#European cornel

[elisarde]

Cornus mas flower buds

2019.

[thebotanicalarcade]

n247_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: Fructologie,. Amsterdam,M. Magérus,1771.. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/55364277

[ornithological]

everyone say thank you to livecams for birds

[reportwire]

After one year of war, how to break the stalemate in Ukraine?

February 24 will mark one year since Russian tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine. As it stands there is still no end in sight and the U.S. is facing increasing pressure to provide military aid in the form of high tech equipment such as F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams tanks. David Silbey is an associate professor of history at Cornell University where he specializes in military history, defense…

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

How Russian colonialism took the Western anti-imperialist Left for a ride

Blindness to Russian colonialism distorts Westerners’ view of the Ukraine war

"Fucking shit Russian car," my driver spat as a Lada sedan passed us on the highway from Georgia's capital of Tbilisi to Stepantsminda during my trip there in 2019, shortly after our long conversation touched on Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia.

His momentary flash of anger was an eye-opening glimpse at the consequences of Russia's steadfast refusal to let go of the 14 nations whose independence following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union dictator Vladimir Putin infamously called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" – not to mention the ethnic minorities still under Moscow's yoke – and its brutal punishment of Georgia and Ukraine for daring to seek a bright future outside of Russia's sunless orbit.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has cast a long-overdue spotlight on Russian imperialism and colonialism, yet many Westerners fail to grapple with how Russia's colonial legacy continues to this day and is part and parcel to its war against Ukraine and descent into fascism. Consequently, many end up whatabouting, excusing and even overtly sympathizing with an empire whose colonial practices mirror those of historical Western European empires in cruelty, chauvinism, thievery, exploitation, cultural erasure, racism and genocide and that is now ruthlessly attempting to conquer one of its neighbors.

Russia displayed that ruthlessness last week when it lobbed missiles at Odesa, damaging port and grain storage facilities as well as its historic center, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

"They're interested in lands and influence and a buffer zone between them and the West, in sea access – but not in people and not in culture," said Ukrainian Parliament adviser Yuliia Shaipova who, together with her husband, Aspen Institute NextGen Transatlantic Initiative member Artem Shaipov, was at home in Odesa after hiding in a nearby bomb shelter.

Yet, Westerners safe from bombardment like long-shot third-party presidential candidate Cornel West continue to accommodate Russia. In a July 13 interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins, West called Russia's invasion "criminal" but insisted it was "provoked by the expansion of NATO" and is a "proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation," adding Neville Chamberlain-esque icing on the appeasement cake by proposing Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia.

The tell in West's remarks was calling the U.S. an empire but referring to Russia by its de jure name, implicitly erasing its imperial, colonial character. It's a common tendency among the segment of the left to which West belongs, one that Kazakhstan-born Pitzer College sociology professor Azamat Junisbai attributes to ignorance and a myopic, know-nothing focus on American imperialism to the exclusion of imperialism by other nations.

"They're kind of imperial about their anti-imperialism," Junisbai said. "There's something very provincial and strange about it where you literally do not know anything about what's happening beyond this one issue you care about."

While West and other leftists blame "NATO expansion" for provoking Russia, Junisbai compares NATO membership – which, after all, the former Warsaw Pact and Baltic countries all sought voluntarily – to a restraining order against an abusive partner.

"People don't recognize that there was an abusive relationship, that there was colonialism," he said, speculating that blindness to Russian colonialism could be due to a failure of Western education systems as well as Soviet propaganda and leftist valorization of the Soviet Union as a foe of Western imperialism. Another potential culprit is knee-jerk distrust toward American foreign policy popular among some leftists and alternative media that leads to a simplistic "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" worldview.

"People, I think, just get so wedded to their vision of themselves as fighting 'The Man,' fighting the power that they are blinded and taken for a ride by Russia, in this case serving as useful idiots," Junisbai said.

Both Yuliia and Artem Shaipov pointed the finger at academic studies of Russia in the West that view it through Moscow's imperial lens. The two have published articles advocating for a "decolonization" of Russia studies and greater attention to how veneration of the "great Russian culture" – such as the genocide- and conquest-glorifying literature of Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin – has provided a conduit for Russian imperialist ideology to sneak into the Western mind.

"Part of the reason is that it's Western academia that kind of perpetuates this imperial understanding of our region that benefits Russia's imperial policies," Shaipov said, pointing to how Western academic institutions place Ukraine and other post-Soviet nations under Russia's geopolitical umbrella of "Eurasia." "It speaks volumes about the reasons why still many people in the West see Ukraine and other independent states as the sphere of influence of Russia."

