General Discussion

Something lighthearted since I've been reading nonstop about Japanese Imperialism!!

Tea culture in China is not a monolith (you might be saying, "Yeah, duh" but hear me out this is fun), ever since tea has been consumed in the country, it's undergone many different methods of being enjoyed. First and foremost, its history is noted in written records dating as far back as the Tang dynasty (which started in 618 AD) by Lu Yu, also known as Tea Saint.

During the Han Dynasties (206 BC-220 AD) it was enjoyed like a thick soup. Tea would be dried into cakes, crushed with a unique looking contraption, and then made with boiled water and other additives such as millet until mushy and edible.

At some other point in time, it actually became popular custom to whisk tea (similar to how matcha is whisked) which would produce a foam. Here is the real kicker of this part and what made me want to write a post on it: nowadays, teaware is made with a glazed white inside because we want to see the color of the liquor (liquid), but at this point in time (which I cannot remember at the moment, sadly) the inside of teaware was black because they wanted to see the whiteness of the foam produced from whisking in order to properly appreciate and assess the tea's quality.

Infusing (just. steeping the leaves as is like how we do it today) didn't become a thing until (relatively) recently, during the Tang dynasty but it truly picked up in the Ming and Qing dynasties! And now gong fu is a more modern version of steeping tea, wherein one uses a gaiwan (a type of tea holding vessel) and a high tea leaf to water ratio and alarmingly short steeping times (15-45 seconds depending on the tea) in order to taste the tea's flavor as it evolved over the many, many steeps (a good sheng puh er can withstand up to 30 steeps this way!)

The first airstrikes on US soil were carried out in late August 1921 at Blair Mountain, West Virginia. Ten thousand miners and union organizers went on strike to protest brutal working conditions in the mines, the "pay" system of company scrip in lieu of money, and mandatory residency in company towns which rendered the miners virtually slaves to the bosses. A combined force of coal mine owners and the US Army dropped bombs and fired field artillery against the miners, who held out for five days under the assault and scared the living daylights out of capitalists.

@azarias

HI DO YOU ALSO LIKE LABOR/UNION HISTORY AND 20TH CENTURY US HISTORY?

[quote name="bbgummi" date="2024-02-28 09:25:03" ] @azarias HI DO YOU ALSO LIKE LABOR/UNION HISTORY AND 20TH CENTURY US HISTORY? [/quote] Guilty as charged. There's a reason we usually [i]don't[/i] learn this stuff in school. Makes the richies nervous.

this is so far back in the history of life im sure the average person won't find this interesting whatsoever but there was a very major mass extinction event around 2.4 billion years ago that doesn't get discussed with other mass extinctions because not only is that an insane amount of time ago but finding fossils/fossil evidence of microorganisms isn't the easiest task. obviously the earth didn't start out with its atmosphere but life had already begun before the proliferation of oxygen and the organisms that existed weren't able to cope with this new element in the oceans and atmosphere. it took a good hundreds of millions of years to build up however and there couldn't be significant amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere until it reacted with the iron formations currently in the oceans (banded iron formations are the result of this). anyways the cyanobacteria that were producing the oxygen couldn't even handle it so it took a while for life to be able to adapt to these new conditions, and then also the earth cooled so much as a consequence it went through a few ice ages so things were rough for a good minute there. but complex life was able to form because of the increased energy oxygen imparts and also we have a lot of cool rocks an minerals we wouldn't have otherwise.

I need to come back to this post when I have more energy to infodump! Ancient Rome and the Latin language are special interests of mine.

just a little tiny fact but the Oregon trail headed out the same year the fax machine was invented!

Dmitri Shostakovich enjoyed football (soccer) and would attend matches when he could, travelling across the ussr to see them. Also he was rather stoic and unsentimental, keeping very few letters (EXCEPT ONE WRITTEN BY HIS FRIEND ISAAK WHICH HE ASKED HIS WIFE TO BRING HIM ON HIS DEATHBED AND HE WOULD SMILE AND LAUGH FONDLY AT IT AUUUGH..)

Also we almost didnt get Die Toteninsel from Rachmaninov had he seen the original painting (which was in color) instead of the black and white one (the one the piece is based on)

[font=american gothic][size=4]This is a placeholder for the EUNUCH POST this week [emoji=undertide tongue size=1]

I think I should bring up my favorite (more obscure) history thing. I think we all know about the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 at this rate, so how about moving it to Texas with the Crash at Crush?


In 1896, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad had way too many extra trains. They had recently upgraded to 60 ton engines and had an abundance of 30 ton engines laying around, so a guy named William Crush said “Hey I have an idea. What if we hosted a huge publicity stunt by ‘safely’ crashing two engines into eachother? I mean, Ohio did it and it was a success. It’ll probably work for us too.” The people agreed.

So they set up two wells and an circus tent, along with a grandstand and a ton of other things. William Crush looked at the thing and said “I’m naming this after myself. Crush. Very fitting.” Tons of events were hosted along with the crash, an entire carnival, really.

The engineers said “this is safe”, and went with it. People who weren’t reporters would have to stand 200 feet back while reporters got another 100 feet up front. The railroad got really popular to that destination, with 30 trips to and from the place.

After an hour long delay, pictures were taken and the trains were taken to their places. The trains collided and the engines exploded, despite they said they wouldn’t. 6 people were injured, and 2 died from the ordeal. The area got a historical marker and Scott Joplin wrote a song about it. National news. Despite everything multiple other companies crashed their trains into eachother.

Technically, this is the shortest lived town in history, spanning 2 days I believe.