#The Madrigal Paradox

[nael-opale]

I just thought the reason why Bruno can do Parkour at 50 years old is probably because he had the worst room since he was 5...

You gotta be athletic to beat down those stairs.

[applesap-fics]

Sometimes I imagine fic ideas and the conversation around them more than the actual content of the fic itself. Like, I'd want to write about Bruno having things he keeps to himself. He shares his telenovelas with the sobrinos who are interested, not with the townspeople. Some things he talks or jokes with his mother about. Some things only with his sisters, or just one of them. He confesses only to the priest. I could have one of the grandkids ask him, "so tío Bruno, how come you never married? Is it because of your gift?" And I could make him say, "oh, sorry, eh, that's private. Would rather not discuss." And they might be even more curious, "but did you ever have a girlfriend? Or could it be you don't like girls?" And he might go "I'm not comfortable discussing things like that", and they'd let it go.

And in my fantasy someone might comment (because I always hold out hope for comments) "oh but what is he though?? What did you have in mind? Gay ace uninterested?? Fish lady's lover??" so that I could go, "sorry, I dont know either. He didnt tell me! :( "

[achitka]

I love this character - Copper if awesome. If you ever wondered what Bruno might be like in a dystopian future...go watch it.

[pridepages]

Books Read on PridePages

Under the cut: find all the writing I’ve done on books I’ve read so far. (up to date as of 9/15/24).

Below is the Master List of all the books I’ve read and written about on Pride Pages.

WLW Books:

Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli

Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

The Fiancee Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur 

Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur 

The Monster of Her Age by Danielle Binks

The Unbroken by C.L. Clark

Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun

The Untimely Undeath of Imogen Madrigal by Grayson Daly

Last Girls Standing by Jennifer Dugan

Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel by Sara Farizan

Undergrounder by J.E. Glass

Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail by Ashley Herring Blake 

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone 

A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar 

In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae

Youngblood by Sasha Laurens

I Await the Devil’s Coming by Mary MacLane

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta 

Godslayers by Zoe Hana Mikuta

Out of Character by Jenna Miller

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk 

Sunshine and Blood by Roxie Randall

The Society for Soulless Girls by Laura Steven

The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride by Hayli Thomson

Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood

Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner 

City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn 

City of Vicious Night by Claire Winn

MLM Books:

This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed 

Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

My Dear Henry by Kalynn Bayron

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Last Call: a True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green 

Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall

Husband Material by Alexis Hall

Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble by Alexis Hall

In the Case of Heartbreak by Courtney Kae

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

In Deeper Waters by FT Lukens 

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson 

Heartstopper (vol 1-4) by Alice Oseman 

This Winter by Alice Oseman 

The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan & Mark Oshiro

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell (bonus: “Snow for Christmas”)

The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer (second post)

The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian

The Problem With Perfect by Philip William Stover

Darkhearts by James L. Sutter Napkins and Other Distractions by MA Wardell

Mistletoe and Mishigas by MA Wardell

Teacher of the Year by MA Wardell

Asexual/Aromantic Books:

I Am Not Your Chosen One by Evelyn Benvie

Aces Wild by Amanda Dewitt 

Loveless by Alice Oseman

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

Trans/NonBinary Books:

Infinity Alchemist by Kacen Callendar

Ander and Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa

The Feeling of Falling in Love by Mason Deaver 

Glitter and Concrete by Elyssa Maxx Goodman

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Spell Bound by FT Lukens

Self-Made Boys by Anna-Marie McLemore 

Outlawed by Anna North

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa

I Was Born For This by Alice Oseman

Queer Books:

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé 

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake

Gwen and Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher

Who We Are in Real Life by Victoria Koops

Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen

The Bell in the Fog by Lev AC Rosen

[latristereina]

Isabella of Castile, the Catholic, was born on April 22nd in 1451, on Maundy Thursday, at the so-called royal palace of the village of Madrigal, called de las Altas Torres. At the moment the most important source about the birth is the letter sent by John II to the city of Segovia, on April 26th, 1451, informing them of such happy event: 

’I let you know that, by the grace of our Lord, past Thursday the Queen doña Isabel, my very dear and very beloved wife, gave birth to an infanta, which I let you know so you would give many thanks to God for the liberation of the said Queen, my wife, and for the birth of the said infanta, because of which I ordered Johan de Busto to go to you, who carries the present.’ 

That <<past Thursday>> coincided with Maundy Thursday hence could not be more important in religious Christian life, and she took responsibility to celebrate it during her whole life with her family and with her court. The chronicler Doctor Toledo will specify that she was born in Madrigal, on Thursday, on April 22nd, at 4:30 pm. Thanks to both sources, we have established the day and hour of birth. 