The resulting sympathy for Russia's imperial worldview finds expression among Western academics, media personalities and activists who deny Ukrainians' agency in repeating the Kremlin conspiracy theory that Ukraine's 2014 Revolution of Dignity was a "U.S.-backed coup" – as if Ukrainians couldn't have removed outrageously corrupt Kremlin stooge Viktor Yanukovych from office after his security forces murdered over 100 peaceful protesters without foreigners pulling the strings – or characterize former communist nations' NATO membership as provoking Russia rather than protecting them from it.

And it's a mindset rooted in over 400 years of imperialism and colonialism that caused atrocities as horrific as those of Spain or Britain.

Russia's conquest of Siberia starting in the 1580s, for instance, included the enslavement of indigenous peoples whom it forced to pay tribute in the form of furs known as yasak on pain of death, resulting in starvation as people struggled to meet yasak quotas instead of feeding themselves in a system some historians have compared to Belgian King Leopold II's enslavement of the Congo. Russian Cossack gangs raped and murdered while Orthodox missionaries stamped out native religions and alcoholism and smallpox decimated local populations. Today, indigenous people in Siberia and the Russian Far East frequently live in poverty while Moscow strips their lands' rich natural resources to line the pockets of oligarchs and fuel the glitz of cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, while their men disproportionately make up the cannon fodder that Russia sends to the Ukrainian front.

"If we take the Russia that is situated behind the Urals – the Central Asian part of Russia, the far East Asian parts of Russia, the [northernmost parts of Russia] – the cities are just being used for extractive purposes, so [the Russians] don't care even about their own people and minorities that are in Russia itself," Shaipova said, noting how nearly all of their enormous wealth goes to the Russian metropole. "So basically, take Norilsk or Irkutsk – those cities look like an atomic bomb has exploded there."

In the Caucasus, where Russia vied with the Ottoman and Persian empires for power, the Muslim Circassians, who had inhabited the area for millennia, resisted Russian domination. So in 1857, Tsar Alexander II ordered their expulsion to the Ottoman Empire under a proposal by Count Dmitri Milyutin, who said it would "cleanse the land of hostile elements" and open their farmland for Christian settlers. The result was the Circassian genocide in which nearly the entire Circassian population was killed or expelled to the Middle East, where most Circassians live today.

Junisbai's own life is a testament to Russia's thorough colonization of his country, which began in earnest in the 18th century after Russia conquered it. His mother tongue is Russian rather than Kazakh thanks to generations of Russification that made learning Russian essential to get ahead while casting indigenous languages by the wayside. That led to him being conditioned to look down on Kazakhs who could not speak Russian properly while growing up in Almaty, whose population during the Soviet era was about four-fifths Russian and had only two Kazakh-language schools in the early 1980s, while Kazakhs largely lived in rural areas. Meanwhile, his great-grandfather was a member of the Kazakh intelligentsia, for which the Soviets executed him at Omsk in 1935 during Stalin's purges. Consistent with Russia's pattern of extractive relationships with its colonies, Moscow picked Kazakhstan as the place to test nuclear weapons, Junisbai's mother growing up only a couple hundred miles from a testing site.

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought to the forefront the issues of language and Russian colonialism that Junisbai had been thinking about for a while. Today, he spells Kazakhstan's name as "Qazaqstan," reflecting the native pronunciation, rather than the more common Russian-based spelling.

"This invasion – just the scale of it and how blatantly imperialist it was – was a point of no return," he said, regarding how it got him thinking more about those issues. "Like how strange and horrible it is that I am stuck with Russian, and it's like having something stuck in my body, and I cannot remove it."

In contrast with its terrestrial empire building, Russia didn't have as much luck overseas, as its North American and Hawaiian colonies proved unsuccessful, along with its lesser-known attempt to partake in that most infamous example of European colonialism, the 19th-century Scramble for Africa.

Russia's covetousness toward Ukraine differs somewhat from its other colonization activities, but comes from the same underlying desire to subjugate. It stems from the popular myth that Russia is the legitimate heir to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus, centered on modern-day Kyiv, which Putin cited in a July 2021 pseudohistorical essay denying Ukraine's right to sovereignty, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." But as Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy points out in his new book, "The Russo-Ukrainian War," although the Grand Principality of Moscow – later called Muscovy – derived much of its culture from Kyivan Rus, 15th-century ruler Ivan the Great invented the myth of Muscovy's inextricable link to it by declaring himself the sole legitimate heir to the Kyivan princes in order to justify his conquest of the Republic of Novgorod.

