#‘Derive this equation!’ and it’s just a different equations with different letters

[aesthetic-uni]

Physics is three equations that a bunch of people looked at and thought “but what if it was fucked up”

And I hate them and myself

[yaeggravate]

Unraveling Princess Fischl

So I recently finished studying Princess Fischl in a lab and the results I got were kinda crazy.

As a disclaimer, I do this just for fun. I like connecting dots and solving puzzles. But I'd rather you draw your own conclusions. In this post I will try to dissect the mysteries surrounding the Prinzessin. And you really can't talk about Fischl without including Kaeya. I've even got a surprise guest star for you.

WARNING: this post is VERY long, click on that Read More at your own risk, otherwise you'll be stuck scrolling forever.

For simplicity's sake Princess Fischl will be referred to as Fischl while playable Fischl will be demoted to F.

PART 1: MIDSUMMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Most of this will use the books Legend of the Shattered Halberd and Flowers for Princess Fischl as a source. These books are authored by someone named Mr. Nine. The books are published by Yae Publishing House. So keep in mind there's a non-zero percent chance Mr. Nine is actually just a certain Nine-Tailed Fox.

F's alternate outfit is called Immernachtstraum. This is a reference to Shakespeare's play Midsummer Night's Dream. In German the play is called Ein Sommernachtstraum. So you can see the similarities (Immernachtstraum means Eternal Night's Dream.)

Kaeya is in part based on the Indian changeling prince from the same play. The character Oberon, the Fairy King, is the french derivative of Alberich. The play itself is basically about people getting into Shenanigans so absurd it might as well be a dream. Oberon and his wife Titania are actually key players in quite a bit of different media… But as much as I want to delve into that, this isn't a Kaeya post.

Just remember for now that Titania is the Fairy Queen.

In the book Flowers for Princess Fischl, there is a mention of a Sommernachtgarten. It is described as a Domain possessed by someone highly skilled in the magical arts. Sommernachtgarten seems to have existed in Teyvat. The domain Midsummer Courtyard, which has the Thundering Fury set, tells us the Sommernachtgarten was buried underground.

The domain is located in Starfell Valley. It's nearby Starfell Lake and Starsnatch Cliff. Starfell Lake is said to have been formed by a fallen star.

Fischl is also equated to a star that fell down. Notably, in F's birthday letters, and in Legend of the Shattered Halberd.

Birthday Letter: Day of Destiny… On the day of a sacred star's descent from the depths of the night sky into this realm, I, the Prinzessin der Verurteilung, have asked Oz to cross the ocean and bring, me exotic treasure.

LotSH Vol. 1 The story was that an iron meteorite had fallen from the sky five or six years ago, and convention dictated that as nature's treasure it belonged to the imperial family.

Starsnatch Cliff is the only place where Cecilia flowers grow. These flowers have a triquetra shape, which is similar to Kaeya's passive talent Glacial Heart. Kaeya has been featured with these flowers in his birthday arts, and even invites the Traveler to go see the flowers with him.

Alice: With enough bombs placed in proper positions, even huge cliffs like Starsnatch would crumble into dust in a second. With flatter terrain, Mondstadt would surely look much nicer. But that unctuous Cavalry Captain rejected my proposal instantly. He even asked me to stay away from Starsnatch Cliff.

Furthermore, when Alice proposed to blow Starsnatch Cliff up, Kaeya denied her request and warned her to never go near there again… Starsnatch Cliff also overlooks the Nameless Island which is shrouded in mist and invisible on the map.

菲谢尔 = Fischer = Fischl

Fischl's name might be a reference to the Fisher King from Arthurian legends. One name of the Fisher King is Amfortas. In the game Anfortas is the name of the Knight Marshal of the Schwanenritter; he's thee Alberich who stepped up as Regent King when Irmin was indisposed.

Perhaps Fischl was the original "Fisher King" and the kings who came after her, like Irmin and Anfortas, fulfilled her role. …But this would imply Fischl was once the ruler of Khaenri'ah. That would be crazy, right? Right, guys?

PART 2: THE PRINCESS OF JUDGEMENT

When I was analyzing the 8-pointed star, I discovered these 8 points could actually correspond to the Guardians of the Eight Directions in Hinduism.

For some reason, ascension gem stones are named after Hindu gods (with the exception of Electro). This isn't the case in the original Chinese naming however.

Still, I tried to mix and match the gemstones to a direction.

North: Kubera, The God of Fortune -> GEO

South: Yama, The God of Justice and Death -> ???

East: Indra, The Lord of Heaven and God of the Weather, Sky, Rain, and Storms -> ELECTRO

West: Varuna, God of the Seas, Oceans, and Rain -> HYDRO

Northeast: Ishana, God of Birth, Death, Resurrection, and Time -> DENDRO

Southeast: Agni, God of Fire -> PYRO

Northwest: Vayu, God of the Winds and Air -> ANEMO

Southwest: Nirṛta, God of Death, Sorrow, and Decay -> CRYO

Hydro (Varunada), Pyro (Agnidus) and Anemo (Vayuda) gems already have the same names as the Hindu gods so that was easy. The Electro gemstone Vajrada is named after a sword but it belongs to Indra, God of Weather, Rain and Storms.

That just left me with Cryo (Shivada), Geo (Prithiva) and Dendro (Nagadus). Ishana is the God of Birth, so I'll assign him Dendro. Kubera is the God of Fortune which is Geo because Mora.

Now Cryo is a bit puzzling, because it's named after Shiva, who in Java and Bali Hinduism is actually the direction in the center. Some crazy implications here for our buddy the Tsaritsa because Shiva is the God of Destruction within the Trimurti, a trinity of deities. The other two are Brahma, God of Creation and Vishnu, God of Preservation.

In Java Hinduism, Brahma and Vishnu would correspond to the directions Zenith (South) and Nadir (North). Whether this is hinting at something about the nature of the Tsaritsa is unclear. When you see Three Deities you think Moon Sisters, right? However, we can't rule out the possibility that Genshin decided to mix these deities up. Let's just spare ourselves the headache for now and forget about this. This is a Fischl analysis after all.

So instead, let's have a look at the Cryo gemstone's original name in Chinese. The stone is simply called Grieving Ice.

哀叙冰玉: Grieving Ice

Since Nirriti is the God of Sorrow, I decided to assign them Cryo. Now we are left with one deity, Yama: The God of Justice and Death. Well, it can't be Hydro, because we already assigned them to a God. So it has to be someone else.

Fischl's title is the Prinzessin der Verurteilung. Which translates into Princess of Judgement. According to Legend of the Shattered Halberd and F's voicelines, Fischl's role was to act as a judge.

More About Fischl: I To condemn the guilty, to sanctify the just, and to draw all castaway dreams into the embrace of the infinite Immernachtreich. This is the birthright of the Prinzessin der Verurteilung, and her burden. None may gainsay it.

What's interesting is that Fischl uses magical arrows to shoot down the "enemies of fate".

About Us: Shooting Down the World Beast Should this world, like a beast prowling in the night, covet your dreams, then I, Prinzessin der Verurteilung, shall fell it with my ensorcelled arrows of judgment!

Feelings About Ascension: Intro My magic arrow cries out my holy name as it streaks through the night, praying that the violet lightning of retribution shall strike the enemies of fate down from the skies!

On the 8-pointed star, there's an arrow pointing upwards. Kaeya, Clothar and Halfdan's stars on their outfits and even F herself have the arrow pointing downwards.

The achievement you get when you find this door is called "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here". Which is a reference to the entrance to Hell in Dante's Inferno.

The Immernachtreich is described as a place where all things will eventually flow into. Immernachtreich literally translates into Eternal Night Realm…

Flowers for Princess Fischl: Phantasmagoria Every good, bright and noble thing must eventually fall to inexorable entropic destruction, and the final destination of the universe is the realm-in-waiting of the Prinzessin, Immernachtreich. This is the fate of all worlds, of the universe, and all who live in it.

In the Immernachtreich Apokalypse, Leon calls Fischl the Soteria.

Soteria means salvation, preservation. It's used as an epithet for Persephone and Hecate. Persephone was forcibly made Queen of the Underworld, and Hecate is also known as the Goddess of the Underworld and Witchcraft…

Look, I don't want to claim Fischl was the secret 8th Archon or anything, because lest we forget Khaenri'ah was a godless nation who would've been Fischl's enemies. But why then would Khaenri'ah have this giant star referencing the 8 deities as their emblem in the first place? Seems a bit counterintuitive. I don't have the answers for now, and perhaps the 8th "archon" was simply Irmin. Or maybe it's not even representing a god but an element or a direction.

Regarding Oz, he is a not so subtle reference to Odin/Irmin but is also a reference to the Wizard of Oz. In the first book, it was revealed this wizard was literally just some guy pretending to be powerful. Eventually Oz starts working as an advisor for the true ruler of Oz, Princess Ozma, who is the inspiration behind Fischl. We'll get back to that later.

This Oz's full name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. OZ is actually short for Oscar Zoroaster. Zoroaster is referenced in Flowers for Princess Fischl.

In a distant causality, if the philosopher Zarathustra was not chosen, then the opera writer would have gained victory in the contest over the will of the world.

This does make you wonder if Irmin really was the true ruler of Khaenri'ah and if he even existed the way we believe he did. Perhaps Fischl got Irminsnapped and now everyone believes Irmin was always the One-Eyed King.

Of course this is all my personal speculation and I could be way off here.

Wait, before we move on to next section, I want to point out something that always gets ignored:

Kaeya and Mona, when they cast their bursts, summon the same 8-pointed star. This is unique to them alone. Could there be a connection between Khaenri'ah and witchcraft? Or is either Kaeya or Mona an outlier?

PART 3: HEXENZIRKEL

In the trailer Mage's Teaparty, there are eight witches shown. However, we only know the names of six witches, and there is a chair missing at the table.

There is a slideshow where the figures of the eight witches are shown, minus Andersdottir who is represented by the book The Boar Princess.

Observe the witch on the broom and the little witch. The design of the little witch is similar to the design of a famous fictional character who got pulled into another world: Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz books.

Dorothy is illustrated as having twin tails and wearing a farm girl dress. Dorothy's character was influenced by the character Alice, from the Wonderland books.

Originally I assumed Alice Genshin might be based on book Alice. However, it's the Narzissenkreuz quest that's based on the Wonderland books and Mary-Ann who takes the role of Alice.

With that in mind, could Alice Genshin actually be more of a Dorothy inspired character instead?

Now, Dorothy had a very good friend, called Princess Ozma. Ozma seems to be the inspiration behind Fischl.

So who is Ozma? I only have the Wiki to go on because I'm not about to read 40 books, but by the sound of it, Ozma is the current ruler of the realm of Oz. She is the daughter of a human king and a Fairy Queen. Her mother Lurline was the one who created Oz and turned it into a Fairy country.

Ozma took it one step further and separated Oz entirely from the outer realms making it invisible to outsiders. Everyone who enters Oz never ages.

If you're an F main I'm sure you know by now Fischl created another universe and founded paradise.

Now I want you to take a look at the witches portrayed in these circles. There are two witches holding a sphere. In F's cutscene from the Summertime Odyssey event, she is also holding a sphere which contains the Immernachtreich which you can see in the header image of this post and below.

You might think a glowing sphere represents a crystal ball to scry in, but that poses a problem since known prophet Barbeloth is probably represented by the witch holding a waterdrop, which is Hydromancy. So the glowing sphere might not necessarily mean a prophetess.

As for the identity of the other witch with the globe, I believe this could be Alice, since she was the one who created the domain/dreamscape of the Veluriyam Mirage. It could also be Rhinedottir who is creating something in a flask.

So Orb = Domain/Realm/Creation

Furthermore F's specialty food is Die Heilige Sinfonie, which has a Magic Hexagram painted on top… (Die Heilige Sinfonie translates into The Holy Symphony.) As mentioned before, the Sommernachtgarten could only be created by someone with great magical powers…

Magic Circles is Ceremonial or Arcane Magic, and according to a note left by Master Ruggiero in Bravais' study, Arcane Arts originated from a pre-Remurian civilization.

So someone must have taught humans magic. Might sound obvious, but it begs the question of WHO?

PART 4: FREYJA

To answer this question we need to dip our toes into Norse mythology. As you know, Odin is Irmin.

There was a war between two groups of gods: the Aesir and the Vanir.

Eventually they had enough and decided to exchange hostages as a peace offering. The goddess Freyja, originally part of the Vanir, joined the Aesir which would be Odin's group. As a sacrificial priestess, she was the one who taught the Aesir dark magic, which included seeing into the future. The implication here then is that Odin was taught black magic by Freyja.

This magic is known as seiðr. Seiðr is derived from *soi-to- which means rope/string. The distaff, a tool used for spinning wool, is associated with dark magic. There are images of women riding distaffs as a broom, similar to a witch riding a broomstick. To quote the Wiki: "In any case, the string relates to the "threads of fate", that the Nornir spin, measure, and cut. " Wait, that sounds familiar:

F, joining the party voice line: The threads of your fate lie in my hands!

Scholars suspect Freyja is the same person as Gullveig who was involved in the Aesir-Vanir war. Gullveig was attacked by the Aesir with spears; she died and was reborn three times. When Fischl tried to visit the Kingdom of Eternal Twilight she was also attacked by its people and "shed her blood on the sacred emblem" whatever that means. It was Oz who saved her, pledging his loyalty to her.

Freyja sometimes is conflated with another goddess named Frigg. There has been much debate whether or not these two goddesses stem from the same deity. Frigg is part of the Aesir and usually Odin's wife.

I mention this because in the book Hex and Hound, one of the characters is named after Frigg: Nottfrigga. This book is about two twin witches sharing the same body. In the book we find out that they were the daughters of a powerful witch, but witches are unable to keep more than one offspring of the same generation. This led to Nottfrigga's twin sister Magdalene eventually dying, and her using magic to sustain her sister inside a magic bracelet.

In Norse mythology, Nott is the personification of night. Nott's father is named Narfi. This really got my attention, because Fischl's full name is Fischl von Luftschloss Narfidort. (Fischl of the Castle in the Sky Narfidort.)

In the Hexenzirkel teaser, every witch is represented by a teacup (or in the case of Andersdottir, an inkbottle) but the saucer next to Nicole's teacup is empty. Since this saucer belongs to the same teaset this could mean one of the missing witches is Nicole's twin sister or a relative.

So what could Fischl's role be in all this? Perhaps she's one of the twin sisters, or their mother. Perhaps she's even an ancestor. ...Or completely unrelated to them and I'm full of shit.

PART 5: THE HARBINGERS

F's theme shares a leitmotief with the Fatui Harbingers theme.

F's theme: Sieh an, mein Sommernachtgarten! Signora's theme: Saltatio Favillae

Obviously this means Fischl is Capitano.

Composers don't do these things by accident. This is hinting at something. Either Fischl is connected to the Harbingers, was/is one of the Harbingers, or she is indeed the Tsaritsa.

Which is not as crazy as it sounds.

In Legend of the Shattered Halberd, Fischl possessed someone else's body. And if she is Freyja's equivalent, who died three times, then it's possible she could've been reborn as someone else. In the book, it was Mir who summoned Fischl into Weiyang's body and sacrificed his eye to appease her. Pierro is working for the Tsaritsa and has his right eye covered for reasons unknown. Having been a royal mage who would have had access to Khaenri'ah's restricted library, perhaps it was Pierro who summoned Fischl into the Tsaritsa's body.

The Tsaritsa is collecting the seven Gnoses, Fischl had to collect seven of the nine Ominous Swords to repair the Divine Halberd, which would be herself. She already had two of them in her possession… Could also be that the Tsaritsa is trying to revive her. This would imply Fischl is the Third Descender. Since she came from another world, this is not impossible.

The Fisher King, Fischl's possible namesake, was struck with a wound that could only be healed by a "pure fool" who would ask him the right question. ...Fatui is Latin for fools. If the Tsaritsa really is/is possessed by Fischl, then creating an organization of fools starts to make sense: the fools are her saviors.

This could also connect to the empty 10th seat within the Harbingers. The vacant spot could be a reference to the Siege Perilous, which was an empty seat reserved for the one successful in obtaining the Holy Grail by way of saving the Fisher King.

Usually this is accomplished by Percival, who later finds out his mother is the sister of the Fisher King. In the story, Percival keeps failing to return to the kingdom of the Holy Grail since it is an otherworldly place. Does that not remind you of Kaeya trying to find Khaenri'ah but failing halfway through?

Going back to Princess Ozma, an evil witch cast a spell on her that turned her into a little boy named Tippetarius. This was done to prevent Ozma from ascending to the throne. Tip was unaware of his true identity until he was transformed back into Ozma.

tippet /tĭp′ĭt/ noun A covering for the shoulders, as of fur, with long ends that hang in front.

As noted in The Marvelous Land of Oz, Chapter 23, Tip has brown colored skin.

…Kaeya, blink twice if you need help.

As a staunch hater of things that don't make sense, I highly doubt this means Kaeya is Fischl; the game would never go there. Perhaps being "Fischl" is simply hinting towards the fact that he will become one of the Fisher Kings.

That would certainly explain this random hangout ending.

Now, here's where things get really crazy.

Remember Anfortas? The Knight Marshal of the Schwanenritter who took over as regent after Irmin became indisposed? At the time of writing, Anfortas's fate remains unknown.

As said before, Anfortas is the name of the Fisher King in Arthurian legends. Fischl's name might've been a nod to that.

But it gets weirder.

T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land combines Arthurian legends with the legend of the Fisher King. In it, he associates the Fisher King with the tarot card Three of Staves.

The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

…We have seen this symbol somewhere before. On the constellation wheel of the Fatui Harbingers. By process of elimination this constellation belongs to Il Capitano.

👏🏽👏🏽CONGRATULATIONS CAPITANO YOU ARE KAEYA'S NEXT TOP GRANDPA 🎉

Kidding of course, but I doubt this is a coincidence. This doesn't necessarily mean they are the same person, maybe Capitano simply mindmelded with Anfortas. It's a fantasy game, everything is possible at this point.

Wait a minute… three nails, three deaths… Uhhh maybe Fischl really did turn into Capitano.

