#Military comparison

[vngful]

im sorry this made me laugh so f*cking hard i had to share it here too

[mythalism]

genuinely curious how the writers and larger dragon age audience would treat thom rainier if instead of being appropriately* repentant and putting himself in prison he blew up a major orlesian government building to instigate a chevalier rebellion or tried to have someone do some necromantic blood magic ritual involving uncertain danger and possible sacrifices to bring the innocent children he ordered killed back to life

[ponyrepress]

The way the Canaries are structured is interesting when you think about the fact they basically consist of people deemed both useful and expendable to elf society. Most of them are prisoners on forbidden magic charges for any reason you can think of. The wardens are nobles' kids that more often than not are their least favorites (Mithrun being an exception thanks to his brother being physically unfit to take the job). They're formally called the Dungeon Investigation Unit, but widely referred to as Canaries on account of the fact they're basically a suicide squad and the apt description of Canaries in a coal mine when their boats' bows are marked with birds being right there. Like. There's a lot to be said about elf society given the fact that the people sent to be on the forefront of dangerous situations on behalf of the queen are all people considered to be disposable in one way or another.

[marejuka]

I want to get used by them Till i cry and theres a Pool underneath me from squirten AHHHG

[guysshowingofftheirmuscles]

[nueveg]

[cookie-nom-nom]

[cervinae-canine]

This isn't completely related to selfshipping but i unironically love making up shipnames for my s/i and the tf2 characters.

[also to note: some of these are not canon; pyro and scout are friends; and saxton hale is just kinda there. idk he's alright.]

Engineer x Morale: Radio Repair

Soldier x Morale: Roger That

Spy x Morale: Esprit de corps, Radio Drama

Medic x Morale: Herzschlag / Heartbeat

Demoman x Morale: Boombox

Sniper x Morale: Radio Silence, National Outback

Heavy x Morale: Tea and Jam

Scout x Morale: Skip Distance

Pyro x Morale: Smoke Signals

Miss Pauling x Morale: Two-way Radio

Saxton Hale x Morale: Mating Calls [this one is just dumb ignore]

Proships DNI

[nightmare-foundation]

First. I must say, thank you for being an ozpin apologist.

What makes you dislike the Academies so much? Other than maybe the age. Actually how does the system even work? I never cared much for the rwby side stuff (only recently watched the vid on the great war & a reading of The Infinite Man), so if it's mentioned there I wouldnt know. Is it just Combat School-> Huntsman Academy, or is there more to it?

I don't actually dislike the Academies, but a lot of people do. I see them as a neutral/morally gray sort of thing.

In general, how the Huntsman system works seems to be you start training from a young age and then you get into one of the four Academies. A lot of stuff on how it works isn't very clear? But Combat School isn't a requirement to get into the Academies (Jaune and Blake got into Beacon without going into Combat Schools), though it seems to be the most normal, possibly the safest way to train and get into the Academies.

I think an issue is how young people typically start training, which seems to be... 10-13 years old if I had to hazard a guess? Though this doesn't seem to be required either (Jaune got in with no training, and learned quickly, but this doesn't seem to be normal) I don't think, just the norm. It's also unclear if 17 years old is the required age to get into a Huntsman Academy, or if 17 is just the minimum required age with the occasional outlier (i.e. Ruby getting in at 15). I'd say it's more likely 17 is just the minimum required age, since it'd be kinda stupid to not allow people to join based on age lol.

Its also unclear to me if getting into the Huntsman Academies is the ONLY way to become a Hunter. Overall I'd say the Academies are comparable to college, with it being the norm to train from a young age and then get into one of the 4 Academies at 17 at the youngest.

The Academies, to me, also seem to be pretty safe for what they do. No required waivers to get in (waivers, iirc, being legal documents to keep an organization or person from being sued), lots of safety measurements (the cameras in the Emerald Forest and the likelihood of the teachers intervening during initiation and training missions), plus legal processes (Ozpin interviewing teams CVFY and RWBY individually for example, and iirc says that certain things have to happen and if things go wrong he and Glynda are held responsible, etc). It's definitely not foolproof, given the plotline of Hazel's sister, Gretchen, dying during a training mission, but these moments of things going wrong are treated as unusual.

In my opinion, the Academies are definitely necessary on paper. The actual system itself is flawed, and each Academy has their own separate issues given they work independently, but overall the Huntsman Academies aren't as evil as people make them out to be. People are going to have to learn to fight Grimm, considering they're an existential threat, and it was already common to learn how to fight them before; the Academies just centralize the learning and makes it safer to do so, and also offers the necessary resources to learn and make weapons. It's safe to assume that before it was learn to fight Grimm or die, for the most part.

The Academies also help to make non-huntsmen feel safer, since Hunters can also be hired help, and there's lots of Hunters being pumped out every year. People can be protected, or they can learn to fight, where that might not've been an option before.

