/pt/ – Petrarchan

>>13412 Isambard Kingdom Brunel's father was another engineer called Marc Brunel and I believe he was half-French? He was the one who built the first tunnel under the thames, which was a big sensation in its day and gets a few unexpected shout outs in Moby Dick. I don't think that answers your question though. In fairness a lot of Victorians had quite weird names.

>>13413 Oh I know who he is in the framework of engineering history. I just hate how I have to look up his name each time because it's so weird and I can never remember it. I am a Weird Name Appreciator, though, don't get me wrong. Victorians, Colonial-era Puritans and Quakers, Nigerians, I always acknowledge the novelty they bring to the English language

>>13420 baader-meinhof effect. but come on, you really haven't heard of the word daugerrotype before today and you learnt it from a video game? you should read more

>>13484 You're coping on most of those Trump ones. The Ginsburg one is kinda important, but as a video, not a photo. Without the movement and audio it's really not interesting, and does little to hint at the context. The one where he was shot, sure, and probably the McDonald's feast and mugshoot too. Looking at the talk page, the rule currently in effect is photos must appear in cerain published collections of photographs, mostly from Time magazine, as well as some other magazines and news outlets. A rule like this makes sense for Wikipedia, but has a strong anti-recency bias that will probably only get worse, as well submits itself to the licensing deals paid out by third parties. It's part of a broader issue where the internet still sees itself as downstream of legacy media, despite having been definitively at the helm for a decade. Who's going to declare what photos are significant today without checking Wikipedia first? And now instead of establishing any institutional curation, the very idea of authoritative publishing will be washed away with a thousand AI built websites that will happily serve you the 100 most significant photos of all time.

>>13614 Ok, I didn't realize there was objective criteria for what constitutes importance. Still, it seems like the cope is acting like there aren't plenty of important Trump photos, whether it's liberal Wikipedia editors or liberal Time editors doing the coping. You yourself admit most of my examples are important. I'm not saying all this as a fan of the man—I'm not—but he's unquestionably an era-defining figure and an avatar of America as it is, rather than how liberals would like it to be. You'll learn more about the country from meditating on this image than you will from any of the list's contemporary selections.

>>13620 > Ok, I didn't realize there was objective criteria for what constitutes importance I don't think it claims to be strictly objective, but wikipedia's philosophy is that there should be rules for consistent article management, and when those rules don't work to make good articles, the rules should be changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_rules%22_means Wikipedia doesn't determine what's important by itself, so it uses external sources. The problem is that there is no organization with the authority to make this judgement for the internet era, so Wikipedia has nowhere to look to. > You'll learn more about the country from meditating on this image than you will from any of the list's contemporary selections. No, the whole story is a pretty banal conservative work-ethic tale, just as boring as the photo with a kid touching Obama's hair. And including the taco bowl picture would be like putting one with Hillary Clinton and her hot sauce.

>>13621 You've badly misread it. While I appreciate and sympathize with your cynicism, I think you're letting it cloud your vision instead of sharpen it. When I look at the photo, I first see the unsteady posture of Trump's bloated physique, the way he teeters forward, a big body on tiny feet. He yells inexplicably at the kid, his fake tan making him look red in the face. Then, there's the way his red tie and the kid's red shirt mirror each other, with the background flowers trying to bridge the gap. The kid is lackadaisical in how he pushes the lawnmower, and looking at the grass of the lawn, he's doing an absolutely shit job. (The nerve of that kid! To ask to mow the White House lawn and then half-ass it.) Finally, the photo's taken at a distance, and the surrounding space makes both figures appear small and unimportant. What I see in all this is an allegory for the decline of white America. And Trump is both a product of white America's reaction to that decline and, through his ego and incompetence, hastening it. I think I could tell similar stories about pretty much any of the Trump images I mentioned. The taco bowl was a poor choice. It's a funny photo, but much of the humor comes from the patronizing post that accompanied it, and it doesn't really say much. But to my previous list, I'll add the photos of Trump looking miserable surrounding by his cheering family when he won in 2016, Trump leering like a demon at dinner with Romney, and Trump crossing his arms surrounded by Merkel and the other European leaders. Really, most any photo of Trump is going to look somewhat interesting. He's a fascinatingly contradictory character in ways that neither his fans nor his haters can grasp. He's simultaneously magnetically attractive and grotesquely repellant, vital and decrepit, neurotically put together and constantly falling apart, a genius and a retard. He's at once the macho man of Ben Garrison's imagination and the disgusting baby of liberal's and yet also neither of those. We don't deserve him, and yet we very much do deserve him, for good or ill.

>>13624 I'm not being cynical about it all. It's an old man giving a young boy either corrective advice or words encouragement, yelling because the lawnmower's engine is running. It's a normal interaction being acted out at the White House to humanize the president, set an example for the country, and with the details picked to signal cultural alignment with the base. Just like a little kid touching an adult's hair. > Trump crossing his arms surrounded by Merkel and the other European leaders. Yeah, that one ought to be there. Seems like something libs and cons could agree on too. Again though, Wikipedia is going to have an anti-recency bias. The talk page also mentions another absent photo, but which wouldn't go against Wikipedia's politics or biases, and has had plenty of time since publication. The Blue Marble, which I guess has been consistently snubbed by Time.