"The independent Russian state, born of the struggle between Moscow and Novgorod, resulted from the victory of authoritarianism over democracy," Plokhy writes.

Shaipov said Muscovy inherited its political culture not from Europe, but from the Mongol Empire of which it had long been a vassal.

"This is their political tradition of authoritarianism, oppression and continuous imperial conquest," he said.

Ukrainians learned that the hard way in the mid-1600s when Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against their Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rulers and established an independent state, seeking protection from their Orthodox co-religionists in Muscovy. But after helping them achieve victory, their Muscovite allies sought to dominate them, leading to another Ukrainian Cossack rebellion in 1708 that soon allied with Sweden. Muscovy defeated them at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, and in 1721, under Tsar Peter I, Muscovy became the Russian Empire.

In other words, Russian claims of lordship over Ukraine are about as credible as if British leaders called decolonization a "geopolitical catastrophe" and then dredged up medieval manuscripts to make the case against Irish independence.

The Russian Empire collapsed with the 1917 October Revolution, but that tradition of authoritarianism, oppression and imperial conquest persisted as the empire got a new coat of paint, trading tsars for commissars and rebranding as the U.S.S.R.

Numerous nations under Russian rule for centuries declared independence – including Ukraine as well as Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, the Tatar-led Idel-Ural State and others. But the Bolsheviks quickly invaded nearly all of them, forcing them into the newly established Soviet Union, which reoccupied the Baltic nations after World War II, leaving only Finland independent. In Ukraine, Stalin caused the Holodomor, a genocidal famine that depopulated most of the country's east, allowing its resettlement by Russians. In 1944, he accused indigenous Crimeans – for whom even the term "Crimean Tatars," Shaipov noted, is a misnomer with colonialist undertones – of collaborating with the Nazis and deported them all, allowing Russians to become a majority in Crimea too.

Those malign political traditions continued after 1991 as Russia crushed the fledgling Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and Tatarstan and sponsored pro-Russia breakaway states in Moldova's Transnistria region and the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where Russia used false accusations of genocide as a pretext for its 2008 invasion, a tactic it would rehash in Ukraine six years later.

And they live on today in Russia's nationalist, imperialist, bloodthirsty and downright genocidal "Z" propaganda for domestic audiences.

Even Russian liberals remain far from untainted. While Westerners lionize Alexei Navalny as a freedom fighter, Junisbai highlighted his history of racism toward Central Asians.

"Navalny is not really well-liked in Central Asia because he's the person who contributed to hate crimes against Central Asians in Russia," Junisbai explained, lamenting how many Westerners continue to see that part of Navalny's past as marginal.

Navalny also drew scorn for a series of tweets on July 25 in which he called Russian war criminal Igor Girkin a "political prisoner" following his arrest for criticizing Putin.

Shaipov and Shaipova pointed to how Jan Rachinsky, the head of Memorial, rejected the idea of Russian repentance for waging war against Ukraine in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture last year.

"This understanding of themselves as an empire is part of their national identity, and this is also what concerns the so-called Russian liberals," Shaipova said.

At the same time, Junisbai said people inside Russia consistently fail to acknowledge their nation's colonial history.

"The surest way to offend a Russian person is to talk about colonialism or Russians as colonizers," he said

Instead, Russians overwhelmingly view themselves – in true colonialist form – as having civilized Central Asians, believing they were illiterate before Russia introduced Cyrillic, despite Junisbai's grandfather having written in Arabic script, and that if not for Russia they would still be riding horses and living in yurts.

"It's just like, 'we built your schools, we built your hospitals – how dare you be disrespectful, how dare you not appreciate us,'" he said.

This lack of self-awareness stands in stark contrast with European nations that decolonized and, although in fits and starts, today seek to atone for past injustices. In 2021, Germany formally apologized for genocide in Namibia in the early 1900s, while Queen Camilla declined to wear a crown at King Charles' coronation bearing the Kohinoor diamond, which Britain plundered when it ruled India.

Shaipov and Shaipova said Russia must also undergo decolonization, a process the world should not fear.

"In order for them to heal, they need to go through this healing process and repentance so that they can reconcile with neighboring countries and with the peoples that populate the Russian Federation," Shaipov said.

But Russia must first remove the Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak that has long allowed its colonial legacy to go unnoticed.

"Once you tear it off, then people can see the horribleness – like, how could people side with an abuser and against someone who's trying to take out a restraining order against this abuse," Junisbai said.

[emptymasks]

After months of saying I'll finish these, they're finally done. Castlevania chibi stickers and badges are up on Etsy. There's three listings, one for the video game characters, one for the cartoon, and one for the cartoon sequel Nocturne. Making these stickers were a reward unlocked in mine and Julia_boo's donothon back in April.

