Notices by Nat Bennett (nat@ruby.social)

@siege Yeah I also saw something about the Galli making money by telling people's fortunes. Which has me chewing on the relationship between queerness and astrology/tarot. Reminded me of living in Venice Beach, the land of Crystals.

Also what I can't help but imagining as... tambourine raves?

@siege It's sometimes unnerving how modern that particular era sounds.

Also: Wow Cybele's cult and how she got to Rome is wild, I am reading about it in detail for the first time now.

@siege There's a specific incident I'm thinking of with Publius Claudius Pulcher, who dressed up as a woman to join sacred women-only rights and seduce Caeser's wife, and ends up on trial for that but the evidence in the trial is... substantially that he's been having an affair with his own sister?

@siege It's not totally clear to me if cross-dressing was a Thing for this guy or a one off. Cicero talks a lot about it when he's attacking this guy later, and it seems like he's *mostly* taking this one incident and making it into a Thing for political reasons... but then he describes the cross-dressing in technical detail and it's like, okay, Cicero, why do you know this much about how to do drag.

@siege Claudius later got himself adopted by a man younger than himself so he'd be eligible to run for Tribune so he seems to have been a general social boundary crossing weird dude, but the way the cross-dressing incident in particular is written about always makes me think that like, there was something *happening* here socially that mostly doesn't make it into the sources, but that this incident got written down because of the trial around it.

@siege This reminds me of the weird and poorly-explained role that cross-dressing played in the end of the Roman Republic

Cannot overstate the value of regularly delivering working software.

My single most effective software dev habit is to start with a walking skeleton -- a "real" if very stubbed out program that can be deployed on its real infrastructure, receive real calls, visited for real etc. -- because of what this does for non-programming stakeholders.

When they see a real working thing and then they see that thing get meaningful improvements they tend to chill *way* out and get much easier to work with.

@bobfisherphoto I really like the version of this that Mastodon cropped