The Academies DO have flaws, don't get me wrong, but I believe those flaws tend to be intrinsic to the kingdoms themselves rather than always being a flaw of the entire system itself. The episode that reveals Cinders backstory is criticizing Atlas itself, since Rhodes is, presumably, an Atlesian Huntsman and pressures her not to fight her literal slave owners (and this episode is in the Atlas arc, which basically repeats "Atlas fucking sucks" to you a billion different times). Not only that, but Atlas Academy is also pretty tied to the Atlas military, and also doesn't typically let faunus in. These are pretty uniquely Atlas issues, given the other kingdoms don't have militaries and the other kingdoms also let in faunus, including the very anti-faunus kingdom of Mistral.

So the Academies don't all share the same issues, which is pretty clear since Beacon is seemingly the most progressive of the Academies (though still deals with anti-faunus bullying, but Cardin and his team are the only examples and were only seen in v1, so we don't know how common that is either). The criticisms of the Academies are all very region-based so far, and that's the legitimate criticisms (I'm still not sure where people got the impression that students regularly die in the Academies, since there's nothing even implying that).

Basically my opinions of the Academies are that they're more or less necessary, though they do have problems that vary from Academy to Academy (forgot to mention- Shade seems very ableist and strength-based, which is a very Vacuo-unique issue that the other Academies don't deal with). I'd argue the biggest issues lie with the Combat Schools, given how young students start training, though the Combat Schools aren't required.

Otherwise, the Academies lie in a gray area. The people on Remnant don't live like we do; they're in a perpetually post-apocalyptic world with monsters as an existential and very real threat. Even if you don't have any Huntsman relatives, it's still very likely you've either lost someone to the Grimm, or know someone who did. They're a constant threat unless you live a very privileged life, and even then, they can still be a threat. Fighting is a very normal and necessary thing in the world of Remnant, and is pretty much baked into the world's cultures. Civilization being destroyed is a very real threat, and a constant one, and the population on Remnant is much lower than here, IRL. So something like the Academies are genuinely necessary there, whereas it wouldn't be here.

Its a very complicated and nuanced thing lol. People have a hard time really believing that the Academies lie in a gray area, rather than being completely 100% evil and unnecessary. They're very necessary, and have flaws. The only way you can believe they aren't necessary is if you think the Grimm are somehow secretly Not That Bad. Dunno, it's complicated lol.

[lurking-latinist]

I think I might need the mathematical resources of category theory to express the blorbo thoughts I'm having right now

[lesbiansloveseokjin]

day 239/548 of jungkook's military service

this picture was posted on 170702 with the caption:

017 #BTS LIVE TRILOGY EPISODE III THE WINGS TOUR ~Japan Edition~ Last day in Sapporo! This is also the last day of the fan club exclusive event booths. JUNG KOOK's handwriting is written on each card☺ Thank you for your hard work everyone👍 #BTS

(trans cr: Jackie @ bts-trans)

[guysshowingofftheirmuscles]

[liiacfleur]

I love writing smut but damn it’s hard to find a good word other than semen that’s time period accurate without sounding like a medical text book

[wonder-worker]

In the end, politics was an accretion of personal decisions, and that means that the personality of the protagonists cannot be left out of the discussion. It determined not only how they reacted to the situations in which they found themselves, but how others reacted to them. The growing support for Edward IV in 1461 must have owed something to the realisation that he would make an effective king - whereas his father never seems to have been regarded in that light.

— Rosemary Horrox, "Personalities and Politics", The Wars of the Roses (Problems in Focus), Edited by A.J Pollard

When the worst had happened, and civil war was a reality, the overwhelming imperative was to find some way of restoring order. At the level of high politics, what this entailed in practice was a rallying around the de facto king. The Wars of the Roses, far from weakening the monarchy, actually strengthened it, since the king was the only man able to surmount faction. In spite of [Henry VI’s] manifest failings, Richard, duke of York's criticism of the regime commanded little high-level support - and would have commanded even less but for the crown's alienation of the junior branch of the Nevilles, headed by York's brother-in-law the earl of Salisbury. York in fact never did attain the political viability to break the vicious circle of temporary ascendancy and political exclusion. It was his son, Edward, earl of March, who finally mustered enough support to take the throne. He was able to do so in part because the situation had been transformed by the country's descent into open war, which reduced the compulsion to uphold the king as the embodiment of stability. Once it was no longer a matter of averting war, but of stopping it, political opinion began to divide more evenly between Henry VI and his rival. However, the crucial change may well have been York's own death at the Battle of Wakefield late in 1460. In the ensuing months Edward of York was able to present himself as the man who could mend the shattered political community. That self-identification with unity proved immensely potent, and it was not a role which could plausibly have been filled by his father. In the eyes of contemporaries, York had been the begetter of faction: a man tainted by his willingness to go to extremes.

[fatehbaz]

On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[epikhightechnology]

Ppl calling idols fat as an insult........ when i catch you