Castlevania video game characters available: Aeon, Albus, Adrian 'Alucard' Tepes, Genya Arikado, Carmilla, Charlotte Aulin, Christopher Belmont, Cornell, Death, Vlad 'Dracula' Tepes, Elisabetha Cronqvist, Elizabeth Bartley, Eric Lecarde, Grant Danasty, Hector, Isaac Laforeze, Joachim Armster, John Morris, Jonathan Morris, Julia Laforeze, Julius Belmont, Juste Belmont, Leon Belmont, Lisa Tepes, Loretta Lecarde, Lucy Westenra, Maria Renard, Mathias Cronqvist, Maxim Kischine, Mina Hakuba, Nathan Graves, Reinhardt Schneider, Richter Belmont, Sara Trantoul, Shanoa, Simon Belmont, Soleil Belmont, Soma Cruz, Sonia Belmont, Stella Lecarde, Trevor Belmont, Walter Bernhard, Yoko Belnades.

Castlevania cartoon characters available: Abel, Adrian 'Alucard' Tepes, Carmilla, Death, Vlad 'Dracula' Tepes, Godbrand, Greta, Hector, Isaac, Lenore, Lisa, Morana, Striga, Sypha Belnades, Trevor Belmont, Varney.

Castlevania Nocturne characters available: Adrian 'Alucard' Tepes, Anette, Drolta Tzuentes, Edouard, Erzsebet Báthory, Julia Belmont, Juste Belmont, Maria Renard, Mizrak, Olrox, Richter Belmont, Tera.

I can’t link to my Etsy without risking Tumblr hiding the post from tag search results, but the link is in my pinned post, my carrd, I’m emptymasks on Etsy. Reblogs help support artists more than likes ❤️

[ID: Individual pixel art chibi drawings of 86 characters from various European musicals (listed above) that are available as stickers. These drawings are also available as badges where they are placed inside circles to show what they will look like as physical button badges, some of them with plain colour backgrounds and some with 1-3 different pride flags as examples of how you can customise the backgrounds.]

[eretzyisrael]

by Mark Oppenheimer

Black Classic also offers numerous books by the late Hunter College historian John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), who shared Welsing’s homophobia. Clarke’s detractors often mention his antisemitism, but his homophobia is sometimes overlooked. On YouTube, you can see him cheered on as he tells an audience that Africans “had a healthy attitude toward things other people made unhealthy and made filthy and dirty.” Scornfully, he denies the possibility of gay Africans in antiquity. “Show me one case of sexual deviation before the coming of foreigners!” Elsewhere, Clarke, who blamed the “Jewish educational mafia” for multiculturalism, wrote an introduction to an edition of Michael Bradley’s 1978 book The Iceman Inheritance, which argues that white people are genetically predisposed to higher levels of racism and aggression than other groups, and speculates that Jews might be the ultimate “Neanderthal-Caucasoids.” 

He also wrote the foreword to Bradley’s 1992 work Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization. This last work argues that the people known as Jews today are descended from eighth-century converts to Judaism, having usurped the tradition from a group that had been practicing Judaism for more than two millennia; these late-arriving Jews, including today’s Ashkenazi Jews, have uniquely high levels of Neanderthal aggression, which has helped them dominate other groups.

In 2001, Clarke told an interviewer that “the European uses this religion”—Judaism—“as the handmaiden of his imperial desires. I strictly mean the Europeans who answer to the word Jew. He reads the word Jew into ancient history, where the word didn’t exist. When the European Jew didn’t exist.” In an interview you can find online, Clarke told an audience, “If Jews want to dominate something, it’s very easy to dominate us. So that’s what they do.”

The idea that “white” Jews, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi (Iberian), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African), are somehow impostors or usurpers—with the “real” Jews coming from the Nile River Valley or other parts of Africa—is a poisonous myth deployed to subvert the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s a lie presented as a given within a certain strain of Afrocentric thought, and embraced not only by Clarke but by the aforementioned “Dr. Ben”—Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan—who, like Clarke, is well-represented in the offerings of Black Classic Press, which publishes 12 ben-Jochannan titles. These include We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”

In 2015, shortly after ben-Jochannan’s death at 96, The New York Times reported that for decades he had deceived employers about his credentials, telling Cornell and other institutions that he had degrees from Cambridge, in England, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Neither school had a record of his enrollment. “ ‘People condemn me for not being an intellectual of the Ph.D. type,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan once said, reacting to questions later raised about his résumé,” the Times wrote. “While he used the ‘white man’s credential’ to go ‘certain places,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan said, he refused to ‘let the white man certify’ his work.”

