Gosh this is just such a pitch-perfect way to describe my own feelings and obsession with, from like a functionality and aesthetic perspective, the tech of this era of my youth too–we’re likely very close to the same age and there was this sort of vision of tech/the internet that the stuff you’re talking about that never came to pass (or came to pass in a twisted way) that makes it all feel like an alternate version of the future
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My honest answer to this question is memories. I feel like I’m always ruminating on my past, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways, but mostly neutral.
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My very first impulse was to say that my Roman Empire is the very late Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire (although I hate using the inaccurate Victorian term for it). I’m not especially interested in early Rome, I’m interested in the extremely weird eastern empire remnant that existed from the 4th century until the mid 15th. But I’m also interested in Islamic post-conquest Constantinople and Anatolia.
But I think my actual answer is Expo 70. I’m completely obsessed with its imagery and the absolutely bonkers architecture of its pavilions. But most of all, my Roman Empire is Tarō Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun. I’ve visited it multiple times, I’ve collected artworks involving it and figurines of it, and I even have a pair of tattoos that reference it. I’m generally fascinated by Okamoto’s work too, but the Tower of the Sun is at the top of it all, for me.
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I think about pre civilization a lot.
Other than that there’s a lot of things that I come back to but maybe not so frequently as suggested. If I think of any in the next week and remember I’ll post again.
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adding this to my japan travel map. Kenzo Tange apparently did the roof structure for the expo and he’s an incredible architect. The interior shots of the expo 70 museum are wild! do you have any good resources you recommend for learning more?
also wow expo 2025 opens in 2 days in osaka! I’ll just miss it though on my travels. It’s open 4/13 - 10/13
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A good place to start is the Expo 70 Official Guide that archive.org helpfully has a scan of. Unfortunately I don’t know of a lot of English language resources abut Expo 70 other than random internet news pieces about the fairly recent restoration of the Tower of the Sun. I’m sure there’s a lot more out there in Japanese, but my ability to do good searches in Japanese is pretty limited.
Kenzo Tange is also a favourite! In addition to the big roof he served as the general expo designer. You can find a bunch of vintage photos of the Expo that show some of the pavilions.
There’s also the small but great Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum in Minato in Tokyo that’s well worth the visit. Oh! And if you pass through Shibuya Station you can his gigantic and amazing mural the Myth of Tomorrow!
That’s super cool about Expo 2025! I can’t do crowds like it will inevitably have, but I bet it’ll be interesting!
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Hard for me to pick one thing. If I were keeping it to videogames, I might say Nintendo because they have such an interesting history where they rose as THE videogame company before effectively creating their own competition through their arrogance. It’s been so long that they’re the only one of the big 3 console manufacturers with so many people that feel a need to say how much they hate Nintendo whenever they get the opportunity and so many longtime devoted evangelists ready to lick them boots.
They’re a giant corporation just like any giant corporation but I see people online call them the worst of all the gaming companies, giving the reasons of… Their games don’t go on sale much and they charge a lot for rereleases? Weird thing when you got Blizzard right there with some bananas sexual assault scandals or Microsoft eliminating competition by acquiring the competition. Reminds me of EA being voted worst company in America when they shut down a bunch of studios, yet below them were companies like Nestle.
Lots to think about here, and lots left unsaid to keep it short. I’m a Nintendo kid, for sure, but I’m not blind to the fact that Nintendo almost certainly has as many problems with crunch and misogyny as any other, but they’re a sealed black box and we know little of their internal workings.
But also relevant to the Roman empire:
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yeah mine is very similar to this. mostly thinking about the places I’ve lived in and the memories I created there. like “sondering” but tied to particular place, hard to describe but im in that mindset/train of thought often. other than that, music production/creative processes.
there’s those and then there’s cyclical ones that come and go. for example when I moved to Chicago I was obsessed with the World’s Columbian Exposition.
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I’d say the same, but truly, I think it’s more common than we think. People ruminate a lot about memories or about the past.
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Yes but no one does it quite like me
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I ruminate on MoH’s memories instead of my own.
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there’s a gachapon version of this! do you have it?
(i think the first time i saw the tower of the sun i also said something close to 何だこれは！)
edit: ok now that i looked it up there seem to be many gachapon of it, but i was thinking of these:
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I do have that whole set, along with most of the set that you can put on the edge of a glass:
And two of the Taroman set:
There’s an absolute mountain of Tower of the Sun stuff out there! I still regret not getting the transforming Chogokin version I saw once but in my defence it was something like ¥25,000 which was more than my games budget for that trip.
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I don’t know who will win out of the two, but you already won my heart.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about how people espouse buying REAL and expensive versions of things that last the test of time. But what I feel goes unsaid is that cheap and crappy things can also last the test of time if you are careful. A plastic fork.. you can reuse it for months if you don’t lose it. Plastic sunglasses… maybe they aren’t RANDOLPH AVIATORS (if you know you know, I wish I didn’t know). But you can literally use them for years. A lot of influencers I watch, seem to have a common theme of ‘being on a higher plane - buying very expensive high quality items, and it’s better because they last’. They seem earnest but I think they are usually selling something. Maybe I don’t have a clear conclusion, but I think about the issue a lot. Maybe it would be better if we didn’t live in a world of junk, but we do- so use it! Just don’t make more. This is also linked to how suspicious I am of anything ‘Every Day Carry’ on the internet. It seems like people living ridiculously, I guess.
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I also spend a lot of time thinking about the shape and fabric of geometry of the universe - specifically, how little margin of rotation there is between eating a chip flat (OK) and a chip vertically (OUCH!)
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the teachings of Jesus. I don’t have faith or even a belief in (any) god, but I was raised Christian. My grandparents, who came up during the Great Depression with my grandfather fighting in WWII, played a big role in my life growing up and their take on Christ was one of love and kindness. It’s very disorienting when contrasted against today’s hateful religious right. This empire makes me sad.
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hmm, there’s a lot of ‘buy it for life’ that isn’t actually that expensive, though.
things like bausch and lomb sunglasses are an order of magnitude higher quality than today’s ray-bans and don’t necessarily come with a huge price tag.
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Gah, woke up thinking maybe I need to go to Expo 2025? I’m not sure I can reliably do crowds like I used to, but the Grand Ring is awfully cool.
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