#Structural alignment

[rotruff]

night so long you start thinking of your f/o taking care of you so you can just lay down . night so long you start thinking abt them taking off coats and unzipping dresses or unbuttoning shirts and being careful when they take off any makeup or glasses and giving gentle little reminders when they hand over any medications or even just a glass of water to make sure you've had some.

[stephantom]

I’d need to watch it again to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure that Thomas Becket is the only character who independently initiates touch with Henry?

There are plenty of people whom Henry touches, and it’s almost always possessive or threatening: the villager woman in the first flashback scene, the Saxon peasant girl (and possibly the old man? I think he prods at both of them with his riding crop), Gwendolen (holding her shoulders/neck), the French prostitute (kissing, leaning over, sitting on, slapping her butt), his sons (pushing and kicking them), the bishop (strangling), his barons (clutching onto one, tapping one’s head to indicate his vapidness), and Thomas too—(clasping his shoulders when he realizes Thomas is hurt, holding his hand to put on the chancellor ring).

Interestingly, I don’t think we ever see Henry touch or be touched by his mother or his wife. There’s the moment when he grabs/kicks their needlework, and later on he knocks all the plates off the table, possibly vaguely in their direction—so there are two physical interactions which are violent but still sort of… distant? And still the direction is just Henry to them (in terms of physicality, anyway—verbally, they do initiate conversations/fights with him).

Does anyone touch Henry? There are the monks who whip him in the end, but Henry has ordered them to do it. Likewise, there’s the servant/valet/page who begins to wipe him dry in the bath scene, but again, that’s someone performing a duty. Thomas Becket though, cuts in and takes over the drying, and the dialogue tells us explicitly that he’s not expected to do this, and doesn’t have to (“You’re a nobleman—why do you play at being my valet?”) but Becket seemingly wants to do it, and he knows Henry likes how he does it: enthusiastically, confidently, warmly, and freely (“No one does it like you, Thomas”). He towels Henry’s head, helps Henry put on his boots, and then casually uses Henry’s legs to push himself up to stand.

There’s the scene in Henry’s tent, after the French prostitute has left and the two of them are sitting on the bed: Becket sort of leans in and briefly clasps Henry’s arm where it’s lying in his lap, casually and warmly.

There’s also the getaway horse ride, where Becket is holding onto Henry, arms wrapped around him, and they’re both laughing and smiling. Henry’s shirt actually falls open a little and Becket’s hand winds up on his bare torso.

And then there are the thwarted attempts at touch, after the split: the two scenes where Henry accuses Becket of not loving him. Both times, Becket moves toward Henry and reaches out to touch him, and both times, Henry moves away and tells him to keep his distance.

They’re quick little things, but if they are actually the only instances of anyone touching Henry affectionately (or even of their own volition) that we see over the course of the movie, it does support an impression of Henry as fundamentally isolated—maybe there is truth to his claim that Becket is the only person who’s ever loved him.

What’s tragic is that 1) Henry doesn’t really know how to express love himself (see: Henry expressing nothing but violence and entitlement to everyone else around him, and even to Becket for the most part), and 2) Becket’s love, albeit huge in Henry’s world, is conflicted and unfulfilling—for both of them.

Becket might be the only person who’s dared to reach out to Henry and meet him on something close to a human level, and Henry loves him for it, but why does Becket do it? Part of it may just be an instinct of Becket’s to fulfill a need where he sees one, if he can, and if it benefits him. I think it’s so interesting that Henry seems obsessed with the question of whether Thomas really loves him, when it seems the truth might be that Thomas actually doesn’t know; maybe it’s an unanswerable, even nonsensical question to him. Like, what else could he do? I don’t know. “Insofar as I was capable of love, yes I did [love you].” But the fact that his last words, unwitnessed and private, are, “Poor Henry.” Fuck me up.

Ok, that last paragraph got away from me and now I can’t stop. Tempted to draw comparisons to “Beauty and the Beast” (this is a sad version where no magical transformation happens… unless you take a particular Catholic stance and consider that both of them maybe took real solace and meaning in Thomas being made a saint and that Henry maybe found real absolution through his penance).

I also want to compare all of this to “The Lion in Winter”, where it feels like, rather than a story about one lonely monster in a castle full of people he sees as objects, it’s a whole microcosm of traumatized and power-hungry people, reaching out for power and security and love and stabbing each other in the back, over and over. (Like, of course his mother and wife and kids have complex feelings for him—some of which involve love!) I think that depiction is better and less myopic, more true to life and probably a more accurate portrait of the historical figures involved (even when it comes to Henry and Becket—Becket was of that world too, after all), but I think I’ve rambled enough about all of this, so I’m going to end this post now. I’ll just say that there’s something nevertheless appealing about the boiled-down fairytale melodrama of “no one else ever loved me but you!”

[msburgundy]

also the fact that my jaw seems to be accepting the corrected position makes me feel more optimistic about the prognosis overall

[febos]

Happy to share, ARTEMIS is now published at NAR!

https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae758

ARTEMIS is a new tool for RNA/DNA 3D structure superposition and structure-based sequence alignment. Our benchmarks show that it outperforms the existing tools for both sequentially-ordered and topology-independent alignment.