As far as I can tell, Coates has nowhere discussed the allegations against ben-Jochannan, his longtime intellectual partner—and a writer who remains a source of revenue for the press. To the contrary, Coates has always spoken of ben-Jochannan with reverence. “In 1978, when we started publishing, three elders were inspirations and gave their support—John G. Jackson, John Henrik Clarke, and Yosef ben-Jochannan,” writes Coates on the Black Classic website. “His books have revolutionized the way Black people relate to Africa and the Nile Valley.” After ben-Jochannan’s death, Coates told the Times, “I consider Dr. Ben the greatest of the self-trained historians.” Ta-Nehisi told the Times that ben-Jochannan’s example “runs through everything I do.”

Along with Clarke and ben-Jochannan, one of the authors best represented in Black Classic’s offerings remains Tony Martin. The Jewish Onslaught may be gone from the website, but several of his other books are still there, including a pamphlet, published in 1998, containing the text of a lecture given in Trinidad called The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future. Although largely about the Afro-Caribbean experience, Martin takes time to explain that “[p]seudo-scientific racism had been around since at least the 4th or 5th century AD when the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, pioneered the notion that Africans were recipients of the curse of Ham.” The Talmud makes no connection between Noah’s son Ham and Africa—that is a later, mainly Christian tradition, seen in early church theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea (CE 260-340) and Bede (CE 673-735). 

But Martin, though a professor at Wellesley for many years, isn’t making a scholarly argument. He is making an indictment. This is also what he is doing when he writes:

“When President Clinton becomes president, he goes to Geneva and he bows down before the World Jewish Congress. When the African American woman Myrlie Evers-Williams became head of the NAACP the other day, she went straight to Geneva and bowed down before the World Jewish Congress.” This is fiction, of course—neither of them went to Geneva to genuflect before Jews—but hardly surprising coming from Martin, who elsewhere in his pamphlet calls the World Jewish Congress “a body organized on a racial or religious or whatever-the-Jews-are basis.”

One has to ask: Why is Coates selling this? 

[strawberryblondebutch]

I know we’ve asked you about who you think will be the first draft pick in 2025, but how about the full first round? I know this is very speculative considering we don’t even the order of the team picks and we won’t know what each team is looking for until after the season, so I’ll probs ask this again later, but any preliminary predictions?

Okay, this is a fun question! Let's talk about drafting strategies first.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to a draft. The first is drafting for need, which is exactly what it sounds like: "we really struggled with finishing, we need a winger with a good snapshot." "This team really struggled in the faceoff circle, let's try to get a center who can win those battles." "For the love of God, get someone on D who can throw their weight around." The other school of thought is best player available, which is also kind of exactly what it sounds like -- screw need, we'd be stupid not to take this one.

Hindsight is usually 20/20, and drafting for need/BPA discussions are usually difficult because they fall victim to this. "Sure, we got the best player available, but we really needed a 1D" vs. "sure, we're short on center depth, but this player was available and we passed over them!"

It's way too early to put together a full draft board because (1) we don't know the order in which teams will be picking, and (2) it's hard to tell which GMs will be drafting for need and which will be taking the BPA. My casual observation is that Ottawa focused more on need (they wanted to get bigger, and Serdachny was the biggest F in the first round, and the Charge were also the first team to take a goalie, because Masch got overworked last season) and Boston was more BPA.

That all being said, here are some first-round draft candidates, in no particular order:

Abbey Murphy (F / Minnesota). I mean, yeah. She's the consensus 1OA pick. If she doesn't come off the board first, it's because she snapped her leg in half and retired from the sport. Or she got banned from IIHF play for biting a ref, idk.

Haley Wynn (D / Clarkson). Probably the best D on the draft board. The only knock against her is that she's right-handed, and I'd say most teams already have their 1RHD settled, but Wynn is the kind of player you make room for. She moves the puck incredibly well, and she has a deceptive skating and puckhandling game that throws off opposing forwards.

Nicole Gosling (D / Clarkson). I'd be remiss not to include Wynn's liney here (and cousin of Sceptres first-round pick Julia Gosling!). Clarkson is a particularly vexing opponent for the other ECAC schools, and that D corps is a big reason why. Unlike Wynn, Gosling is a lefty, and she's very good at clearing the zone, taking pressure off the goalie.