👏🏽👏🏽CONGRATULATIONS CAPITANO YOU ARE PRINCESS DIANA'S NEXT REINCARNATION 👸🏼

PART 6: THE THIEF AND THE MAGE

Alright, for this section I want us to keep in mind the following things:

Fischl is a fallen star

Fischl may have been a mage

Fischl could be connected to Irmin and thus Khaenri'ah

The play of the Veluriyam Mirage is written by Zosimos. This play stars Kaeya as a Thief, Klee as a Mage and Idyia as a last minute heroine added to the story.

You see, Zosimos originally wanted to write a story based on rumors he'd heard about a thief and a mage. This means the play might not be entirely fictional. The problem is that Zosimos combined Idyia's backstory with the story of the Thief and the Mage, making it hard to tell which bits belong to Thief's story.

We know at least that Alice was the mage who helped Idyia. But what about the Mage who helped the Thief? Who was she? Could it have been Alice or someone else?

For that we need to consider the character Kaeya was playing. It's unknown who he is, but if Klee was playing her mom then it stands to reason Kaeya must've been playing someone connected to him. Before you get excited, this does not necessarily mean someone related to him by blood. Could also just be someone from Khaenri'ah. Heck, we don't even know the gender of the mage, for all we know they could've been a man.

Now, the soundtrack that plays during Kaeya's part is called Towers of Afrasiab. This name has come up before. In the play of Kaeya's hangout, the character he plays opposite of is called Frasiyav. The location of the Khaenri'ahn door is called Hangeh Afrasiyab.

I personally suspect Afrasiyab is either Irmin or the founder of Khaenri'ah.

Afrasiyab is a character from the Persian epic, the Shahnameh. Afrasiyab lived in an underground iron palace held up by hundreds of columns. (If you look at the architecture in Hangeh Afrasiyab, you'll see little reliefs of men holding up a ceiling above them.) Afrasiyab lacked the divine royal glory known as Khvarena and was obsessed with obtaining it. In the play they say Frasiyav lost because he lacked the blessing of god…

I mean it can't get any more obvious than that. So this could mean the dude from Kaeya's hangout was Irmin. Which does raise a bunch of questions, such as who is the identity of the Prince in this play? And why were they at war?

Should be noted in the hangout's play, Frasiyav offered hostages as a peace offering. Kind of reminds me of the war between the Aesir and Vanir… Also, Kaeya's character Prince Qubad is based on Siyavash who eventually married into Afrasiyab's family…

Towers of Afrasiyab then could refer to Khaenri'ah. In the Veluriyam play, the Thief is also from a dark realm. I hesitate making the assumption that this guy is Irmin or Kaeya's pirate grandpa so I will refer to him as simply the Thief.

In the play, the Thief witnesses a shooting star falling from the sky and follows it. However, what he finds is not a star but a young woman. Well, we know Fischl was also a star that fell down. And we know Fischl visited the Kingdom of Eternal Twilight and got bodied for her efforts. Oz took her under his wings and saved her life.

If the Thief encountered the Mage this way it would explain why the Mage helped him as a way to repay him. Perhaps the Mage taught him Arcane arts or helped him protect the "Dark Realm", who knows?

If this Mage really was Fischl and the Thief someone connected or related to Kaeya it would explain why Fischl and Kaeya seem to be connected.

About Kaeya F: His nature is obscure, his fate a mystery, and his speech a vexing tapestry woven of both fact and fiction… Perhaps he and I share the burden of mystical sight…

About Fischl  Kaeya: Hmm? You think Fischl having one eye covered is very fitting given her title of Prinzessin der Verurteilung. Hahaha, if that's the case, that must also make me a descendant of some kind of former royal lineage, no?

Furthermore, in Legend of the Shattered Halberd, Fischl's partner in crime, the man who summoned her, is named Mir. This is a reference to Mimir, the severed head from Norse mythology who acted as an advisor to Odin.

Mr. Nine states Fischl was attracted to Mir… and that Oz was more of a familiar of Fischl.

In Wagner's opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, Mimir is known as Mime, the brother of Alberich.

....😮‍💨

Well, I have to say, even after all of that, I am completely stumped. If anyone knows what's going on, let me know, because I for one would love to know WHAT'S GOING ON FOR ONCE. GIVE IT UP FOR KNOWING WHAT'S GOING ON

[techmomma]

Bitty Baby Arabic Lessons

If you’re just tuning in, I want to make simple, informal posts for those who know very little about MENA and SWANA cultures, to help give people a jumping off point in their own research. See here for details.

1. Al or el (depending on where you live):

it's an article. It's literally just "the."

Examples:

Al-Quds: THE Holy (the Arabic name for Jerusalem)

Al-kitaab: THE book

Al-Jazeera: THE island

Funfact! "Algebra" comes from the Arabic word "al-jabr," which means "the operation" or "the equation" ("the equation to restore or to balance," in full).

"Al" is also incredibly common to find in last names in Arabic. For example, "masri" means "(an) Egyptian." So the name "Ahmed Al-masri" translates to "Ahmed the Egyptian." You can also find last names derived from an ancestor's job, much like you can in English. "Yakob al-Jarrah" translates to "Yakob (Jacob) the Surgeon."

There is also another variation of "al," pronounced more like "awl," that denotes a clan or tribe or family. So "Al-Saud" can mean "of the Saud family."

2. Arabic is written right-to-left.

You weebs should be familiar with this.

To use Al-Quds from earlier, written in Arabic it looks like this

القدس <- and you start from this end and work to the left. sduQ-La, if we translate it letter for letter.

3. Arabic letters change form depending on if they're in the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

Before you worry, just remember that we have a very similar thing in cursive. For example, if you are writing the letter F in cursive, it will look just a little different depending on where it's positioned in the word (and if it's capitalized).

Farm. offer. brief. f

See what I mean? It's the same letter, but how exactly it's written depends on where it is, and if it's alone. Same thing in Arabic.

This can look a little drastic to someone not used to looking at it, but I mean. Look at the difference in English between a capital F and a lowercase f. Or worse, capital G and lowercase g.

4. Misc. notes I didn't know where to put

Quranic or Classic Arabic (Fushya Arabic) is the standardized form you will see taught in school. There are hundreds of regional dialects and variations though. Please look up any map of "Arabic speaking countries" and you will see how fucking enormous the range is.

Arabic is a sister language to Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician, Syric, Akkadian, and Sumerian. All are thought to descend from an early proto-Semitic language.

Arabic has gendered nouns, but also gendered verbs! This is one of the myriad of reasons Arabic is so incredibly nuanced. What can seem like a very easy, simple two-word sentence can have volumes of meaning behind it just by changing the verb gender.

In fact you can have the subject, object, verb, tense, pronoun, quantity, and gender of a sentence easily understood in a SINGLE WORD. For example, يلاعبونهما (Youlaebounahouma) means "They are playing with both of them." One word!! ISN'T THAT COOL??

Egyptian Arabic is sort of considered the Hollywood Accent of the Arabic world, since many popular movies are produced in Egypt. In the same way that a lot of Californians sound like people in Hollywood movies, because Hollywood is in, you guessed it, California.

English (and many other Western languages, ESPECIALLY Spanish) have so, so, so, so, so, SO, SOOOOO many loanwords from Arabic. "Algebra" was mentioned already, but the list includes but is not limited to: Albatross, chemistry (alchemy), admiral, apricot, artichoke, average, borax, candy, caravan, caraway, checkers, chess, coffee, cotton, elixir, garble, gauze, gazelle, ghoul, jar, jasmine, jumper, kohl, lacquer, lemon, lime, macrame, magazine, mattress, mummy, muslin, nadir, orange, popinjay, reem, rook, safari, saffron, sash, sequin, serendipity, spinach, sugar, syrup, sorbet, talc, talisman, tamarind, tariff, tuna, typhoon, vizier, zero, to name a few of thousands more.

Words are written right to left, but numbers are written left to right!

One of the reasons there are so many variations in spelling is because Arabic developed primarily as a verbal language and was only codified (turned into a written language) later, with some of the earliest examples being poetry. Arabic poetry as a tradition dates back at least 1600 years! (And of this, love poems are the most popular!!)

Classical Arabic is most often what Arabic is written in rather than spoken. Modern Standard Arabic is the version you will hear most often spoken.

Arabic does not use capitalization or contractions!

There are seven main styles of Arabica calligraphy: Kufic, Dewani, Thuluth, Naskh, Rayhani, Muhaqqaq, and Reqa. There are many regional variants and forms of calligraphy as well, including the tughra, which is a calligraphic monogram/seal/signature.

Hope you enjoyed this infodump and learned some things! Arabic is an incredibly beautiful and underrated language! I highly recommend learning even the smallest bit about it!

[tellurian-in-aristasia]

Sai Thame

Source

Sai Thamë is the universal principle of order. Order is fundamental to the traditional understanding of the cosmos. Indeed the very word cosmos (Greek Kosmos) means order, as opposed to chaos, which is its opposite principle. In Greek thought, the creation of the universe consists in bringing cosmos (order) out of chaos (disorder); in other words, order is equivalent to being itself. The modern scientist's definition of entropy, as derived from the second law of thermodynamics, carries precisely the same implication.

Cosmos, or order, also means beauty. Hence our word cosmetic, which means to make orderly, and hence to make beautiful. To understand this fully, we need to understand what beauty really is. The modernist believes that beauty is literally "in the eye of the beholder": that there is no such thing as objective beauty. Beauty is merely an accidental preference of the brain for certain sense-objects over others. The objects which the brain finds beautiful have no objective quality that makes them beautiful; it is just a question of subjective preference.

You will see how this view follows naturally from the idea that we have no sources of information beyond sense-impressions and the action of earthly reason (or earthly sentiment) upon them. Because the modern mind denies the solar Intelligence accepted and understood by all traditional peoples, it can conceive of no faculty which could perceive an objective universal quality such as beauty; nor can it conceive of the existence of such an objective universal quality.

For the traditional mind, all worldly beauty is the reflection of Divine beauty. Earthly things may participate to a greater or lesser extent in the absolute beauty of the Divine, and to that precise extent do we rightly call them beautiful or not beautiful.

Beauty and order are not precisely the same thing, but they are very closely entwined. The beauty-half of the equation rightly belongs to Sai Sushuri and the order-half to Sai Thamë. This is one reason why they are often said to be sisters.

The name of Sai Thamë, without a capital letter, is often used as a noun or an adjective. To say that something is thamë or athamë is to say that it is orderly or disorderly; but we must understand by this that we are speaking of its consonance or lack of consonance with the Universal Harmony, that which, in the words of an Aristasian Scripture, "holds the stars within their courses and a drop of dew pendant upon a blade of grass". This conception is neatly put in the Aristasian book The District Governess:

Harmony, Comeliness, Seemliness: such are the watchwords of Aristasian ‘Law and Order’—a phrase from another land which would not be in the least out of place upon Aristasian lips, but would carry with it quite another colouring. All law, to the Aristasian, is akin to the laws of mathematics or of music — an expression of the underlying harmony of being; all order fundamentally the order of a dance, which is ultimately the great dance of the cosmos, presided over by Thamë, the Angel of Harmony. To an Aristasian, grace in the sense of ‘gracefulness’ is not a different concept from grace in the thealogical sense. They are intimately bound up one with another — and all of life is intimately bound up with them.

Sai Thamë is thus the Janya of royalty and authority. The Empress or the Queen in Aristasia rules not by her own authority, but as the administrator of the Golden Order (Greek Chrysothemis: chrys meaning gold and Themis being the Greek name for Thamë, the original feminine form of Jupiter). The royal function is to reflect the eternal and changeless Order of Being, as is seen in the movement of the stars, into our earthly polity. Since we are in the lower world of flux and change, adaptations and adjustments need to be made from time to time, to allow for changing conditions. If this were not the case, new laws would never need to be made and the first order could stay unchanged throughout history. However, law-making should be as minimal as possible. The task of the law-maker is not to re-shape the world according to her own ideas or those of her friends, but is more akin to the steering of a ship. Her job is to keep a straight course — the same course as that of her wiser mothers — despite the buffetings of wind and wave. If there were no wind or wave, no steersmaid would be needed, but in the lower world of flux and change, adjustments must sometimes be made in order to keep our course. That, to the traditional mind, is the whole art of politics. The idea of parties and of opposing political opinions, upon which the rajasic world bases its polity is due to the principle of Vikhë, or conflict, entering into a sphere that should belong purely to Thamë. This, of course, is precisely what one would expect to happen in the Age of Iron.

Politics is not the only sphere in which this takes place. Since the Eclipse, the attack on order of every sort (and on its sister-principle of beauty) takes place in every conceivable sphere from dress and speech to art and entertainment. The attack on thamë in every area may be said to be the defining characteristic of the post-Eclipse world, and the restoration of thamë the heart-principle of Aristasia-in-Telluria.

If one word were to sum up the influence of Sai Thamë, that word would be harmony. In traditional philosophy, creation is often seen as an act of music. Thamë is literally the Music of the Spheres, the cosmic harmony that moves all things in their proper places and thus sustains them in being. For without that harmony, all would dissolve into chaos and nothingness.

Sai Thamë also governs rituals of all sorts, and thus the dance, which is not only the expression of harmony, but also, in its origins, of a ritual nature.

[crater-lake]

5

3/10/23

I feel very proud of myself! Here are the reasons. I just finished my 7:30AM - 12:00PM shift. It was an easy day. I can wake up and go to work. I feel lucky that waking up does not hurt as much as it used to in High School. I was explaining derivatives to an OA and it caught me in a fury of numbers. I found the equation to describe the change of the numbers of fourth power numbers. Which is to say the numbers between 1,16,81, 256 etc. I came up with the equation: 4x^3-6x^2+4x-1 which generates the sequence: 1, 15, 65, 175, 369, 671. I have not done math in a little while so it impressed me that I was able to generate it. I felt useful and intelligent. My coworkers were confused by me and I explained that I don’t like to be bored. It was a lot of fun. Once the caffeine hits my system, I’m gone. I also forwarded the link for submitting an advertisement to the Student Centers for Stephanie from my Bilingual Research Class for her endangered language project workshop. I knew how to find her email. I coordinated with Jenn for Make-a-Wish for next week’s schedule and coordinated with Demi to ensure I can do both next week. I went to the Main Lounge and played piano and talked to Elizabeth and that faculty member about music at the piano. He asked me to play Clair de Lune and I did not mind. Hablé con Elizabeth sobre su hijo y como aprender tocar el piano y quiere que aprenda “Happy Birthday.” I also made a reservation for Mangia Toscano at 7PM so I can get dinner with my friend Sam! I played Rachmaninov. I came to Brower to eat food. Miquel told me he sent the Catalan poem I wrote for him to his mother, who said it was “precious.” Miquel loves the poem I wrote so much that it made him cry. I got my third and final reference for my internship application for the Court Interpreting Internship I am applying for this summer! I asked my interpretation professor from Spain and he agreed and I even emailed him in Catalan! This week, I made a Linked-In and completely revised my resumé. I just need to write a Cover Letter and wait for Liz’s new email for her Philadelphia job. I’m seeing my friend Matt in 45 min, who I met over the summer because he came in to play the piano and I said, “What is your story?” and I showed him my Golden Hour Poetry (before JVKE ruined the phrase) and we reconnected after Spain and yes, everyday I wake up and wonder when Fulbright results are coming out. I have never wanted something so badly in my whole life. I am listening to Arlo Parks and thinking of Ananya and how I am doing everything I have ever dreamed of and I remember so viscerally when I was at Make-a-Wish having just left and evening was a vibrant amber hanging in the pine trees across the parking lot and black silhouettes spread their wings against the radiant firmament (word occurred to me for some reason) and I felt utterly there, like dumbfoundedly there, wildly there. And I knew Vulnera was different and that it ended again, for me, in that moment. I have made it despite the horror I have witnessed getting older. I led a sectional in University Choir and people ask me if I study music and I say I don’t, I just love it. I do Sinfonia with Jay as well and feel proud. When I get the chance, I go to the gym and have good sex with pretty men and I can hold my glorious sadnesses and set them down if I need to and the coffee is sprinting through me and I feel warmly about graduating and I will do everything I need to do to be okay and to not be in vulnera. I am actively trying to invest into my life and my wellbeing and my friends and my existence. I do not deserve vulnera. I am in my name and my story. People value and love me. I can leave a room. I can try to leave a room. I can leave the room 598 times and then try again. Now Black Dog is playing: the E major seventh to A major seventh is being saved. Miquel said to me: T’estime molt molt molt molt molt. 

[bounce-a-coin-off-your-witcher]

close encounters of a new kind

The Witcher/X-Files au that literally nobody asked for

tw: the FBI

---

Jaskier straightens his new plaid blazer, squares his shoulders, and swans his way into the Director’s office as confidently as possible. The Director stands quickly from the leather chair behind his enormous desk and offers Jaskier a wrinkled hand to shake. “Good morning, Agent Pankratz, and thank you for coming in on such short notice. It’s nice to finally meet you face-to-face.”

“And you, Sir,” Jaskier nods. The Director gestures for him to take a seat and the agent does, trying to keep his nerves from showing. “Your message sounded urgent; how can I help you?”

“You’ve been with us for just over two years, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You attended medical school but chose not to practice; why not become a doctor? Why work for the FBI?”

“My parents thought it was just rebellion,” Jaskier says, chuckling a bit to break the tension. “But actually, I was recruited out of medical school. I thought it would be a good opportunity to establish myself.”

“Are you familiar with an agent by the name of Geralt deRiv?”

Jaskier tries desperately to hide his shock and confusion. Of course he’s heard of Geralt ‘Spooky’ deRiv, the FBI’s most notorious psychological profiler-slash-field agent. “I know him by reputation, Sir.”

“Reputation?” the Director looks skeptical and Jaskier hurries to continue.

“I know that he’s an Oxenfurt-educated Psychologist who wrote one of the most educational and widely-read studies on serial killers and the occult. I know he’s helped catch several notorious and dangerous murderers. He’s an incredible analyst.”

