#Textual Variants

[irisbleufic]

Here’s something neat that’s adjacent to this analysis, and which further speaks to the intensity of Hamlet’s and Horatio’s bond. In 1891, Wilhelm Viëtor edited and published an edition of Hamlet that placed First Quarto (Q1), Second Quarto (Q2), and First Folio (F1) textual variants side by side in a parallel texts edition. There’s a variant in F1 that deviates from Q1 consisting of a single word, in one of the most often-quoted lines in the entire play, that in all honesty hits so much harder when it’s the textual variant that the occasional director of a production chooses over the Q1 variant. So, here’s the Q1 and F1 variants of this segment laid out on the same page from that edition:

Q1 Text:

There are more things in heauen and earth Horatio

Then are dream’t of in your philofophie

(There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy)

F1 Text:

There are more things in Heauen and Earth, Horatio,

Then are dream’t of in our Philofophie

(There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our Philosophy)

*

What’s my point here? F1’s “our philosophy” goes so much harder and is so much more poignant in this overall context than Q1’s “your philosophy”—but “your” is nearly always chosen over “our.”

Justice for the F1 textual variant, y’all. If you’re ever in a position to direct this show, do what I saw two different directors on separate continents do back in 2005 and choose the “our” reading. Those two productions (Boston’s Shakespeare on the Common & English Touring Theatre) had the queerest, most stunning Hamlet/Horatio duos I’ve ever seen. They both fucking wrecked me.

ummmm. hi. i've talked about this literally a million times but i will talk about it again because i'm deranged

hamlet's father says to him. as a ghost. IF YOU EVER LOVED ME. you will KILL for me. right?

hamlet, as he dies. says to horatio IF YOU EVER LOVED ME… you will LIVE for me .

and in that moment. hamlet's big question, "to be or not to be", is answered, isnt it? not for himself, but for horatio. HE cannot be, but horatio can, horatio MUST if he loved him

and ANOTHER thing. hamlet says to horatio in the middle of the play that he holds horatio in his heart's core, ay, in his heart of heart……. he then changes the subject abruptly, not allowing horatio to respond

as hamlet DIES.. he says "if thou didst ever HOLD ME IN THY HEART" (a CLEAR connection to the earlier conversation) and asks him to live and mourn him and tell his story, and AGAIN hamlet did not ASK "did you love me?" he NEVER asks "did you love me?"

no, he says IF you loved me… (dont tell me. i dont want to know. just listen, dont tell me.) he doesnt want to know the answer, i don't think. i think he's scared to hear it, first in that moment of vulnerability when he shared the largeness of his feelings and bared himself so completely and utterly that he had to brush past it and pretend he hadnt... and last in the moment of vulnerabilty when he is about to die. it's natural, isn't it? to be scared? scared of knowing the truth?

but horatio DOES answer…….. only, he does it when hamlet is already dead. he does it very subtly. he says "good night sweet prince, and may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest"

using the intimate, familiar terms.

for the ENTIRE PLAY he used "you" and "your". only now, when HAMLET IS DEAD, does he use the intimate form. to show how dear hamlet was to him

and another thing……. you'll notice that horatio tries to drink of the poison and kill himself alongside hamlet….. who does that remind you of?

and hamlet's RESPONSE, that its no good for them BOTH to die, that ONE must live on, is SO CLEARLY contrasting (yuppp) romeo and juliet !!

!!!!!!!!!

and what is romeo and juliet? a SATIRE. it's a MOCKERY of young love and the foolishness that comes with it, so when HAMLET AND HORATIO are faced with THE SAME SITUATION, and they handle it better than romeo and juliet, who were a MOCKERY of young love, it leads me to the conclusion that hamlet and horatio are the TRUE example of love. love done the right way, great and true love in the realest sense.

you get it?

also, as a side-note, it's just so interesting to me that horatio, who hamlet said WAS NOT A SLAVE TO HIS PASSIONS, who did NOT get over-emotional and rash in situations like this...... tries to DIE rather than live without hamlet…….. but hamlet stops him. like!! thats his main thing, yet he got so overwhelmed in this moment with grief and honour and whatever you may call it.... it seems significant.

[mindfulldsliving]

Latter-day Saint Views on the Bible: A Comparative Analysis

Latter-day Saints (LDS) hold the Bible in high regard, recognizing it as the word of God. However, they believe its teachings must be interpreted correctly. This unique perspective is foundational to their faith

Photo by Rachel Strong on Unsplash Words carry immense significance in any discourse, especially when discussing religious beliefs and doctrines. In their latest post, the writer at Life After Ministries blog attempts to utilize 1 Timothy 4:16 to critique what they term the “lies of Mormonism.” The writer emphasizes that Christians should heed not just God’s words, but also be aware of the…

[bigboobshaunt]

Idunno! Alex and Sandra are soooo clearly both alter-egos to Alexandra* that I can't help but feel any read that would treat them as different people is very disingenuous, like... their genderfluidity is a reference to the color-changing nature of their alexandrite core, it could not be any clearer...