Viivi Vainikka (F / Lulea HF). I do not watch a lot of European hockey, although I would like to. Those who do watch the SDHL cannot stop talking about Vainikka. She's absolutely the top European prospect of this draft class, plays center and left wing competently, and is one of those players that you just can't stop watching.

Kristyna Kaltounkova (F / Colgate). Kalty gets a big boost here in that two coaches are already familiar with her game: she's played on the Czech national team and for Colgate University, so McLeod and Fargo already have a good rapport with her, which goes a long way in adjusting to the pros. As a member of Team Czechia, she's also held her own quite well against more developed national teams. One red flag against her: she was suspended under unknown circumstances for two games last season and took another two games off for personal reasons.

Rory Guilday (D / Cornell), Lacey Eden (F / Wisconsin), Casey O'Brien (F / Wisconsin). Flip a three-way coin for that last first-round spot. All three players have something in common: what they do well, they do so well that they make it look easy. All three have incredibly strong fundamentals, which is their greatest strength and weakness. Flashy players get the most attention, but the most skilled players will fly under the radar. Which one of this trio gets taken first will depend on need: Guilday is a rock-solid stay-at-home defender who doesn't show up on the score sheet, Eden is a winger with a strong finishing touch who needs to be part of a 1-2 punch, and O'Brien is the best playmaking center in the draft. All are specialists, and it comes down to what will pull your team together.

[raindrop-21]

Songs and Suds

A/n: First ever fic/drabble bear with me

Word count: 1,174

Cw: Hybrid character, can be read as gn but "breasts" is used to describe reader's chest a couple times, reader is called "Maus" a few times

summary: After a total bust of a concert, you and König went back to your hotel to get warmed up after getting rained on, it seems a bath is the only way to get König off your chest.

Song because it's mentioned in the fic:

You and your cornel, König, had shared a love for music. It started a year ago when you caught him humming the lyrics to one of your favorite songs. From then on, you had shared songs and bands you had come across with each other, slowly bonding over the music to your now relationship. At the start of the year, a band you like, Ghost, announced their tour. You told König, and he was all for it. Sadly, due to work, you couldn’t go to any of the European concerts, but you could both request leave to go see one of the American shows. Your leaves were accepted, and you both went to America a few days before the concert started to get comfortable in your hotel room.

The hotel is a bit more expensive than you would’ve liked, but König insisted on getting it and just couldn’t say no to him because he was the one paying for it. On the day of the concert, you got up early, showered, and when it got closer to being time to head to the concert venue, you put on your band tee and did your makeup to match that of the frontman’s. König was wearing a band tee and a surgical mask with the band logo on it.

You got in the car and headed to the venue. Once inside the venue, you found your seats and waited for the concert to start. As the opening band came out, it was slightly raining, and they started their first song. You could feel the song reverberating throughout your body. About halfway through the third song, it started raining even harder than it was before, and they had to stop because the stage got flooded. They tried cleaning off the stage, but as they were cleaning, it started thundering, and lightning started lighting up the sky.

The venue staff evacuated everyone in the venue and sent everyone back to their cars. While everyone was waiting for updates as to what was happening, you and König were sitting in your car with the heat on, just like others at the venue. The heat was doing nothing; you were both still cold and wet. Due to how cold it was, König had transformed into his hybrid state and crawled under your shirt to try and get any sliver of warmth he could. After three hours of waiting and three shitty updates, the venue Facebook had finally said that the show was cancelled, so you started driving back to the hotel.

Once back at the hotel, you’re still wet and cold, and König is still between your breasts. König, who had taken solace in the space between your breasts, pulling them together with his tentacles to try and warm himself up, is shivering. You had noticed his shivering since he had gotten between your breasts. Noticing his shivering, you suggest he take a bath.

“König, I can feel you shivering; you should go take a bath.”

The only response you get is him shaking his little head and making an annoyed clicking sound. You sigh and decide to try again.

“König, you need to warm up. You won’t get warm staying there.”

He refuses with an annoyed chirp and a shake of his head again. You sigh again, this time in defeat, and internally say “Fuck it” as you decide that if he won’t do it himself, you’ll do it for him.

You walk into the bathroom, turn on the faucet to a warm setting, and start disrobing. Once you’re fully nude, with König still attached to your chest, you slide into the warm water. As your cold body makes contact with the warm water, you let out a content hiss at the feeling. König opens his beady little eyes at the sound you made and the now-warm temperature of the air around the two of you.

He moves one of his tentacles to test the temperature of the water. Feeling the warmth of the water against the coldness of his tentacle, he lets out a happy chirp before wiggling himself off your chest and into the water. As he wiggles into the water, you reach for one of your favorite soaps that you brought with you to the hotel and add some to the water. As the water starts to foam up, you watch as König starts playing in the suds. As you watch him play in the suds, you decide that if you couldn't see Ghost live, you’d listen to their songs now.

