https://twitter.com/EmbassyofRussia/status/1493884806022713344

Rufus T. Firefly:

I would separate convenience from physicality.

I love being able to check the definition of a word or the year a book was published with a few clicks, instead of trudging over to a heavy old dictionary or encyclopedia, prising it open, then flipping pages until the proper nugget of information is revealed.

You’ll have to pry my mouse from my cold dead fingers on that account.

However, the sensory joys of physical books, magazines, and whatnot cannot be underestimated. We live in a physical world in physical bodies. We are not digital beings existing in cyberspace and interacting with virtual objects.

It matters.

Lately I’ve been going through the old paperbacks I’ve been lugging around. Some I read in high school. They are nothing special. They are old Ballantine, Dell, Signet mass market paperbacks I paid a buck or two for back then.

Now they are fifty years old and falling apart. I don’t want to buy new copies, assuming I could. I’m happy to repair them by wrapping the covers and spine in clear packing tape, so they’ll last another decade or two.

I’ve come up with my own technique and it’s a small, pleasant ritual to restore my old books this way.

Re Ukraine:

https://twitter.com/MuradGazdiev/status/1493862768818151425?cxt=HHwWgoCz6b-RorspAAAA

“The Russian Foreign Ministry has called on Western media outlets to publish a full list of dates on which Russia will invade Ukraine for the year ahead, so Russian diplomats can schedule their vacations accordingly.

This is not satire. They did this”

(Screen cap in case Twitter memory holes original)
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/098/946/594/original/f9e89a72d15e42cf.png

Yes!

… and yet… I was thinking about this today when reading all the comments on this post.

So many of us had hours and hours of fun as kids and adolescents poring over physical maps, stamps, almanacs, encyclopedias, Chilton’s automobile manuals with their exploded diagrams of automobile parts, the Old Farmer’s Almanac, dictionaries, the Funk and Wagnall’s, the Book of World Records… Something very visceral and tangible about it.

When knowledge is too easy to discover is it cheapened?

That’s amazing! You made my day! I just texted that link to my college friend who mocked me all those years ago. Turns out I was right! Think he’ll apologize?

Page 68 of the archive window. (not the text)

“On anginne aerest waes word …”

It don’t have the keyboard set up to do eth or thorn or the old monkish “and” sign

Wow. Sometimes the Internet is worth more than can be easily stated.

Just so you know, I’m not yet certain that that is the same work I found back in the stacks in school.

As it has Mercian and Northumbrian dialects, it might be.

As I recall, the texts were printed in parallel.

Just now found the one which I linked to above.

Rufus T. Firefly on February 16, 2022 at 3:26 pm said:

DNW @ 12:57pm,

How about Americans and Chaucer or Beowulf?

I have enough trouble with the Lord’s Prayer in Old English.

You might for example be able to read the introduction to The Gospel of John too.

https://archive.org/details/holygospelsinan01skeagoog

But if someone threw The Wanderer at you and asked you what it said, I doubt that any of us could make sense of it without at least 3 weeks of study.

Speaking of wanderers, I keep waiting for one of the history channels on YouTube to cover the great migration of Saxon nobility that took place after the Normans really settled in.

I had read that some had left England, but I had no idea of the many thousands who departed in fleets for Constantinople, some of whom built a colony on the Black Sea.

Quite a story. Hell of a thing to lose your country and to become so wretched.

One day while eating in the cafeteria one such friend held up a marshmallow and asked, “Hey, Rufus. Where do marshmallows come from?” I looked at the marshmallow he held in his fingers and thought to myself, “Well, marshmallows don’t have much protection, so they probably don’t grow under or on the ground. But trees seem to produce bigger things like apples and oranges…” “I don’t know,” I stated, “Maybe bushes?”

From marshes of course.

https://eattheplanet.org/marsh-mallow-the-sweet-edible-that-inspired-the-candy/