The Director’s eyebrows scrunch together thoughtfully and he glances up at Jaskier with an expression of utter exhaustion on his wizened face. “Lately he’s been… focused on a project outside the FBI mainstream. We’re having trouble reigning in his less standard investigative practices and we need... Have you ever heard of the X-Files, Agent Pankratz?”

“They deal with unexplained phenomena, if I’m correct, Director.”

“Yes, Agent Pankratz, you are correct. That’s why we’ve asked you here, you see. We’d like you to assist Agent deRiv. We need you to write field reports of your experiences and double-check the validity of his work.”

“Are you asking me to debunk the X-Files and all of Agent deRiv’s work?”

“No, Agent Pankratz. We merely want you to observe, assist, and solve whatever cases possible. We want you to tell us the truth.”

“Understood, Sir.”

---

A few long minutes later, Jaskier finds himself standing outside a nondescript beige door with a covered glass window; the same as every other door in the long white hallway. He knocks twice and puts his hand on the knob without waiting for an answer, even as a low voice calls from within: “Nobody here but the FBI’s most unwanted.”

Jaskier steps into the room and takes a long, slow look around. As with any FBI office, there are a couple wooden desks piled with boxes of files, their accompanying chairs invisible beneath the collected data. The walls are covered with graphs and data charts, newspaper clippings and, oddly enough, there’s a poster displayed prominently at the center of the chaos depicting a UFO and the large white block letters: I WANT TO BELIEVE.

Huddled over a desk, his surprisingly broad shoulders hunched forward and his head lowered over a light board, sits the most handsome man Jaskier has ever laid eyes on. This is Geralt deRiv? This absolute god of a person, with long white hair that cascades over his shoulders like a waterfall of moonlight and eyes so piercingly light that they’re almost gold rather than hazel… this is Spooky deRiv?! Jaskier takes a moment to organize his thoughts before fully entering the room and approaching his new (gorgeous) partner.

“I’m Agent Julian Pankratz, but you can call me Jaskier,” the younger man introduces himself, stepping forward and offering his hand. “I’ve been assigned to work with you.”

“Ah, lovely. Who did you piss off to end up down here with me?” the senior agent grunts, glancing between Jaskier’s hand and the lightboard. 

“I’m actually really excited to be your new partner,” Jaskier smiles. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Hmm.”

“If you doubt my credentials I have my-”

“You’re a medical doctor even though you did your undergraduate thesis on Einstein’s Twin Theory. High marks, especially for someone who had the nerve to rewrite Einstein.”

“Yes, well-”

“It’s just that the laws of physics apply so very rarely to my work,” Geralt gestures at the alien poster, the lightboard, the walls tacked up with newspaper clippings; Jaskier shrugs in reply. “But maybe I can get your medical opinion on this.”

He turns off the lights and shows Jaskier a series of photos, followed by a chemical equation that leaves the doctor reeling. Holy shit. This is… fascinating. 

“Four different states, four different women. All the same marks and the same unknown chemical compound left behind. Now, can you tell me why this is being labeled unexplained phenomena and shoved down here with the rest of these boxes? Why isn’t this case getting solved by our outstanding agents, right this very moment? This picture is less than two days old.”

“Well I suppose that it is unexplained, isn’t it? Until we solve the case, of course,” Jaskier grins at Geralt over his shoulder. He knows he’s a goner. It’s too late for him, both professionally and romantically. This guy has him by the heart and the mind. Geralt smirks a bit and shakes his head. Jaskier looks back at the projector screen and asks, “Do you have any theories?”

“Several.”

“Well then, partner,” Jaskier grins, shoving a box over so that he can perch on the desk’s worn surface. “Let’s get started.”

[wits-writing]

What’s so Funny About Vengeance, the Night, and Batman? – Two Superhero Parodies in Conversation

Back in 2016, the first trailers for Director Chris McKay’s The Lego Batman Movie hit. A spinoff of the take on the iconic hero, voiced by Will Arnett, from 2014’s The Lego Movie. Those trailers spelled out a plot covering how Batman’s life of crimefighting is turned upside down when Robin unexpectedly enters the picture. It was a funny trailer, promising another insightful comedy from the crew behind The Lego Movie. A promise it handily delivered on when it came out in February 2017 with an animated feature steeped wall-to-wall jokes for the sake of mocking Bruce Wayne’s angst filled crusade that can only come from understanding what’s made the character withstand the test of time.

But there was a thought I and others had from seeing that trailer up to watching the actual movie:

“This seems… familiar.”

Holy Musical B@man! is a 2012 fan-made stage production parody of DC Comics’ biggest cash cow. It was produced as the fifth musical from YouTube-based cult phenomenon Starkid Productions, from a book by Matt and Nick Lang, music by Nick Gage and Scott Lamp with lyrics by Gage. The story of the musical details how Robin’s unexpected entrance ends up turning Batman’s (Joe Walker) life of crimefighting upside down. Among Starkids’ fandom derived projects in their early existence, as they’ve mainly moved on to well-received original material in recent years, Holy Musical B@man! is my personal favorite. I go back to it frequently, appreciating it as a fan of both superheroes and musicals. (Especially since good material that touches on both of those isn’t exactly easy to come by. Right, Spider-Man?)

While I glibly summarized the similarities between them by oversimplifying their plots, there’s a lot in the details, both major and minor, that separates how they explore themes like solitude, friendship, love, and what superhero stories mean. It’s something I’ve wanted to dig into for a while and I found a lot in both of them I hadn’t considered before by putting them in conversation. I definitely recommend watching both of them, because of how in-depth this piece goes including discussing their endings. However, nothing I can say will replace the experience of watching them and if I had included everything I could’ve commented on in both of them, this already massive piece would easily be twice as long minimum.

Up front, I want to say this isn’t about comparing The Lego Batman Movie and Holy Musical B@man in terms of quality. Not only are they shaped for vastly different mediums with different needs/expectations, animation versus stagecraft, but they also had different resources at their disposal. Even if both are in some ways riffing on the aesthetic of the 1990s Batman movies and the Adam West TV show, Lego Batman does it with the ability to make gorgeously animated frames packed to the brim with detail while Holy Musical often leans into its low-fi aesthetic of characters miming props and sets to add extra humor. They’re also for different audiences, Lego Batman clearly for all-ages while Holy Musical has the characters cursing for emphasis on a regular basis. On top of those factors, after picking through each of these for everything worth commenting on that I could find, I can’t say which I wholly prefer thanks in part to these fundamental differences.

This piece is more about digging through the details to explore the commonalities, differences, and what makes them effective mocking love letters to one of the biggest superheroes in existence.

(Also, since I’m going to be using the word “Batman” a lot, I’ll be calling Lego Batman just “Batman” and referring to the version from Holy Musical as “B@man”, with the exception of quoted dialogue.)

[Full Piece Under the Cut]

Setting the Tone

The beginning is, in fact, a very good place to start when discussing how these parodies frame their versions of the caped crusader. Each one uses a song about lavishing their respective Batmen with praise about how they are the best superheroes ever and play over sequences of the title hero kicking wholesale ass. A key distinction comes in who’s singing each song. Holy Musical B@man’s self-titled opening number is sung from the perspective of an omniscient narrator recounting B@man’s origin and later a chorus made up of the Gotham citizenry. Meanwhile, “Who’s the (Bat) Man” from Lego Batman is a brag-tacular song written by Batman about himself, even playing diegetically for all his villains to hear as he beats them up.

Holy Musical opens on a quick recap of Batman’s origin:

“One shot, Two shots in the night and they’re gone And he’s all left alone He’s just one boy Two dead at his feet and their blood stains the street And there’s nothing, no there’s nothing he can do!”

We then get a Bat-dance break as the music goes from slow and moody to energetic to reflect Batman turning that tragedy into the driving force behind his one-man war on crime. Assured by the narrator that he’s “the baddest man that there’s ever been!” and “Now there’s nothing, no there’s nothing he can’t do!” flipping the last lyric of the first verse. For the rest of the opening scene the lyrics matter less than what’s happening to establish both this fan-parody’s version of Batman and how the people of Gotham (“he’ll never refuse ‘em”) view him.

Lego Batman skips the origin recap, and in general talks around the death of the Waynes to keep the light tone going since it’s still a kids movie about a popular toy even if there are deeper themes at play. Instead, it continues a trend The Lego Movie began for this version of the character writing music about how he’s an edgy, dark, awesome, cool guy. While that movie kept it to Batman angry-whiteboy-rapping about “Darkness! NO PARENTS!”, this one expands to more elaborate boasts in the song “Who’s the (Bat) Man” by Patrick Stump:

“In the darkest night I make the bad guys fall There’s a million heroes But I’m the best of them all!”

Batman singing this song about himself, as opposed to having it sung by others aims the crosshairs of parody squarely on the hero’s ego. His abilities make fighting his villains effortless, like this opening battle is more an opportunity to perform the song than a life-or-death struggle. Even Joker’s aware of that as he shouts, “Stop him before he starts singing!” This Batman doesn’t see himself as missing out on anything in life, even if he still feels that deep down. Being Batman is the coolest thing in the world that anyone would envy. He’s Batman, therefore everyone should envy him.

The songs aren’t only part of the equation for how these two works’ opening scenes establish their leading hero. While both songs are about Batman being cool, they’re separated by the accompanying scenes. Lego Batman keep the opening within the Joker’s perspective until Batman shows up and the action kicks in. Once it does, we’re shown a Batman at the top of his solo-hero game. Meanwhile, Holy Musical’s opening is about B@man building his reputation and by the end of the song he has all the citizens of Gotham singing his praises with the titular lyrics. Both are about being in awe of the title hero, one framed by Joker’s frustration at Batman’s ease in foiling his schemes yet again and the other about the people of Gotham growing to love their city’s hero (probably against their better judgement.)

That’s woven into the fabric of what kind of schemes Batman is foiling in each of these. Joker’s plan to bomb Gotham with the help of every supervillain in Batman’s Rogues Gallery is hilariously high stakes and the type of plan most Batman stories, even parodies, would save for the climax. Neatly exemplified by how that’s almost the exact structure of Holy Musical’s final showdown. Starting with these stakes works as an extension of this Batman’s nature as a living children’s toy and therefore the embodiment of a child’s idea of what makes Batman cool, his ability to wipe the floor with anyone that gets in his way “because he’s Batman.” It also emphasizes Joker as the only member of the Rogues Gallery that matters to Lego Batman’s story, every other Bat-villain is either a purely visual cameo or only gets a couple lines maximum.

The crime’s being stopped by B@man are more in the “Year One” gangster/organized crime category rather than anything spectacle heavy. Though said crimes are comically exaggerated:

Gangster 1: Take these here drugs, put ‘em into them there guns, and then hand ‘em out to those gamblin’ prostitutes! Gangster 2: Should we really be doing these illegal activities? In a children’s hospital for orphans?

These fit into that model of crime the Dark Knight fights in his early days and add tiny humanizing moments between the crooks (“Oh, Matches! You make me laugh like nobody else!”) in turn making the arrival of B@man and the violence he deals out a stronger punchline. Further emphasized by the hero calling out the exact physical damage he does with each hit before warning them to never do crime again saying, “Support your families like the rest of us! Be born billionaires!” Later in the song his techniques get more extreme and violence more indiscriminate, as he uses his Bat-plane to patrol and gun down whoever he sees as a criminal, including a storeowner accidentally taking a single dollar from his own register. (“God’s not up here! Only Batman!”)

A commonality between these two openings is how Commissioner Jim Gordon gets portrayed. Both are hapless goofs at their core, playing more on the portrayal of the character in the 60s TV show and 90s Burton/Schumacher movies than the serious-minded character present in comics, Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, and other adaptations. Lauren Lopez’s portrayal in Holy Musical gets overwhelmed by everything thrown at him, eventually giving up and getting out of B@man’s way (“I’m not gonna tell Batman what to do! He’s Batman!”) Hector Elizondo’s Gordon in Lego Batman clearly reached the “stay out of Batman’s way” point a long time ago, happy to have “the guy who flips on the Bat-signal” be his sole defining trait. While the characterizations are close, their roles do end up differing. Lopez’s Gordon sticks around to have a few more comedic scenes as the play goes on, where Elizondo’s exist to set up a contrast with his daughter Barbara and her way of approaching Batman when she becomes Police Commissioner.

These opening sequences both end in similar manners as well; the citizens of Gotham lavishing praise on their respective Batmen and a confrontation between Batman and the Joker. Praise from the citizenry in Holy Musical comes on the heels of a letter from B@man read out on the news about how much they and the city of Gotham suck. They praise B@man for his angsty nature as a “dark hero” and how they “wouldn’t want him any other way!”, establishing the motif of Gotham’s citizens in Holy Musical as stand-ins for the Batman fandom. Lego Batman uses the praise of the Gotham citizens after Batman’s victory in the opening scene as a lead in to contrast their certainty that Batman must have an exciting private life with the reality we’re shown. Which makes sense since Lego-Batman’s relationship to the people of Gotham is never presented as something at stake.

Greater contrast comes in how the confrontations with the Joker are handled, Lego Batman has an argument between the hero and villain that’s intentionally coded as relationship drama, Batman saying “There is no ‘us’” when Joker declares himself Batman’s greatest enemy. The confrontation in Holy Musical gets purposefully underplayed as an offstage encounter narrated to the audience as a Vicki Vale news report. This takes Joker off the board for the rest of the play in contrast to the Batman/Joker relationship drama that forms one of Lego Batman’s key pillars. While they take different forms, the respective citizenry praise and villain confrontation parts of these openings lead directly into the number one common thematic element between these Bat-parodies: Batman’s loneliness.

One is the Darkest, Saddest, Loneliest Number

Batman as an isolated hero forms one of the core tenants of the most popular understanding of the character. Each of these parodies picks at that beyond the broody posturing. There’s no dedicated segment in this piece about how these works’ versions of the title character function bleeds into every other aspect of them, but each starts from the idea of Batman as a man-child with trouble communicating his emotions. Time’s taken to give the audience a view of where their attitudes have left them early in the story.

Both heroes show their loneliness through interactions with their respective Alfreds. Holy Musical has the stalwart butler, played by Chris Allen, try to comfort B@man by asking if he has any friends he enjoys being around. When B@man cites Lucius Fox as a friend he calls him right away, only to discover Lucius Fox is Alfred’s true identity and Alfred Pennyworth was an elaborate ruse he came up with to protect Bruce on his father’s wishes. Ironically, finding out his closest friend was living a double life causes Bruce to push Alfred away (the play keeps referring to him as Alfred after this, so that’s what I’m going to do as well.) After he’s fired he immediately comes back in a new disguise as “O’Malley the Irish Butler” (same outfit he wore before but with a Party City Leprechaun hat.) That’s unfortunately the start of a running gag in Holy Musical that ends up at the worst joke in the play, when Alfred disguises himself as “Quon Li the Chinese Butler” doing an incredibly cringeworthy “substituting L’s for R’s” bit with his voice. It’s been my least favorite bit in the play since I first saw it in 2012 and legitimately makes me hesitate at times to recommend it. Even if it’s relatively small bit and the rest holds ups.

That disclaimer out of the way, that conversation between B@man and Alfred leads into the title hero reflecting on his sadness through the musical’s I Want Song, “Dark, Sad, Lonely Knight.” The song’s split into two halves, the first Alfred reflecting on whether he played a part in Bruce’s current condition and the second B@man longing for a connection. The song does a good job balancing between the sincerity over the hero’s sadness and getting good laughs out of it:

“Think of the children Next time you gun down the mama and papa Their only mama and papa Because they probably don’t have another mama and papa!”

The “I Want” portion of the song coming in the end with the repetition of the lryics “I want to be somebody’s buddy.”

Rather than another song number, Lego Batman covers Batman’s sadness through a pair of montages and visual humor. The first comes after the opening battle, where we see Batman taking off all his costume except for the mask hanging out alone in Wayne Manor, showing how little separation he puts between identities. Compared to Holy Musical where the equivalent scene is the first we see of Bruce without the mask on, which may come down to practicality since anyone who’s worn a mask like that knows they get hot and sweaty fast. Batman is constantly made to appear small among the giant empty rooms of his estate as he eats dinner, jams on his guitar, and watches romantic movies alone.

Ralph Fienne’s Alfred coming in at the end of this sequence witnessing Batman looking at a photo of himself as a boy with his parents for the last time. Alfred outlines Batman’s fear of being part of a family again only to be met with Batman denying he has any feelings ever. Pennyworth’s role as a surrogate father gets put into greater focus here than in Holy Musical, as we get glimpses of Alfred reading a book titled “How to Deal with Your Out-of-Control Child.” Also shown in smaller scenes of Alfred dealing with Batman’s insistent terminology for his crime fighting equipment, like calling his cowl an “armored face disguise.”

Batman’s denial of his pain contrasts how B@man wallows in it. Though he’s forced to confront it a little as the Joker’s plan ends up leaving him with no crimefighting to fall back on to ignore his issues. This montage gets set to the song “One” by Harry Nilsson and details Batman, unable to express his true feelings, eventually letting them out in the form of tempter tantrums. There’s also some humor through juxtaposition as Batman walks solemnly through the streets of Gotham City, rendered black and white, as the citizens chant “No more crime!” in celebration, while flipping over cars and firing guns into the air.

A disruption to their loneliness eventually comes in the form of a sensational character find.

Robin – The Son/BFF Wonder

Between both Bat-parodies, the two Robins’ characterizations are as close as anyone’s between them. Each is nominally Dick Grayson but are ultimately more representative of the idea of Robin as the original superhero sidekick and his influence on Batman’s life. The play and movie also both make the obvious jokes about Dick’s name and the classic Robin costume’s lack of pants at different points. Dick’s origin also gets sidestepped in each version to skip ahead to the part where he starts being an influence in Batman’s life.

