#Mark Stafford

[downthetubes]

FOLD lineup adds comic creators Mark Stafford and William Potter to lineup

The first FOLD – Derby Zine Fest is shaping up into an amazing event jam packed with indie creators, coming to Derby on Saturday 13th April 2024

[slingshotsandrosarybeads]

Matt is me when playing games 😂

[une-sanz-pluis]

The same was found in later reigns; the Crown had inbuilt advantages which an energetic king could exploit when it came to securing land. Anne, countess of Stafford had little option but to accept the new division of the Bohun estates as laid down by Henry V. Joan, dowager countess of Hereford, who had held dower in the Bohun lands since the last earl's death in 1373, died in 1419. Henry V then brought a case for the redivision of the inheritance on the grounds that the profits of his share, inherited from his mother Mary de Bohun, were 100 marks less than those derived from the pourparty of Anne's mother Eleanor. Anne's arguments for accepting the original division were overruled and a new partition drawn up. Although this ostensibly still gave Anne greater profits than Henry, her responsibility for arrears due to the king from Brecon, which was allotted to her, and the growing problems of securing revenues from Welsh lordships, meant that she probably lost on the deal. Anne was also anxious to secure lands held by her father Thomas of Woodstock, and here persistence and determination paid off in the end and she secured the lordships of Oakham and Holderness. It is significant that when her father's attainder was reversed by Henry IV he 'forgot' Anne's claim and granted Holderness to his son Thomas, whose widow refused to surrender the lordship after his death in 1421. It appears that Anne did not secure the lordship until the year before she died.

Jennifer Ward, English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages

[thingsmk1120sayz]

The 13 year old Sabres shirt from the last time they were in the playoffs

[willstafford]

Full of Beans

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK Gatehouse Theatre, Stafford, Thursday 12th December 2024 Eric Potts is a giant of pantomime and, although he doesn’t grace the stage in this production, the script bears his hallmarks from start to finish.  If there’s anything he doesn’t know about pantomime, it probably isn’t worth knowing.  This show is just one of ten he has written this year for venues throughout the…

[ultramarkmacsounds]

(markmacshow) Another chance to checkout last night’s show on 107.3 Stafford FM. Mark Mac - The Sounds Collective We are very proud to welcome back A Good friend of mine, And a brilliant Dj, An awesome Producer and The Owner of The Excellent South African Deep House Label DeepStitched, He did us an exclusive hour long guest mix all the way from Johannesburg South Africa it’s the amazing 2lani The Warrior. He has been filling dance floors all over the South African club scene since around 1997 and in that time, he has grown with his experiences and his talents 2lani has been one of the main people in South that has made distinct difference in the south African music scene. He has been responsible for expanding Deep house and Underground music throughout South Africa, and way beyond. We are so chuffed that 2Lani has found time to join us on The Sounds Collective this week and he did us an exclusive Brilliant One hour Guest mix... As for me I'm Jumped on the decks for the first hour and I mixed up a selection of brand new promos and brand new releases and a few awesome classics. All of which are coming from Some top quality artists and some outstanding underground labels. The show kicked off at Midnight and went on for two hours. on 107.3 Stafford FM Across the county. Online at www.stafford.fm/ And the new you can find the links for the brand new app at www.stafford.fm/daytimes/mobile-app/?_=412 I do hope you enjoy… MarkMark Mac Hour 1 1 Jordan Reece feat. Mellow Men - Moon Queen (Mark Mac Remix) - Sound Vessel Records 2 Atley Bestoren - Soulful (Original Mix) - DeepClass Records 3 Mark Mac – Across The Globe – 247 Re-edit. 4 Taleman - Second Date (Original 12") – Souksonic 5 Amarno - Structure - Original Mix - Oh! Records Stockholm 6 Marcus Kardos - Delusions - Erdi Irmak Remix - Bekool Records. 7 Lance Kearns - Ahoo Original Mix – Deepwit Recordings 8 Susana Lee, Lafreq, M-Sol DEEP - I Found You – Label M-Sol DEEP 9 Mishandinho – Socotra – Label Blur. Release Date: 13/10/2023 10 Khaaron - Extraneus - Original Mix - Ready Mix Records 11 Ismail Kizil, M-Sol DEEP - Silk Road - Label M-Sol DEEPMark Mac2Lani The WarriorThe Sounds CollectiveStafford FMDeep HouseHouseTechHouseDeepTechnoTechSpaceSpaceHousevibesChillMixDjProducedsmoothTranceClassHouseTunesTracksPromosMixeddeepdeephousemusicdeephousevibesdeephouselovers107.3StaffordFmOrganicHouse

[criphd]

At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[metamorphesque]

touch as a love language

Margaret Atwood, Christophe Vacher, William Stafford, Alphonse Osbert, Shauna Barbosa, Sherrie McGraw, Natalie Diaz, Mark English, John Keats, Megan Howland, Marya Hornbacher, Ron Hicks, Sanober Khan, Ron Hicks, Banana Yoshimoto, Ron Hicks, Ocean Vuong, Anne Magill, Mary Oliver

buy me a coffee

[ycoil]

