Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
“Crazy Rich Asians is nominated tonight for best musical or comedy…. It is the first studio film with an Asian American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha”
This is the first time I’ve seen color tattoos on dark skin that actually look vibrant and pigmented!!!!!
Once I was talking to a dark skinned lady who told me that she was jealous of my pasty skin because she wants color tattoos, which her artist said wasn’t possible with her skin tone. I sent her to mine, and he proceeded to go off about how dark skin accepts greens, yellows, and white beautifully, and that her previous artist just lacked the skills to use those 3 colors as highlights to make other colors pop more. If you are dark skinned and your tattoo artist says you can’t have bright colors, find a new one.
jack black’s first real video is him going to the pinball hall of fame and singing all star by smash mouth while playing a shrek-themed pinball machine so i’d say jablinski games is off to a fucking excellent start
I know this is meant to be a funny but funfact! The lotus set in Magic: The Gathering is bar-none the most expensive set in history, getting a whole set for a 60-card average deck would easily cost more than the car pictured. This card alone is worth nearly 20k, with some others costing several thousand dollars.
someone is absolutely a fuckin rich nerd.
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL
It’s because of a few factors all coming together!
First, this set was released in 1993. The cards from it are so rarely in good condition anymore that the ones that are in mint condition are disproportionately valuable.
Second, there is, of course, the nostalgia value of this being the first set ever released for the game.
Third, Magic: the Gathering was the very first trading card game. Richard Garfield, the designer, had no idea how popular it would get, and there was literally nobody else on the planet who had experience balancing a type of game that had never existed before. These days, TCGs are a whole industry, and you can look at the past efforts of other designers for your cues. In 1993, this was completely unexplored territory. As a result, the set this came from is completely imbalanced. Cards they thought would rule the game were regarded even then as nearly useless; cards they thought were fairly balanced or that would be rare in a neighborhood due to people just buying a box or two instead snapped the game in half. There’s a really famous combo using only four cards, all of which are in this set, to kill your opponent from full health before they even get a turn. Black Lotus is part of that combo.
As an addendum to the balance issue–Black Lotus, which gives you free “mana”–which you use to play other cards–at a rate better than literally anything else in the game, is considered the single most powerful card ever printed, because things that generate resources are generally more useful than the things that USE those resources.
Fourth–and this is a point of contention even to this day–Black Lotus cannot be reprinted due to legal issues. After the unexpected popularity of the game took off, Wizards of the Coast released a set called Chronicles that reprinted a lot of cards that were hard to find…which tanked the value of their original printings. Collectors threw a petulant hissy fit, and Wizards made the ill-advised decision to publicly commit to a “Reserved List” of cards that they would never reprint.
The Reserved List stopped getting new cards put on it after a couple of years, but the damage was done. Sure, some of these cards can’t be reprinted in certain competitive environments because they’re too powerful, but it’s been so long since they were last printed that they’re extremely hard to find even if you have the money to buy them. They’re so hard to find that officially sanctioned tournaments that allow those cards often allow a certain number of stand-in “proxy” cards just to make it so that people can play the game. Wizards releases anthology sets on a more regular basis, now that the collector’s market no longer has a stranglehold on the game, but they would be sued to oblivion if they abolished the Reserved List, despite the vast majority of players hating it.
So to sum up–Black Lotus was a “rare” card in the three limited-run sets it was printed in, it can’t ever be printed again, it was last printed twenty-five years ago in sets with extreme nostalgia and symbolic value, and it’s the single most powerful card in the entire game.
So, yes, it sells for tens of thousands of dollars.
reblogging this here because mtg has such personal meaning to me and I wrote a whole-ass essay about it