Robin’s introduction to the comics in Detective Comics #38 in 1940, marking the start of Batman’s literal “Year Two” as a character, predating the introduction of Joker, Catwoman, and Alfred, among others. Making him Batman’s longest lasting ally in the character’s history. His presence and acrobatics shift the tone by adding a dash of swashbuckling to Batman’s adventures, inspired by the character’s namesake Robin Hood, though both parodies take a page out of Batman Forever and associate the name with the bird for the sake of a joke. Robin is as core to Batman as his origin, but more self-serious adaptations (i.e., the mainstream cinematic ones that were happening around the times both Holy Musical and Lego Batman came out) tend to avoid the character’s inclusion. These two works being parody, therefore anything but self-serious, give themselves permission to examine why Robin matters and how different characters react to his presence. Rejection of Robin as a character and concept comes out in some form in each of these works, from Batman himself in Lego Batman and the Gotham citizens in Holy Musical.

The chain of events that lead to Dick becoming Robin in Lego Batman are a string of consequences for Batman’s self-absorption. A scene of Bruce barely listening as Dick asks for advice on getting adopted escalating to absentmindedly signing the adoption paperwork. Batman doesn’t realize he has a son until after his sadness montage. Alfred forces Batman to start interacting with Dick against his will. The broody loner wanting nothing to do with the cheery kid, played to “golly gee gosh” perfection by Michael Cera, until he sees the utility of him. Batman doesn’t even have the idea to give Robin a costume or codename because he clearly views the sidekick’s presence as a temporary measure for breaking into Superman’s fortress, made clear by how he lists “expendable” as a quality Dick needs if he wants to go on a mission.

This makes Robin the catalyst for Batman’s shifting perspective throughout Lego Batman. When Robin succeeds in his first mission, the Dark Knight is hesitant to truly compliment him and chalks up his ward’s feats to “unbelievable obeying.” Other moments have Robin’s presence poke holes in Batman’s tough guy demeanor, like the first time Batman and Robin ride in the Bat-mobile together, Robin asks where the seatbelts are and Batman growls “Life doesn’t give you seatbelts!”, only for Batman to make a sudden stop causing Robin to hit his head on the windshield and Batman genuinely apologizes. They share more genuine moments together as the film goes, like Batman suggesting they beatbox together to keeps their spirits up after they’ve been imprisoned for breaking into Arkham Asylum. Robin’s representative of Batman gradually letting people in throughout these moments.

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, B@man needs zero extra prompting to let Robin into his life. Nick Lang’s Robin (henceforth called “Rob!n” to keep with this arbitrary naming scheme I’ve concocted) does get brought into his life by Alfred thanks to a personal ad (“‘Dog for sale’? No… ‘Orphan for sale’! Even better!”) but it’s a short path to B@man deciding to let Dick fight alongside him. The briefest hesitance on the hero’s part, “To be Batman… is to be alone”, is quelled by Rob!n saying “We could be alone… together.” Their first scene together quickly establishing the absurd sincerity exemplified by this incarnation of the Dynamic Duo. An energy carried directly into the Act 1 closing number, “The Dynamic Duet”, a joyful ode between the heroes about how they’re “Long lost brothers who found each other” sung as they beat up supervillains (and the occasional random civilian.)

That song also ties into the contrast between the Batman/Robin dynamic and the B@man/Rob!n one. While Holy Musical is portraying a brotherly/BFF bond between the two heroes, Lego Batman leans into the surrogate son angle. While both are mainly about their stories’ Batman being able to connect with others, the son angle of Lego Batman adds an additional layer of “Batman needs to take responsibility for himself and others” and a parallel to Alfred as Batman’s own surrogate father. It also adds to the queer-coding of Batman in Lego Batman as Batman’s excuse to Robin for why he can go on missions is that Bruce and he are sharing custody, Robin even calling Batman’s dual identities “dads” before he knows the truth.

In the absence of the accepting personal responsibility through fatherhood element, the conflict Rob!n brings out in Holy Musical forms between B@man and the citizens of Gotham. “Citizens as stand-ins for fandom” is at it’s clearest here as the Act 2 opener is called “Robin Sucks!” featuring the citizens singing about how… well, you read the title. Their objections to Rob!n’s existence has nothing to do with what the young hero has done or failed to do, but come from arguments purely about the aesthetic of Rob!n fighting alongside B@man. Most blatantly shown by one of the citizens wearing a Heath Ledger Joker t-shirt saying Rob!n’s presence “ruins the gritty realism of a man who fights crime dressed as a bat.” It works as the Act 2 opener by establishing that B@man and the citizens conflicting opinions on his sidekick end up driving that half of the story, exemplified in B@man’s complete confusion about why people hate Rob!n (“Robin ruined Batman? But that’s not true… Robin make Batman happy.”)

Both Robins play into the internal conflict their respective mentors are going through, but what would a superhero story, even a parody, be without some colorful characters to provide that sweet external conflict.

Going Rogue

Both works have the threat comes from an army of villains assembled under a ringleader, Zach Galifianakis’s Joker in Lego Batman and Jeff Blim as Sweet Tooth in Holy Musical. Both lead the full ensemble of Batman’s classic (and not so classic) Rogues at different points. As mentioned before Joker starts Lego Batman with “assemble the Rogues, blow up Gotham” as his plan, while Sweet Tooth with his candy prop comedy becoming the ringleader of Gotham’s villains is a key turning point in Act 1 of the play. Part of this comes down to how their connections to their respective heroes and environments are framed, Sweet Tooth as a new player on the scene and Joker as Batman’s romantic foil.

Lego Batman demonstrates Batman and Joker are on “finishing each other’s sentences” levels of intimate that Batman refuses to acknowledge. Shown best in how Joker’s plan only works because he can predict exactly how Batman will act once he starts playing hard to get. When he surrenders the entire Rogues Gallery (without telling them) and himself to police custody, he describes it as him being “off the market.” He knows Batman won’t settle for things ending on these terms and tricks the hero into stealing Superman’s Phantom Zone projector so he can recruit a new, better team of villains for a take two of his masterplan from the start. Going through all this trouble to get Batman to say those three magic words; “I love hate you.” Joker as the significant other wanting his partner to finally reciprocate his feelings and commit works both as a play on how the Batman/Joker relationship often gets approached and an extension of the central theme. Batman is so closed off to interpersonal connections he can’t even properly hate his villains.

Sweet Tooth, while clearly being a riff Heath Ledger and Caesar Romero’s Jokers fused with a dash of Willy Wonka, doesn’t have that kind of connection with B@man. Though there are hints that B@man and his recently deceased Joker may have had one on that level. He laments “[Joker]’s in heaven with mom and dad. Making them laugh, I know it!” when recalling how the Clown Prince of Crime was the one person he enjoyed being around. This makes Joker’s death one of the key triggers to B@man reflecting on his solitude at the start of the play.

What Sweet Tooth provides the story is a threat to B@man’s new bond with Rob!n. Disrupting that connection forms the delicious center of the Candy King of Crime’s plan in Act 2. He holds Rob!n and Gotham’s people hostage and asks the citizens to decide via Facebook poll if the sidekick lives or dies (in reference to the infamous phone hotline vote from the comic book story A Death in the Family where readers could decide the Jason Todd Robin’s fate.)

With the rest of the villains under the leadership of the respective works’ main antagonists, there’s commentary on their perceived quality as threats. When Holy Musical has Superman talking to Green Lantern about how much B@man’s popularity frustrates him, he comes down especially hard on the Caped Crusader’s villains. Talking about how they all coast by on simple gimmicks with especially harsh attention given to Two Face’s being “the number two.” Saying they’re only famous because B@man screws up and they get to do more damage. Which he compares to his own relationship with his villains:

Superman: You ever heard of Mr. Mxyzptlk? Green Lantern: No. Superman: No, that’s right! That’s because I do my job!

Lego Batman has commentary on the other villains come from Joker, recognizing that even all together they can never beat Batman, because that’s how a Batman story goes. The other villains get portrayed as generally buffoonish, struggling to even build a couch together and described by Joker as “losers dressed in cosplay.” Tricking Batman into sending him to the Phantom Zone provides him the opportunity to gather villains from outside Batman’s mythos and outside DC Comics in general. Recruiting the likes of Sauron, King Kong, Daleks, Agent Smith from The Matrix, and the Wicked Witch of the West, among others. When I first saw and reviewed The Lego Batman Movie, this bugged me because it felt like a missed opportunity to feature lesser-known villains from other DC heroes’ Rogues Galleries. Now, considering the whole movie as meta-commentary on the status of this Batman as a children’s toy, it makes perfect sense that Joker would need to go outside of comics to break the rules of a typical Batman story and have a shot at winning.

The Rogues of Holy Musical get slightly more of a chance to shine, if only because their song “Rogues are We” is one of the catchier tracks from the play. They’re all still more cameo than character when all’s said and done, but Sweet Tooth entering the picture is about him recognizing their potential to operate as a unit, takeover Gotham, and kill B@man. The candy-pun flinging villain wants all of them together, no matter their perceived quality.

Sweet Tooth: “We need every villain in Gotham. Cool themes, lame themes, themes that don’t match their powers, even the villains that take their names from public domain stories.” (Two Face’s “broke ass” still being the exception.)

Both Joker and Sweet Tooth provide extensions of the shared theme of Batman dealing with the new connections in his life, especially with regards to Robin. However, Robin isn’t the only other ally (or potential ally) these Dark Knights have on their side.

Super Friends(?)

The internal crisis of these Caped Crusaders come as much from how they react to other heroic figures as it does from supervillainous machinations. In both cases how Batman views and is viewed by fellow heroes gets centered on a specific figure, Superman in Holy Musical and Commissioner Barbara Gordon (later Batgirl) in Lego Batman. Each serves a vastly different purpose in the larger picture of their stories and relationship to their respective Batmen. Superman reflecting B@man’s loneliness and Barbara symbolizing a new path forward for Batman’s hero work.

Superman’s role in Holy Musical runs more parallel to Lego Batman’s Joker than Barbara. Brian Holden’s performance as the Man of Tomorrow plays into a projected confidence covering anxiety that nobody likes him. Besting the Bat-plane in a race during B@man’s Key to the City ceremony establishes a one upmanship between the two heroes, like Joker’s description of his relationship with Batman at the end of Lego Batman’s opening battle. Though instead of that romantically coded relationship from Lego Batman, this relationship is more connected to childish jealousy. (But if you do want to read the former into Holy Musical B@man, neither hero has an onstage relationship with any woman and part of their eventual fight consist of spanking each other.)

B@man and Superman’s first real interaction is arguing over who’s the cooler hero until it degrades into yelling “Fuck you!” at each other. B@man storming off in the aftermath of that gets topped off by Superman suggesting he should get the Key to the City instead, citing his strength and longer tenure as a hero (“The first hero, by the way”) as justifications. This only results in the Gotham citizens turning on him for suggesting their city’s hero is anything less than the best, which serves both as a Sam Raimi Spider-Man reference (“You mess with one of us! You mess with all of us!”) and another example of the citizens as stand-ins for fandom. Superman’s veil of cocksureness comes off quickly after that and stays off for the rest of the play. Starting with his conversation with Green Lantern where a civilian comes across them, but barely acts like Superman’s there.

One of the play’s running gags is Superman calling B@man’s number and leaving messages, showing a desperation to reach out and connect with his fellow hero despite initial smugness. Even before the first phone call scene, we see Superman joining B@man to sing “I want to be somebody’s buddy” during “Dark, Sad, Lonely Knight” hinting at what’s to come. The note it consistently comes back to is that Superman’s jealousy stems from Batman’s popularity over him. This is a complete flip of what Lego Batman does with the glimpse at a Batman/Superman dynamic we see when Batman goes to the Superman’s fortress to steal the Phantom Zone projector. The rivalry dynamic there exists solely in Batman’s head, Lego-Superman quickly saying “I would crush you” when Batman suggests the idea of them fighting. Superman’s status among the other DC heroes is also night and day between these works. Where Lego-Superman’s only scene in the movie shows him hosting the Justice League Anniversary Party and explaining he “forgot” to invite Batman, Superman in Holy Musical consistently lies about having friends over (“All night long I’m busy partying with my friends at the Fortress… of Solitude.”)

Superman’s relationship to B@man in Holy Musical develops into larger antagonism thanks to lack of communication with B@man brushing off Supes’ invitations to hang out and fight bad guys (“Where were you for the Solomon Grundy thing? Ended up smaller than I thought, just a couple of cool guys. Me and… Solomon Grundy.”) His own loneliness gets put into stronger focus when he sees the news of Rob!n’s debut as a crimefighter, which makes him reflect on how he misses having Krypto the Super-Dog around. (The explanation for why he doesn’t have his dog anymore is one of my favorite jokes in the play and I won’t ruin it here.)

Where Superman’s a reflection of B@man’s loneliness, Rosario Dawson as Barbara in Lego Batman is a confrontation of Batman’s go it alone attitude. Her job in the story is to be the one poking holes in the foundation of Batman as an idea, starting with her speech at Jim Gordon’s retirement banquet and her instatement as commissioner. She has a by-the-book outlook on crimefighting with the omnicompetence to back it up, thanks to her training at “Harvard for Police.” Babs sees Batman’s current way of operating as ineffectual and wants him to be an official agent of the law. An idea that dumps a bucket of cold water on Batman’s crush he developed immediately upon seeing her, though that never fully goes away.

Her main point is that Batman “karate chopping poor people” hasn’t made Gotham better in his 80 years of operating. A contrast to Holy Musical’s Jim Gordon announcing that B@man has brought Gotham’s crime rates to an all-time low (“Still the highest in the world, but we’re working on it.”) She wants to see a Batman willing to work with other people. A hope dashed constantly dealing with his childish stubbornness as he tries to foil Joker’s schemes on his own, culminating in her arresting Batman and Robin for breaking into Arkham to send Joker to the Phantom Zone.

Barbara’s role as the one bringing grown-up attitudes and reality into Batman’s world does leave her in the role of comedic straight woman. Humor in her scenes comes from how she reacts to everyone else’s absurdity rather than anything she does to be funny. This works for the role she plays in Lego Batman, since she’s not there to have an arc the way Superman does in Holy Musical. She’s another catalyst for Batman’s to start letting people in as another character he grows to care about. Which starts after she lets the Dynamic Duo out of prison to fight Joker’s new army of Phantom Zone villains on the condition that he plays it by her rules. Leading to a stronger bond between Batman, Robin, Alfred, and her as they start working together.

The two Batmen’s relationships to other heroes, their villains, Robin, and their own solitude each culminate in their own way as their stories reach their conclusions.

Dark Knights & Dawning Realizations

As everything comes down to the final showdowns in these Bat-parodies, the two Caped Crusaders each confront their failures to be there for others and allow themselves to be vulnerable to someone they’ve been antagonizing throughout the story. Each climax has all of Gotham threatened by a bomb and the main villains’ plans coming to fruition only to come undone.

Holy Musical has Sweet Tooth’s kidnapping of Rob!n and forcing Gotham to choose themselves or the sidekick they hate sends B@man into his most exaggerated state in the entire play. It’s the classic superhero movie climax conundrum, duty as a hero versus personal attachment. Alfred, having revealed himself as the “other butlers”, even lampshades how these stories usually go only for that possibility to get shot down by Bruce:

Alfred: A true hero, Master Wayne, finds a way to choose both. B@man: You’re right, Alfred. I know what I have to do… Fuck Gotham, I’m saving Robin!

B@man’s selfishness effectively makes him the real villain of Holy Musical’s second act. Lego Batman has shades of that aspect as well, where Batman gets sent to the Phantom Zone by Joker for his repeated refusal to acknowledge their relationship. Where the AI running the interdimensional prison, Phyllis voiced by Ellie Kemper, confronts him with the way he’s treated Robin, Alfred, Barbara, and even Joker:

Phyllis: You’re not a traditional bad guy, but you’re not exactly a good guy either. You even abandoned your friends. Batman: No! I was trying to protect them! Phyllis: By pushing them away? Batman: Well… yeah. Phyllis: Are they really the ones you’re protecting?

Batman watches what’s happening back in Gotham and sees Robin emulate his grim and gritty tendencies to save the day in his absence makes him desperately scream, “Don’t do what I would do!” It’s the universe rubbing what a jerk he’s been in his face. He’s forced to take a look at himself and make a change. B@man’s not made to do that kind of self-reflection until after he’s defeated Sweet Tooth but failed to stop the villain’s bomb. He’s ready to give up on Gotham forever and leave with Rob!n, until his sidekick pulls up Sweet Tooth’s poll and it shows the unanimous result in favor of saving the Boy Wonder. Despite everything they said at the start of Act 2, the people want to help their hero in return for all the times he helped them. All of them calling back to the Raimi Spider-Man reference from Act 1, “You mess with one of us. You mess with all of us.”

Both heroes’ chance at redemption and self-improvement comes from opening themselves up to the people they pushed out and dismissed earlier in their stories. Batman takes on the role he reduced the Commissioner down to at the beginning of the movie and flips on signals for Barbara, Alfred, and Robin to show how he’s truly prepared to work as a team, not just with his friends and family but with the villains of Gotham the Joker pushed aside as well. Teamwork makes the dream work and they’re all able to work together to get Joker’s army back into the Phantom Zone but like in Holy Musical they fail to stop the bomb threatening Gotham. Which he can only prevent from destroying the city by confessing his true feeling to Joker

Batman: If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have learned how connected I am with all of these people and you. So, if you help me save Gotham, you’ll help me save us. Joker: You just said “us?” Batman: Yeah, Batman and the Joker. So, what do you say? Joker: You had me at “shut up!”

The equivalent moment from Holy Musical comes from B@man needing to put aside his pride and encourage a disheartened Superman to save Gotham for him. This happens in the aftermath of a fight the two heroes had where Superman tried to stop B@man before he faced Sweet Tooth, B@man winning out through use of kryptonite. That fight doesn’t fit into any direct parallel with Lego Batman, but it is important context for how Superman’s feeling about B@man before Superman finally gets his long-awaited phone call from the Dark Knight. Also, the song accompanying the fight, “To Be a Man”, is one of the funniest scenes in the play. What this speech from B@man does is bring the idea of Holy Musical B@man as a commentary on fandom full circle:

B@man: I forgot what it means to be a superhero. But we’re really not that different, you and me, at our heart. I mean really all superheroes are pretty much the same… Something bad happened to us once when we were young, so we dedicated our whole lives to doing a little bit of good. That’s why we got into this crazy superhero business. Not to be the most popular, or even the most powerful. Because if that were the case, hell, you’d have the rest of us put out of a job!