We define hypnosis as a situation in which imaginative suggestions for changes in thoughts, feelings, and actions are provided to a person in a context defined as “hypnosis,” with the expectation that the participant will respond to them in a compelling manner consistent with his or her beliefs about hypnosis, often derived from the broader socio-cultural context. Imaginative suggestions are requests to experience an imaginary state of affairs as if it were real. (Kirsch & Braffman, 2001) They differ from various other types of suggestion (e.g., the placebo effect, sensory suggestions, and the misinformation effect), as indicated by relatively low correlations between responsiveness to these various types of suggestion. Imaginative suggestions can be given with or without the induction of hypnosis. When given in a hypnotic context, they can be administered by a person designated or perceived to be in the role of a “hypnotist” or self-administered, in which case the situation is construed as “self-hypnosis.”

It can be said that someone is “hypnotized” when he or she responds to imaginative suggestions that are presented following a hypnotic induction ritual, which may be elaborate or as simple as merely defining the situation as “hypnosis.” People who are able to respond to the imaginative suggestions that are characteristic of hypnosis are often termed highly hypnotizable or susceptible to hypnosis. However, the very high correlation between responsiveness to these suggestions in hypnosis, and the same suggestions without the induction of hypnosis (r = .67 for behavioral scores; r = .82 for subjective scores; Braffman & Kirsch, 1999), indicates that the term highly suggestible is a more accurate description of these individuals. We propose that the ability to respond to imaginative suggestions depends on the ability to experience or translate the suggested sensations and imaginings into credible and compelling subjective experiences and actions...

...it is crucial to clearly define the events as “hypnotic” in nature, to distinguish the social interaction from everyday communications, and to mark the special occasion as one in which consciousness or capabilities will be optimally and radically expanded beyond the mundane. That is, what is paramount is that the hypnotist presents communications in such a way that they are deemed to be “hypnotic,” as defined by the socio-cultural context...

...The broad skein of cultural beliefs and expectations in which hypnosis is embedded coalesces into a loosely woven script that specifies how events will unfold and what is expected from the participant during hypnosis (Lynn & Green, 2011). In this initial stage, the hypnotist may define hypnosis in various ways, ranging from a state of absorption in suggestions, much like being absorbed in a movie; to an altered state of consciousness; a state of dissociation; and thinking and imagining with suggestions. The particular way in which hypnosis is defined is less important than casting the situation as “hypnotic,” boosting response expectancies (i.e., anticipations of automatic subjective and behavioral responses to particular situational cues) for successful responding and providing a rationale for administering suggestions that are delivered in the next phase. According to Kirsch, hypnotic inductions produce hypnotic responses, much like placebos, by the power of the expectancies they induce and produce alterations in a wide variety of responses, including sexual arousal, anxiety, depression, and pain (Kirsch, 1985, 1991, 1994). When hypnosis is described as a trance, participants are not as responsive and experience diminished subjective effects compared to when hypnosis is defined as merely involving cooperation (Lynn, Vanderhoff, Shindler, & Stafford, 2002). This finding is not particularly surprising, given that many participants experience trepidations regarding what they (mistakenly) believe to be succumbing to a radically altered state of consciousness in which they relinquish control to the hypnotist. Indeed, this widely prevalent belief may predictably engender uneasiness and even outright anxiety and reluctance or resistance to participate fully. Accordingly, early on, the hypnotist often confronts cultural myths and misconceptions head on, informing individuals that they will not lose control, that they can resist suggestions if they choose to do so, and that they will not lose touch with their surroundings.

In this initial information-giving or “preinduction” stage of the hypnotic proceedings, rapport and positive response expectations about hypnosis are established, participant fears are minimized as myths about hypnosis are debunked, and an unspoken “contract” is established that the hypnotist will facilitate the responses of the participant who is willing, motivated, and hopefully able to experience whatever is suggested. This first stage also often involves setting an agenda for hypnosis and removing barriers to optimal responding in which (a) suggestions are tied to goals of research or therapy; (b) motivation is enhanced by emphasizing the appealing features of hypnosis (e.g., relaxation, calm); and (c) expectancies about hypnosis are clarified, often by way of discussion that reveals and addresses lingering concerns about full immersion in the experience of hypnosis.

Lynn, S. J., Laurence, J.-R., & Kirsch, I. (2015). Hypnosis, Suggestion, and Suggestibility: An Integrative Model. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis

[downthetubes]

London’s Bookery Gallery’s “All About Ink” exhibition opens this weekend

A smashing exhibition of comic art opens at the Bookery Gallery in London this weekend

London’s The Bookery Gallery hosts an inky extravaganza, All About The Ink!, this month, opening on Saturday 8th April and running until 6th May 2023. An exhibition of contemporary cartooning and comics art, the show will be a cavalcade of inky splendour, hanging original works by over 20 cartoonists, alongside digital displays of works in progress, coloured finishes and short films. The…

[familyabolisher]

At the outset of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans' genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other's present is the colonizer's own past. Wells's Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race's own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as "living representatives of the early Stone Age," and thus their "extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged" (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of "our" past, with Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of "primitive" societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on "Scientific Exploration and Empire" in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, "absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel" for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable "fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old" (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[namu-the-orca]

Do you happen to know why bowhead whales have that little line of black dots on their white chins? Once I noticed it it became so distinctive to them, it seems so unique! Is it markings or perhaps just like, white rubbed off by ice or something??