[creatingblackcharacters]

"This aspect of [Christine] Jorgensen’s story figured prominently for those acutely aware of how unfreedom—in the forms of criminalization, colonialism, imperial conquest, internment, Jim Crow, and other modes of repressive, quotidian violence—figured black life in the United States and around the world. In a letter written to Jorgensen’s parents, one woman wrote, “I am a Negro . . . [and] find many obstacles that must be overcome. [Jorgensen also] . . . belonged to a minority group but she [broke] through its limitations. If more people would face the brunt of the battle I am sure we would all live in a much more pleasant world.”

The letter’s invocation of the rhetoric of war to describe the forms of violent limitation that defined blackness as a matter to “overcome” exposes how Jorgensen’s spectacularized trans embodiment carried with it an illusory promise of freedom within a landscape of structural, textual, and physical violence of varying scales.

Jorgensen, in other words, as Emily Skidmore has argued, was instrumental to the construction of the “good transsexual,” whereby she and other white trans women “were able to articulate transsexuality as an acceptable subject position through an embodiment of the norms of white womanhood, most notably domesticity, respectability, and heterosexuality.”

This maneuver, Skidmore notes, “was only possible through the subjugation of other gender variant bodies[;] as the subject position of the transsexual was sanitized in the mainstream press and rendered visible through whiteness, other forms of gender variance were increasingly made visible through nonwhiteness.”"

Black On Both Sides- A Racial History of Trans Identity, C Riley Snorton

(yes, I know that they used 'sexual' instead of 'gender', they're using the language of the time to explain how Christine was received politically versus cis and trans people of color)

[nkjemisin]

I’m always on the lookout for creative, world-specific swears in media, and I wanted to say that I think the ones from the Broken Earth series are genuinely fantastic. “Rust” in particular feels very intuitively like a swear, to the point where I sometimes use it in real life!

Were there any other words you considered for that category that didn’t make the cut?

Not really, though I did consider dropping most of the "our world" swears in the text at one point. I was worried that the occasional "shit" or "fuck" might be too jarring -- but in our own world, most cultures have a derogatory word for excrement, and a lot of them exclaim about sex (though not always negatively), so I reasoned that they could fit into a not-our-world too. "Hell" was the real problem, though, because that's a distinctly Christian word. But it occurred to me that the idea of hell as a fiery place underground actually made more sense in the Stillness than it does in our world. There's not much textual support for a fiery hell in the Bible, but the Stillness has a) way more visual evidence of fiery stuff happening underground, given that it's much more seismically active, and b) a cultural awareness that there's Somebody Down There and that They Ain't Nice. So I went ahead and included that one too, though I interspersed it with some "fire-under-earth"s and other local variants just to make it work better.

I've found myself saying "rusting" too, now and again. Tho I also use "frak," "frell," and other SFF neologisms too!

[finelythreadedsky]

unfortunately doing textual criticism in a conference paper means having to read textual variants aloud. suffering.

[yamayuandadu]

I'm assuming we basically don't have any art of Gazbaba and Kanisurra, so based on textual evidence, what would be the most authentic way to depict them in art?

Yeah, there are no known depictions of either of them. Due to their relatively minor position we also have no hints like kudurru symbols or astral association to go by (the latter obviously aren’t always indicative of a deity’s iconography, though). Therefore, everything under the cut is, out of necessity, an educated guess at the absolute best.

In theory, one could base their depiction on the famous reference to both of them as “hairdressers of Nanaya”, which lines up with a name of their shrine in Babylon, Eḫilisigga, “house of beautiful adornment”, with ḫili apparently referring to coiffure in this context (Andrew R. George, Four Temple Rituals from Babylon, p. 295). Probably the best way to indicate that would be to depict them with combs or other paraphernalia of that sort. However, Paul-Alain Beaulieu explicitly labels the characterization of the pair as hairdressers as “late theology” (The Pantheon of Uruk in the Neo-Babylonian Period, p. 318). As far as I am aware there’s no strong indication that their character had some intimate connection with hairdressing at any earlier point in time, even though beautician deities do occur here and there (ex. Ninkarnunna in Ninurta’s court). And there’s no shortage of earlier sources associating them with Nanaya - in fact, in love incantations they almost never appear without her (Gioele Zisa, The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia. Nīš Libbi Therapies, p. 141; note Kanisurra being invoked with Ishara in a formula on p. 271 though) - so I’m not sure if it would be viable to attribute this to preservation bias. In Gazbaba’s case I’d say we have three different possible additional sources to draw from:

a) the incantation series Šurpu addresses Gazbaba as “the smiling one” (ṣayyaḫatu). I would argue we can effectively treat her expression as an attribute based on that - it is agreed the aforementioned title designates her as a deity linked to sexuality (her very name might be derived from kuzbu, which means something along the lines of “sex appeal”, so i’), since Akkadian love poetry emphasizes smiling quite often (he Loss…, p. 141). Given the fairly stoic expressions of most surviving statues, I think a wide smile would stand out as a unique characteristic.