You grab your phone, open the playlist for the setlist that you have made, and put it on shuffle. “Spillways” starts playing, and the lyrics and instruments start echoing throughout the bathroom.

As you relax into the warmth of the tub and the sound of the music, König uses his tentacles to take a washcloth and wash your body. Slowly run it over your face, neck, chest, arms, stomach, and legs. He uses a small cup to rinse off the soap on your body before transforming into his human form (thank God the tub’s huge) and requesting you do the same. You slowly run the soap-covered washcloth over his back, arms, chest, and legs before washing it off of him.

After your bath, you both dry off and get dressed. Once you are both dry and dressed, you both go lay in bed. He holds you in his arms as you wrap your arms around his waist and snuggle your face into his neck.

“I’m sorry, Maus our first concert together, and it wasn’t really even a concert.” König mumbles into your hair as he rubs your back.

“It’s not your fault, Kö; it’s the venues’.” You softly say back as you lightly give him a squeeze.

"But I could’ve chosen a different show date to go to, and you would’ve been able to see them. You’ve wanted to since you knew about the band.” He replies in a tone that says he truly thinks it’s his fault.

“König. It’s not your fault that this show of theirs just so happens to be at an incompetent venue that claims ‘rain or shine’, but doesn’t have proper coverage of the band’s equipment. And plus, this most likely won’t be the band's last tour. They’ll probably have another tour next year that we can go to. Now, no more of this, and let’s go to bed on a happy note.” You reply in a tone that tells him that there is no arguing and he should probably just go to sleep.

“Okay, Maus, fine. It’s not my fault.” He says with a chuckle as he senses the non-nogotian in your voice. “Let’s go to sleep. Love you, Maus.”

“Love you too, Kö. Goodnight." You reply happily as you both drift off to sleep in each other's arms.

The concert may have been a bust, but you didn’t let it ruin your night. The night was bound to end with you in your lover’s arms, concert or not.

@littlebluespoon a little gift from your beloved Burbur anon <3

(banner by @bangssefi)

[crestiebestie]

A non-exhaustive list of the birds whose calls/songs I've heard today, sitting indoors with the door open for a breeze:

- American robin (never shuts up, always angy at something or another)

- chipping sparrow (incessant beeping. it is Chipping Time)

- American crow

- American goldfinch (lotta territorial beeping today which. my man sounds like a squeaky toy. so scary.)

- downy woodpecker

- white-breasted nuthatch

- brown thrasher (a surprise! not common in this much urban sprawl)

- house finch (such a pretty lil song! highlight of my mornings!)

- house sparrow (invasive but i like them anyway. they didn't ask for this. loud babies.)

- European starling (same as above but add more grease lol)

And probably more I can't immediately recall. I live in a suburb of a Metropolitan Area. This is not exactly Peak Biodiversity, and yet! Many birds.

My point is, even if you can't go outdoors very often, it's good to allow the outdoors in because there's a lot of good stuff out there. It's good to remember that there are beings (probably very nearby to you!) who aren't concerned with anything but foraging and hunting and mating and other Life Stuff. Learning the bird calls and songs common to your area is a great way to connect with the nature all around you, which can help you maintain a healthier sense of perspective.

Cornell Ornithology is a great resource to get started and their app Merlin allows you to install identification data packs specific to your region. They have packs for all over the world. It even has a feature to ID birds based on photos or sounds! (Though that stuff's a bit limited and finicky imho)

Anyway. Go birding. Stay home birding. Whatever you need to do to get your attention focused on nature instead of... [gestures broadly] all of the horrors. It's good for you.

[nicoooooooon]

Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace), 1950 by Joseph Cornell

Influenced by Surrealism, Joseph Cornell began making collages and boxed assemblages in the early 1930s. Throughout his life, he read avidly about the great figures of European Romanticism and Symbolism, finding inspiration not only in the romantic ideals of a distant past, but also in prosaic, everyday objects and materials.

[coffeefrenchandhistory]

top 5 insane things anti-zionists have done/said since oct 7

Anti-Zionists Antisemites, Jew-haters, genocide simps... different names for the same thing.

Claiming Israelis are just White Americans/Europeans to the point of even giving them fake White names to dehumanize them even further (and engage in blatant antisemitic ideals that Jews are a people who have no homeland, when we returned to our indigenous homeland).