ARTEMIS allowed us to identify an intriguing structural similarity between Lysine and M-box riboswitches (see the figure) and to describe the minor-groove/minor-groove helical packing motif. ARTEMIS is the first tool able to report several alternative superpositions, which makes it suitable for structural motif identification tasks.

ARTEMIS is available at GitHub: https://github.com/david-bogdan-r/ARTEMIS

Thanks to Davyd Bohdan, Janusz Bujnicki, & International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw!

[itspileofgoodthings]

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[wildstar25]

Shout out to this specific illustration of Izutsumi's claws Ryoko Kui's Daydream Hour 3 for being the closest representation to how I picture Arsay's claws. Granted Arsay's are longer, but I've always been into the idea of them being retractable to a degree. Arsay trims them often but they also grow pretty fast!

[ragsy]

i gotta find a way to share a picture of it without fully doxxing myself but when i got my passport renewed today, the circuit clerk office gave me a luggage tag as i was leaving, and it is absolutely one of the most "GRAPHIC DESIGN IS MY PASSION" objects i've ever held in my hands

[lesbianlenas]

i was considering taking a class & then i saw that u have to write a 7k word paper for it omg 😭 i already have to write my comment which is 7k words imagine me writing two 7k word papers in one semester 😭 i was immediately like nvm i’m not taking that!

[mayor-david-prentiss]

not to be a hater but i hate what they did to the italian course on duolingo :/ now the course is the same as every other site, teaching you a bunch of phrases that you'd need if you were a tourist, but not actually teaching you grammar. it's unironically worse for my desire to learn than the nonsense sentences that at least utilized the grammar and vocab they'd previously taught me

[express-archives]

even though ambrose was the one who usually took care of them, artemis was actually the one who tended to many of the orphaned children's emotional and physical needs in-depth when she could. among these children was a baby mnemosyne, but that isn't the main point of this post HAHAH

the cousins were joined in their efforts to protect these kids who had suffered so much at the hands of war, but both of them were very busy participating in it. ambrose was not as attuned to their needs as artemis and usually just did what she told them to.

...which still heavily carries over to the present time. ambrose likes kids but struggles with taking care of them to an extent (they're kind of awkward at it ngl), meanwhile artemis is proficient at it like it's the easiest thing in the world.

[sugarglider-s]

holy fuck the more I read about noam chomsky the more I love him.

[keeps-ache]

'you're too technical' no i'm not!! you're using the wrong phrase and the wrong words and equivalating two things that are nearly complete opposites and/or irrelevant to each other !!

[anghraine]

The secondary D&D group I complained about before got worse, and I just remembered one of the highlights was the DM's absolutely terrible take on alignment.

He's not strict about it, which is good, I guess, but his rationale is that Lawful Good = your character's idea of what is good is entirely determined by the law, Chaotic Good = compelled to immediately act on noble impulses, no matter how stupid, while his takes on True Neutral and the evil alignments were fairly normal.

I've always gone with "Lawful" not as "goodness is defined by the law"—which could very easily just end up at functional Lawful Evil—but as a shorthand for lawful characters' drive towards systems of order, even if it's not uncritical acceptance of any system of order the character happens to encounter. There's a reason that the Lawful Evil stereotype is "villain with a code" and not "villain who obeys every law ever," but idk, some people seem unwilling to extend the more functional version of Lawful in Lawful Evil to Lawful Good. Like ... no, a Lawful Good character is a genuinely good person by definition, and no more restricted by every legal code in the world than a Lawful Evil character would be.

I think a lot of interesting character dynamics are lost in "goodness is the law if you're Lawful Good" rather than "Lawful Good characters are driven by noble motives and by adherence to a systematized order or code." If it's the intersection of Lawful and Good and not Lawful = Good, then the lawful and good motives might reinforce each other at times, but can also collide in interesting ways.

And no, Chaotic Good =/= Chaotic Stupid.

[gardengnosticator]

Do you have any thoughts on the abolition of the family?

why did this ask get formatted into a column?

edit: okay so now its normal

[swordatsunset]

My general (not hardline) opinion on the ‘family’ within media and art and stories is that it can be deeply stifling and exhausting to see stories that uphold the family as the place where you return to comfort and safety— but that I think much of the friction in more general stories is with terms. “Found family” as a concept I think can be very affirming for this idea of companion or kinship, when not simply twisted into “found family is when random people end up reenacting all the roles and dynamics of the nuclear family, except this time the gruff dad is not ACTUALLY her biological dad!” The family is shorthand for comfort, and kinship, and companionship, and it is very difficult to articulate those particular relationships without needing to reference the family, or familial dynamics, but I don’t think that inherently condemns lots of media in this grey space as regurgitating the structure of the family even if you call it by the name of “found family,” because I think oftentimes they are engaging with an approach beyond the family

[angelsaxis]

i liked these violent delights but im listening to this hour long rant review of it because i know that part of why i loved it so much was the prose. id just come off a book that i hated (infinity son, so so so boring) and i read that strong opening and i was hooked. also i loved juliet's cousin(s) askldfhklsjdf