b) it is possible that Gazbaba’s name was either cross contaminated with Nanaya’s or intentionally modified to resemble it, since the variant Kazbaya is also attested (Jeremiah Peterson, God lists from Old Babylonian Nippur in the University Museum, Philadelphia, p. 71-72). It might very well be just a hypocoristic, to be fair, but given the close association between the two this proposal seems plausible to me. On this basis, I would argue assuming she was also depicted similarly to Nanaya isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Granted, the pre-Seleucid depictions of Nanaya aren’t exactly distinct iconographically, so I’m not really sure if this helps much.

c) the third hint is VERY conjectural, and also only came to my attention so recently I didn’t include it in her wiki article yet: in An = Anum, she occurs on tablet IV, but in a somewhat puzzling position, between a list of steppe-related figures and Ishara’s and Manzat’s mini-sections (Wilfred G. Lambert, Ryan D. Winters, An = Anum and Related Lists, p. 22). It’s an open question if she was listed in Nanaya’s section too, since the latter is poorly preserved; we can only be certain that it encompassed Muati, Kanisurra and Bizilla in addition to Nanaya herself (An = Anum…, p. 177). Why Gazbaba would be separate from her peers is uncertain to me - unless some hitherto unknown characteristic made listing her next to nondescript steppe-related entities or Ishara more sensible to the compilers (granted, there might be no reason, and you could also easily question why is Manzat listed after Ishara and not with other astral deities - my personal guess is that due to both being worshiped on the eastern frontier but this is speculative). I’m not sure if this could translate into any tangible iconography, either - though Ishara does have tons of distinct symbols attested, and the steppe association could lend itself to something like Amurru’s stereotypically “western” iconography, I suppose.

As for Kanisurra: a) the association with love and eroticism, while attested, is not equally strong in her case as in that of Gazbaba (The Loss…, p. 142) - so I don’t think transferring what we know about the latter to her would work. Perhaps building upon the one off Ishara connection - so scorpion motifs of some sort - could work? But I’m not entirely sure if that’s warranted. b) her recurring epithet is “lady of the witches” (bēlet kaššāpāti); there is at least one incantation where the sole difference between copies is that some refer to Kanisurra by name and some simply invoke the bēlet kaššāpāti (The Loss…, p. 430). Per analogy with other more or less positively regarded figures invoked to prevent unwanted interference from beings regarded negatively, one is tempted to ask if perhaps Kanisurra was imagined as a witch par excellence, like how Pazuzu was both the scourge of the lil demons and himself a demonic winged figure, while Ninkilim, the lord of small animals invoked to protect crops from his “subjects”, was seemingly a deified mongoose. Daniel Schwemer appears to more or less go into that direction and notes that “imagery of singing witch-girls that descend from heaven and a young, enchanting and, at the same time, dangerous goddess as lady of the witches illustrates that the stereotype of the kaššāptu has little in common with that of the old hag in European folklore” (Mesopotamia in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, p. 52).  

If this assumption can be transferred from text to visual arts, perhaps it would be sensible for Kanisurra to be depicted with objects associated with witchcraft; these included just about anything that could be used to bind a person (Mesopotamia, p. 44); figurines or drawings representing people meant to be affected by a curse (ibidem, p. 44-45); water prepared as if it was for funerary offerings for rituals involving the symbolic killing of a person (ibidem, p. 46-47); miscellaneous “sorcererous devices” (upīšū/upšāšû) sent as omens (ibidem, p. 47-48; Schwemer cites an example involving a dead mouse - it required a mouse burial to break the curse). Slander was also associated with casting curses (ibidem, p. 48-49) but I don’t really think there’s an easy way to represent that visually. c) based on the possible derivation of her name from the mythical toponym Ganzer, ie. the entrance of the underworld, and some less certain evidence (presence in mourning rites for Shu-Sin might have more to do with the ceremony taking place in Uruk than with character of any deity involved) it is presumed that Kanissura was an underworld deity (The Pantheon…, p. 316-317).

Frans Wiggermann argues that members of this category were particularly commonly depicted wearing a type of flat cap in place of the usual more conical or cylindrical horned crowns (Nergal B. Archäologisch, p. 224). However, I’m not entirely sure if this is a consensus view; and I’m pretty sure there’s a fair share of depictions of Nanshe where her crown/cap is flat-ish. Still, it’s a pretty distinct article of clothing.

