Future guys trying to loon up how something of current era works and they get hit with the old classic forum comment:
"Ask on our discord".
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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I hate every day that discord destroyed forums
You can replace future with current.
The worst I found was a git readme saying to just join their discord.
Here's Ada Palmer explaining why this happened on the Dwarkesh podcast. Also the reason they saved religious texts over everything else was because monks were in charge of copying over the scrolls.
Monks were the og RAID array
Religious Archive of Important Documents
This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.
{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.
And then you get someone like Thomas Thistlewood. Just an average slave owner.
This mofo sold me shitty copper. Ea-Nasir, you're on my shitlist for eternity, you hear me!
Highly suggest Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror for all of you who like this stuff. All her work is great.
Wait, is this someone's actual ancient journal??? How incredibly exciting? And what was that slightly different recipe?
If we actually had lots of surviving material like that it would be amazing.
Before the early modern period it was rare for people to write down boring or mundane shit because writing was hard and expensive.
We've uncovered less than 1% of the Assyrian/Babylonian tablets that are thought to exist. Theres a lot of stuff out there that's well preserved thankfully even if we haven't uncovered it yet.
Whats cool is cuneiform could be written phonetically so a Babylonian scribe could write down any language even if they don't understand it. They apparently could also write at the speed a person speaks so they acted like stenographers in court or executive assistants for rich merchants or elites.
People probably used a lot of slate+chalk or wax tablets for regular note-taking.
Similarly, archival grade paper and printing is STILL really expensive and folks STILL aren't doing that for their grocery lists and honey-dos. Not to mention that nearly all of our digital writings are extremely ephemeral. Wont somebody think about the future historians!!!!
Now writing is very easy, though I'm somewhat glad the whole bullshit going on on social media is rather easily lost as well. 🫠
I keep a paper diary which I just assumed would rot away as a write-only set of documents, but then I think of all the digital work from 10+ years ago I've lost to plain bit rot, and I wonder if these chickenscratch braindumps on graphite and cheap recycled paper aren't the more durable medium.
I've thought about keeping a journal but I don't think having a copy of a lot of my thoughts laying around for someone to find is a good idea.
Yeah you have to be careful what you write in there for legal reasons, but you could just omit some stuff or use coded phrases only you know the meaning to (eg. Got to the milk just before it expired = had hot homo sex in the park).
The Spectrum Through The Ages.
"autism was invented by modern liberals to fake a diagnosis"
Journal from ancient mesopotamia:
Ye olde version of looking up a weird specific software problem and the guy answered his own post with just ‘nvm fixed it!’
(exactly the problem you're having)
[Deleted]
Thanks! Nothing else worked at all, but that solution worked perfectly!
"[Removed by moderator]"
I had the same problem and this forum post solved it: (link to a website that no longer exists)
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Too many damn times...
I was promised an immortal repository of knowledge in my youth. Now most of my bookmarks are dead links and finding answers is just like your example half the time.
"Read the wiki" but the part of the relevant wiki page for the subject was removed years ago and the edit history was purged after the server ran out of disk space.
Return to thread and complain that people are clueless and directing you to a useless resource. Mod locks thread and threatens you with a ban.
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It's sad to think that probably about 90% of writing from antiquity is lost. Then again, 100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost. And that's by far the largest part of human history.
Same for fossils. Heavily forested areas often had soil too acidic to create fossils at all. Fossils take some real luck and the right conditions to make. Otherwise, bones just slowly disintegrated. I've seen estimates that 90%+ of species that ever existed left no fossil evidence.
It's also why there's large gaps in the Human and Great Ape fossil records. Australopithecus fossils appear in Chad, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa... And no where in between. But is not like none of them existed in the lush jungles of central Africa. The soil dissolved the bones. Same with gorillas. There are no gorilla fossils.
We could fossilize a gorilla. We should fossilize a gorilla.
Quick, where's Harambe?
Probably still Cincinnati
100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost
Not entirely true. Some aboriginal oral traditions have accurately described the Budj Bim and Tower Hill Eruptions that happened 37k years ago, and the dramatic rise in sea levels 7-10k years ago.
The oral traditions of aboriginal tribes is kinda crazy. During the European colonization of australia there are times where you get to see encounters from written documents by Europeans and the history recalled by oral and dance traditions recorded by aboriginals. They tend to match in everything but perspective and often the aboriginal depictions are often more detailed.
The local Aboriginals to me have oral stories about the most recent ice age.
I assume the big one not the little one. It would be anticlimactic for it to be "you know it got quite a bit colder for a little while before you all showed up"
I have been told they described the formation of glaciers, so definitely the big one.
Yeah, some of the stuff that has been able to be confirmed via geological studies is just insane. It's crazy to me how they aren't more widely known for disrupting the idea of prehistory.
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