#Arizal

[todaysjewishholiday]

5 Menachem Av 5784 (8-9 August 2024)

Almost every Jew (and for that matter many a Gentile) has heard of the Kabbalah at some point or another. And the Kabbalah which they know of is almost certainly the Kabbalah of Yitzhak Luria, who died on the 5th day of the month of Av in the year 5332.

Luria was born in Jerusalem in 5284 to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardi mother. His father died when he was a young child and he was taken in by a wealthy maternal uncle in Cairo who wished to raise him as a Torah scholar. At the age of fifteen, he was married to his uncle’s daughter, and his uncle continued to financially support them while Yitzhak studied. When he was in his mid twenties his studies took a mystical turn, and after some time he withdrew to the banks of the Nile to be an ascetic and took a seven-year vow of silence, returning home only on Shabbat and speaking to nobody if he could at all avoid doing so. It is probably during this period that he developed his own novel mystical system. At the age of 35 he returned to Jerusalem, but after only a few months there departed for the new center of Jewish mysticism in Tzfat at the kabbalistic yeshiva of Moshe Cordovero. Cordovero died within a year of Luria’s arrival but the newcomer’s charisma and confidence led the gathered disciples to select him as their new teacher. Luria wrote little during his own life, though he composed three poems which became popular for Shabbat recitation. But he lectured extensively and enthusiastically and after his death his disciples compiled his conceptual system from their lecture notes. For years it was circulated among a small group of kabbalists in a small number of copies, before finally receiving a wider printing. By that point Luria’s system had become widely adopted by mystically inclined Jews thanks to his popularity with the mystics of Tzfat.

Yitzhak Luria died within three years of his arrival in Tzfat, at the age of 38.

It is also Erev Shabbat! The queen herself comes to meet us before sunset as we light the candles in her honor. Prepare yourselves to greet her!

[readancientscripts]

HEB/ENG books

[illyanarasputinfan]

Darkchild/Illyana Rasputina X-Force Annual #1 (1992) “Shattershot”

Darkchild serves as a member of X-Force in an alternate future timeline. Her team is comprised of Cannonball, Sunspot, Siryn, Douglocke, and Power Pax. They aid Shatterstar in quashing a rebellion by the Spineless Ones on Mojoworld, where he is ruler.

[coldgoldlazarus]

Honestly like

I've been in a zen state of "whatever happens with RWBY happens, it's out of my hands either way" basically ever since the last big RT controversy and Volume 9. I wasn't going to push for a Volume 10 greenlight like some of the fandom were, but I would still watch and enjoy it if it happened. Companies all suck and almost all of the media I love was built on miserable worker treatment; I can name the Metroid Prime trilogy off the top of my head as a known example, the first two games were made under extreme crunch and the third was only marginally better. Metroid Dread seems to have been similarly rough behind the scenes. Across The Spiderverse, too, for a different example. RT wasn't special or unique in this, and I never bought into the parasocial aspect of that enough to feel betrayed by them like many apparently did. It sucks that it is this way, but like, if you tried to weed out every problematic thing from your life you'd be left with nothing; you gotta pick your battles.

I digress. Point is, RWBY's future has been up in the air for A While now, so this doesn't feel all that different for me. And maybe in the long term this could turn out to be a good thing, if someone else does pick it up and can get most of original CRWBY rehired to keep working on it. It is a long shot, but if anything slightly less of a long shot than when the idea was originally brought up during that whole controversy drama. Though I do want to caution people, hope for the best, brace for the worst. This could just as easily turn into another Gen:Lock Season 2 situation.

Honestly, the show I'm much more concerned about at this point is Recorded By Arizal. Those pilot shorts were really promising, but then it's been radio silence since, last I heard, and now whether or not that will get to have anything done with it is unlikely at best. RWBY at least has the benefit of momentum and attention behind it; RbA didn't get a chance to get off the ground, and I'm not sure whether RT or WB or both were to blame. But as unlikely as it is, I do hope that that Yssa can find some way to make it a reality.

But at the end of the day, they're just shows. RT was just a company, and while not uniquely awful like some insist, still a pretty bad one. I'm not really that broken up about it, neither do I see it as cause for celebration. What happens, happens.

The important thing here is the people left behind. Casey Lee Williams having to find out from twitter bothers me a whole of a hell lot more than everything else I previously mentioned about this situation; I really hope everyone left in the drift from this can recover quickly, and I wish them better going forward.

[splicejunction]

marvel.com slash contact

[aimless-aimz]

artdump for my babies. I need to talk about them more

[archivyrep]

The "archives room," dictionaries, and the value of words in "The Great Passage"

Mitsuya in the reference room in the second episode of The Great Passage When I started watching The Great Passage, also known as Fune o Amu and Weaving a Ship, on Prime Video (of all places), I expected there would be scenes in libraries and that I would be writing a post about it on my sister Pop Culture Library Review blog, but I couldn’t be proven more wrong. Instead, this 2016 anime has…

[postcard-from-the-past]

Arize river by La Bastide-de-Sérou, Gascony region of southern France

French vintage postcard

[highasfshit]

I don’t understand people who think dry herb vapes can’t hit hard. Look at dis!!!

