y

💕 Artist: #PeteMcKee in City: #Sheffield 69 Broad Ln, Fagan's Pub, UK 🇬🇧 2013 and 05/2024 - Title: "The Snog" 😘 (Frank and Joy) - #Art #Streetart #Mural #Artist #TheSnog #Painting #Cartoon #Classics
#GoodMorning ☕ @PeteMckee

Streetartwall. A comic-style mural depicting an unusual couple has been painted on the white exterior wall of a pub. It shows an older couple making out. He is an older man with a brown jacket and a brown plaid cap on his head. She has purple hair, glasses, earrings and is wearing a purple coat with a pattern. She has purple hair, glasses, earrings and is wearing a purple coat with a pattern. She boldly grabs his arm and energetically gives him a snog on the mouth. The mural is a real eye-catcher and has almost become a Sheffield landmark.
Info: Pete McKee (born 1966) is an English cartoonist who tells short stories with minimalistically drawn figures and a colorful "pop art" aesthetic. The mural with the lovers from Sheffield was originally painted for an exhibition in 2013 and has suffered somewhat over the years. Reason enough to freshen it up in 2025 and give Joy a new hairstyle and a new coat.

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287d

I was reminded today that Meta/Facebook's data center project is called Hyperion. Here are some facts about that name that may or may not be of interest.

Hyperion's name comes from two Greek words that together mean "watcher from above" or "he who goes above".

Hyperion was a Titan, the ancient Greek gods that preceded the Olympian gods like Zeus, Athena, etc. Prometheus, Atlas, and the word Titan itself are frequently used to name tech projects. A fun web search is "COMPANY_NAME Titan"; try it. It seems lost on these folks that the Titans were deposed by the Olympian gods and condemned to an eternity in Tartarus, a kind of hell. In other words they're the loser gods, if you want to be simplistic and vulgar about it.

It is believed that one of Hyperion's offspring, Helios, as well as all of Helios's offspring, were imagined as being black-skinned.

My wife, who is a classicist, and I regularly shake our heads about the names of tech projects like this. I always ask her for the dirt on the name, and she always delivers (as in the above, which I credit to her).

#DataCenters #Cloud #AI #Facebook #Meta #Hyperion #GreekGods #AncientGreece #Titans #Classics

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1y

Beach vacations only became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries as part of the lifestyle of the wealthy in Western countries. Early Europeans, and especially the ancient Greeks, thought the beach was a place of hardship and death. As a seafaring people, they mostly lived on the coastline, yet they feared the sea and thought that an agricultural lifestyle was safer and more respectable.

From The beach wasn’t always a vacation destination - for the ancient Greeks, it was a scary place: https://theconversation.com/the-beach-wasnt-always-a-vacation-destination-for-the-ancient-greeks-it-was-a-scary-place-259356

A post in The Conversation by my favorite classicist (my wife!)

#summer #beach #AncientGreece #myth #classics

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25d

In January 2026, a group of Hugh Cook fans began republishing his 10 book series, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

This is noteworthy since these novels were basically out of print and weren't available in e-book or audio. Untangling them from copyright limbo was no small feat.

In August, these fans, operating as Zenphos Press, published the first audio edition of The Wizards and the Warriors. The first novel in the series.

I was lucky enough to snag an early copy via the r/hughcook sub.

The narrator, Morgan Scott, is also a fan, and does an excellent job, you can feel that this is a labor of love for him.

Originally published from the mid 1980s to the early 90s, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness stands out as a critique of the heroic fantasy tropes so common in that era.

While other novels in the series use humor as part of this deconstruction, The Wizards and the Warriors is deadly serious. It is not Pratchett's The Color of Magic. It is more like Saving Private Rian. Working within the format of a heroic tale, exposing its dirty underbelly.

Cook takes the wizards and the warriors, two major examples of toxic masculinity and exposes the folly in their quest for power.

I originally learned of Cook's novels in the early 2010s. As a blind person I had to use a synthetic voice to listen to them.

Cook had a website on the early internet where he published the full text of, The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, the second book of the Chronicles. After reading that I had to resort to bootleg e-book versions scanned and uploaded by fans.

I'm very glad this series is finally getting a proper audiobook edition.

This is my original 2013 review:

Hugh Cook inserts some reality into his Fantasy.

While the setting is fantastic, Cook makes sure to break our expectations of a regular fantasy adventure, with his less than heroic heroes and less than clear path to ultimate goal.

My favorite scene is a battle where we first hear about the general's well laid plans and then watch them crumble in the face of reality.
So many books place a brilliant commander in charge and then you watch his brilliant plan unfold like clockwork. Hugh Cook is way beyond that kind of fantasy.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/95351200-2bf6-40d0-86ee-83dbe316e541

@bookstodon @audiofiction #fantasy #HughCook #AudioBooks #ChroniclesOfAnAgeOfDarkness #SFF #classics #amReading

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