Kotor: The Venetian Fortress Venice wasn't just canals - it was a trading empire. To protect its ships, it built fortresses along the Adriatic. Kotor is one of them. Others came before: Illyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs. But earthquakes erased most of that. What stands today is largely Venetian. Walls climb from the water to the mountain top. Even a fortress, they made elegant. Now tourists take the 1,350 steps. The fortress just watches - grey stone against the sunny coast. Silent. Still here 📍Kotor. Montenegro

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This reminds of sama's line that "a kid born today will never be smarter than AI" The concept of 'robotic' as something mechanical, clunky, suboptimal or funny won't exist ~5 years from now; a little farther into the future, the general concept of 'artificial' won't mean much either. A little like how 'digital' already doesn't make much sense today Once such categories dissolve, will the past become easier or harder to read? Will it be legible at all?

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did satoshi nakamoto read about history? https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/conflict-and-collectibles-among-yurok_87.html

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wake up babe 1729 AD just dropped https://x.com/johannesmkx/status/2024776653902053713?s=20

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the SAG-AFTRA reaction to Seedance is especially funny in the context of Hollywood beginning with studios like Paramount and Universal in their evasion of the monopolist East Coast trust that Thomas Edison formed to enforce his patents on cameras, film, and projectors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company

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I built an app for myself that turns historical battles into cinematic scene plans then uses Gemini to generate an 8-second video based on them. Here is the Battle of Austerlitz.

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Super interesting video. https://youtu.be/OndXawgRAeo

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new Fall of Civilizations dropped recommended listening for your weekend gn https://open.spotify.com/episode/6AeHi8T4D6zgQqzzRkroUw

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling

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A few days ago, I stumbled upon this place and have been desperately wanting to share it, but it's too important not to dive into its history first. Dionysos marble. Mount Pentelikon - arguably the most significant marble quarry in history. Its active exploitation began in the 5th century BC, during the golden age of Athens. The quarry's marble was renowned for its dazzling whiteness with a subtle warm hue and a uniform, fine-grained structure, making it a favorite among architects. Pentelic marble was used for many structures on the Acropolis, as well as for the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The quarry operated until the mid-20th century. Today, it stands as a historical landscape - the cradle of classical architecture and a unique venue for events. Its natural amphitheater shape makes it perfect for hosting concerts, theatrical performances, film screenings, and devilishly aesthetic exhibitions

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what inspired Tetris? Tetris, created in 1984 by Soviet computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, drew heavily from Western mathematical and technological innovations, reflecting the indirect flow of ideas across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Pajitnov, working on speech recognition and artificial intelligence, programmed the game on the Elektronika 60, a Soviet minicomputer cloned from the U.S.-designed DEC PDP-11. The core concept stemmed from Pajitnov's childhood fascination with puzzles, specifically pentominoes—a tiling puzzle involving 12 shapes made of five equal squares, which players arrange into a rectangle or other figures. Pentominoes were popularized in the West by American mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, who coined the term in 1953 and explored their properties in his 1965 book Polyominoes, turning an older geometric idea (with roots in ancient puzzles) into a modern recreational math challenge sold as wooden sets in the U.S. and Europe. before Tetris, there were arcades. Arcades as entertainment venues evolved from 19th-century dime museums, exposition midways, and amusement parlors in the West, where coin-operated novelties like phonographs, kinetoscopes (early moving-picture viewers), and mutoscopes drew crowds for a penny or nickel. Hence the term "penny arcade". The shift to video arcades began in 1971 with Computer Space, the first commercial arcade video game, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (future founders of Atari); it was a single-player space combat simulator based on the 1962 mainframe game Spacewar! but struggled due to its complexity. likewise in the 19th century, there were the precursors of pinball, based on the parlor game of bagatelle. In 1871, British inventor Montague Redgrave, who had emigrated to the United States, patented an improved version of bagatelle, introducing a spring-loaded plunger to launch the ball and marble balls for smoother play. The modern coin-operated pinball machine emerged during the Great Depression in 1931, with David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball becoming a hit as affordable entertainment; players inserted a coin to release balls onto a playfield filled with pins and holes for scoring. Just like the penny arcade. These early machines lacked flippers, relying on chance and nudging, which led to associations with gambling and bans in cities like New York until the 1970s. The game transformed in 1947 with Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty, introducing player-controlled flippers, shifting pinball toward skill-based play and sparking its post-war boom. so if you don't know, now you know. https://farcaster.xyz/jvaleska.eth/0xe487b368

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How Nazi Germany was stopped with fake coal https://youtu.be/xdkkR4SCXL4?si=L6ArPw3RzQq3LXRz

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