These depictions and their "abbreviations" seem to follow some kind of convention, or even standardisation. This could imho indeed speak in favour of a #communication system for storing and transmitting specific content and #knowledge.

And sometimes there are even #symbolic substitutes for larger, more complex depictions. Like, for example, the #bucranium ("ox head") instead of an aurochs in its entirety, arrow-like zigzag lines instead of snakes, or large birds reduced to a few lines.

These depictions are well fitting into PPN #iconography known from a variety of typical find groups - apparently shared over a wider region and forming a common set of symbols within what seems a large-scale communication respectively exchange network.

www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-tel...

These so-called stone #plaquettes (the type originally named at (and after) the site of #JerfElAhmar in modern day Syria) are a very fascinating find group in particular since they seem to serve no other purpose than indeed carrying these symbols (see e.g. 5-7 in the figure here).

I think it's more that, at a certain point, there simply do not exist enough hours. I am facing similar issues in teaching.

Fair enough-- though that also gets harder if they are being hit with a big increase in submissions, as I think is happening to some.

the car! and that advert!!! i just think this is incredibly, perfectly funny bsky.app/profile/over...

But that's just it IMO- they are similar- that's where the tension comes from. Scrooge starts off as a clerk, the same as Cratchit. It's partly Fezziwig's generosity that allows him to become secure. That and never having a family. The life cycle squeeze was real.

the phrase "middle class" with a certain amount of security, but I don't think we are meant to see the Cratchits as particularly secure.

in terms of random chance and societal brutality. Oliver Twist barely escapes it; David Copperfield almost falls in; etc. I got a similar sense from Hallie Rubenhold's "The Five" (w/out the moralizing). Maybe this is the source of peoples' trouble with the distinction. I think people associate...

I think it's clear from Dickens' novels as a whole that the Cratchits are not rock bottom but that also Dickens saw them as barely skating above an abyss-- his characters so often poised on a precarious edge off which they could fall at any time-- often presented in moral terms but also...

Love it but dunno about Hadrian, he seems to have been pretty uptight about his architecture…