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UntimelyDhelmise said:
Male elephants undergo a phenomenon called musth, where their testosterone levels skyrocket and secretions stream down the sides of their heads. This causes even the most gentle individual to go unimaginably berserk, attacking other elephants, humans, even unrelated animals that just happen to be in their way. Most videos you see of domestic elephants suddenly going crazy during festivals and in zoos are a result of musth.
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I will name my son Musthfasa.
 
SkeetNYeet said:
I've heard the vomitorium thing before but was it ever actually proven? It sounds like something a dumb historian would write or a Rome-hating country would make up. I know that a lot of the wackier stuff you hear about Roman times is made up or exaggerated.
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Well, thanks for telling me because i double checked it. The vomitorium was the puking room in ancient rome, but also it was the name for the entry way for actors and gladiators in theatres and colosseums.

The source for the vomitorium that i found also tells that according to Cicero, Julius Cesar avoided a murder attempt going to the vomitorium instead of the latrine, which was where assasins were waiting for him.
 
Harlan Ellison once mailed 213 bricks (postage due) to a publisher that wouldn't pay him. He also mailed a dead gopher by third class to be received weeks later to another publisher that skipped out on paying him.
 
The Spartans were some of the best warriors in ancient times, but they became a ruthless warrior society in fear of slave revolts. The Spartans enslaved enormous amounts of people and since they were outnumbered by their slaves, Spartans decided to become the best warriors on earth in order to deter their slaves from rebelling against their masters. Even Spartan women became warriors and were trained, but their training wasn't the same males undertook.

Edit: Also, after Xerxes invaded Greece, the city states of Greece agreed to create a common army to fight external threats (they would still fight each other regularly tho). To this army, each city put a certain amount of men to form the army. Sparta put only a single man, who would be in charge of training everyone else.
 
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Malagor the dank omen said:
The Spartans were some of the best warriors in ancient times, but they became a ruthless warrior society in fear of slave revolts. The Spartans enslaved enormous amounts of people and since they were outnumbered by their slaves, Spartans decided to become the best warriors on earth in order to deter their slaves from rebelling against their masters. Even Spartan women became warriors and were trained, but their training wasn't the same males undertook.

Edit: Also, after Xerxes invaded Greece, the city states of Greece agreed to create a common army to fight external threats (they would still fight each other regularly tho). To this army, each city put a certain amount of men to form the army. Sparta put only a single man, who would be in charge of training everyone else.
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Sparta also ended up as a matriarchy near the end of it's life as most men would die as soldiers and wives could inherit money. Spartans also allowed cucking through means of eugenics, as in an infertile or weak man would allow his wife to be knocked up by a super bull to have good offspring. It was very rare though and they took martial vows very seriously.
 
Pixichick said:
Banging your head against the wall burns 150 calories and hour....
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And if you've ever worked in an office for more than 20 minutes, you understand why they no longer pay for company gyms.

Count groudon said:
Ah the executioner sword. One of the most metal weapons to ever come out of Europe. The sad thing is, most of its problems come from it being so damn unwieldy. It was only the length of a normal one-handed sword, and it lacked a point which made it more akin to a large double-sided meat cleaver, but because the blade was made to be pretty dense to help with slicing through flesh and bone it’s awkward proportions made the fucking thing a chore to swing properly even for the brawniest motherfuckers of the time. Usually two-handed weapons were carefully crafted to make them deceptively light with a huge range so that it’d hit hard and keep the wielder at a safe distance without wearing them down, but not this bastard. They were such a bother to use that eventually they just said fuck it and had them used as royal ceremonial decoration swords.
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It’s inscription reads: “when I raise this sword, so I wish this sinner will receive eternal life” in German. Real paladin shit right there.

The east also had their own, much more effective version of the executioner swords. There’s we’re pretty much just large curved greatswords that were much easier to handle and required way less hassle to actually use. They’re still used today in a lot of middle eastern countries in fact.
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Portrait of a famous Indian executioner with his big ass sword.
Sorry, I’m an ancient weapons and armor sperg.
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Apparently, the origin of the khopesh and the Persian variations of it was as a machete-style farming implement, but they eventually realized that the enlarged curve at the end wasn't just useful for hacking through tree limbs. It's the same kind of physics that make the khukri and skrammasax such impressive weapons, for their relative size - they concentrate a lot of weight at a fairly small point, although in rather different ways, with the former having it concentrated on the inside of the blade curve, and the latter having a heavy, belled tip, causing it to function like a sword-shaped axe.