This speech extends into an exchange between the heroes about how superheroes are cool, not despite anything superficially silly but because of it. Bringing it back to the “Robin Sucks!” theme that started Act 2, saying “Some people think Robin is stupid. But those people are pretentious douchebags. Because, literally, the only difference between Robin and me is our costumes.” The speech culminates in what I genuinely think is one of the best Batman lines ever written, as B@man’s final plea to Superman is “Where’s that man who’s faster than a gun?” calling back to the trauma that created Batman across all versions and what he can see in someone like Superman. So, B@man sacrificing his pride and fully trusting in another hero saves Gotham, the way Batman letting Joker know what their relationship means to him did in Lego Batman.

Each of these parodies ends by delivering a Batman willing to open himself up to a new team of heroes fighting at his side, the newly minted Bat-Family in Lego Batman and the league for justice known as the Super Friends in Holy Musical. Putting them side by side like this shows how creators don’t need the resources of a Hollywood studio to make something exactly as meaningful and how the best parodies come from love of the material no matter who’s behind them.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

[arabic-langblr]

Hi! I was recently told that learning Fusha is completely useless if you want to learn Arabic to communicate in it. Do you think this is true?

Hi, anon.

I don’t think this is correct, this is why I disagree.

First of all: I’ve always told people that learning MSA is important because it gives you structure, I’ll elaborate on this a little. 

Since we know that the dialects are all derived from standard Arabic, in order to learn the “modified”, you need to know the original version so that you can understand it. It’s important to know the point of reference so that you can see how this is modified. 

For example قلم   can be pronounced as ‘alam, galam, qalam, etc, so if you know that these are all just dialectal differences in the way the letter ق  is pronounced, things will be easier for you to learn.

Similarly with لعبة which can be read as Luʿbah or Luʿbeh ; when you hear someone saying Naḍḍāra you’re more likely to know that this means glasses if you know the word نظارة, and this will help you understand the dialect and make some generalizations to help you master it (for example Levantine dialect tends to pronounce ظ  as ض in many cases; and they also tend to read the ق  as أ ).

This reminded me of Wuthering heights, and Joseph’s Yorkshire dialect which was difficult to understand, so having an understanding of English and grammar will help you understand the parts which have his speech.

Second point : as I mentioned in a previous post, native speakers don’t speak 100% dialect all the time, there are many situations where we need to either mix in some MSA , speak in MSA, or speak in MSA with some phonetical modifications  like when you’re speaking to someone who isn’t familiar with their dialect, or in situations where you’re trying to sound more polite or formal with someone (a boss, a customer, someone who has high status etc).

Native speakers also quote proverbs or poems from Standard Arabic very often.

Third point: if you don’t learn any MSA you won’t be able to understand any news in Arabic or any weather forecast, not to mention the fact that you won’t have access to Arabic literature (poetry, prose, novels, songs, etc), which I personally find very enriching and very entertaining and amusing to read. 

Even to this day people still read and write their books in MSA (not to mention the countless audio books that you can also hear in MSA) There are also dubs that are done in MSA like animated series, some movies and series.

Finally, I’ve also see some people equate MSA to Latin and dialects to romance that evolved from Latin and it’s an inaccurate comparison; Arabic along with all the different dialects are still the same language, different ways to speak the SAME language. 

Arabic speakers from different regions understand MSA while people who speak romance language probably won’t understand Latin (not to mention that it’s a dead language and that it’s no longer officially used in these different countries).

I know that Arabic and French have evolved differently but I’ll use this example to illustrate my point: if you want to go to Quebec in Canada for example, you’ll still need to learn the standard version of French before learning the dialect, right? You need to learn the grammar and vocabulary to know how things have changed in the dialect and you’ll need a point of reference.

Here’s a small chart that I made, if we want to be more accurate, Latin should be compared to the Mother Semitic language from which Arabic (along with its different dialects) has evolved. 

(There are many more languages in this chart ofc)

I hope this helped, anon. Please don’t listen to people who try to discourage you when they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. 

The efforts you’ve made into learning MSA are not wasted, you’re doing a wonderful job so keep it up!

[frunbuns]

Fics that punched me in the face and stole my lunch money

one more time with feeling by Soulykins (Not rated, 4009 words)

When Five Hargreeves is four-years-old, he discovers his power.

He also discovers a whole lot more than that.

They’re all figuring out their powers, and as a consequence they all move out of the nursery into their own rooms after a somewhat unfortunate incident regarding the discovery of Six’s powers. Regardless, Five isn’t very fond of the new arrangement because he’s lonely.

He can’t sleep without the sounds of his siblings around him. One’s sleepy whuffling and Four’s random exclamations, Six shuffling around and Two kicking his blankets off in the night. It’s too quiet.

That is, of course, when the man falls into his room.

Probably one of my all-time favourite fics. It hits hard and is honestly the reason this rec list was made. I swear the ending knocks the breath out of me every time I read it.

little white lies by Soulykins (General Audiences, 3750 words)

The first time Five lies, really lies, he's four-years-old and taking the blame for something he didn't do.

And then he doesn't stop.

--

Five lies to everyone. He lies to his father, to his siblings, and even to himself.

(Five has broken himself apart and put himself back together so many times over the course of his life. When you're broken, you use whatever is at hand to glue yourself back together. Love and loyalty and determination, of course. But hate and spite and fury all work as well.

Five never noticed when he started gluing himself together with lies. Lies are not very good glue, they come apart too easily.)

Five protecting his siblings? Angst and hurt? Yes. It hurts, but in a good way. Like all good angsty fics do. The ending? My god. A very nice way to end all that angst. Thank you very much.

Delusions of a Practical Nature by KnightNight7203 (Teen and Up, 5045 words, 3 chapters)

This wasn’t how today was supposed to go. He was supposed to get through the next layer of his equations, finally narrow down the limits he’s been searching for for the past month and a half. But maybe he should sit down with his family more often. For the first time in a long time, he feels something akin to peace.

In which Five doesn’t always have to make it through an apocalypse alone.

You think this is nice. A few things that make you go “That’s weird”, and then it punched you in the gut with the ending and you realize; “oh shit” and it’s actually really sad. This is yet another one of the fics that made me make this list lol.

Don’t waste your time (or time will waste you) by rosewitchx (Teen and Up, 4408 words)

He was an old man. He is sixteen. Ben dies next week. How does he know that? “I think I broke it,” Five stutters, and for the first time in her short life Vanya sees absolute terror in his eyes.

- Or, Five travels back again. Something goes wrong.

Heartbreaking in all the best way. This one hurts, but it wraps up nicely at the end and I like that in a fic (or anything tbh). It kinda feels like one long gut punch at times.

losing you to the gutter by tiesmp3 (Teen and Up, 2328 words)

fire, it burned my skin but i still want to play with it. - “baby boy”, mother mother

or, five is teetering on the edge of a very steep cliff—or, maybe he always has been, but no one’s ever really cared about it, anyway.

Hurt and comfort. Five’s PTSD being adressed. Getting the help he needs. All the good stuff.

and i'll be back (again and again and again) by artfulacrostic (Teen and Up, 3560 words)

Five stumbles to his feet and looks up at his family.

They seem so...startled. Staring, like they can't believe he's back, even though he's been back over and over and over.

Of course, they don’t know that. They never do.

//

Five relives the eight days before the apocalypse over and over again in a whirlwind of equations, alcohol, and failure.

This one’s a ride, y’all. Oh my fucking god. It’s so good. The feels, holy shit. I have no words. Just read it. This was also one of the fics that made me make this list.

Bolt from the Blue by TheArchaeologist (Mature, 84665 words, 39 chapters)

When they were sixteen Klaus successfully escaped for the night, and to celebrate went to the disco with a girl he barely knew. He was young, terribly misguided, but overall the night had been amazing.

He just didn't expect to have a baby dumped in his arms nine months later.

Or,

The author takes a throw away joke in the show and runs with it.

This is a looong one, I have to be honest with you all. It really is. It’s so good and heart wrenching and sweet and oh so sad. In an Alternate Universe Five is Klaus’ son and we follow him and Ben as they try their best to raise him with the little they have, until it all goes to shit. It’s part of a longer series and let me tell you; It’s a wild one.

And I Will Run Fast, Outlast by beastboy12 (Teen and Up, 27345 words, 7 chapters)

Five is fine. Getting his siblings to see that is a different matter entirely.

In which Five has a very difficult time accepting that he may not, in fact, be okay.

This one’s also on the longer side, but not terrifbly so. It’s another fic where Five struggles with his trauma and gets help. Some recovery. A very nice read. Make sure to read the warnings though, as it covers some difficult things. Be aware of that when reading this.

Side Effects May Vary by CivilBores (Teen and Up, 6565 words)

Allison crosses her arms. “Five,” she says firmly, “when was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t know,” Five says honestly. At Allison’s expression, he quickly adds, “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what it’ll take for all of you pea-brained idiots to realize that.”

“We may not be as intelligent as you, Five,” Allison says, “but at least all of us are smart enough to know how to take care of ourselves.”

OR

A week after the world is saved, Five convinces himself that he is still experiencing lingering side effects of paradox psychosis. His family has something to say about that.

Five’s falling apart and he thinks it’s paradox psychosis. The siblings try to help him. It takes some time, but eventually they get through to him. Turns out it’s not that serious, but Five is a disaster so what do you expect?

we are alive, here by pilotpoison (General Audiences, 1364 words)

The Apocalypse was diverted, and Five finally gets to feel.

Probably one of the shortest ones on the list. Five has a bit of a breakdown after finally stopping the apocalypse for good. Angsty with a hopeful, nice ending.

(i heard a rumor) i put a band-aid on a bullet wound by telm_393 (Teen and Up, 3220 words)

Allison tries to figure out who she really is. Allison tries to calm her brother down. There are no quick fixes.

Allison centered fic where she struggles with the loss of her voice and powers. It delves into Allison’s feelings towards the sitauation and her siblings (mostly Vanya). Basically she kinda learns how to live without the use of her voice, which has been such an imprtant part of her before and she also has a nice moment with Five where she calms him down after a nightmare. It’s also an interesting look at what Five’s trauma might look like from an outside perspective.

Derivation by obvious_apostate (General Audiences, 3199 words)

Grace wants to give the children something special for their birthday. She succeeds for six of them.

Your typical fic of the siblings recieving their names, expect in a slightly different direction. Grace sends out letters to the sibling’s mothers to ask what their names should have been and Five’s the one that never gets one. It’s sad and it hurts, but it’s so good.

[missbeautyandherbeast]

Delicate

Leo X Reader (High School AU)

Summary: Senior year and here you are, ready to just get through it with no mishaps. It was not going to be anything like last year. You swore it to yourself... But a certain blue eyed guy seems to be derailing that plan.

Summary: Who’s ready for another High school AU? Because I am!! Not quite the same universe as my other one (but let’s see what I can do and maybe that’ll happen) but this time with Leo. I was going to write something angsty, but then this happened so.... I love you all and let me know what you think!!

Tags: @brightlotusmoon​ @boatloadsofheart @legandarybeauty​​ @crazywritingbug​​ @bitch-kms @ravn-87 @just-a-casual-fangirl-011​​ @unicornjoos @stuckoutsideofthebox @ilikestuffproductions​ @whygz​ @coffee-addicti​​ @sugarspooks15@leslieebee@serperiorkb@blossom-skies @fantastical-67impala-fangirl@coresan​ @big-banging-red​ @iceprincess2019​ @raphaeladdict​ @thirstyforvenom​ @merindagriese​ @depressedemo-152​ @bengewatch @corabmarie​ @bitemebro522​ @tmnt-queen​ @muleka-loka​ @violet-sky-96​ @curadopordeus​ @artemismohr18​ @thewhisperpen​ @xjupitermoonsx​ @bisexualbumblebeesstuff​ @merindagriese @oceans-daughter-3​ @dixonreedusfangirlforever 

I saw him in the halls all the time. We were almost in the same sphere of friends. Except that I kept myself away from people like him. The partiers, the drinkers, the “popular.” Sure, if I tried, I could get into the circle, but I didn’t want to be like that. Ever. I knew who I was, and I was okay with that.

Not that I hadn’t tried. My entire junior year looked like the movie Mean Girls and I was Cady. It was exhausting trying to keep up with who hated who and who was friends with who. I had better use of my time, and emotional quota.

Still, some part of me wanted to think that he was different. Now that it had been a few years since the Mutant Act was introduced, Leo and his brothers had no problem finding their place in our school clicks.

He was a football player, the quarterback. He had every cheerleader talking about him and every college looking at him.

Not that I was looking or talking about him. No. Of course not.

We had Chemistry together. The class not... We were lab partners, that was it. Got it? 

Good. Because my heart didn’t.

First hour chem, bright and early at seven thirty in the morning. What a joy. I took my seat at about seven ten and scrolled through my Tumblr notifications, answering what I could. He sat down next to me at about seven fifteen.

Taking out a binder that wasn’t for this class—not that I was nosey, but I knew what Shakespeare looked like okay?—He skimmed through a few pages and tried to underline, hesitating to write.

“Engle?” I asked softly, looking up from my phone. “I think I have him an hour before you,” I offered a small smile.

“Yeah,” He nodded and sighed. “Why of all things would he choose Macbeth?” Leo muttered.

“He’s a Harry Potter fan. It’s in there. So, he probably likes the familiarity.” I shrugged. “And there’s a lot of good symbolism and stuff in it to write about.”

“You actually understand this?” He looked at me shocked.

I let out a small laugh and looked down quickly, trying not to blush. 

“Most of the time,” I admitted.

Bri perched at the edge of our table and quickly captured his attention, talking about the game Friday. I sighed internally and took out my stuff for class. Class droned on, covalent bonding... real riveting stuff.

All the while I watched as Leo tried to do both, chemistry and English work as he tried to decipher both codes. Deciding that I had no control over my heart anymore, I took out my other binder—my English binder—and slipped out my “No Fear Shakespeare” Macbeth book from the pocket and slid it over to him with a soft smile before giving my attention back to the teacher.

“Thanks,” He offered it back to me at the end of class.

“Keep it, I’ve read it enough times.” I hugged my binder to my chest. “And I think you need it more than I do,”

He let out a little sheepish laugh and looked down. “Yeah, probably. Thanks Y/n,”

“Anytime,”

I watched him walk away and sighed.

“You like him,” Megan nudged my shoulder, grinning—she was a sorta friend of mine. We had done a few projects together—I gave her a shrug.

Maybe I did. But maybe I didn’t want to admit it. 

“I can set you two up,” She smirked.

“No, God no, I’m not like that anymore Megs, you know that. That... that part of me is gone.” I shook my head as we walked to second hour together—Engle.

___________________________

Leo stared at the book in his hands. Your notes were all over it and there were so many little tabs and dog eared pages. He couldn’t quite figure out your system, but there had to be some importance for what you highlighted or marked.

And then there was the matter of why you had given it to him in the first place. You were smart, he knew that. You blew past him in every class and he had no idea how. Your homework was always done, and your essays were always exemplified. And you had given him this book. Your holy grail of Shakespeare notes. And you told him to keep it.

He knew who you were, last year you hung out with him and his—your—friends, but this year, something changed. It was like you removed yourself all together form his group. He hadn’t heard any drama that went down, or fights... you just sort of fell out.

“Who’d you pay for that?” Raph joked, nodding to the book. “Or did you steal it form some nerd?”

“It’s Y/n’s.” Leo narrowed his eyes at his brother, “She gave it to me.”

“You still like her then?” Raph raised an eyebrow.

“No,” He shot down quickly, then sighed, “It’s complicated... over the summer. I don’t know what happened. We just don’t talk anymore.”

“Well, have you made an effort to talk to her?” Raph mused. “I know you act like some bigshot athlete, but you are still my brother, fearless. You’re not fooling anyone, and I don’t think you’re fooling her either.”

“How could she possibly know anything?” Leo muttered.

“She’s a smart kid. Weird at time sure, but she did something I have to give her credit for.”

“What?”

“She stopped pretending.”

____________________________

My phone buzzed as I was combing through my math homework—curse you, derivatives. I picked it up and saw that it was a snap message from Leo.

Cursing Megan internally, I opened it. 

—Leo: thanks for the book :)

I stared at the message, trying to figure out if Megan had talked to him or not. But if Megan knew, so did the whole cheer squad probably. I didn’t think that Leo did though.

—Y/n: sure

There, totally casual.

—Leo: I think engle thinks I’m cheating because I suddenly got good at understanding macbeth

I chuckled at that and shook my head. Yeah, that would be Engle. Maybe I would talk to him about it.

—Y/n: He would

See? Still casual. No reason for alarm. It was almost easier talking to him like this. There were no expectations, no one was watching. It just...was.

—Leo: you going to the game Friday?

 Okay, so maybe not.

—Y/n: I dunno, not really my scene. 

—Leo: You used to go all the time last year

—Y/n: Things change...

—Leo: It wasn’t something that I did was it?

I stared at the letters, trying to make sense of what they meant. Well I knew what they meant; I just didn’t know where they came from. Why would he think that he was the problem? We barely talked at all least year. Maybe a streak here and there on snapchat... but nothing...

—Y/n: Why would you have done something?

—Y/n: It’s fine, I just stopped trying to impress people whose opinions didn’t matter

—Y/n: Not that your opinion doesn’t matter to me

I quickly added that.

—Leo: oh

—Leo: okay

What was I supposed to make of that? I groaned and rubbed my face.

—Y/n: I promise that it wasn’t anything that you did

—Y/n: I was just tired of living up to other people’s expectations

—Y/n: So, I stopped

He didn’t respond for a few minutes, so I put down my phone and started to read the next equation, when my phone buzzed again. It was him.

—Leo: It’s not the same without you around

Okay, what the hell was that supposed to mean? How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? My heart was elated that he had said something like that, but I didn’t want to hope that he had missed me. There had to be something that I was missing. Maybe this was a set up...