It would perhaps also be tempting to ask if the attendant deities accompany Nanaya in Sogdian art are a distant echo of Gazbaba and Kanisurra - one of the murals from Panjikent shows her with two smaller figures who are “nimbate, with shoulders aflame, carry spears and at least one of them wears armor” (Michael Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World, p. 123; line drawing on p. 307).

The relief from the funerary couch from the Miho Museum also shows Nanaya in the company of two female attendants, though they are not armed, let alone armored. However, while it does appear plausible that Gazbaba and Kanisurra were still worshiped with Nanaya at least in Borsippa and Babylon in the second half of the first millennium BCE (Four Temple…, p. 295-296; note also Usur-amassu with Kanisurra on p. 296), I am not aware of any evidence that they were transferred eastwards alongside her, so I’d be cautious.

[teatime-tangents-and-toys]

Context for the demonique poll:

Out of 547 dolls (Including non glow variants, presents, res dolls, and 2 plush characters) a total of 7 have brown skin and only 3 are explicitly human skintones (Macumba, demonique, and Gomez addams). The other 4 are a burned doll, a zombie & a ghost fully colored brown, & a scarecrow. Literally .01% and most don't seem to be poc.

None of the latino dolls, their resurrections and variants, including those based on a real person, are brown. Nor is the only hawaiian doll or any of the asian dolls.

There are far more blue (20), grey (14), black (12), and green (37) dolls. THAT'S how low the diversity is.

(ignore my previous ask, there were typos)

Yep. I forgot about Gomez, but he almost doesn't count to me since he's a licensed doll who had to look that way. But on that note, it also really bothers me that we didn't get Candyman. That would have been a slam dunk, and LDD just didn't even make a second clearly Black doll that would have been an obvious choice for LDD Presents.

Further context on this context, if I'm interpreting correctly:

* Burned doll: I'm assuming you mean Honey, who is either burned or extremely decayed. Her vinyl cast is actually the yellow tones that show through, so the doll isn't even molded in brown--the second photo shows her head popped out a little to reveal the base color of her vinyl.

Honey and her friend Hemlock are both zombies dressed as living girls for Halloween, and both of their masks are White, with Honey's remaining real hair matching and further implying the mask is what she used to look like.

* Zombie: Menard is a strange pinkish-brown color as a vinyl cast, which doesn't quite scan as a natural flesh tone, but he is caked in earthy yellow and orange and brown paint where his skin isn't covered by his costume.

The zombie he's based on, from the gruesome film Zombi 2, is from a Caribbean island, but LDD Menard's name and backstory are taken from a different character in the film who is a White man, leaving the LDD pretty ambiguous. The famous zombie from the film is anonymous and wasn't a known character in the story.

* Scarecrow: Purdy in the Wizard of Oz line is cast as the Scarecrow because of her brain theme, and Scarecrow Purdy has a really good brown skintone for potential POC dolls, but is just using it to look more like burlap.

Purdy's other dolls are not evidently to be taken as non-White.

The previous LDD scarecrow, Isaac, has only standard LDD parts for his head and boots, and a soft fabric body and plastic hands that look like twigs, so what little of his "skintone" that's there is yellow-orange and is not meant to look human. There's no implication that Isaac is made from a corpse in either of his poems, and his death date is blank, suggesting he never lived.

* I wasn't sure what you meant by "ghost fully colored brown". If you were talking about Tommy Knocker, I see what you mean:

But Series 34's photos had a misleading heavy filter effect over them, and the real doll is not dusty brown, but rather, a definitively pale tone, possibly close to S11 Isaiah's.

Nobody in Series 34 is a brown skintone, and if they were, it probably wouldn't have been to make them non-White. It would just be a dirt effect.

Further thoughts:

I wouldn't protest against headcanons that Calico was a non-White character giver her patchy mix of three fantasy skin shades (and values) and her yarn hair texture, though textually she's clearly a fantasy Frankenstein monster with a heavy theme of a patchwork fabric rag doll motivating the skin colors and yarn hair.

I'm disinclined to argue the Asian dolls absolutely needed a separate human skintone or that they couldn't join in on stylized pale tones, but none of them even are human-toned. (The Yuki-Onna and Hopping Vampire are Japanese and Chinese respectively, while Maggot is overtly anime-styled and likely Japanese. The first two being stark white suits the look of traditional paintings and dolls from the times and cultures they invoke, but Maggot could be flesh-toned. A few other dolls might also be Asian but that's less confirmable--though it seems any doll who could be read as Asian-coded is also not a human color.)

You're right about Milu being a fantasy color and the Dia de Muertos-inspired dolls all being pale, and indeed, (Latina) Jenna Ortega's Wednesday is given a stylized deathly skintone in LDD rather than using the actor's real color on the TV show. And the only Romani character, in addition to her horrible name (it's just the G-word) and overall stereotyping, is also starkly pale.