Also, Landsknecht were basically one of the most badass mercenaries of they're time, with the giant feathered hats and zweihander great swords. Anyone familiar with WH Fantasy knows where the various Imperial units of greatswords get their historical inspiration from - Krauts with giant 2-handed swords, who were so metal that their wives and children allegedly went out after battles to finish off the wounded at do their looting for them, so they could get drunk.
 
When they aren’t searching for food, lone bears in the wild can frequently be observed reclining on rocks and trees, happily watching sunsets, waterfalls, lakes, mountain ranges, etc.

People who have studied this phenomenon believe that it’s because bears, oddly enough, genuinely appreciate natural beauty and like to relax and pass time by looking at pretty landscapes. It’s a weirdly deep hobby for an animal that’s otherwise known for fucking shit up and wiping their asses on trees.
 
Ronnie defo Jr of the Amityville murders and David Berkowitz the son of sam are inmates at the same prison Sullivan county correctional facility
 
People that use DMT or drink ayahuasca often describe very similar archetypes of creatures they encounter on their trips, Terence McKenna called them "self-transforming machine elves". These beings inhabit a very techno-magical environment that some describe as a "carnival" where they show off impossible mechanical constructions or create entirely new ones. Sometimes people report that they either felt like they shouldn't be there or these "elves" explicitly told them so.

One explanation of such similarly reported encounters can be that the brain tries to make sense of the disrupted drug-induced visual information by causing these humanoid entities (so beings somewhat similar to us) to appear and provide certain visual stimuli while the brain attempts to process things normally.

Additionally, I find that feeling of "I'm not supposed to be here" very familiar, as it always accompanies me when I get lucid dreams. Is it the brain directly telling us "dude, the fuck are you doing? I can't work like that, knock it off"? Fascinating stuff.
 
Malagor the dank omen said:
That shit was called Hachigane and in time it became a symbol of good luck among warriors, because one saving your life from a blow to the head meant you had incredibly good luck.

And let's keep it up with weeb war history. One thing usually people say about samurais is that they didn't used guns because they considered dishonorable. Instead, they didn't used guns because of several reasons: they could only fire once before becoming completely useless, clumsy and loud, the shot could be deflected by armor, very expensive to produce and you couldn't use them while raining. This meant that not many warlords in the Sengoku era didn't adopted them once they got introduced by the Portuguese in Japan (the portuguese also introduced bread and two sweets that they are known today in Japan as Castella and Confeito). It wasn't until some rowdy and westaboo feudal lord decided to make use of those guns. It was Nobunaga Oda who showed everyone that guns were a very powerful weapon if used in the right way when he managed to defeat the unbeatable cavalry of the clan Takeda with several squads of riflemen. Thanks to him other feudal lords and warlords started to implement guns and also the use of the Ashigaru (translated means "Light foot"). The Ashigaru were super light infantry, usually peasants levied from towns which were considered not more than cannon fodder in past times since they were only used as spearwalls agains cavalry. With the introduction of guns, weapons that are easy to use with minimal training, the Ashigaru gained a lot of notoriety and they were levied in massive numbers during the Sengoku period due to their newfound usefulness in battle.
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That's the battle at Nagashino which essentially oversaw the eventual the destruction of the Takeda clans power in feudal Japan. The battle was by no means remarkable in the fact that the Daimyo had been employing Teppo Ashigaru and firearms in battles before that point.

What set apart Nobunaga's forces is that he'd had stockades built to protect the handgunners from the cavalry charges, had implemented strategies for continous firing which the men had drilled in (3 guns to a man, with a reloader for continues fire in volleys.) It was then that the other Daimyo saw how effective proper placement and use of firearms could be used to take down a superior fighting force. (Takeda had the best heavy cavalrymen in Japan.)

The irony of the Ashigaru being given firearms, came from the fact that the Portuguese who had been trading the arquebuses to the Japanese Daimyo, had essentially been selling them older and outdated designs, which had a small but usually lethal failure rate. Ashigaru were seen as a perfect medium for this system, as levied peasants dying from exploding long guns wasn't seen as a great waste of man power, where as a trained Samurai was.

Also the dislike for the matchlocks as being dishonorable didn't come about until much later during the Tokugawa period, and for the same reasons that the French disliked English Bowmen at Agincourt, it was seemingly unreasonable to the Bushi class that a peasant armed with a flintlock/matchlock with minimal training could take down a Samurai who had spent his whole life training in the variety of weapons systems that made up the bulk of learning throughout their career.