—Y/n: I’m still here

There. Nonchalant. I set down my phone and ignored it when it buzzed again, determined to finish my homework before midnight.

The notification wasn’t him. It was just an email.

 ________________________

Leo walked into class the next morning and found you sitting there. Not like you hadn’t been there before him every morning of class. But it seemed different, though you remained the same.

He sat down next to you, almost nervous, and not knowing why. 

“Morning,” He offered.

“Hi,” You looked up and smiled.

He could see that something hid behind your smile, but he didn’t know what. He wanted to know. It dawned on him that maybe he never really knew you at all last year. Just a persona, like you knew his mask.

_______________________

“Do you like Harry Potter then?” He asked, almost hesitant.

Confusion flitted across my face as I looked up at him, turning off my phone. He continued.

“You mentioned it yesterday. You knew that Macbeth was used in Harry Potter...”

I smiled as he connected the dots for me.

“Uh, don’t tell anyone, because someone will be out for blood. But no, not really. I haven’t read them... and I’ve barely seen the movies,” I admitted, embarrassed.

“Really?” Genuine surprise lit up his face. “God, Donnie would have a heart attack. He and Mikey are so into it. It’s hard to go without one of them mentioning or referencing something,” He sounded annoyed, but with endearment.

I laughed, knowing what that was like.

“Yeah, I’m... I know a lot of fandoms... but never go into Harry Potter. I’ve tried, believe me, but,” I shrugged. “I think I missed the right time in my life to read them ya know?” My eyes met smiling blue ones as he nodded.

“So what fandoms are you into?”

“Oh, we don’t have enough time for that,” I laughed as the bell rang.

“Who knew miss popular over here was such a nerd,” He teased as the teacher started the class.

.

.

Like my stuff? Here’s my masterlist!

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 241

MUSLIM CONTRIBUTIONS TO MATHEMATICS: Part 1

When we talk about Muslim contributions to mathematics we are usually referring to the years between 622 and 1600 ce. This was the golden era of Islam when it was influential both as a culture and religion, and was widespread from Anatolia to North Africa, from Spain to India.

Mathematics, or "the queen of the sciences" as Carl Friedrich Gauss called it, plays an important role in our lives. A world without mathematics is unimaginable. Throughout history, many scholars have made important contributions to this science, among them a great number of Muslims. It is beyond the scope of a short article like this one to mention all the contributions of Muslim scholars to mathematics; therefore, I will concentrate on only four aspects: translations of earlier works, and contributions to algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. In order to understand fully how great were the works of scholars in the past, one needs to look at them with the eye of a person of the same era, since things that are well-known facts today might not have been known at all in the past.

There has never been a conflict between science and Islam. Muslims understand everything in the universe as a letter from God Almighty inviting us to study it to have knowledge of Him. In fact, the first verse of the Qur'an to be revealed was:

Read! In the Name of your Lord, Who created… (Alaq 96:1).

Besides commanding us to read the Qur'an, by mentioning the creation the verse also draws our attention to the universe. There are many verses which ask Muslims to think, to know, to learn and so on. Moreover, there are various sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, encouraging Muslims to seek knowledge. One hadith says, "A believer never stops seeking knowledge until they enter Paradise" (al-Tirmidhi).

In another hadith, the Prophet said, "Seeking knowledge is a duty on every Muslim" (Bukhari). Hence it is no surprise to see early Muslim scholars who were dealing with different sciences.

TRANSLATIONS

Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) said, “Knowledge is the lost property of a Muslim; whoever finds it must take it” ; hence Muslims started seeking knowledge. One way they did this was to start translating all kinds of knowledge that they thought to be useful. There were two main sources from which Muslim scholars made translations in order to develop the field of science, the Hindus and the Greeks. The Abbasid caliph al-Mamun (804–832) had a university built and ordered its scholars to translate into Arabic many works of Greek scholarship. Between 771 and 773 CE the Hindu numerals were introduced into the Muslim world as a result of the translation of Sithanta from Sanskrit into Arabic by Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibrahim al-Fazari. Another great mathematician, Thabit ibn Qurra, not only translated works written by Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Ptolemy and Eutocius, but he also founded a school of translation and supervised many other translations of books from Greek into Arabic. While Hajjaj bin Yusuf translated Euclid’s Elements into Arabic, al-Jayyani wrote an important commentary on it which appears in the Fihrist (Index), a work compiled by the bookseller Ibn an-Nadim in 988. A simplified version of Ptolemy’s Almagest appears in Abul-Wafa’s book of Tahir al-Majisty and Kitab al-Kamil. Abu’l Wafa Al-Buzjani commented on and simplified the works of Euclid, Ptolemy and Diophantus. The sons of Musa bin Shakir also organized translations of Greek works.

These translations played an important role in the development of mathematics in the Muslim world. Moreover, the ancient Greek texts have survived thanks to these translations.

ALGEBRA AND GEOMETRY

The word "algebra" comes from "Al-Jabr", which is taken from the title of the book Hisab Al-Jabr wal Muqabala by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (780–850). Al-Khwarizmi, after whom the "algorithm" is named, was one of the great mathematicians of all times. Europe was first introduced to algebra as a result of the translation of Khwarizmi's book into Latin by Robert Chester in 1143. The book has three parts. The first part deals with six different types of equations:

(ax2 = bx) ; (ax2 = b) ; (ax = b) ; (ax2 + bx = c) ; (ax2 + c = bx) ; (bx + c = ax2)

Khwarizmi gives both arithmetic and geometric methods to solve these six types of problems. He also introduces algebraic multiplication and division. The second part of Hisab Al-Jabr deals with mensuration. Here he describes the rules of computing areas and volumes. Since Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, “Learn the laws of inheritance and teach them to people, for that is half of knowledge," the last and the largest part of this section concerns legacies, which requires a good understanding of the Islamic laws of inheritance. Khwarizmi develops Hindu numerals and introduces the concept of zero, or “sifr” in Arabic, to Europe. The word “zero” actually comes from Latin “zephirum,” which is derived from the Arabic word “sifr.”

The three sons of Musa bin Shakir (about 800–860) were perhaps the first Muslim mathematicians to study Greek works. They wrote a great book on geometry, Kitab Marifat Masakhat Al-Ashkal (The Book of the Measurement of Plane and Spherical Figures), which was later translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona. In the book, although they used similar methods to those of Archimedes, they move a step further than the Greeks to consider volumes and areas as numbers, and hence they developed a new approach to mathematics. For example, they described the constant number pi as “the magnitude which, when multiplied by the diameter of a circle, yields the circumference.”

A well-known poet, philosopher and astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048–1122) was at the same time a great mathematician. His most famous book on algebra is Treatise on the Demonstration of Problems of Algebra. In his book besides giving both arithmetic and geometric solutions to second degree equations he also describes geometric solutions to third degree equations by the method of intersecting conic sections. He also discovered binomial expansion [26]. His work later helped develop both algebra and geometry.

Thabit bin Qurra (836–901) was an important mathematician who made many discoveries in his time. As mentioned in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography he “played an important role in preparing the way for such important mathematical discoveries as the extension of the concept of number to (positive) real numbers, integral calculus, theorems in spherical trigonometry, analytic geometry, and non-Euclidean geometry. In astronomy Thabit was one of the first reformers of the Ptolemaic system, and in mechanics he was a founder of statics.”

To give an idea of his importance, we will just give here, without details, one of his theorems on amicable numbers. Two natural numbers m and n are called “amicable” if each is equal to the sum of the proper divisors of the other:

for n > 1, let pn=3.22n–1 and qn=9.22n–1–1. If pn–1 , pn and qn are prime numbers, then a=2n pn–1 pn and b=2nqn are amicable.

[internetbynight]

𝙊𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙇𝙞𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙣 𝙀𝙭𝙩𝙧𝙖-𝙈𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙚

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. [In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who "understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity."] That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.

What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?

Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himself against other individuals, in a natural state of affairs he employs the intellect mostly for simulation alone. But because man, out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest bellum omni contra omnes [war of all against all] from his world. This peace pact brings with it something that looks like the first step toward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth. For now that is fixed which henceforth shall be "truth"; that is, a regularly valid and obligatory designation of things is invented, and this linguistic legislation also furnishes the first laws of truth: for it is here that the contrast between truth and lie first originates. The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a "truth" in the sense just designated. If he does not wish to be satisfied with truth in the form of a tautology—that is, with empty shells—then he will forever buy illusions for truths. What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. But to infer from the nerve stimulus, a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (for that is what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming for. One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.

Let us still give special consideration to the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person "honest." Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: the leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named "honesty"; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions. In the end, we distill from them a qualitas occulta [hidden quality] with the name of "honesty." We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as mute, there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a rational being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. But in any case it seems to me that the correct perception—which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject—is a contradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.

Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate here—from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths—everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense perception—if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound—then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature—which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal, "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman." In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people—the ancient Greeks, for instance—more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses—and this is what the honest Athenian believed—then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries man where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption—in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.

Frederich Nietzsche

[antoine-roquentin]

The squatter camp outside Lawley township, in the southwest of Johannesburg, stretches for miles against a bare hillside, without electricity, water, or toilets. I visited on a blustery morning in October with a local journalist named Mophethe Thebe, who spent much of his childhood in the area. As we drove toward the settlement he pointed out land that had been abandoned by white Afrikaner farmers after the end of apartheid in 1994, and had since been taken over by impoverished black settlers who built over the former farms with half-paved roadways and tiny brick houses. You could still see stands of headstones inscribed in Afrikaans, all that remained visible of the former inhabitants.

Thebe warned me that his family had participated in a gang conflict here, part of the endless “taxi wars,” which have made killings of drivers a common occurrence. “It’s no problem,” he said. “I’m very popular. But I like to come in a different car every time for safety.” Later, he would point casually at a lot and say it was the place where his father-in-law had been murdered in a shoot-out.

We were looking for a boyhood friend of Thebe’s, the local head of the Economic Freedom Fighters. In recent months, both the EFF and left-wing members of the ruling African National Congress, which has governed South Africa since 1994, have led occupations of vacant land mostly owned either by the government or members of the white Afrikaans-­speaking population, who would once have been termed Boers. Boer means “farmer” in Afrikaans, and their descendants see agriculture as their history and identity, as well as their rightful inheritance. Even a quarter century after the end of apartheid, 72 percent of privately held farmland in South Africa is owned by whites, who now make up just 8 percent of the country’s population of over fifty-six million. Blacks, 81 percent of South Africa’s population, own only 4 percent of the country’s rural land. It’s this imbalance that has led as many as five million squatters to occupy land like that in Lawley over the last two decades.

A windstorm was blowing in as we came into the settlement. The pavement ended. We got out of the car and walked up a dirt track. A man with a gray beard and a tattered military jacket appeared. “Welcome to our squatter camp!” he said with a broad smile. He was fifty-five, and had participated in the land grab because he hadn’t had work in years and couldn’t pay the rent in the brick house he’d been sharing. I gave him a cigarette and asked how the land had been settled. “I don’t know who owns it,” he said. “We just came. They say the white man is in America now.”

To the extent that news about land reform in South Africa has reached international audiences at all, it’s been refracted through the lens of a narrative promoted by white conservatives about a supposed “white genocide”—killings of mostly Afrikaner farmers—equating land redistribution with race war. Even though there’s no direct connection between murders of white farmers and land reform, an idea has nonetheless taken hold in the international media of landowners under murderous assault by the black masses, the clearest symbol that in twenty-five years of post-apartheid majority rule whites have become a persecuted minority.

It’s easy to forget today, in the years since Nelson Mandela has become a secular liberal saint, that the victory over apartheid was not a product of tidy pacifist resistance to political injustice. The ANC’s guiding Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955, declared the need for land redistribution—“The Land Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It!”—and the document is a revolutionary manifesto, calling not just for democracy and political equality but for the redistribution of land and the nationalization of mines and industry. The charter recognized that political equality would be meaningless without wealth redistribution, since whites had long ago handed themselves control of the country’s natural resources: one of the first pieces of segregationist legislation passed by the newly independent Union of South Africa was the 1913 Natives Land Act, which barred whites from buying property from blacks, and vice versa, at a time when about 90 percent of the country’s land was already in white hands. This law codified white territorial control, and it presaged the apartheid government’s creation of jerry-rigged “homelands” for the black population, with the aim of relegating the entire black population to 13 percent of the country’s landmass.

In the ensuing decades of the twentieth century, the majority of whites lived in fantastic comfort, at the pinnacle of a virtual slave state with protected industries, enjoying a legacy of infrastructure paid for by hard currency that was always in ready supply from the country’s mines. In the case of South Africa’s rich agriculturalists, a tiny minority lorded over huge farms maintained on a plantationlike system with cheap, disposable labor always at hand. The EFF and others currently calling for redistribution learned a lesson from this: it is hard to control the flow of transnational capital, but it’s not so hard to control wealth derived from the ground. “Without the land,” the EFF’s deputy head, Floyd Shivambu, said recently, “you won’t be able to economically empower the black majority.”

In 1994, after years of guerrilla conflict and agitation, white supremacy didn’t fall through peaceful protest—it was a surrender, an acknowledgment that the Afrikaners had lost a multifront war for power. But this surrender came with a wary eye to the future. It was a calculated and successful maneuver to avoid the sort of reckoning that would have accompanied a full-scale revolution, a sudden collapse of the apartheid government, and a chance for the ANC’s leftists and their allies to implement the more radical portions of the Freedom Charter. These goals were mostly set aside in the happy early days of democracy when the ANC won the country’s first free elections and was in no mood to inflame the hundreds of thousands of well-armed and highly trained Afrikaners who had fought in the bush wars and might be inclined to fight for the creation of a separate white state. The new South Africa needed international investment and acceptance, and the World Bank was hardly going to approve of plans to nationalize the country’s farmland and mines. Instead, ANC leaders chose a path of reconciliation and adopted a policy of “willing buyer, willing seller,” by which they hoped to coax white farmers into selling land at market prices to be redistributed. But very few farmers sold out, and most land remained in white hands.

Meanwhile, post-apartheid, blacks were suddenly free to move to cities, and millions began a massive rural-to-urban migration that continues to this day, augmented by millions more desperately poor immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Newly arrived migrants congregated wherever they could hope to find work, building informal settlements of shacks, often on parcels they seized from farmers or the government, and waited, hoping the authorities might move in and offer services or build permanent housing, even as the squatter camps continued to grow with new arrivals.

Today, fourteen million South Africans live in extreme poverty, often in informal settlements or conditions that are no better. There are a tiny number of whites who live in squatter camps—13,310 of them, according to a 2016 government estimate—and the plight of this minute slice of the South African poor has been very heavily reported on. In 2013, the BBC repeated a wildly inflated estimate by “Afrikaner-rights” activists that up to four hundred thousand whites were living in camps, which is a number that it later became clear the activists had made up more or less on the spot. It has now been repeated countless times, but it’s hard to find much reporting at all about the conditions of the millions of blacks living in camps.

With the population growing rapidly and migration still ongoing, the land issue has exploded. One notorious settlement I saw in Johannesburg, called Diepsloot, is home to over one hundred fifty thousand people. There are millions upon millions of people with nowhere to go in a country where everywhere you look there are vast tracts of wide-open, white-owned land, occupied by nothing but sheep and wandering guinea fowl.

The EFF was born out of rage at this situation. The group advocates wholesale nationalization of the country’s land—an idea that has actually been tried with some success in neighboring Mozambique, where all land is owned by the government, and given out to farmers and builders via long-term leases—though the ANC leadership, wary of international condemnation, and of the economic collapse that followed Zimbabwe’s chaotic and violent takeover of white-owned land in the early 2000s, has adopted a more moderate tone. EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, once a chubby firebrand with a taste for flashy cars and watches, founded the organization after being expelled from the ANC in 2012, and he quickly grew it into the third-­largest political party in the country and an unpredictable threat on the ANC’s left flank. “The land issue has been with us too long,” he said in 2014. “I can’t be everywhere. I am not the Holy Spirit. So you must be part of the occupation of land everywhere else in South Africa.” As head of the EFF, he took the title of “commander in chief,” and adopted the party’s now-ubiquitous uniform of a red shirt and red beret. The fervor of his followers, coupled with the radicalism of the EFF’s politics, terrify some whites—a reaction he seems to enjoy provoking. When an interviewer recently confronted Malema for allegedly advocating the murder of white landowners, he denied the charge, saying he hadn’t called for whites’ “slaughter . . . at least for now.

I wasn’t in South Africa long before I got used to being handed a phone with an image called up of, say, a best friend shot point-blank in the back of the head, or a seventy-three-year-old father beaten to the point that his skull was pulled off his brain like tortilla chips. There are massive WhatsApp chains and Facebook groups that share these kinds of photos, and to scroll through them is enough to turn you paranoid and almost frantic. You get accustomed to the bloody photos, but the dark part is how hard it is to understand the attacks: Why would people force children to watch their mother’s gang-rape, creep up to shoot an old couple as they sleep in bed, force a twelve-­year-­old into a bathtub and drown him in boiling water?

It’s a simple fact that there is an element of racial vitriol to some murders of white farmers. One recent attack came two months after vandals painted the words “Kill the Boer,” which is the title of a favorite song of Malema’s, on the door of the victims’ farmhouse. The attacks are often elaborately and senselessly violent. But farmers are only one of a broad host of people in South Africa who are at a high risk of being murdered—night-shift workers and Uber drivers, for example, are in greater statistical danger. And international media, which have amplified the idea that so-called farm murders are a major concern, has been oblivious to a key fact: last year, in a country where almost twenty thousand people were slain, most of them black, there were only sixty-two farm murders, according to government statistics. Sixty-two. According to one of the country’s largest agricultural associations, murders of farmers are at a twenty-year low. And not all of the victims are even white. In a town called Krugersdorp I investigated the recent killing of a man named Aron Mutavhatsindi. His alleged murder took place on a farm, but he was black—shot at range by a white security guard who saw him driving a tractor and decided that he was stealing it.