[transgenderer]

The Epic of Manas is a traditional epic poem dating to the 18th century but claimed by Kyrgyz tradition to be much older. Manas is said to be based on Bars Bek who was the first khagan of the Kyrgyz Khaganate. The plot of Manas revolves around a series of events that coincide with the history of the region in the 9th century, primarily the interaction of the Kyrgyz people with other Turkic and Chinese people.

The government of Kyrgyzstan celebrated the 1,000th anniversary of Manas in 1995. The eponymous hero of Manas and his Oirat enemy Joloy were first found written in a Persian manuscript dated to 1792–93.[1] In one of its dozens of iterations, the epic poem consists of approximately 500,000 lines.

The epic poem's age is unknowable, as it was transmitted orally without being recorded. However, historians have doubted the age claimed for it since the turn of the 20th century. The primary reason is that the events portrayed occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. Central Asian historian Vasily Bartold claimed that Manas was an "absurd gallimaufry of pseudo-history,"[1] and Hatto remarks that Manas was

"compiled to glorify the Sufi sheikhs of Shirkent and Kasan ... [and] circumstances make it highly probable that... [Manas] is a late eighteenth-century interpolation."[2]

Changes were made in the delivery and textual representation[3] particularly the replacement of the tribal background of Manas. In the 19th century versions, Manas is the leader of the Nogay people, while in versions dating after 1920, Manas is a Kyrgyz and a leader of the Kyrgyz.[4] Use of the Manas for nation-building purposes, and the availability of printed historical variants, has similarly had an impact on the performance, content, and appreciation on the epic.[5]

Attempts have been made to connect modern Kyrgyz with the Yenisei Kirghiz, today claimed by Kyrgyzstan to be the ancestors of modern Kyrgyz. Kazakh ethnographer and historian Shokan Shinghisuly Walikhanuli was unable to find evidence of folk-memory during his extended research in 19th-century Kyrgyzstan (then part of the expanding Russian empire) nor has any been found since.[6]

While Kyrgyz historians consider it to be the longest epic poem in history,[7] the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata and the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar are both longer.[8] The distinction is in number of verses. Manas has more verses, though they are much shorter.

Manas is said to have been buried in the Ala-Too mountains in Talas Province, in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. A mausoleum some 40 km east of the town of Talas is believed to house his remains and is a popular destination for Kyrgyz travellers. Traditional Kyrgyz horsemanship games are held there every summer since 1995. An inscription on the mausoleum states, however, that it is dedicated to "...the most famous of women, Kenizek-Khatun, the daughter of the emir Abuka". Legend has it that Kanikey, Manas' widow, ordered this inscription in an effort to confuse her husband's enemies and prevent a defiling of his grave. The name of the building is "Manastin Khumbuzu" or "The Dome of Manas", and the date of its erection is unknown.

heroic levels of cope from the kyrgyz

[walkswithmyfather]

This is fascinating! By Stefan Hager (FB)

“We currently have 5,800 plus Greek New Testaments manuscripts, 10,000 plus Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 plus manuscripts in various languages). if we were to stack the manuscripts we have found today it would reach more than a mile high). Beating all other historical records of the ancient world. for example, no one doubts the historical person “Homer” as we have 1.800 plus manuscripts of his life, yet we have 25,000 plus manuscripts of the life of Jesus, and that doesn’t include secular sources). And considering that the earliest copies of the New Testament are written within 25 years after the death of Jesus, but the earliest copies of Homers works are written 400 years after the death of Homer. Jesus is the gold standard for historians. If we’re going to doubt Jesus. We might as well doubt all ancient history.

Comparing these manuscripts we find that the teaching, stories, doctrines of the bible are all surprisingly the same. reading a bible in English vs reading a bible in Russian. It may be worded differently but you get the same story/biblical doctrine).

Tho no one manuscript is perfect. Through the centuries, minor differences arose in the various copies of the Scriptures. The vast majority of these differences are simple spelling variants, inverted words (one manuscript says “Christ Jesus” while another says “Jesus Christ” or different ways people have spelled names). or an easily identified missing word. In short, over 99 percent of the biblical text is not questioned. Of the less than 1 percent of the text that is in question, no doctrinal teaching or command is jeopardized. In other words, the copies of the Bible we have today are pure. The Bible has not been corrupted, altered, edited, revised, or tampered with.

“The early books of the bible” were so vastly copied and wide spread that if one group in Africa wanted to change any part, believers in Israel, Rome, Alexandria would have easily identified the change to the wide spread text/message.

