cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/72694016 (original title: YOU BASTARDS)
Modular mace head
What is the bowl of wicker balls on the coffee table in every airbnb for?
Just try building your nanomachines without one!
Obviously it's the ship design the Grays used during their early recon phase.
Time Traveler: "Listen, I know it's weird, but spread making this thing as a tradition, it'll confuse the fuck out of historians in a couple thousand years."
It was found in a Roman toilet along with three shells.
It's for starting a ball of yarn, also drugs
It's an old-school Beanie Baby.
Someone crafted, it looked amazing, everyone wanted one, they probably started calling them good luck charms and sold a bunch more.
It's an anomalous object that expands the inside dimensions of a space without altering the outside dimensions. It gets lazy about it after a while though and starts making stuff out of whatever bullshit comes to hand, though. DO NOT leave it outside for prolonged periods of time.
Theory: They were masterpieces, in the old meaning
A masterpiece was an item you would craft or something you would do to earn you the rank of Master in your Guild.
This is easy to describe and judge, but hard to make if you aren't experienced.
They put them in their gold hoardes as they were basically their version of a degree
(If you're a metalworker and want to check if you would've earned the rank of Master in an ancient Guild, you can try to make one of these)
Psssh, you can CNC that bad boy in an hour with close to no work.
With quite a bit of work. That's more than one setup and probably a decent amount of time getting the CAM programming right.
Or maybe it was the opposite, they were a basic project assigned to beginner metalsmiths to teach them the different skills. That's why they're everywhere, because everyone who went to the Roman equivalent of trade school made, like, 1-3.
That's why they're everywhere
If I recall correctly, they aren't everywhere though.
Afaik they were only found in provinces but not in Italy.
Nothing like showing off your mastery of the craft by... making the exact same thing everyone else did.
If they're trying to objectively evaluate someone's skills that's exactly what you would want to do. If you have to come up with a different criteria for every submission then it starts to become subjective quickly.
Standardized testing!
That everyone else knows is pain in the dickhole to make? Yeah, works well, actually.
Check out 90% of woodworking posts, logic holds up.
Oh shit, is the epoxy river table our version of the dodecahedron!? 😱
Wait till the wood rots away and all future archaeologists find is the epoxy.
"We believe 21st century rich people put a long strip of epoxy in their homes for ritualistic purposes. Though some have suggested it's pretty obviously some device for knitting."
Oh cmon, it's obviously a dildo but the scientists didn't want to say it out loud.
Art historians prefer the term “fertility idol”
Wait till they find the terabytes of fertility idols on my computer.
As is tradition!
but.. tradition is peer pressure from dead people.
and.. dead people turn into zombies.
Ipso facto, you better make it or zombies will take your lunch money.
Logically sound reasoning.
That's unlikely. It seems to have been such a regional thing that I don't think it's that. If it were, you expect it to come from a Roman tradition, or at least be adopted by them, yet these aren't found there.
Most convincing theory I've seen is that it's a cipher tool.
(/srs) my most convincing theory is that it's for testing smithing skills. Like that one boat on 3D printers.
A Roman benchie?
I mean... Maybe... It would be a tricky make that would require quite a bit of skill to cast or bend, weld and polish.
Not an unreasonable hypothesis all things considered.
This is going to be future archaeologists with all of our electronics.
It's already difficult to get some 10 year old devices' documentation or user manual. The company behind it might not even exist anymore so I'm off to digging up the archives or translating chinese OEM's pdfs.
I sometimes have to support old harsware still used in live systems and sometimes it feels like digital archaeology trying to find. I feel a massive wave of relief if I see them running an old enough version of our software that I can tell them lol nope unsupported.
Oldest thing I have had to support this month is a card reader from the late 90s. Essentially a scanner which scans printed templates and identifies where someone filled in the form on it. The customer was putting the cards in upside down.
And you know what to look for, have the resources to find it, and can interpret the information when you find it.
Imagine having an Xbox, a router, a cable modem, an iPhone 11, the control board from a washing machine, and the central unit from a Tesla and trying to explain what each of them was without any other context, cables, chargers, etc...
Maybe not even a compatible source of electricity!
Don't even get me started on the ephemeral nature of software...
Idk how many times i have to post this, but it's clearly a prime chaotic resonator. Slot some fossils into that bad boy and craft some good gear!
look at this larper, he doesn't even recognize a bigass thundercube.
You use this for krangling your items.
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