So how is it that the land question and “farm murder” narrative became intertwined? The answer, to a large extent, is a man named Simon Roche, a leader of a Christian survivalist group, the Suidlanders (pronounced Seit-landers, and meaning southlanders in Afrikaans), who claim over one hundred thousand members or supporters, all white, and who have forged deep ties to American white supremacists and far-right figures such as Alex Jones. Roche has worked to link—especially to credulous international audiences—the issue of farm attacks with the threat of land expropriation. Malema has played on this theme, too—once tweeting “maybe, maybe not” when he was accused of encouraging farm attacks—but the truth is that most land occupations happen peacefully, and there appears to be no record of an EFF-led occupation resulting in murder. Farm murders happen, but they have little to do directly with land occupations.

I met Roche one day in Bloemfontein, and he drove me into the scrub desert of the Northern Cape, where he is preparing for civil war. He is a burly, earnest, and slightly disheveled forty-eight-year-old, who, like all of his fellow Suidlanders, follows the teachings of an Afrikaner prophet named Siener van Rensburg, who served as a spiritual guide and military adviser during the second Boer War against the British. The Suidlanders believe van Rensburg prophesied a war that would be both the beginning of a marauding massacre of whites in South Africa and the clarion signal of a World War III.

Today, the most extreme of van Rensburg’s disciples have a plan to retreat to an all-white redoubt in the desert, where they’ll preserve the core of their nation and live as a tribe of the pure. They imagine that they are a part of an international front fighting against the ever-busy “globalists,” who are facilitating the destruction of Christian civilization and white people everywhere by means of open borders and capital-driven globalization. And they have quietly built a worldwide following, finding that, at least on this last point, many Europeans and Americans agree with them.

Roche and I drove past vast tracts of white-owned farmland where neat and isolated houses sat in stark juxtaposition to squalid little settlements where the area’s black population was packed in. He pointed out a trio of silos to our right. “I can’t say if those have any part in” the Suidlanders’ plan for civil war, Roche said, “but it might be interesting to you that silos figure heavily in our national emergency plan. We keep track of the location and use of them.” He claimed that he had well-placed contacts in governments around the world, though he didn’t mention, and seemed to want to conceal, that he’d just received an official delegation from the German Bundestag, organized by a parliamentarian from the right-wing AfD party. A small ridge rose behind the farm with the silos. “And beyond there is a military installation. Which obviously we keep track of as well.” Secreted in the country around us, in caches disguised as graves, he had laid out his own personal matériel for the coming war. He thought it a bad look for someone as public as him to talk about weapons he might own, but the first place we stopped was a gun shop, where he was having a hunting rifle fitted with a scope.

Roche was twenty-three in 1994, when democracy finally came, and full of enthusiasm for the project of a new South Africa. In his thirties, he got into event planning, working closely with the ANC. He claims he was asked in 2008 to oversee planning for Nelson Mandela’s funeral. But in response to developments such as Black Economic Empowerment policies, which he saw as cutting qualified whites out of jobs, he began to see himself as less of a South African, and more of a white South African, and now he saw farm murders as part of a secret plot to fulfill the unachieved aims of a socialist revolution. He joined the Suidlanders in 2015, and soon left his event work in Johannesburg and moved to a Suidlanders’ enclave called Vanderkloof, to prepare for the moment when the civil war would erupt. “I know we had to give something as white people,” he told me. “But they take and take and take, and now we’ve given enough.” It’s this resentment that connects him to other aggrieved whites across the world, and it was striking to hear his words and think how comfortably they’d fit in the mouths of conservative friends of mine in the United States, talking about immigrants or Black Lives Matter.

Personally, I had come to South Africa with a sense of despair, bringing with me a question about whether it was possible that the only real answers left to the issue of whiteness were exactly the options presented by Roche and his racist allies: a choice between a power-obsessed vision of innate white superiority, which I would never share, or a kind of permanent self-loathing and apology for sins of the past, which I did not think was very workable as a politics. I’d wanted to come meet Roche to see where he—like so many other whites around the world recently—had gone wrong.

We arrived at Roche’s spare little home in Vanderkloof, a prosperous Afrikaner town with one small grocery store, two bars, and the feel of a cross between a merry Swiss village and a dystopian garrison city, which in some sense it is. It sits high in the steep red-rock hills above the reservoir formed by the massive Vander­kloof Dam, on the Orange River. It is in an area that’s a traditional stronghold of the Boers, only a short drive away from the whites-only town of Orania, which since the 1990s has served as a refuge from integration and a first step toward Afrikaner self-rule. Vanderkloof itself has one non-white resident, a self-mockingly funny and slightly pained-seeming man who serves as a senior official in the local ANC, while the rest of the nearby non-white population lives down a road past the local dump in a squalid assemblage of mud-brick houses separated by rutted dirt streets.

Roche and I went for a beer at an open-air bar overlooking the reservoir. André Coetzee, a balding, tan, and dapper Afrikaner who gave off an air of knowing much more than he wanted to say, came and joined us. In March 2017, Roche and Coetzee took the money from the sale of a hundred prize Angora goats and used it to finance a trip to America, where they’d hoped to raise money but ended up seeding the farm-murder narrative into the American far-right’s collective consciousness. In Newport Beach, California, a notoriously anti-­Semitic “think tank” called the Institute for Historical Review invited Roche to give a speech. He spoke to a slightly befuddled audience of old, sweater-wearing southern Californians, telling them about van Rensburg’s prophecies and how the Suidlanders were in their estimation the “world’s largest civil defense organization.” They had been constituted, he said, by a mysterious former ­South African Defence Force intelligence officer named Gustav Müller—­an imposing ex-farmer reportedly with several bankruptcies to his name, who has long been a target of South Africa’s intelligence services but has avoided successful prosecution and has taken it upon himself to interpret van Rensburg’s prophecies and lead his people in the coming civil war.

This speech, warning that events in South Africa were only a hint of what would soon come to the West, went over relatively well, and Roche began cold-calling white supremacists around the country. There is a recording of at least one of these calls, and it is slightly funny to listen to: in it, an aggressively modest and bumbling Roche calls a prominent white-supremacist blogger named Brad Griffin, thinking that Griffin has a radio show. “We are interested in getting as much coverage as possible,” he said, “for the simple reason that our president is now talking about taking back all of the land.” Griffin agreed to write about the Suidlanders, and very quickly Roche began to find other takers. By March 26, 2017, he was appearing on a livestream with Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist who is a favorite of Donald Trump Jr., who once said that Cernovich deserves to win a Pulitzer. Roche then showed up unannounced at the Infowars headquarters in Austin, Texas. He has now appeared on Alex Jones’s show three times.

After Coetzee returned to South Africa, Roche kept up a madcap Kerouac-­meets-the-Klan sort of tour, reveling in the moment, riding Greyhound buses and hitching rides across the United States. He met Nathan Damigo, of the prominent “alt-right” group Identity Evropa, who gave him $341 for bus fare and food. He was asked to be a speaker at the 2017 American Renaissance conference, a major gathering for white supremacists. He went to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally along with white supremacists like Christopher Cantwell, the so-called “crying Nazi” made famous by a Vice documentary on the protests. Matthew Heimbach, a key organizer of the event, gave money to the Suidlanders, according to the investigative website Right Wing Watch, and in November 2018 would travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, helping to lead a protest over white genocide in South Africa. “We were [in Charlottesville] as observers, of course,” Roche told me. “But it was obvious what side we were on. And none of the violence came from our side.” Cantwell was later arrested for his part in violence that day.

The trip built Roche a platform among whites all over the world who thought that their societies were besieged by tides of immigration and by minorities demanding redress for centuries of slavery, racism, and colonization. Roche assured them they had apologized enough. This was a message that, as it turned out, fit neatly with the worldview of the president of the United States. It’s impossible to say whether Roche’s appeals to white nationalists filtered up to Donald Trump, but by managing to be interviewed by Cernovich and on ­Infowars—a show Trump himself has appeared on and claims to admire—he brought his message to Trump’s core followers.

In April 2018, an Identity Evropa member went to a Breitbart town hall event and stood up to ask Ann Coulter a question: “Why do you think the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of white farmers in South Africa?” The crowd erupted in applause. “I am so glad you asked that question,” she said. “No one under fifty is getting his news from the mainstream media anymore.” She said she had just done an event in Boulder, Colorado, with college students. “Every conservative question,” she said, “was about South Africa.”

As is often the case with the right in the United States, the extreme version of a narrative is aided by more mainstream figures who give fringe politics a sheen of respectability and bring them to an even wider audience. In a similar way, Roche has been aided by the efforts of Ernst Roets, the deputy head of ­AfriForum, a largely white and Afrikaans organization that claims to be the continent’s largest civil-rights group, with a total membership they estimate at around 215,000, which if true is a huge portion of the country’s 2.7 million Afrikaners. In May 2018, Roets took his own trip to America where, in Washington, D.C., he bumped into the US national security adviser, John Bolton, at an event and gave him a book he’d authored on farm murders, titled Kill the Boer, accusing the government of being “complicit” in the attacks. “We don’t expect that Donald Trump would make it his priority to fix the crisis in South Africa,” Roets told me. “That’s not going to happen. But what we do know is that the ANC has had this wind of international approvals, given that it’s seen as the party of Nelson Mandela and the party of liberation and so forth. So they’ve sort of been given a free pass, and I know it’s starting to crumble that perception of them.”

During his trip in May, Roets appeared on television as a guest of Tucker Carlson on Fox News, who led off the segment by saying outright that whites in South Africa were the victims of a genocidal plot. “South Africa is a diverse country,” Carlson said, “but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.” He said that white farmers were being “targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” and darkly and falsely claimed that the government’s response to the issue had been to initiate the land expropriation process.

On August 22, Carlson ran another segment about what he’d called “a racist land grab” in South Africa, and Donald Trump responded the next morning with an alarmed tweet that described “farm seizures . . . and large scale killing of farmers,” which was curious, because the segment he tweeted in response to hadn’t actually focused on farm murders. He had already imbibed, from one source or another, the “white genocide” narrative. He ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study the issue, and suddenly the item was leading off newscasts and newspaper homepages around the world. a white farmer is killed every five days in south africa . . . ran a lurid and false Newsweek headline, lazily and irresponsibly attributing their claim to “activists” from South Africa, and authorities do nothing about it.

“Something like four hundred white farmers have been murdered—brutally murdered, over the last twelve months,” Australia’s former prime minister, Tony Abbott, said at the time, directly linking farm murders with land expropriation, and using a figure that was so wildly inflated that it could only have been invented wholesale or taken from extreme-­right propaganda. “Just imagine the reaction here in Australia if a comparable number of farmers had been brutally murdered by squatters intent on driving them off their land.”

There was no doubt in Roche’s mind that he was part of a swelling global movement. “Donald Trump gave conservatives—the people who care about their culture and their people—the freedom to stick their head above the parapet,” he told me back at the bar in Vanderkloof. “It was almost divine. If you’re a religious person, it’s hard to think it was a coincidence that I was in America with this cause at that time.”

Coetzee, who had been ordering drinks, came back to our table with more beers. He and Roche spoke for a moment about a supposed intelligence assessment that they claimed had just been leaked to them from inside South Africa’s State Security Agency, estimating the Suidlanders’ numbers at over one hundred thousand, including many former high-level military officers. It was like an American right-wing fever dream: an all-white town where everyone was armed, devout, and ready to defend themselves against any incursion from the surrounding black settlements. “Welcome to the safest place in South Africa,” Roche said as we drank.

“No one will come to rape our women four at a time here,” Coetzee said. I asked why they wouldn’t. “They know we’d fuck them up,” he said.

“I was born and raised on a white farm,” a burly and vivacious radical named Andile Mngxitama told me, as we sat in a blond-wood-and-cortados sort of coffee shop in a swank mall in Johannesburg. “I was raised there and went to farm school.” This is what shaped his political consciousness, he said, as he rose to become one of the intellectual architects of the EFF, an ally of Malema, and a parliamentarian, growing into exactly the sort of figure Roche fears is taking over the country. “An acute expression of the situation in South Africa between black and white is found on the farm,” he said, “because there you have a clear situation of masters and slaves.”

In South Africa, it was whites who had access to capital, he believed, and the clearest and most tangible expression of the capital they held was land, capital a black farmworker or a homeless migrant could understand, touch, walk on, and—given the right circumstances—seize. Redistributing land, which was by statistical definition a white–black issue, was the first step in a much bigger fight for black economic equality. In 2015, Mngxitama split from the EFF, which was growing as he saw it into a corrupt vehicle for the messianic tendencies of Malema, who has been convicted by the government of “inciting racial hatred” and trailed by accusations of embezzlement. Mngxitama founded a party called Black First Land First, which today has thousands of members and has made Mngxitama one of the most visible figures in South African politics, and which he expects to lead into parliament in the next elections, scheduled for May 2019. “The project here is essentially a race problem,” he told me. “The confrontation is going to be racialized.”

I asked whether he was worried that land expropriation would collapse the economy, the way it had in Zimbabwe, where production of key crops such as tobacco fell by as much as 80 percent after the country’s thousands of white-owned farms were forcibly seized. The United States and other Western powers imposed punitive sanctions, and the already indebted country remained cut off from World Bank and IMF loans. The country’s GDP contracted by 45 percent, and an inflation spiral made the currency basically worthless. The ANC has said they don’t intend to replicate Zimbabwe’s mistakes, and instead hope to implement a plan that “includes individual ownership . . .  direct State ownership, trusts and communal land custodianship.” But Mngxitama wants nothing less than full redistribution. “I don’t care,” he said, pointing to the fact that millions of blacks in South Africa already lived hand-to-mouth. “We live in a permanent recession. So don’t tell me about economic collapse, man.” He grew slightly heated. “The idea that there’s an economic collapse, it’s a white thinking and it serves the interest of people who have land in this country. We move from a premise that we are excluded anyway,” he said. “You’re talking about your economy, because you’re the beneficiaries of that economy. We are not.”

He said he didn’t want all whites to leave, only to learn, for the first time, to play by a set of rules that they themselves hadn’t written. “White people have to be subdued by the fact that we are a black majority, and they will have to live under conditions set by us,” he said. “Here—I’m forced to speak to you in En­glish. Because of the power of whiteness. So in the long run we want to Africanize the whole polity.”

I asked him at last about farm murders, and put it to him that many people thought he and Malema were encouraging them. He turned serious. “South Africa is a war zone,” he said. I suggested that he sounded just like the whites preparing for civil war.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “We murder twenty thousand people a year. Only sixty-two farmers.” He cocked his head. He mentioned the millions who had been displaced by the apartheid government and the shantytowns that the poor live in when they come to work in major cities. “You create a subhuman existence to get white privilege and security,” he said. “If you think about it, it’s a war zone created to secure white people. The few white people who get killed are victims in a war that kills black people.”

He said that he thought the attacks were mostly simple robberies, but with a layer of unanswerable rage that fed them. He mentioned a friend back in his hometown, who had been forced from his house on a white-owned farm after his mother had died: “He said, ‘For the first time, I wanted to take a gun and kill these guys.’ There are a few people like that. If you grew up on a farm . . . that person, their rage, there is something over and above. But I don’t think that’s the biggest element. There’s guns and money on the farms. You go get them.

“We kill small ones,” he continued. “We kill old ones, we kill white people—of course, because we’re killing ourselves. And why do we kill ourselves? Because we’re put in subhuman conditions. Life means nothing. Why the fuck must I care for your life? Life is meaningless.”

One day, Roche and I drove to a farm in Limpopo, where there had been a rash of farm attacks and land grabs, and where a few farms had already been redistributed under the scheme of “willing buyer, willing seller” reform. These farms had subsequently fallen apart—the people who’d been given them didn’t have the money to buy expensive machinery and stock animals, and so they’d sold or eaten the giraffes and kudu, cut the trees of the bushveld, and stripped the houses of anything salable. It was the classic modern economic tragedy—good intentions and piecemeal reform can’t solve the problem of poverty in a world where access to capital is the fundamental avenue to success—and the farms now lay in ruins.

On Roche’s friend’s land, where prize game were bred for sale and hunts, I sat for some time with the farm’s owner, a tough old Anglophone named Rodney Mitchell, and his son, a lithe twenty-seven-year-old named John James. They looked at the issues very practically.

“The problem is that we’re sitting with these masses and masses of people unemployed,” Mitchell told me, “which is getting worse. And a lot of people below the bread line. And that in itself is a big problem, because once you have these big masses it’s very easy when someone like Malema says, ‘We’re going to give you a farm.’ And those guys are getting stronger.”

But while they were suspicious of the new breed of agitators, even they—white farmers—weren’t opposed to all land reform. “You can say whatever you want,” John James said, about the farms in the area that the government had already come in and redistributed. “But it was in a sense fair.”

I noticed at one point the butt of a 9mm sticking out from under John James’s khaki shirt. It turned out that he was part of a self-­defense group that the local farmers had formed, that he kept a gun and a radio on him at all times, and that calls came in at least several times a month that had him loading up the truck and going to a farm to hunt in the bush for attackers. His father had talked about how he’d fought in Angola and knew bush warfare and how to track an enemy by night, and it seemed slightly insane to Mitchell that his quiet and gentle son, who ran the family’s hunting operation but refused to shoot animals himself, was now carrying on the legacy in their own neighborhood, so long after peace was supposed to have come.

“I’m very reasonable with this type of stuff,” John James said, looking sadly away from me when I asked how many of these encounters turned violent. He wouldn’t say whether he’d ever had to shoot someone. “My assumption of a lot of these farm attacks and farm murders is that farmers are treating these guys badly.” And it’s true—many of the murders are unnecessary but not entirely surprising culminations of years of tension, such as when, in 2010, Eugène Terre’Blanche, the rabidly racist leader of the Afrikaner separatist AWB militia and one of the most famous political figures in South Africa, was hacked with a machete and beaten to death with a pipe by at least one aggrieved farmworker, who had not been paid for the month, and who allegedly later announced to the other workers, “I am your boss today.”