This is also evidenced by the Dead Sea scrolls (large portions of Old Testament) which were found in 1947. These scrolls are dated 200BC. So Jesus would have those as scripture during his earthly time, and the content of those scrolls match. If we look at any bible in any chapter and we look at the Hebrew and the same chapter it’s going to read the same way we have today, now it is true there are variations in reading/wording or translation. Every book prior to the printing press has variations. The Quran has variations, The point is, variations don’t give you a different text, a different theology, a different meaning.

Here’s a scaled down example. using textual criticism and cross checking manuscripts. We can pretty much reconstruct what the original said. How does this work?.

Consider the following example. Suppose we have four different manuscripts that have different errors in the same verse, such as Philippians 4:13:

1.I can do all t#ings through Christ

2.I can do all th#ngs through Christ

3.I can do all thi#gs through Christ

4.I can do all thin#s through Christ

Is there any mystery of what the original said?. None whatsoever. By comparing and cross checking manuscripts. the original can be reconstructed with great accuracy and the reconstruction of the New Testament is easier than this, because there are far fewer errors in the actual New Testament manuscripts than there are represented by this example. Plus a vast amount of material to work with.

Any unbiased document scholar will agree that the Bible has been remarkably well-preserved over the centuries. Even many hardened skeptics and critics of the Bible admit that the Bible has been transmitted over the centuries far more accurately than any other ancient document.

There is absolutely no evidence that the Bible has been revised, edited, or tampered with in any systematic manner. No one group has ever had control over the biblical text. The sheer volume of biblical manuscripts makes it simple to recognize any attempt to distort God’s Word. There is no major doctrine of the Bible that is put in doubt as a result of the inconsequential differences among the manuscripts.

Ancient scribes often copied books letter by letter (one by one). not sentence by sentence. It was a long process but they assured Accuracy. And they would count the letters of the copies and count the letters of the original. if the original had 500 letters and the copy had 497 letters, they would destroy the copy and restart.”

[mindfulldsliving]

Biblical Insights on Personal Revelation and Criticism

Jethro advising Moses (detail), Jan van Bronchorst, 1659. Royal Palace of Amsterdam, Wikimedia The concept of personal revelation is not unique to the faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). It is a foundational principle found throughout religious history, including within the Bible itself. Yet, critics of the LDS faith frequently dismiss or invalidate personal…

[scribefindegil]

mmmmm . . . textual variants in early modern print my beloved . . .

[maniculum]

So, this one is from Cambridge's MS Kk.4.25, which Cambridge's digital library describes as a "didactic miscellany". There's actually quite a lot of information on this manuscript accompanying their digitization... I'm putting a cut here before I start throwing in the links and images and stuff.

All right, link:

The manuscript is from England circa 1230, and is apparently from the same tradition as another of their bestiaries (Fitzwilliam MS 254). One of the major differences between the two is that this contains a couple extra chapters, including one enigmatically titled "The Four Ways it is Sinful". (The four ways what is sinful? You know. It.)

The description also tells us this is "a masterpiece of bestiary imagery, often overlooked in discussions of the most beautiful examples," which is not the vibe I was getting from the Flat Crocodile at the top of this post, so hold on a bit while I flip through the digitization.

Okay, so Flat Crocodile is not representative, this is really good. The section on sea creatures is quite charming also. I recommend everyone go follow that link above and flip through it a bit -- there's a table of contents you can use to skip straight to the bestiary.

Anyway, to the point of this whole thing. This critter is supposedly a scorpion, and in fact appears in the "worms / vermin" section of the bestiary. If I'm reading the Latin correctly, it comes between the leech:

and the caterpillar:

Despite that context -- i.e., it being in the correct section and surrounded by other things that fall into the medieval category of "worm" (remember, that's a broad category for them, it includes insects and arachnids like scorpions just fine), our artist has drawn what is clearly the only reptile in the chapter:

It even says "Scorpio vermis" right under the image, jfc.

Also, the lumps around the base of the tail can't be credited to Pliny's "knots" as mentioned before; I counted at least three other lizards with those same lumps when I was looking through the digitization, so it's just part of the artist's style.

Speaking of the artist's style, this one should be exempt from the "identifiably a different animal" penalty because it has little ears and a generally mammalian head... except that's, again, how this artist draws all their lizards. In fact, this "scorpion" is basically identical to the Botrax/Botruca a few pages earlier:

I'm making the executive decision than this penalty applies when the artist is just re-using the design of another critter in the same bestiary, even if technically that's not a real animal.

All right, points:

Small Scuttling Beaſtie? ✓, sure, in context we can assume such

Pincers? ✘

Exoskeleton or Shell? ✘

Visible Stinger? ✘

Limbs? 4

Vibes... I dunno. It's fine. It's a lizard, which is nice enough, but we've had much better lizards. And it's kind of losing out in comparison to the other illustrations in this manuscript. I went back and forth between a 2 and a 3, and eventually decided to just settle at 2.5 / 10.