[anianimals-moe]

Pigs from Alice & Zoroku

Today's AniAnimal are these pigs from "Alice & Zoroku". 今日のアニアニマルは『アリスと蔵六』のこの豚たちです。

[lavariz]

I HAVE MY AP MICRO MOCK EXAM TOMORROW I AM COOKED

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

So I am pretty sure we have known Spiral = Rita for a while now... but I don’t think we have ever actually been told HOW that happened so this fills in a lot of gaps with that... but its got some wonky time travel stuff thrown in to just make it a little more murky for funsies....

[snarp]

Affect me with weed effects

[liberaleffects]

@Agatha CoSo

Hundreds of homes outside the boundaries of Scottsdale can no longer get water from the city, so their owners are living a worst-case scenario of drought in the West.

Why did former #Arizona governor Doug Ducey (R) hide this? I think we know why. $$

"Last week, Arizona learned that its water shortages could be even worse than many residents realized. As one of her first actions after taking office, Gov. Katie Hobbs unsealed a report showing that the fast-growing West Valley of Phoenix does not have enough groundwater to support tens of thousands of homes planned for the area; their development is now in question."

[aimless-aimz]

um

yea!

first time joining artfight and nothing is loading lol. im 90% sure joining late is fine, so i'm PRAYING the site will calm down by tmr so i can put my shit up </3

(praying that the quality didnt die because i'll cry)/silly

[archivyrep]

Archives and archivists are anything but neutral [Part 3]

Continued from part 2

In the first episode of Recorded by Arizal, Arizal begins to define what an record keeper means, to her.

Star Wars is not the only series with these themes. Recorded by Arizal seems to hint at the idea that "archiving will never be neutral" and is not a neutral act. This is because the protagonist in that series, which will likely never be made into a full series, Arizal, dreams to be a record keeper. In that series it is a person who will "travel across the world, trying to document it for those within the city...with the records she collects and creates." This recording of information, through a series of vlogs, will undoubtedly be shaped by what Arizal sees as important to preserve, with other aspects falling by the wayside. She will be collecting records for an archive, bound to the "records themselves, and their creation" as a keeper, even though her efforts will make the history of her city that much richer and fuller, for all to understand.

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Feb. 9, 2022.

The same could be said about Peridot in Steven Universe. As I've written closely, what she does is closest to a records analyst, while engaging in some tasks like an archivist. In those capacities, she is tasked with gathering information about the Cluster. What she is collecting is colored by her knowledge of Gems and her beliefs, which is steeped in the Homeworld ideology that the Diamond rulers are superior while everyone else is lesser and insignificant. They are "pebbles" as she terms them at one point. She later learns her way out of these destructive thoughts, beginning to love the Earth, and everything on it. What she collects and records changes as a result.

The basement archives in The Ghost and Molly McGee, Phineas and Ferb, The Regular Show, and Stretch Armstrong all have collections which have their own organizational systems, even it is portrayed as haphazard at times. These systems are clearly not neutral and are arranged in such a way that it reflects the biases, beliefs, and actions of those who organized them, and the rules governing those arrangements.

Of these series, Stretch Armstrong features an archivist. He is named Grandpa Park, a Korean-American man who is the grandfather of one of the protagonists, Nathan Park. He is a former reporter who is wise and knows the secret identities of the protagonists. The stacks of basement newspaper archive is organized by whether something is "local" or "worldwide." It was one of the earliest posts on this blog and I remember being so excited to watch it, as it featured an archivist, unlike anything I had seen up to that point. There is no doubt that his experience as a reporter affects how the archive is organized, along with his personal biases, although he is not hemmed in by institutional rules, as this archive is all his own.

Different media formats, as presented by Archie, in the season 4, episode 30 episode of Regular Show, entitled "The Requirements to Waken the G.O.O.F."

Like Stretch Armstrong, The Regular Show also features an archivist, named Archie the Archivist. He is also known as Archie and works in the library. Other than the fact he is a Laserdisc Guardian who defends the protagonists from those who want VHS to be dominant, very little about him is known. He only appears in two episodes, "The Last Laserdisc Player" and "Format Wars II," and never again after that point. Even so, it is clear what he is doing is not neutral. Rather, he is a keeper of data from "bad" people as he is taking sides in a conflict.

I could go through many other shows that I have watched since 2020 with archives and archivists. Even so, I feel that this post is a good starting point to this topic, and one that can, hopefully, built upon in the future in ways that discuss this in depth.

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Update: As I half-expected, people on /r/archivists were annoyed by this post. One cranky archivist declared "any article that uses Attack of the Clones as evidence of anything in the real world is not well." Another said it "seems like a bad faith post" because "a lot of people get that information and organizational systems are products of people and have biases but this is not the argument that is being made," adding the "blog post barely touches on real archiving before it focuses almost entirely on fictional archives in pop culture." Its almost like these people don't understand what this blog is about, jeez. I'm really just waiting until I get banned from /r/archivists, as I think it is coming. We'll see what happens. In response to this, Sam Cross told me "This is why I stay away from Reddit most of the time" and I can agree with that.