That night, Roche and I dined with Mitchell and ate steaks as thick as the dictionary and spun-sugar desserts, and then slept in luxury safari tents overlooking the game park. We left the next morning and went to meet a private security force in Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg, where Mutavhatsindi, the black farmhand, had been shot and killed. Roche wanted to help a friend get his hands on a Saracen armored personnel carrier that a contact in the area didn’t have any use for, and after some phone calls we went over to kick the tires. “What I want is to see this thing, you know, running over protesters with petrol bombs,” the man giving it away said, as an old Afrikaner in a sky-blue Versace shirt fiddled with the carburetor. “We should put a GoPro on it,” someone said, “so you can watch.”

Just before I left South Africa, I drove to KwaZulu-Natal, to join Roche and the Suidlanders’ leader, Gustav Müller, at a campout along the banks of a slow little river, where crocodiles and giant lizards lounged in the reeds. Thebe, my black driver and guide, understandably didn’t want to go anywhere near the gathering, and he drove on to meet some friends, leaving me outside a tightly guarded gate behind which 250 or so Suidlanders had come for a monthly gathering where they prayed, listened to speeches of dire warning and planned for the coming war.

I got there just in time to hear Roche give a speech to a rapt crowd huddled in the cold on the banks of the river. “You guys, being white,” he told them, “represent the very stupidest people in South Africa. Because you represent those who will believe anything.” He said that they’d been lied to for generations—conned into believing in the false promise that whites could find a home in the rainbow nation. He warned them about black Africans’ propensity for killing women and children, a propensity they had supposedly shown in wars that predated the white settlement of the interior and which, he claimed preposterously, went beyond anything Europeans had exhibited in all the great wars of the past few centuries. They couldn’t see the danger, because they had been told that all races, their neighbors and fellow citizens, were equal. “We are being enveloped in layer upon layer of lies.” He wanted them to know that there was a plan at work. He began to bellow and wave his arms. “It is not about the land. It has got nothing to do with the land.” It was about a plot to destroy whites, and they needed to be ready.

After the speech, Roche said he wanted to go buy cigarettes. We drove out into the countryside, past white-owned farms where warthogs and kudu ranged against the fence lines, and the only place we found open was a big old country hotel, built in a faux-Tudor style. We went in to see if they sold cigarettes at the bar. We bought some, and Roche noted wistfully that the camp was a booze-free zone. “How about a quick one now?” he said.

Roche spoke to the young black bartender in Zulu, which he had learned working alongside blacks in his twenties, back in the days when he still believed in the promise of a multicultural South Africa, and we got a couple rum and cokes and sat down. “As a matter of interest,” he said, “and you’re free not to answer. But what do you tell Mophethe”—my guide—“about me when you talk to him?”

The question didn’t surprise me. Roche had the tendency, in common with a certain kind of American, to regard black people as inferior and as his political enemies, even as he seemed to like them and care what they thought of him. Finally, I said that I told Thebe that Roche was racist, and that I thought it was unfortunate that this was how things had turned out—because I didn’t think that caring about a people, or having a sense of historical identity, or however you wanted to put it, had to be an exclusionary project. I told him that I’d met Andile Mngxitama. Roche seemed surprised and intrigued—Mngxitama was the clearest representation of the forces he had set himself against. I told him that, as I saw it, their politics weren’t really so different—that they both saw the post-apartheid South Africa as an unfinished revolutionary project, one that had brought nominal political equality but had left the basic economic reality of white supremacy intact. I said that I thought the white nationalists and the black radicals understood power as a much more concrete substance than Western liberals had been willing to see it over the past several decades. The two groups of South Africans didn’t see a world where constant growth and globalization would solve all problems by default. They saw power as a finite, divisible resource—to which the obvious corollary was that it was something that could be fought over, and won. I said that I thought this was more or less the way the world was headed, and I said that lately I found it easier to trust and talk to people who saw things in these clear terms, because I felt as though I’d grown up in a world that had been lying to itself, pretending that the realities of power and limited resources didn’t exist. And I said that, to be totally honest, there was a large part of me that wouldn’t care at all if history finally caught up to the white South Africans, the revolution finally came, and they were either forced to bend the knee or flee the country. But I knew that if white people in the United States—even liberals who like to congratulate themselves for being such fine antiracists—had to face an imminent, concrete, and irrevocable loss of economic and political power, they might suddenly find themselves feeling far less solidarity with the oppressed than they’d like to imagine. This is the true reality of confronting white supremacy that I’d learned in South Africa: it means white people giving things up.

Roche paused for a very long time. We drank a few more drinks as he explained that he hadn’t expected a response “quite so radical.” I covered the bill. I tipped the bartender heartily, and he said something in Zulu that obviously affected Roche very much. We got to the truck, and he tried to explain. “He didn’t say simply ‘thank you,’” Roche said. “He said something deeper—in Zulu, it means, I am grateful for you. It’s a very significant way to put something.” He put his hand to his forehead. “It’s moments like this,” he said, “when I question some of the people I have made my allies. But now it’s the only path.”

He seemed to relish having chosen a side, to have a politics to fall back on when complicated moments like this arose. And he had relished talking about Andile Mngxitama, an adversary who had chosen a side just as he had, and who spoke plainly about making whites bow down in the face of a black power that Roche was convinced was swelling and would soon engulf the country. “If that’s how Andile sees it, then I respect it a great deal,” he said. “To that I only say we must fight it out, and let’s die like men.”

[teachinginfields]

The Math Brain - Part 4

The ability to internalize rules also helps a great deal in learning Math. Math is a subject where all information is governed by rules. Rules guide how formulas are written, how they are used. Some procedures derive directly from logic. For example, if x is the only unknown, it has to be the number that completes the equation. But many other procedures and rules may seem arbitrary. The writing and symbols we use to express Math, for example, are quite random. Why use the letters x and y to express unknowns? Why are ratios expressed by a horizontal line in between two numbers? It’s these small and arbitrary that end up confusing the young brains that are trying to sort out all the mysteries of the subject. Students may not know which are the rules to follow in some situations or not in others. 

As a student, I was quick to understand and internalize the rules in Math. Encountering a new rule, my brain never doubts its veracity, it simply accepts it as truth and tries to use it. But not all brains treat rules the same way. Some brains don’t do well with arbitrary rules. Some brains like to challenge rules. Faced with a Math problem that requires the application of rules, those ways of thinking don’t do well. But on the contrary, those ways of thinking might work exceptionally well on an English or Social Studies problem that demands more creative or expansive thinking? We can also argue that this instinct to automatically learn and internalize rules is not conducive to critical thinking, which depends on an instinct of the brain to recognize, but also doubt and reflect upon the rules it’s been told. And in many subjects besides Math, this type of thinking is necessary.  

All of these reasons explain one thing -- that the Math Brain is a very general term, that the fact that some people are naturally good at Math is just a myth. Being able to learn Math takes many different skills, including ability to listen and focus, ability to perceive logic, ability to internalize rules, and etc. None of them are set skills that someone is born with. I gained my listening skills by discussing with my parents on social issues since I was little. Some of these skills, such as being able to perceive logic, can also be a result of habitual ways of thinking. Some of these habits, such as the instinct to follow and apply rules, may be unconducive to other types of learning. Being good at Math also depends on one’s interest in Math, whether or not someone prefers a single set solution to a problem for example. To me, none of these skills can be judged as better or more preferable than others. So let’s stop judging students as intelligent or not based on whether or not they possess the specific skill sets that lead them to be better at Math or Science.

[drnikolatesla]

Why Was Nikola Tesla One Of Albert Einstein’s Biggest Critics?

We know that Albert Einstein’s Theory​ of Special Relativity says that the kinetic energy (e) of a body equals its mass (m) times the speed of light (c²), or (e=mc²). The equation expresses a theory that mass and energy are the same physical entity and can be changed into each other. It also asserts that speeds greater than 186,300 miles per second (speed of light) are impossible in the universe. It is literally one of the principal tenets of the theory; that the mass of a body increases with its speed, and would become infinite at the velocity of light. Hence, a greater velocity is impossible.

Nikola Tesla positively denied Einstein’s theory, not just because he rejected the idea of matter being convertible into energy, and energy into matter, or even the existence of space-time, but because he himself had measured speeds traveling faster than light in many experiments, observations and measurements, both qualitative and quantitative throughout his lifetime of research.

As far back as 1896, Tesla conducted experiments on cosmic rays where he measured cosmic ray velocities from the star Antares, which he measured to be fifty times greater than the speed of light, literally demolishing one of the basic pillars of the structure of relativity. Also, in 1899, he conducted and recorded numerous experiments at Colorado Springs where he sent electrical currents from his transmitter around earth and back to his receiver traveling at a mean velocity of 292,815 miles per second. After these experiments, On April of 1900 he published a patent on this transmitter titled the “Art of Transmitting Electrical Energy Through the Natural Medium,” which was just a play thing compared to his Magnifying Transmitter patented in 1914. Also, in June of 1900, he published an article in the Century Magazine titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy," where he outlined his experiments in Colorado Springs and his plans for the future.

Whether you believe Tesla witnessed and measured such speeds or not, his statements should still be given due consideration. After all, both Tesla and Einstein were genius minds, but Einstein was merely a theoretical physicist who relied on abstract mathematics and other scientist's work to prove his theories, while Tesla followed the scientific method like a religion and was solely dependent on actual experimentation to prove his. Nikola Tesla’s work and theories have yet to be proven wrong to this day and are beginning to resurface as present science and technology improves.

Anyways… Here are 6 quotes from Tesla critiquing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Enjoy (((:

*Nikola Tesla reading James Clark Maxwell’s book, “The Scientific Papers,” in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston St. 46, New York*

1. “What is ‘thought’ in relativity, for example, is not science, but some kind of metaphysics based on abstract mathematical principles and conceptions which will be forever incomprehensible to beings like ourselves whose whole knowledge is derived from a three-dimensional world.”  –NT  (“Great Scientific Discovery Impends.” Sunday Star. Washington D.C., May 17, 1931.)

2. We read a great deal about matter being changed into force and force being changed into matter by the cosmic rays. This is absurd. It is the same as saying that the body can be changed into the mind, and the mind into the body. We know that the mind is a functioning of the body, and in the same manner force is a function of matter. Without the body there can be no mind, without matter there can be no force. Einstein has for years developed formulas explaining the mechanism of the cosmos. In doing this he overlooked an important factor, namely the fact that some of the heavenly bodies are increasing in distance from the sun. This is the same as writing a business letter and forgetting the subject you wish to write about. In order to explain this phenomenon Einstein has invented the quantity “lambda.” My theory of gravitation explains this phenomenon perfectly.” –NT  (Tesla’s statement relating to force and matter, to Einstein’s theories, and Tesla’s own theory of gravitation. Courtesy of Nikola Tesla Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. April 15, 1932.)

3. “I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved, is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.” –NT (“Pioneer Radio Engineer Gives Views On Power.” New York Herald Tribune, September 11, 1932.)

4. “[The Theory of Relativity] is a mass of errors and deceptive ideas violently opposed to the teachings of great men of science of the past and even to common sense. The theory wraps all these errors and fallacies and clothes them in magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king. Its exponents are very brilliant men, but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists. Not a single one of the relativity propositions has been proved.” –NT(“Tesla, 79, Promises to Transmit Force.” New York Times, July 11, 1935.)

5. “The kinetic and potential energy of a body is the result of motion and determined by the product of its mass and the square of velocity. Let the mass be reduced, the energy is diminished in the same proportion. If it be reduced to zero the energy is likewise zero for any finite velocity. In other words, it is absolutely impossible to convert mass into energy. It would be different if there were forces in nature capable of imparting to a mass infinite velocity. Then the product of zero mass with the square of infinite velocity would represent infinite energy. But we know that there are no such forces and the idea that mass is convertible into energy is rank nonsense…

“According to the relativists, space has a tendency to curvature owing to an inherent property or presence of celestial bodies. Granting a semblance of reality to this fantastic idea, it is still self-contradictory. Every action is accompanied by an equivalent reaction and the effects of the latter are directly opposite to those of the former. Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curvature of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies and, producing the opposite effects, straighten out the curves. Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible. But even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for them and its assumption dispenses with space curvature. All literature on this subject is futile and destined to oblivion. So are also all attempts to explain the workings of the universe without recognizing the existence of the ether and the indispensable function it plays in the phenomena.” –NT (“Dynamic Theory Of Gravity.” July 10, 1937. Prior to interviews with the press on his 81st birthday observance.)

6. “The relativity theory, by the way, is much older than its present proponents. It was advanced over 200 years ago by my illustrious countryman Boskovic, the great philosopher, who, not withstanding other and multifold obligations, wrote a thousand volumes of excellent literature on a vast variety of subjects. Boskovic dealt with relativity, including the so-called time-space continuum.” –NT

( Follow @drnikolatesla )

[lime-bloods]

All of the kids’ lands seem interconnected in ways that seem significant but I can’t really say how.

The Lands of Wind and Shade and Light and Rain are one big example. It was four whole years ago when Homestuck was just beginning to wrap up when I first noticed that after LOWAS’ quest is over, it seems destined to basically become a Land of Light and rain; with the heavy clouds gone, the Shade should turn to Light, and with a native population of amphibious salamanders, there’s going to need to be some Rain to fill in the now empty canals and oceans, right?And I just recently talked about some other connections the two lands could have.

LOWAS and the Land of Heat and Clockwork, too, seem to have connections. LOWAS’ native materials are all industrial; crude oil and other products of mining. But the culture of LOWAS is largely agricultural, and the bare minimum machinery there is all pneumatic. LOHAC, on the other hand, is a hub of crude industry. The symbol associated with oil is even a gear, and is later used to represent LOHAC itself.

LOHAC seems to connect to the Land of Frost and Frogs, too. Like LOWAS and LOLAR, the planets represent opposites, Frost and Heat. But there’s a fundamental similarity, too, in that both planets are tectonically active. LOFAF begins to heat up when the Forge is stoked, and LOHAC is covered in lava from the very beginning.

Another interesting possibly connection can be found in some of Hussie’s Book 2 commentary regarding his initial plans for the Lands:

I also had the idea that these 4 substances [oil, chalk, amber and uranium] would serve as various contaminants on their planets, in ways relevant to their personal quests. John’s planet and all its pipes were clogged with oil [...] Dave’s planet was covered in gears, which would be gummed up by sticky amber sap.

Sap, of course, comes from trees, of which LOHAC has none. LOWAS has a few, but by far the largest population of healthy-looking plant life lives on LOFAF.

Of course, it needs to be mentioned that fireflies, seemingly native to John’s world, have also been found encased in amber, seemingly native to Dave’s world. And that in popular culture - in Jurassic Park in particular - the notion of insects encased in amber is interconnected with the idea of genetically modifying and breeding frogs, ala LOFAF.

Possibly this represents a symbolic cycle of worlds. LOFAF heats up to become like LOHAC, which churns out pollution to become like LOWAS, which when cleaned up becomes like LOLAR. This sort of cycle is already represented in the comic by the Land Gates, which take the player from one planet to another in a cyclical motion.

LOHAC’s quest or lack thereof kind of throws the first big obstacle into the equation. LOFAF becoming warm and LOWAS becoming clean are part of their beneficial world-altering quests. LOHAC becoming more polluted doesn’t really seem to fit in with that theme, and its quest, from what the comic shows us, just seems to be initiating the Scratch. How does that fit in? There’s a couple ways you could interpret it.

Dave’s general role in the game tends to be breaking things so they can be fixed later. That’s how the Scratch is initiated, too; through Beat Mesa being damaged. So LOHAC being messed up so that it could be fixed a different way is consistent with that.

The Scratch itself is also consistent with this scenario. In a Scratch, a world is reset so another set of heroes can attempt to save it. See above. But a Scratch is also what allows Lord English to make himself a part of a world, and if oil is a symbol of Lord English’s corruption, this also makes sense.

Another explanation could merely be that as a Time player, Dave’s land is naturally out of sequence with the others.

The second missing link in the chain is the one between LOLAR and LOFAF. How does a chalky ocean world become like a frozen jungle planet? Like LOHAC’s, LOLAR’s Land quest is much less understood than LOWAS or LOFAF’s. We know she has to play the rain, but what does that mean?

JASPERSPRITE: All the life in the ocean and all the shiny rain and the songs in your head and the letters they make [will tie together]. 

JASPERSPRITE: A beam of light i think is like a drop of rain or a long piece of yarn that dances around when you play with it and make it look enticing! 

JASPERSPRITE: And the way that it shakes is the same as what makes notes in a song! 

JASPERSPRITE: And a song i think can be written down as letters.

JASPERSPRITE: So if you play the right song and it makes all the right letters then those letters could be all the letters that make life possible.

Jaspersprite seems to heavily imply that playing the rain involves rearranging genetic code in the water (G, C, A, T - note three of those are also notes you can play on an instrument) in order to make the ocean it flows into capable of creating life. Genetic coding is exactly part of LOFAF’s quest, so that’s a connection; but also filling an ocean with genes in the hope of creating life is kind of primordial, and remember Jade’s quest is also primordial because frogs + bugs stuck in amber = dinosaurs.

Andrew also has this to say about what he initially planned for LOFAF:

Jade’s [planet] was going to be in some way affected by fallout (nuclear winter?).

Obviously nuclear war doesn’t happen on LOLAR, but Rose’s role does end up involving a nuclear explosion when she heads out to detonate the Tumor. This is a parallel to Dave’s quest, because it’s another personal quest that doesn’t exactly pertain to her land, and it can also be read as having a double meaning. Rose thought she was going to blow up the sun, which would be kind of like causing an eternal winter, but actually she just caused a large atomic explosion. In supporting this reading, LOLAR itself seems to be covered in hints of some kind of future atomic disaster, like this giant carving of the Green Sun:

It could also be worth noting that nuclear fallout is associated with mutation and messing up genes, and that some of LOLAR’s shiny mutant genewater is pouring out of floating shells, which is another word for bombs.

One final morsel for thought: oil is the remains of dead animals. If we take for granted that LOLAR’s oceans are covered in oil, and we assume that this oil contains the genetic code necessary for Rose’s quest, and we imagine that LOLAR’s oil comes from LOWAS, which comes from LOHAC, which comes from LOFAF, then the oil that becomes LOFAF’s frogs would ultimately be derived from the frogs themselves, making the frogs a sort of symbolic paradox clone.