As previously mentioned, -1 for copying. Which... oh dear. Makes this officially the Third Worst Scorpion, sorry Flat Croc fans.

Final points:

2.9 / 10

Eyes on your own work.

[littlesparklight]

(different anon, responding to that last anon)

ah, yes, i know if someone cursed me, i'd absolutely love it if someone got "retributive justice" for me by...murdering my little sibling! (heavy, heavy sarcasm if it wasn't obvious)

Right, of course, of course, that's what we would all want! /s

I have seen many strange statements around Greek myth in general and the Trojan war participants in particular (especially the Trojans), but this is... definitely among the most out there weirdest ones.

There's absolutely no connection between Kassandra being cursed and Troilos being murdered - neither in whatever scraps that have survived textually, nor among scholiasts. You can't just up and decide a couple thousand years later that "this unconnected event is not just connected to another event, but is retributive justice for this other unconnected event!"*. Like, on what grounds??? (*You know what event is sometimes connected to Troilos' murder in the visual representations? The murder of Priam! (Also sacrilegious!) Priam is in a few paintings shown sitting on an altar when receiving news of Troilos being attacked/killed, and sometimes Troilos' death is juxtaposed with that of Priam's. Guy Hedreen in his Capturing Troy talks about this, pointing out that the later prophecy/Troilos' death being made one of the conditions of Troy's fall does in a way connect it directly to the death of Priam.)

And if there would be any "retributive justice" it should come through, or because Kassandra wants it, shouldn't it? By someone connected to her, if not she herself. And Achilles is not at all connected to her. He wouldn't even know anything's happened to her!

Never mind that, exactly, Troilos is her little brother. We don't even have sources until late that says he was the son of Apollo! It doesn't mean he wasn't always Apollo's son, or that it wasn't a variant that was early, but Troilos definitely have more sources stating him as Priam's son than Apollo's. Apollo being the biological father (sharing the role with Priam) adds more pathos, certainly, to the murder of Troilos. But Apollo can be exactly as rightfully vindictive if Achilles has murdered a Trojan prince unrelated to him on his altar. Because regardless of if Troilos is his son, Troilos is a suppliant, and even just pulling the suppliant away from the altar (like sometimes is the only thing Ajax the lesser does to Kassandra) is still a crime against the god! Never mind murdering the suppliant on the altar/within the temple/sacred precinct.

Kassandra would know Troilos as her little brother, her full little brother even if Apollo is the biological father. And compared to the probable negative feelings Kassandra might always have had about Paris, even when he hasn't done anything wrong yet, Troilos has nothing such attached to him. Why the hell, indeed, would she ever want him to suffer for some so-supposed "retributive justice" for her sake?

Where is the justice in that, anyway?

It's not just Apollo losing something or being injured, after all. The Trojan royal family are losing a child, in a very cruel manner (Achilles is shown on several paintings using Troilos' head as a distraction to the rescue team for fuck's sake), and, what, this is in any way "justice" for Kassandra?

The only thing even vaguely "defensible" in Achilles killing Troilos is the potential of his death being a condition/necessity for the fall of Troy, that he otherwise would've become the next Hektor if he got old enough and forever blocked any chance to Troy falling. But sorry, I don't exactly consider that any defense, and even if it was, the way Achilles goes out of his way to kill Troilos in Apollo's temple/on the altar, and then beheading/dismembering him... Yeah no.

And Troilos is, again, not armed and armoured. Even if he'd be midteens (which he could be, that is probably as old as he would be at most, since his murder happens somewhere earlier in the war and if we use the "end point" of his age, twenty, he'd have to be killed sometime before that), he's still not a warrior, or on the battlefield.

Achilles ambushes him, and then runs him down. And if Troilos takes refuge in the temple, Achilles certainly doesn't attempt to remove him from there (of course, as noted earlier, even that would be a crime against a suppliant, but even so).

And again, this hasn't even taken into account Achilles' potential desire for Troilos, where his brutal murder (if not the murder itself), is in response to being rejected*. Again, where is the ~retributive justice~ in that? Would Kassandra want that? Be real now. (*Another bit from Capturing Troy; there's a fragment survival from a tragedy about Troilos, mentioning being violently mounted like an animal... I mean we don't know it's necessarily about what Achilles wants or attempted to do, but that it's there at all...)

But no, of course it's so wrong to defend Apollo aiding Paris in killing an enemy combatant, on the goddamn battlefield, in defense of the city he's guarding and in response to a sacrilegious murder of a child of his.