2. That because Jews had to Hebraize our surnames to eschew the Diaspora — the forced expulsion and 2 millennia of dispossession from our ancestral homeland — that it's """proof""" we don't belong in the Middle East and that we're eUrOpEaNs

3. Liberals, leftists, and other of the social democratic left cheering on the mass rape, murder, and torture of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 Israelis (132 of which are still in Gaza, including little Kfir Bibas who turned 1 in January, 19 women, and 109 men). Not to mention Avera Mengistu (kidnapped in 2014), Hisham al-Sayed (kidnapped in 2015), and the bodies of Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin (kidnapped since 2014). And the college professor at Cornell who said that he was "exhilarated" by the atrocities and war crimes that Hamas committed.

4. The fucking fan fiction and fan art of Hamas terrorists and Israeli hostages, trying to show them in love. For the sake of my own sanity, my mental health, and because I see that art those disgusting images as vile and inhumane, I'm not linking those.

5. The fucking SILENCE of every single organization which says they care about the victims of sexual violence. The sheer misogynistic antisemitism that was unleashed on 10/7 is vile, disgusting, and sickening. Israeli women were raped. Israeli men were raped. They were sexually tortured. And Hamas carried it out. This is fact. And the fact that it took until FUCKING MARCH 2024 for the UN (that cesspit of shit) to say it speaks volumes.

[thebotanicalarcade]

n604_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: The plums of New York .... Albany,J.B. Lyon Company, state printers,1911.. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/38554544

[ornithological]

sometimes i feel the need to do bird ID quizzes but it can be hard to find ones for european birds, which is what i'm most familiar with,, most quizzes are north american centered - i do know quite a few birds from there but there's a lot of warblers, sparrows and hawks with plumage variations and it can get confusing lol

[eternal-echoes]

“Although many college students today couldn't locate the Middle Ages on a historical timeline, they are nevertheless sure that the period was one of ignorance, superstition, and intellectual repression. Nothing could be further from the truth - it is to the Middle Ages that we owe one of Western civilization's greatest unique intellectual contributions to the world: the university system.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome.1 The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the medieval world. The Church developed the university system because, according to historian Lowrie Daly, it was "the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."”

- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “The Church and the University,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

—

1. Cf. Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957 [1923]), 1; idem, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cleveland: Meridian, 1957 [1927), 369; Lowrie J. Daly, The Medieval University, 1200-1400 (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 213-14.

[qqueenofhades]

is there a way that colonialism could have been done where it wouldn't be frowned upon by historians? I'm not trying to be condescending or rude or anything. I'm genuinely curious. People have traveled here to start a new life, and they need a place to settle. Honestly, my history is failing me. Did the pilgrims want more land than what they had and drove out the Natives that way?

Hooo boy. There is... a lot going on here.

Basically, and this is nicely as I can possibly say it, "people traveled here to start a new life and they need a place to settle" is straight-up white supremacist mythology about the origins of America and how it was established, and the fact that you're repeating it shows how successfully it has been integrated into what (little) history is actually taught. It's the same school of thought that presents Thanksgiving as a nice hand-holding meeting between the Puritans (the good guys! Founding America! Not at all religious extremists who had been kicked out of England for being, indeed, too religiously extremist) and the friendly Natives! Aww, so much fraternity. Or.... indeed, not so much.

If you are interested in learning how America was actually established as a settler-colonial country by white Europeans through mass violence, centuries-long genocide, and viciously and institutionally discriminatory legal and social measures, the terrible impact that this had on existing Native cultures and peoples, and how this was all retroactively justified and packaged in the narrative of "Manifest Destiny" and religious (Christian) triumphalism, I recommend:

Anghie, Antony. “The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities”, Third World Quarterly (27), 2006, 739-53.

Bushman, Claudia. America Discovers Columbus: How An Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992)

Churchill, Ward. “The Law Stood Squarely On Its Head: U.S. Legal Doctrine, Indigenous Self-Determination and the Question of World Order”, Oregon Law Review (81), 2002.

Churchill, Ward. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997).

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Hall, Anthony J. Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010)

Huhndorf, Shari N. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)

Morris, Glenn T. “Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Development of a Decolonizing Critique of Indigenous Peoples and International Relations” in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (Grounds, Tinker, & Wilkins, eds.) (Lawrence, KS University Press of Kansas, 2003)

Newcomb, Steven T. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishers, 2008)

Saito, Natsu Taylor. Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism  and International Law (New York: New York University Press, 2010)

Tinker, Tink, and Freeland, Mark. “Thief, Slave Trader, and Murder: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline”, Wicazo Sa Review (2008) 25-50.