This is currently my favorite mystery & entry on Wikipedia and it absolutely would be haunting my waking thoughts right before bed were I twenty years younger
Virescent children from an impossible-to-find subterranean world, my god
Even the village’s name is terrifying
Any of the weirdness Charles Fort cataloged in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
where’d I put my fuckin keys
We had another one of these threads on old SB and I linked stuff about the Voynich manuscript which simultaneously gets less and more interesting if you adopt the belief that it was someone making a bunch of shit up for fun 600 years ago and flummoxing 20th/21st century people who believe that any old inscrutable thing must be a dead-serious tome of forbidden/arcane knowledge
what audio can you put bits of in your youtube videos that will not trigger auto takedown notices?
I think it’s outside of things we can possibly learn, but I’d be fascinated to know the types of storytelling games pre-written cultures had (although anthropology may be able to answer this). I’ve read that verbally-recited epics relied on improvisation around key lines of repetition, anchoring the work. With this sort of skill, did the bard engage with each other? Did they build sustained fantasy worlds, or was imaginative thought constrained to the metaphysics of their culture’s religion?
Or,
I wish I knew more about the intellectual history of pen & paper roleplaying games because ‘communal storytelling’ doesn’t seem like it needs a 20th century mind to invent.
I feel like this mystery was solved as mostly just two kids who fled a violent conflict in their home village and were suffering from a condition where eating too much of green vegetables turned their skin green. The girl started eating more varied foods and so she recovered while the boy died of sickness due to refusing to eat anything but beans
A fine lad
yeah i mean the best argument is what kind of mole people would name their town Saint Martin’s Land
I mean i’ve heard of missionary expeditions but this is ridiculous!!
Moving this to Input
Here’s a more down to earth one: the Golden Owl is a french treasure hunt, much in the spirit of the british Masquerade: an owl statue was buried somewhere in France in 1993 and a book was published, containing clues to its whereabouts. 24 years later, it still hasn’t been found and the author, supposedly the only person who knew where the owl was buried, has died in a car accident.
It’s not the only treasure hunt the man has created, or even the one with the biggest prize, so it’s unlikely it was a marketing stunt. His opinion was simply that he’d made the clues too ambiguous, something he corrected in subsequent hunts.
There’s also a bit of controversy regarding the prize itself. What’s actually buried is a bronze owl, which could be exchanged for the golden one which was kept in a safe, but the company owning the safe went bankrupt and after a legal battle the owl was returned to the sculptor who made it (and the paintings used in the book), for safekeeping until a winner would pop up. However the legal status of the hunt is hazy and it isn’t clear if it’s still ongoing.