Homosexuality in exalted.

[Silence In Daylight]

The incest thing was done by the original Ptolemy to curry favor with the natives; incest was highly repugnany by Greek culture.

 

[Silence In Daylight]

But does anyone know if the Greeks showed up, went, "Hey cool country.  I shall rule it and eat gyros!" and then married local Egyptian nobility for the next three hundred years or if they kept the marriages within the wealthy Greek families?

 The Macedonians made it a point to keep their blood as pure as possible; there was a very strict caste system, based on how much Macedonian blood one could claim.


 Granted, the Greeks remained mostly in the city of Alexandria, the artificial graft on the Egyptian tree. The old Egypt was centered in Memphis.

 

[Kyrn]

Heh, Memphis.  Suddenly Bubba Ho-Tep makes so much more sense.

 

[Kyrn]

Fucking Wikipedia. I can't stop reading now.
-S

I spent about an hour on it.   I started clicking hyperlinks and I eventually found myself reading up on various theories regarding the likelyhood of life beyond Earth.  Damn you wikipedia!


Uh, is anyone here ever going to buy an Encyclopedia Brittanica?  Is anyone on the planet?

 

[Jakk Bey]

Not anyone under the age of fifty, and those folks generally already have theirs if they're at all interested by now.


Encyclopedias, by their very nature, used to be obsolete even before the type was set.  Not so much anymore.  Dictionaries still tend to be behind on usage, and will remain so, as language evolves and folks feel the need to set the record, but we're fast approaching an age of shared information that is going to get the tar whalloped out of it if there's ever massive power outages.


Which is why there will always be old coots who will insist on hard copy and good bindings.  While the speed and depth of knowledge is impressive on line, it is perishable.

 

[Flagg]

we're fast approaching an age of shared information that is going to get the tar whalloped out of it if there's ever massive power outages.

All that info isn't going to go anywhere... it just won't be accessible until the juice is turned back on.


-S

 

[Jakk Bey]

I was talking more about catastrophic loss of power on a grand scale.  Disaster--man made or natural.  Not burning of Alexandria kind of wonton destruction, but a by-product of said disaster.  


We'll have an appreciation for books if things get that bad.  And if things get that bad, we won't be just turning on the juice again.


It's the natural cycle for information.  Collection.  Dissemination. Storage. Loss.  Bad things happen.  People, natural disasters, or just plain bad luck.  We have discovered electricity a couple of times.  We still have no idea how the blocks in Mexico and Peru were really moves, and couldn't do it today if we wanted to--20,000ton blocks of stone from Sacsahuaman, and the Incas got it moving, and we couldn't do it today.  Got some theories, but we lose information all the time.  As soon as people stop paying attention, it starts to fade.  Archives are filled with vast stores of information that aren't indexed and cataloged, that will soon be lost.


Some...not so much of a loss.  Lists of things that are so trivial that they are moot.  Others...it'll be some time before we do it again.  Like the whiskey recipe from the thread I started earlier.  Like the recipe for absinthe.  Even if things get written down, they get lost.  I just think with the push to store media electronically, we're balancing both the reward for quick turn around and easy dissemination of information with quicker turn around time for loss.


And there will always be old coots and crusty librarians who will archive information in less perishable mediums for us.  And the grasshoppers amongst us will look upon their efforts askance, until such a time as they are needed.  I readily admit to my grasshopper traits, and I love the easy path to sharing information, but I can also readily recognize the inherent weaknesses of the same push.

 

[Silence In Daylight]

There are some advantages the Brit-3 has over the Wikipedia. The Brit-3 has an excellent record for presenting their information as accurately and objectively as possible. While the WP rarely has any out-and-out mistakes that people don't catch fairly promptly, the information is only as good as its contributor. And that's not taking into account deliberate mistakes...


 Would I buy a Brit-3 for myself? No. Would I take any info from WP with more salt than from a similar entry in Brit-3? Hell yeah.

 

[Persell]

from 2nd page

Off the top of my head one of House patriarchs is schtucking his nephew

I believe your talking about either Cainin Cathik or Banoba ragura (sp? no book in front of me).  In the section for their house it does state that he has been having sex with his nephew for around 100 years.  But, that's just for fun. He still has a wife and "does" his duty for the realm. Can't remember which one, but i am leaning toward Cainin.

 

[Hanat-Osul]

Banoba, if memory serves, has been in a deeply romantic (and entirely mutual) relationship with some nephew of his for quite some time.  Which, while creepy on an instinctual level, is certainly interesting enough to warrant inclusion in a story.

 

[Kyrn]

Ah, Banoba, that's the one.  I guess the idea of a hundred year romance has its merits.  Has anyone here ever read the Theodore Sturgeon short story "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"


It raises questions about the social indoctrination regarding incest.  Man that was a weird class.

 

[Jakk Bey]

Ted and wife were swingers.  Knowing this puts a lot of his tales into the proper perspective.


Robert Heinlein talked a good game, but Virginia Heinlein didn't play that.  Teddy Sturegeon was a whole different, and wonderfully freaky animal...