Steppenfool

Now this auction is over, it is no longer uncouth to discuss it. Did you participate? Any wins?

When I say "thread slots" I mean those present on the front page. A good thread can die because it's pushed off the front page before it gains much traction! Furthermore, I always prefer forums where the majority of threads are of high quality or engaging, and you don't have to sift through low effort threads or quick question and answer types.

I'm putting my idea suggestion here. If there's a better place feel free to move this post. I believe it would be good to have a "Posts that don't deserve their own thread" thread where I can discuss coins casually, ask for coin ID, ask for help deciding between two coins to buy, or freely muse without clogging up the forum. It came to mind when today I felt the desire to complain about how I feel I am being priced out on almost every coin platform nowadays, but I did not want to take up a thread slot with my petty whingeing. 🤣

I was bored during lockdown and dramatically escalated my study of Ancient Rome. I wanted a physical artefact of sorts and subsequently discovered how remarkably cheap ancient Roman coins were. I still can't believe the price I pay for each coin sometimes. They will be eternally undervalued by the market to me due to how much I assumed they'd cost before I checked. I was willing to pay a lot more than £30 for a Constantine. After I bought one of my then favourite emperor, I wanted one of my then second favourite emperor Constantius II. After this, a set seemed appropriate, so I acquired all of Constantine's immediate family. Next I wanted to get my third favourite emperor, Diocletian, and it wasn't long before I had a tetrarch set in mind. Then I headed to the five good emperors and worked on them. After this I spotted a cheap Domitian, one of my other favourite emperors. And so it goes to this day, I become fascinated by different periods of Roman History and buy coins of it. I'm finally enjoying the Republican period in the same way I used to enjoy the Crisis of the Third Century and the Christian Roman Empire, so I may move to there next. I try to buy coins with messaging or relevance to the events/ideologies of the period I am studying. I don't imagine it will ever stop, I'm slowly covering more and more Roman History ground and slowly desiring more and more coins.

Welcome! I stopped posting much and was waiting for a new forum like this ever since @Leo was banned from CT. It left all of the users unsure what had happened, but he was almost certainly caught in the website's harsh anti-spam filter which automatically banned you if you didn't respond to the verification link that often didn't arrive in people's mailboxes. The admins absolutely refused to address this issue and often blamed the user for not following instructions, or using out of date email providers. A few people on reddit/r/ancientcoins had mentioned they were also indiscriminately banned, and it took myself 3 attempts to make a CT account using 3 different e-mail providers ( my regular googlemail didn't work, only yahoo finally did) before I didn't get banned for not clicking a verification e-mail that never arrived. This problem, now coupled with the very draconian moderation, has led to CT not benefitting from the population increase warranted for a burgeoning hobby. Hopefully the word about this site can spread, and we can get the Ancient Coin forum that the community deserves.

“The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is "contemplating" something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It's true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it--why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both." The above quote is from Dostoevsky's work The Brothers Karamazov. It resonated with me greatly at the time of reading so I looked up the image, and have used it for my online presence ever since.