Half the community is called out by “I’d rather spend the evening listening to a gentleman explain railroads” XD
Um, AKTUALLY, MY special fixation is Unique and Interesting unlike everyone else’s, and that’s why everyone wants to hear about the ambiguous nature of minor deities in Roman household rituals 😤
Lay it on me, magister, and I’ll commit working time fraud to listen.
Basically, the lares were household and neighborhood gods that the Romans themselves didn’t understand well. Two contemporary Roman writers give six possibilities for what the lares might be, with both of them admitting them don’t know which description of the lares is correct.
The lares were widely worshipped all the same, with individual households honoring them at the hearth, and both rural and urban neighborhoods typically having a small shrine to the lares at each crossroad, where yearly sacrifices were made and regular minor offerings were presented for the favor of the lares. The lares, despite this ambiguity of what they actually were, were also widely depicted in religious murals, with surprisingly consistent themes and appearance (twin young figures, non-formal dress, clean-shaven, dancing), and seem to have popped up wherever Roman populations were, regardless of whether the city itself was Roman-majority, suggesting that the lares were a core part of Roman religion despite the fact that even educated Roman writers did not necessarily understand what they were.
The book I recently read posits that the lares were gods of place, essentially one of the (many) holdovers from ancient, pre-Greek-influence Roman religio that has an almost animistic conception of the world. Noted is that not only did every household (including rural farming households) have individual lares, but that the lares at each crossroads were separate not only from other neighborhood lares, but also from the lares of each household in the neighborhood, and that early in Roman seafaring, sacrifices were made to lares of the sea.
The book also compares and contrasts them to the Manes/di parentes, the ancestral spirits of the family; to the genius of individuals; and to the genius loci of individual places. The lares were divine and not derived from mortals, and so were not ancestor spirits; the lares persisted beyond any individual, so they were not individual genius; and the genius loci were associated strongly with the land/region itself (though often paired with depictions of the lares), while the lares were associated with human settlement, rather than being autochthonous.
Wait you lowkey might be right, that is interesting XD
I like the sayings. What I utterly disrespect are the AI graphics.
“I would prefer to be chased by an angry goose”. Obviously a Canadian.
“I would rather spend an evening listening to a gentleman explain railroads”. Actually that sounds neat.
Quick, fetch my fainting couch!
Janet? fetch me my tizzy couch!
No shade to you, pug, you post a lot, but does anyone feel like these are just the start of an idea? Not witty enough, just the worst ones out of the bunch if you were riffing with friends. Just barely being “ye olde” not reading clearly as any specific epoque. Plus the card itself is genAI. Eh.
Eh, not everything I post is a banger. I try to keep up one non-crosspost a day, if I find it vaguely amusing.
I didn’t notice it was GenAI when I saw it, since I didn’t look at the images closely. That’s on me. I’m not removing it since it’s already got traction, but generally I try to identify and avoid posting GenAI.
“You and I are about as similar as two entirely dissimilar things in a pod.” - Edmund Blackadder
What’s Victorian for “third row, first column has six fingers while fifth row, second column has a melted hand”?
Fuck me, didn’t even catch that.
“I think I’ve had one too many bourbons”
I only read the words but looking at the pics they all seem to have something vaguely wrong
Yes, and the lady also has a bit of an odd shirt. It’s probably VictorAIn humour.
> I would rather spend an evening listening to a gentleman explain railroads.
Low key, that sounds like a jovial time.
“Your proposal is acceptable.”
Where do I sign up?
Kindly place that idea back where you found it.
I ABSOLUTELY love this one. Definitely stealing it.
Im a fan of good heavens, no.
I think not, dear fellow.
The very suggestion has given me the vapors
I would actually like to spend an evening with a gentleman that explains railroads.
This one is technically modern, as I saw it used by some guy relatively recently (couple of decades back), but going by technology development it could theoretically apply to Victorian times, if not for the crudeness;
‘I’d rather have my dick slammed in the car door.’I would find immeasurably greater pleasure in the use of my member to arrest the rapid closure of the door of a driverless carriage.
…if we’re going with loquaciousness as the defining characteristic of Victorian english.
Column 1, row 6 is basically how claude and all AI models trained on it talk like all the time and consider the height of comedy
