a weird parallel that I can’t tell if it’s related: history & music

when I was a kid I liked learning history, tho mostly in random pockets - anecdotes about Greece, Egypt, Rome, the crusades... as a teenager I read some stuff about the Russian Revolution, US Civil War, etc...

but these “random acts of history” never really cohered into any kind of cohesive whole. The centuries all blurred together, I couldn’t tell the Ottomans from the Persians, etc. And in my 20s I was mostly busy being a working adult and didn’t have time for history (or music)

At some point in my mid-20s, my wife and I watched all of Crash Course World History on youtube, which was a nice sort of big picture overview (I highly recommend it), but ofc we promptly forgot most of everything. Would be like trying to recite Game Of Thrones S2-6 from memory

After I left my job in mid-2018 I started doing some casual nerding on Wikipedia and Twitter, compiling threads here and there, mostly just as a sort of elaborate bookmarking system... but still I wasn’t really actively trying to do anything yet https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1039931147466158080

but this casual nerding out started to swell and grow and before I knew it I was starting to assemble these elaborate threads of threads of historical spelunkings, often referencing one event in relation to another event... https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1250114648558297088

And lately I’ve found myself defaulting to several different history-related YouTube channels to pass the time. OverlySarcastic, OverSimplified, several others... and I’m starting to notice that some kind of framework is emerging. I’m starting to recognise things, relationships

oh and I’ve been casually assembling this list on Roam and updating it and everything’s connected so I keep seeing all these parallels and the number of things to remember actually gets smaller, because things relate to other things https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1371159770858549249

And if I had to explain what it’s like... it’s like suddenly finding yourself conversant in a language you struggled to speak for many years... and you know what else that feels like???

Suddenly feeling my musical repertoire and capability expanding after a decade long slump/plateau!!! what the fuck!!! how/why did these two things happen at the same time?? Is it a coincidence??? https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1386054104120651778