[aprofessionalwithoutstandards]

Idk how to feel about there being very few on-screen examples in canon of women being friends, or just getting along. I’ve always viewed Zhanna and Pauling’s relationship as mostly platonic, where Zhanna grows to respect Pauling for being smart, despite her being ‘weak little baby’, and Pauling respecting her strength and kind of thinking she’s hot, but being too busy to really hang out. I understand why people ship them, but them being friends or otherwise respecting each other’s company scratches an itch for me

Oh tf2 SUCKSSSS when it comes to canonical friendships between women. There are like, four women with actual speaking roles (Pauling, Admin, Zhanna, and Maggie), and out of them there are only two actual textual interactions/relationships - Pauling and Admin, and Pauling and Zhanna. Admin is an ambiguously evil Villain with ambiguously evil Schemes who Pauling is subservient to but not exactly friendly with, and Zhanna directly antagonizes Pauling multiple times, threatens her, and attempts to instigate the WORST kind of woman-on-woman interaction in fiction by insinuating that Pauling must "stay away from her man." Idk I think people get so caught up in a bunch of. not exactly "superficial nonsense" but also not Groundbreaking Representation when they praise tf2 for having very variant body types among its men characters (already a staple of videogame designs, tbh, "the tall, wide tank" is breaking no new ground) and like, women with different nose shapes, and then take that praise to pretend like tf2 is some Beacon Of Feminism when like. it still has problems lol! BUUUT regardless, I do really wish Pauling had more textual women friends, idk just smth abt the way her and Zhanna are written makes me not Super love shipping them lol. Like I understand the appeal and I've definitely reblogged art of them before, but it does remind me of how absolutely slim the pickings are with textual women in tf2. Oh well! Let's hope they put estrogen in the Teufort water instead of lead next comic

[inhexe]

on western written, creative, and literary culture.

as in all other quadrants of oz, the earliest pieces of what we'd call "literature" to emerge from the western quadrant are the oral traditions dating back to the founding of oz. these record the local gods of several prominent settlements, as well as a western version of the ozian creation myth in which a powerful witch first raised the western mountains from the desert, then enchanted stones to turn into living beings. these were put down in writing several thousand years ago, preserving and fossilizing what was a variable and living tradition. they are recorded in the rhythmic poetic format that allowed storytellers and bards to recall their details in performance.

joined with this storytelling tradition is the tradition of western song and chant, which began in the mines. miners in the west typically sing while they work, in order to keep their physical rhythm, liven spirits, pass the time, as well as keep track of individuals in their troupe--think of it as something like their "hi-ho," but in the form of songs that record parallel myths and tales to the western epics, as well as ballads, bawdies, and nonsense songs. in unstable mines, tight working spaces, and tunnels, miners may chant rather than sing, often in a whisper, in order to ensure they keep track of each other. this is called simply "chant," but sometimes "whisperchant."

the west, like the other 4 quadrants, had a localized alphabet (sharing many letters and elements in common with the other quadrants), which became standardized when pastorius the lawgiver took control of oz and imposed centralized rule. assuming that the standard oz alphabet has 26 letters like the english one, the western alphabet had 4 additional letters representing phonemes from its local dialects. a westerner, especially one from a rural or isolated community, and especially one from a specifically mining area, is prone to using these phonemes in place of standard common ones.

for example, assuming that the ozian writing and pronunciation of the word "check" is the same as in standard english, a westerner might say kshek, because they are used to the "ksh" sound from their own dialect rather than the "ch" of standard ozian. these 4 extra letters have seen a revival in literary use over the past 80 or so years, and it is not uncommon for a writer outside the west, trying to convey verisimilitude whether in fiction or news, to (often-inaccurately) add these letters in to depictions of western speech, or to transliterate the pronunciation (as in the example i gave above, literally writing a westerner saying "i went to kshek on the oxen" rather than "i went to check on the oxen").

the literary history of the west is robust. given the long, long history of public education in oz, there has always been a widespread audience for literary output, and like the other 3 quadrants, the west has numerous newspapers, newsletters, popular publications, novels, poems, etc., etc., etc. that represent local interests. it has contributed several books to what is considered the standard ozian literary canon (i'll get back to you when i know what they are...) and while it does not have a reputation like the east or the emerald city, it is not considered lacking in academic, literary, or creative qualifications (this general opinion is reserved for the north, although under oscar's rule that stereotype begins to shift both east and west).

many of the west's most ancient texts are preserved in the library of the ruling witch's castle, although variant manuscripts are also held in private collections and at western universities. the personal papers and written collections of all ruling witches of the west are also held at the castle, although contents are often thin on the ground for the very earliest given the vagaries of time and the efforts of following rulers to erase their predecessors' legacies. around the time of letheia's great-grandmother the textual tradition of rulers becomes much stronger, as from her great-grandmother on, none of the ruling witches were actively trying to destroy and erase their mothers (lmao).

it is not uncommon for scholars, researchers, and other variously interested parties to apply to the ruling witch (in the west as elsewhere) for permission to view her library. this process can be miserable, long, bureaucratic, and expensive for those without courtly connections, and as quick as a brief inquiry with letheia or her steward if you do have those connections.