It also served the purposes of the Bakufu in trying to consolidate the power of the Tokugawa. By denigrating the use of firearms, as well as increasingly isolating the ability to trade with outside forces, as well as the development of some very strict travel restrictions, the chances of peasant/ronin/rebel uprisings was kept to a minimum.

The Shimbara Rebellion led by Amakusa Shiro was the catalyst for the Tokugawa Bakufu to start this, as the Christian's who had rebelled against the government had been armed principally with arquebuses, and had managed to hold of a prolonged siege by the Shogun.
 
Mercedes McCambridge, the voice of Pazuzu in The Exorcist swallowed raw eggs and chain smoked to achieve the raspy voice. Furthermore, she was a recovering alcoholic who voluntarily went off the wagon, downing shots of whiskey in conjunction with the above to get the effect. After shooting, she immediately checked herself back into rehab so she wouldn't be tempted to fall back into drinking.
 
The assasins were a religious warrior order of muslims that were... Well, assasins. They always targeted high profile targets and they took their time in order to have access to the person in order for the deed to be done, going up to spend up to 5 years gaining the trust of their target so they could perform their duty with ease. One particular story was about Saladin, the famed muslim warlord that united most of the muslim world during the crusades in order to crush the europeans that invaded Jerusalem. He was targeted by the assasins in order to be killed and one of them joined the ranks of Saladin's and spent in his army 3 years until he was one of his closest generals. When he saw that he had the chance at hand, he went alone to Saladins quarters to kill him but he couldn't because he was one of his closest friends and so he left him a small pastry and left never to be seen again. This pastry is very significant because it was the assasins' way of saying "I as ordered to kill you but i can't because you are my friend".

Also, assasin is an arab word that means "hash smoker" because assasins obviously smoked a lot of hash. But even despite this and the fact that they were muslims didn't prevented them to be allied with the crusaders for a very long time.
 
Stanley Kubrick would call Stephen King at odd hours of the night to talk about The Shining. King mentioned that Kubrick had called to tell him that he believed the story to hold a positive outlook because the existence of ghosts hinted that we continue to exist in some capacity beyond death.

King had replied "well, possibly so, Stanley, but what about the idea of hell?" He said there was silence for a moment, after which Kubrick curtly replied "I don't believe in hell." and hung up.

Knowing King's hate boner for Kubrick's adaptation, I wonder at times about the validity of it, but I found it funny and interesting enough.
 
Apoth42 said:
In 1930 Spain had a republican revolution that toppled a dictatorship and the monarchy behind that dictatorship.

The 1931 election involved male suffrage and the socialist parties won a massive majority.

Women were granted suffrage by the socialists for the 1933 election and the conservatives won that election by a super majority.
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The second spanish republic was a damn horrid shitshow and i will say that thank god that it lasted barely 8 years (4 if you don't count the civil war years). The coup was barely necessary because the dictatorship of Berenger was already in its death throes after Primo de Rivera left the government and the Great depression settled in Spain too. The army didn't supported the king and so the second republic was in place. Those first elections were won thanks to a coalition between commies, anarchists and socialists who managed to get most seats in the parliament. As you said, there was a proposal to get women to vote as well, but communists and anarchists firmly opposed them (hilariously, the main person against it was a female politician named Dolores Ibarruri) while "progressists" (centre right) were very open and supported the proposal. As you say, conservatives won by a super majority mainly because they consolidated their parties and unified in a common block while lefties split up and splintered away, going to the elections with many different parties that barely raked enough votes.

This period is known in Spain as Bienio negro or "Black two year government" due to the inmense violence that took part in the streets. During the previous government, a military coup took place and failed miserably and this new government pardoned all the people involved in it. It was due to this that during this 2 years in Spain there were 2 coup attempts by commies and anarchists, but ultimately failed because commies and anarchists were constantly quarreling over all sorts of questions. They wanted to topple the government, but couldn't agree on how or when to do it. During this time terrorist acts and assasinations were fairly common, with the carlistas and the falange on the right and the anarchists and the communists on the left. During this time lefties took a particular hatred for the clergy and they started to burn churches, murder priests and nuns and unearthing the corpses of deceased clerics and leaving them at the door of the churches to mock the priests.

It was at this point that pretty much everyone wanted to have a coup and fix things, but to fix things their own way. By the end of the 36 the coup of Franco took place in Morocco and eventually took war to Spain until eventually ground down the republican army. Funnily enough, Franco ended up as dictator by pure luck because all the candidates who were before him died. Mainly the general Federico Mola, the one who organized and launched the coup. There are a lot more interesting stories in the spanish civil war, and i might tell a couple of them.
 
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