This is the wind chime you buy when you want your neighbours to move. 😏

Latin quote 'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo' with English translation: 'I hate the common rabble and I keep them at a distance.'

Re-reading Horace's Odes (3.1.1) this morning: "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo." Basically my thoughts on Twitter/X right now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #poetry #latin #ancientrome

Every time I have more work done on the house or garden which involves cement, I'm going to leave a perfect footprint in it. I'm not going to have my legacy outdone by a bloody chicken.

Oh gosh, that's great. I would buy that version in a heartbeat.

Does passing GO net you 200 sestertii? Asking for a Centurion.

Well... gap years are all about learning new skills and self-discovery I suppose.

Roman fresco from Pompeii painted on a red wall. It depicts a long, narrow landscape panel, painted to look like a framed picture resting on a white marble shelf. The scene shows a Nile marsh with birds, ducks, straw huts and straw enclosure walls, small pygmy figures, and two dogs, with a crocodile in the water at the far right. A large theatrical mask with comically tall hair and a dramatic, shocked expression appears to rest on the panel, giving the impression of a person behind peeking over its top edge. Photo by Jebulon (Wikimedia), CC0 public domain dedication.

The first documented case of someone buying a monitor that's far too wide for the desk. 😜 OK, so it's really a fresco from the Temple of Isis Portico (Pompeii) depicting a Nile scene with pygmies & a theatrical mask peeking over the top.

🏛️ Naples Archaeological Museum. #FrescoFriday #AncientBlueSky

An ancient ceramic beaker with a dark, clay-coloured finish. The vessel has a wide, rounded body that tapers sharply to a small circular base. The exterior is decorated in barbotine, a technique of trailing liquid clay, with a row of small dashes circling the top, just below the rim. Two visible phallic symbols (fascinii) dominate the design. The prominent phallus at the front is winged, while a partly obscured one on the left is unwinged. There are four in all (two not visible in the photo), conveying the idea they are flying or swimming around the vessel. Chips and wear in the dark coating reveal a lighter terracotta colour beneath. © The Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Who knew little flying willies could be so powerful? Excavated from the Roman settlement at Stonea Grange, Cambridgeshire in the early 80s, these winged phalli promised protection from harm, envy, and bad luck. Which obviously worked. (43-409 AD) #AncientBlueSky #AncientRome #PhallusThursday

Sorry if you saw that #phallusthursday post before I ninja deleted it twice. Made myself queasy with my own joke. It was definitely too much. Tamer version incoming.... 😅

Veii: famous for a 4th century BC siege, but in the 4th century AD it may have been one of Imperial Rome's wild-animal depots. This mosaic of an elephant boarding a ship was found there (modern-day Isola Farnese). #mosaicmonday #AncientBlueSky

📷 by Carole Raddato. Badisches Landesmuseum, Germany.

Thanks for the context. They really knew how to make an entrance. Literally!

Don't forget this one. Not a god. Just a guy who (i) keeps screwing up, (ii) facing consequences, (iii) promising he's changed, (iv) rolling the same dumb boulder back up the same dumb hill.

Seems to follow the same number/side convention too. 1 opposite 6, 2 opposite 5, 3 opposite 4. (Opposite faces always add up to seven.

I'd have fainted on the spot the moment I saw IMP DOM on the stamp.

Ils sont devenus ce qu'ils dénonçaient.

The perfect Bloody Mary jug.

Looks like you can still see some of the original pigment. The Ara Pacis is my favourite thing in Rome. The procession panel is *everything*. 🤩 Not enough tourists go to see it, though there is a silver lining to that.

I remember them shoving tips and guides behind premium rate numbers eventually. Enshittification never fails to happen.

Why use 3 lines of text when 20 minutes of video (with 2 unskippable ads and a lengthy Patreon ramble) will do it? 🥱

From 2 mph to 8.7 mph. That's more than a fourfold improvement! The horses must have been thrilled.

Great article. Some parts of Rome would have smelt far worse than others too. Tanneries were banished to the Transtiberim district by law due to the stench. It must have been horrendous since fullers were on every second residential block washing clothes in urine. 🤢 #AncientBlueSky #AncientRome

Pliny would probably write for the Daily Express if he was alive today.

A page from a book displaying historical child-rearing advice. An italicized quote by Pliny the Elder reads: "Putting goat dung in their diapers soothes hyperactive children, especially girls (Pliny Natural History 28.259)."

The cover of the book "A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities" by J. C. McKeown. The cover is designed to look like a wooden cabinet with five horizontal drawers. Each "drawer" features a brass pull handle on the right and a framed artefact on the left. From top to bottom, the images depict: a man playing a a pipe and a woman dancing; a human skull surrounded by various objects; two draped classical women; and a flamingo-like bird, it's body in a woven sling (possibly a carrier) restricting its wings and legs. The full title reads "A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities," with the subtitle "Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World's Greatest Empire" at the bottom. The author's name, J. C. McKeown, is on the label of the bottom drawer.

Pliny The Elder's parenting hack for restless babies? Bung some goat poo in their nappies. It's a gender thing, mostly for girls... because science? Or something. 😬 Found in J.C. McKeown's *A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities*. A great coffee table addition!
#AncientRome #AncientBlueSky
#Books #History

Your 8bit potato is by far the higher resolution image here. No, I'm not proud of myself for noticing. Sorry. 😞

So *this* is the guy to blame for deadlines!

Looks like Gosditch Street or Market Place. How wonderful.

I read somewhere a while ago that Cloudflare Turnstile tracks mouse movement and click timing to separate bots from humans, but I guess that was a load of 💩.

Always. It feels like they want a beard-free, expressionless void. They'll probably come for our eyebrows next.

Yeah, the tech is rubbish. Best bet is to create a separate browser user/profile just for social networks, since they will all be doing this soon. Install the ProtonVPN extension and use the free version to access them. It’s fast and never routes traffic through the UK. Bit of a pain, though.

I shaved mine off after 45 minutes of that crap, and it still took another half hour to stop rejecting me. Flawless tech, obviously. 🙄 I'd been cultivating that beard two weeks too. The bastards.