engage in forbidden sexual intercourse, the Gemara notes that Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: There was an incident involving a certain man who set his eyes upon a certain woman and passion rose in his heart, to the point that he became deathly ill. And they came and asked doctors what was to be done with him. And the doctors said: He will have no cure until she engages in sexual intercourse with him. The Sages said: Let him die, and she may not engage in sexual intercourse with him. The doctors said: She should at least stand naked before him. The Sages said: Let him die, and she may not stand naked before him. The doctors suggested: The woman should at least converse with him behind a fence in a secluded area, so that he should derive a small amount of pleasure from the encounter. The Sages insisted: Let him die, and she may not converse with him behind a fence.

reject modernity (online r*pe academy), embrace tradition (the Beit Midrash telling a man to die)

Amazing! It definitely looks really nice in Junicode, even if it's not 100% the right shape:

So the question is, when did Tertullian's phrase become a clichée known to people who do not read Tertullian (as has been for some decades now, anyway), and was this before "Athens, Jerusalem, Rome" was formulated

Ah but that's not a combining character, so it only gets us ·⁊ next to each other. However, that page liks to Ŀ, which is *almost* right if you change the orientation: www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...

I know there's dot above and below, but "in the bottom left" is beyond me. I was hoping there might be something in the "box-drawing characters" (like ┐) but nothing with a dot inside it that I can see

It seems to me the vast majority of people who explicitly take the figure of "Athens and Jerusalem" from Tertullian use it in a way that has nothing to do with his point (or is contrary to it), so idk if the difference in meaning indicates that he's not still a source in the background

I'm not smart enough to do that but lmk if you figure it out 🙏

@unicode.org please encode Tironian notes! :)

Nota bene: Tironian note for "trans"

(Which I've always assumed go back to Irish/Latin equivalences, but I'm not sure if that is actually so)

Acc. to Wikipedia: "the names may have become associated as a result of the 10th-century St. Adalbert of Prague (born Vojtěch ...) having taken the name ... at his confirmation."

This reminds me somewhat of farfetched conventional Irish/English equivalences, e.g. Dáithí (pronounced ضاهي) = David

Thank you! He is doing much better than expected, thank the gods.

My father had a bad fall today - it seems he narrowly avoided serious damage, but perhaps those of you who worship might pray to Asclepius and Lycurgus (or any god) for him tonight.

good scholarship and art is mostly just realizing whom and what you can become, given all available constraints, whose form of expression is meaningful

there is fundamentally no competitive component whatsoever; competitive art isn't art, competitive thought isn't thought

the second challenge is trying to remember, despite all ideology to the contrary, that, if your scholarship and art is real and of any value, it is necessarily a social phenomenon, a fundamentally social gesture, and not at all any kind of token of individual merit or ability

Logo of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale's 71st conference, to be held in Baghdad on 29 March - 2 April 2026. It shows a detail of an Assyrian statue of a lamassu or winged bull in the background: the right half of its human face with curly beard and pointed bulls' ears. In cuneiform on the left are the symbols ki-en-gi ki-uri5, the signs for "Sumer and Akkad", the ancient name for the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates river.

It should have been the first day of a wonderful conference in Baghdad today - the first time ever that the International Association of Assyriology assembled in Iraq for its annual meeting.

This conference was to be the culmination of 4 years of hard work by Iraqi and international colleagues. 1/4

and when editors have gone back to the manuscripts of influential recent-ish books like Ulysses or The Hobbit, there's not really a single document that represents the text exactly as it was meant to be. it's errors and corrections all the way down!

Not having an "original copy" of an old text does not mean the version we have is unreliable. It can be, but not for that reason. (Just think of modern publishing: is there some kind of inviolate original that you could go check for any book you own? has that ever occurred to you as a problem?)

we only need paganism to be widely practiced and universally known, and these misapprehensions will cease

Who brings the Easter eggs? At various times & places these have been:

- hare
- rabbit
- fox
- cuckoo
- stork
- flying church bells
- crane
- lark
- 'heavenly hen'
- 'the red-egg bird'
- Paschalia the Easter Spirit
- flying old man
- St Nicholas
- God

(Also French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Yiddish, Akkadian, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Russian, Persian, but if I'm pacing myself...)

- Latin
- Greek
- Spanish
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Polish

time is real but clocks are fake

and they're so annoying for intercontinental book club

Bluesky ate the link for the last post: silvae-martianes.blogspot.com/2026/03/we-c...

(post no. 3 will explain the concept, or so i have intended)

yeah, just for a certain format of posts which don't fit a wiki

Bluesky ate the link for this one:

You may wonder if the dawn steals its red from the roses, Or bestows it on them, and the rising day paints the flowers. One dew, one color, one morning belongs to the two: For Venus is the one lady of the star and the flower. Perhaps also one odor; but that one, much higher, is dispersed By the winds, and this, being much closer, wafts. Paphië, common goddess of the star and goddess of the flower, Decrees that their attire must be of the same purple.

A new post on incenses and flowers consecrated to the gods, with little-known tellings of the myths of Myrrha (myrrh), Adonis (rose), Leucothoë (frankincense), Clytië (heliotrope), and Libanus (frankincense/rosemary). And this excerpt from a poem by Ausonius (?):

I know this pales in comparison to the human toll, but I keep thinking about an unedited work by Ibn Waḥshiyyah, written over a thousand years ago, whose only known copies are kept in Tehran. It is too easy to imagine the servants of empire destroying these libraries out of sheer spite.