#Military comparison

[butchford]

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]

[cookie-nom-nom]

[tyrianludaship]

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

[homunculusalphonse]

i may be biased but i prefer fma scar forgiving his brother in the 2003 anime than him forgiving the military that destroyed his people in brotherhood. i know 2003 and brotherhood are different adaptations with different core themes, but scar forgiving the military will never sit right with me.

[nueveg]

[telesodalite]

With Krok now on my mind, it's reminded me of like, the whole deal of him coping with the loss of his squad by believing they'd just become separated? Because that bit is such a fascinating aspect of his character to me.

It's vague in a way that doesn't totally confirm whether he truly 100% deluded himself, or if he just kept telling himself that to try and distract from the truth and memories he didn't want to face.

(Which, for some reason this pisses Misfire off? Which implies something really interesting there about Misfire and his own coping mechanisms and issues that we don't get much of a peer into unfortunately.)

Anyway, I spent way too long thinking about it when I was reading through the comics. And it's like, did studying battles and strategy play a part in this delusion/lie?

Like, you're a being that lives for millions of years, in the middle of a war spanning those millions of years. So, at some point, surely those battles are going to start to blur together. So you've got that, and then you go and face a frankly horrifically traumatic fight that quite literally rips the people you cared about most, and felt responsible for, apart.

Presumably, Decepticons aren't the greatest at handling shell shock and other such side effects of war. So they just take this freshly traumatized mess of a dude, take him off the front lines and plant him on a warworld to aid the fight from a more comfortable distance.

With all this, the mind is bound to be fickle when faced with such sudden loss and change. But Krok obviously did his job there, or at least he was very knowledgeable on history and tactics beforehand.

Either way, he studied battle after battle, went through records of fight after fight, planned for what's next and reconsidered what had already happened. Hundreds of wins and losses.

So did it get jumbled there? In having a head full of battles, did some of them blur and mix with the one that took everything away from him? In trying to solve the failures of past battles, did he try and find where a victory could've been had against the wreckers that day? Did he find a solution that would've had his squad still whole and alive?

From there, did it slip into delusion, or a desperate lie to keep himself going?

I feel like his "mental health matters" moment was an interesting insight into it and possibly the average soldier's rough outlook on trauma. But it was still very surface level I think, but I guess going too deep into the why's and how's wouldn't have been important until maybe the Scavenger centric comics that uh, never happened :/

[mushroom-through-the-stargate]

i love how rodney keeps calling john "kirk" when hes very clearly tom paris

[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]

[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.]