Philosophy, Satire, Obscenity, Archaeology
of Latin walking, Ross Gellar, sushi rituals & video games.
χαίρε (khaíre)*, people!
A collection of odd brews today, which somehow finds ancient Greek connections and metaphorical excavations in philosophy, video games, FRIENDS and sushi.
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🎧 (You can listen to me read this for you, by clicking on the play icon above).
Solvitur ambulando: Action over analysis?
Friday Find: Sushi ritual satire.
The Friendly Finger: An obscene gesture Socrates might approve of.
Dig It Up: Video game archaeology.
With: AI directing actors, Madonna’s resurgence, ‘American Psycho’ trending.
* the ancient Greek for hello, or ‘hail’, or ‘rejoice’!
1. Solvitur ambulando.
I occasionally like to share concepts, terms or ideas I stumble upon. It is interesting to then find how something can be absolutely new to some, and very familiar to others.
Solvitur ambulando is a Latin phrase meaning "it is solved by walking."
Let me first provide a window via my own little life.
Walking. I know it is good for me. Not just ‘getting steps in’, but sometimes walking with little purpose. Often in circles, around a field, but that’s mere detail… it sounds a bit ridiculous when I write it out. Sometimes I enjoy a podcast, but often find it more ‘neutral’ to not. Without any meaningful exercise routine, I figure I should walk as much as possible.
Doing. Choosing action. Considering less; debating, analysing, planning less. Saying ‘yes’. I am often at my best— or at least, most useful— while doing.
Solvitur ambulando is most famously linked to an anecdote in philosophy with Diogenes. One Zeno of Elea— an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher famed for his paradoxes— argued that motion was logically impossible or illusory. Something on the lines of, “If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.”
As a simple but forceful rebuttal, Diogenes- rather than argue- simply stood up and walked, demonstrating motion as self-evident.
So there’s the literal but significant interpretation: walking as remedy. Creative blocks and mental muddles? Walking is invoked as a ready, simple, powerful solution to clear the mind, reorient the brain, let the grey cells breathe. Artists and thinkers across time and cultures have often suggested walks to aid creativity and cognitive recovery- put the body in motion, and the mind follows.
Less literally, solvitur ambulando has evolved to become a prodding call to act; to do rather than think, to embrace action over analysis. It has become shorthand for a bigger idea- certain problems are best resolved through practical action, rather than abstract theorising.
On this, I enjoyed an extract from the writer Henry David Thoreau and his struggles to stay in the moment, even when walking. A thought from a mid-19th century essay that feels remarkably contemporary.
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is- I am out of my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
Indeed, how easy do we find it to shake off whatever ‘village’ we carry in our minds? I'm constantly thinking of something out of the woods, even when I'm deliberately trying to be in them.
2. Friday Find: Sushi Rituals
Presenting an almost two decade old Japanese satire on sushi rituals.
This be a strange and strangely compelling mix of absurdity and fact (probably the hallmark of good satire).
Credited to comedy duo The Rahmens (ラーメンズ) (starring in the clip), it is one of a series of shorts from them called ‘The Japanese Tradition’, which includes pieces on Green Tea , Onigiri, and of course, apologising.
3. The Friendly Finger
FRIENDS fans alert. If you watched the show semi-regularly in the heady 2000s (‘the noughties’), you should be familiar with some cutesy insults. Siblings Ross & Monica, in their much-talked of childhood, came up with a specific physical action to subtly give off the middle finger, without actually doing so- known varyingly as the ‘Ross Gesture’ or ‘The Friendly Finger’.
The traditional middle finger gesture ("flipping the bird") has ancient origins, dating back to Greece and Rome (I wouldn’t have thought it!). It is widely recognised as obscene in many cultures, communicating ‘moderate to extreme contempt.’ It was known in Latin as digitus impudicus or ‘impudent finger’. I propose this Latin term be revived.
Back to the show; once revealed and recalled in their adulthood, we saw them use it frequently in the series; it became an inside joke among the characters too, some of the gang used it as they learnt its meaning. It circled back on my radar recently when a stray Whatsapp GIF was plonked on a group. I was surprised to find the ‘Ross Gesture’ actually took on limited usage outside the show; it didn’t really travel into broader pop culture. Nothing like, “WE WERE ON A BREAK!”.
I’d have thought it was primed for adoption, especially at the height of the show’s popularity. I have seen the odd GIF bandied about, and might have been guilty of sending it a couple of times too.
I did find this lady though, who clearly believes it is highly usable in real-world situations.
Maybe we could all remember this the next time we have an urge to flip the middle finger. After all, even Socrates, all those centuries ago, called one who made the gesture "boorish and stupid.”
Who knows, maybe a couple of millenia on, we could have some pseudo-intellectual looking back at the origins of the ancient Ross Gesture, indulgently considering what passed for entertainment humour in the early 2000s.
*More on the actual middle finger on this podcast, if you are interested.
4. Dig It Up.
Talking of palaeontologists, in today’s edition of ‘jobs that didn’t exist when we were figuring out our lives’, I stumbled upon Video Game Archaeology.
The prevalence of actual archaeology in video games comes usually via playing the role of an archaeologist- think Lara Croft and Uncharted. More recurring now also, are games that actually make you piece together stories from in-game artefacts you discover, a certain kind of puzzle games.
In this interesting little piece about such games, Florence Smith Nicholls casually mentions her job in ‘video game archaeology’.
“I used to work as an archaeologist in the analogue world, where my work consisted of excavations, fieldworks and assessment of potential development sites across the UK. Now I’m doing a computer science PhD focusing in video game archaeology, where I get to come up with novel ways to record gameplay experiences, like doing in-game walking interviews with players in the MMO Wurm Online, or recording the location of player messages in Elden Ring.”
As technology surges on, games and their platforms/ hardware start to become obsolete. Yet, as cultural artefacts they are becoming increasingly relevant to charting human trajectory, so I can see how preserving them too takes on more cultural relevance.
Video game archaeology involves both literal and metaphorical digging. An emerging, cross-disciplinary field, it borrows methods from archaeology, archival studies, preservation, and cultural history while rescuing lost games, interpreting their cultural significance, situating them within broader histories of media and technology.
* This particular stumble came courtesy the recent news that a new Lara Croft series- cooking for some time- is now officially moving ahead on Amazon Prime Video, with Sansa Stark Jean Grey Sophie Turner playing the titular character, in a show written by Phoebe Waller Bridge.
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
An incredible story about the travails of an actor in the Chinese microdrama scene, as he struggles to deal with how much AI is integrated into the actual process of acting & directing. I wrote about it in Puppets & Prompts.
“A cultural disruptor when it came out, it retains a rare cachet more than 27 years later.” A look at how today's pop stars are taking inspiration from Madonna's 1998 masterpiece: Why Madonna's Ray of Light is 2025's hottest album.
Patrick Bateman, the titular ‘American Psycho’, was written as satire. The character, book & film are now also inspiration for a new perfume, a bar and fashion. A Fictional ‘Psycho’ Is Now a Style Icon. Are People Missing the Joke?
