Brian Conaway

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@UntergangGang @DandyGeorgism sadhu sadhu sadhu

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@sailorsRest1 A rash generalization when it comes to Eastern art in general:

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@BiruniKhorasan What's the written corpus underlying the idea that a Zoroastrian humanism existed? The Achaemenids didn't leave all that large a written record... The Cyrus cylinder would be an obvious candidate except that it (and himself) is not particularly Zoroastrian.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@CarlZha Five Dynasties has a lot of dramatic potential, but all this Three Kingdoms media over the decades (centuries?) has taken the air out of the room. Maybe now's the time to reconsider it!

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@veriscopedigita @LegoHighfleet @wrathofgnon Buddhism arrived to Japan alongside a whole host of continental arts and fields of study.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@superinducting I blocked him some time ago and my twitter got more usable. Just another platform-promoted irritant who posts too much and thinks too little.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@FranseviEfendi Byzantine armies after 1204 were shockingly small, and demographics in the region as a whole seem to have fallen behind western Europe. I suppose it makes sense that at least in the Balkans, conquest by outsiders didn't due much to boost the demographics in subsequent centuries.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@k0ushou Ok, this was a fun read - lots of Herodotus-style crazy details about the people and animals of a foreign land. I shared amusing snippets with a friend.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@k0ushou Thanks so much for doing this and making it available!

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@XianyangCB Perhaps once I run out of human-translated texts to check my work against I could start doing the same with LLM output, especially since https://t.co/ZFAUroIiyc is full of it now. But hopefully once I get to that point I'll be ready to translate on my own without any guiderails.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@XianyangCB I'm learning literary Chinese (with more of a medieval focus) while working an unrelated full-time job and raising young kids. I don't think I could do it in such an environment w/o all the resources available, technological or otherwise, but LLMs haven't been one of them.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@RockstarJay94 Also, one of my historical regrets is that Theravada never developed a foothold in premodern China and Japan and never got enriched by participating in their aesthetic and literary cultures. Imagine the Theravada medieval corpus having writings of a monk like Kūkai or Dōgen!

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@RockstarJay94 Oh, what an awful tragedy. Road safety has been a persistent issue in Thailand for years, and I really hope the secular authorities can get a handle on it. And may the wounded monks recover and those who passed attain a rebirth where they can continue practicing the Dhamma.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@FrankCSouthie @gdalton64 @JordanUhl It turns out you can't disparage people for years and then expect them to turn out for your lame party. Plus, even if it's supposedly a non-partisan celebration you know he'd point to high attendance to try to score political points.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@Kasumi10077 In the Genpei War in Japan, the Taira fled Kyoto and kept fighting for 2 more years. The Japanese also knew familiar with the story of Emperor Xuanzong fleeing Chang'an during the An Lushan rebellion. Also there's Emperor Go-Daigo, who fled while fighting the first shogunate.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@RockstarJay94 I'm not generally a fan of the guy (set a precedent for extraordinary political violence in the Ming government, brutal invasion of Vietnam), but I guess he had his upsides too.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@k0ushou Forget mountain pattern armor 山文鎧, we've now got little guy pattern armor!

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@mackleberry221 @AricDomane Tale of Genji is a novel with a definite author, and I don't think I've ever seen it treated as folklore. Tale of the Bamboo Cutter doesn't have a known original author and has various surviving tellings from the Heian period onward - that counts as folklore IMO.

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@threeeyedbarrel Yeah, if you take such a reductive approach to history that you're only interested in the teleology of how institutions in the absolute broadest sense came about, you're losing a whole lot that is of interest

[Brian Conaway @brconaway]

@TiresianLaddie It might help to be from a family of the sort that has a castle to begin with, ruined or not.