Hi! Great question! Bowhead whales indeed wear some beautiful "bead strings" on their chins. They are true markings, and each dot indicates the location of a chin hair! In some whales you'll see that nearer the tip of the chin, the dots become tiny and plentiful, indicating a hairy muzzle. See for example this whale captured by Todd Mintz:

There is a lot of individual variation though. Some whales have few, very large dots, while others have more, smaller ones. The white chin patch itself can also be very big, other times it is very small (like the whale on the left, photo by Kate Stafford), or entirely washed out gray, making the dots stand out less (like the whale on the right, photo by WWF).

Interestingly it seems the "coding" for the hair spots is always present, as they are even a slightly darker shade than their base greyish black colour. See? You can see the "chin" dots run almost up to this Bowhead's cheeks! (Photo also by Todd Mintz or another Arctic Kingdoms photographer).

And while the dots always follow hairs, the bottom of the white chin marking can have all sorts of funky shapes. It can fade out normally, have quite a jagged edge, or a spotted one, like this whale! (photo courtesy of NMFS)

Why exactly they have this colouration I do not know! It may have some advantage we don't know of yet. But sometimes colouration also just happens, and because it is neither detrimental not advantageous, it just sticks around.

[willstafford]

A Thing of Beauty

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Gatehouse Theatre, Stafford, Tuesday 12th December 2023 Beauty and the Beast has increased in popularity as a pantomime since the 1991 release of Disney’s animated feature film and, inevitably, audience perceptions and expectations will be coloured by the pervasiveness of that version.  Of course, for copyright reasons at least, there have to be differences in any…

[gemini-enthusiast]

On this day in space program history, on July 15th, 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz test project launched from KSC Launch Complex 39B...

And from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

This mission was a major landmark in space history by being the first meeting of an international crew in space. American astronauts Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand docked their Apollo capsule to the Soviet Soyuz capsule carrying cosmonauts Alexei Leonov (who had been the first person to walk in space a decade prior) and Valery Kubasov. The ASTP was also the last usage of an Apollo capsule, and the last American space flight before the completion of the Space Shuttle.

The two spacecraft docked on July 17th, and the commanders of each craft, Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov, shook hands to mark the occasion.

Together, the joint crews participated in a number of scientific experiments, including using the Apollo capsule to block the sun and create a man-made eclipse, allowing the Soviet capsule to study and photograph the sun's corona.

The ASTP is now one of the lesser-known parts of the Apollo program, but was a hugely important landmark in space history, and paved the way for future international relations in space. Without ASTP, we would not have the Shuttle-Mir program nor the International Space Station. It marked the end of the Apollo program on a high note.

Well, except for the fact the Apollo crew got poisoned by rocket fuel on reentry and nearly died, but that's neither here nor there.

[lonestarflight]

Saturn Apollo Program

"This artist's concept depicts the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), the first international docking of the U.S.'s Apollo spacecraft and the U.S.S.R.'s Soyuz spacecraft in space. The objective of the ASTP mission was to provide the basis for a standardized international system for docking of marned spacecraft. The Soyuz spacecraft, with Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov aboard, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam in the Kazakh, Soviet Socialist Republic, at 8:20 a.m. (EDT) on July 15, 1975. The Apollo spacecraft, with Astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Slayton aboard, was launched from Launch Complex 39B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at 3:50 p.m. (EDT) on July 15, 1975. The Primary objectives of the ASTP were achieved. They performed spacecraft rendezvous, docking and undocking, conducted intervehicular crew transfer, and demonstrated the interaction of U.S. and U.S.S.R. control centers and spacecraft crews. The mission marked the last use of a Saturn launch vehicle. The Marshall Space Flight Center was responsible for development and sustaining engineering of the Saturn IB launch vehicle during the mission."

Date: 1974

NASA ID: 9401759

[edwardslovelyelizabeth]

"When she became Queen, Elizabeth Woodville was given guardianship of the young Buckinghams [Henry and Humphrey Stafford] and both they and Katherine [Woodville, Elizabeth’s youngest sister] were brought up together at court, with Elizabeth receiving 500 marks yearly for their maintenance…Being raised alongside her new husband, the pair would have had a chance to get to know each other and then as the royal nursery began to fill up, Katherine would have no doubt also spent time with her royal nieces. Indeed, she appears in later life to have been close with the eldest York Princess, Elizabeth, which may be a friendship that had begun in those early years at court." from The Queen's Sisters by Sarah J. Hodder