That's cool. I especially liked the bit about Mary Shelley and her mates competing to write the scariest story. Can you imagine the conspiracy bs you'd have to hear if something like that happened now? I know more than one person who are bummed out because they genuinely believe the world is ending next year. If the climate started doing seriously weird stuff conspiracy nutters would be unbearable.
I imagine there might have been a lot of religious End Times rhetoric, but that looks, in retrospect, as if it's been a constant forever.
When I was working with the Skipper he really advocated for the end of the world being next year, and then one day looked up some info in it intending to convince me... only what he found actually was pretty good at convincing me otherwise. Actually, I think it was this wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon), which suggests a possibility that the Olmec Long Count calendar might measure from a certain astronomical point called the Dark Rift (or Black Road) and simply marks the time when we move through that phenomena again. There's no particular indication that moving through that point means anything besides a convenient place to start counting over again. There were apparently between three and ten ages (or 'worlds') before this one (I'm not sure I understand all the theories and interpretations) and there's no reason to think that moving into the next World means anything in particular is going to end, any more than changing the calendar over to 2000 actually really ended anything. Well, besides my youth. Now I feel old.
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When I was working with the Skipper he really advocated for the end of the world being next year, and then one day looked up some info in it intending to convince me... only what he found actually was pretty good at convincing me otherwise. Actually, I think it was this wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon), which suggests a possibility that the Olmec Long Count calendar might measure from a certain astronomical point called the Dark Rift (or Black Road) and simply marks the time when we move through that phenomena again. There's no particular indication that moving through that point means anything besides a convenient place to start counting over again. There were apparently between three and ten ages (or 'worlds') before this one (I'm not sure I understand all the theories and interpretations) and there's no reason to think that moving into the next World means anything in particular is going to end, any more than changing the calendar over to 2000 actually really ended anything. Well, besides my youth. Now I feel old.