The same can be said about the birthplace, the cradle of the future Queen. It was at the royal palace of Madrigal, not a monumental building which was not for these places of residence, but a temporal residence in the itinerant life of the king and the court. Thus, its simplicity is understandable and its austere mudejár style can be recorded. It seems that house captivated the Portuguese (Isabella’s mother). The palace and the entire village were hers. She would go there to take refuge during decades, when her psychosis intensified, and there she would pass away. 

The newborn was not fed by her mother; it’s certain that Isabella’s wet-nurse was María López, wife of Juan de Molina, whom the queen will recall on March 3, 1495, granting her 10.000 maravedíes <<because the said María López gave her Highness her milk>>. This fact appears in las Cuentas (household accounts) and is indubitable.

- “Isabel la Católica: vida y reinado”, Tarsicio de Azcona

Isabel was born far inland, behind the lofty walls of Madrigal de las Altas Torres—Madrigal of the High Towers—in the heart of the meseta, the flat tableland at the heart of Castile. The forty-eight altas torres rising along the forty-foot-high walls ringing the town spoke of safety in a world geared to war, particularly war between Christian inhabitants and Muslim raiders. But those walls also spoke of paradox: made of brick and rubble, materials typical to mudéjar construction, they revealed an origin or an inspiration unequivocably Arabic. Madrigal, like other places on Spain’s central plateau, had been alternately occupied by Christians and Muslims until well into the eleventh century, and it was home to some inhabitants of Muslim culture afterward. In Madrigal too, in the great house abutting those walls called the royal palace, Isabel toddled under intricately worked wooden ceilings, artesonados, carved by mudéjares, Muslim subjects of Castile’s king. And tradition has it that she was baptized in Madrigal’s church of San Nicolás, in its baptismal font thickly encrusted with gold from Muslim Africa.

Only an occasional reference sheds light on Isabel’s childhood. At seventeen, she wrote to her half-brother, the king Enrique IV, accusing him of having treated her badly, representing herself as a semi-orphan raised in obscurity and kept in want by him. Her court chronicler, Hernando del Pulgar, was to state that her early years were spent ‘in extreme lack of necessary things,’ and that she was without a father and ‘we can even say a mother.’ Isabel was three when her father, Juan II of Castile, died. He had doted on her mother, Isabel of Portugal, his young second wife, and, rumor had it, come to resent the control exerted over him by his longtime mentor, Alvaro de Luna, who sought to regulate the king’s conjugal visits to his queen. What is indisputable is that shortly after Isabel’s birth, Luna was beheaded at Juan’s order. Within a year, Juan, whether through regret or because Luna’s restraining hand was gone, grew immoderate, it was said, in the pleasures of love and table, fell ill of quartanary fevers, and although believing prophecies that he would live to be ninety, died on July 21,1454, and the crown passed to his elder son, Enrique. Juan was forty-nine years old, the longest-lived king of his dynasty in five generations. Enrique IV was then thirty. He had had no children with his first wife, Blanca of Navarre, and his second, Juana of Portugal, would have none until Isabel was ten; until then Isabel grew up seeing her younger brother, Alfonso—born in November 1453 when she was two—as heir apparent to Castile’s crown and herself as second in line, as her father’s last will had stipulated. To the childless Enrique, the two children represented family and dynastic continuity, but also a potential threat. As for Isabel, after the death of her father, her circumstances were none too secure on several other counts she did not mention in that letter.

Her mother, the young dowager queen, Isabel of Portugal, who was twenty-seven years old at her husband’s death, then took the two children to live in Arévalo, a royal town consigned to her in Juan’s will. Shortly thereafter, according to the chronicler Alonso de Palencia, Enrique called on her accompanied by a favorite of his, Pedro Girón, the master of the military order of Calatrava; Girón immediately ‘made some indecent suggestions’ that shocked the recent widow. Palencia, who is generally vitriolic about both Enrique and Girón, went on to assert that the importuning by this overhasty, unwelcome (and, patently, not sufficiently noble) suitor threw Isabel of Portugal into a profound sadness and horror of the outside world, that she then ‘closed herself into a dark room, self-condemned to silence, and dominated by such depression that it degenerated into a form of madness.’

Another chronicler, who was more in touch with events at the time, confirms the reclusiveness of Isabel’s mother but dates it earlier, from her daughter’s birth. Whatever the cause or date, young Isabel grew up with a deeply disturbed mother. The child may well have dreaded becoming like her, and suffered tension between affection and fear. Surely too she was aware that her own birth was among the causes mentioned for her mother’s madness. It is tempting to conjecture that qualities that Isabel displayed as an adult—love of order and the striving for it; a no-nonsense, highly rational stance; and a sharply defined personality, were honed in reaction to her mother’s condition, and even to think that her desire for light in all its forms, and especially in its religious associations—her abhorrence of the forces of darkness, her determination to cleanse the body politic of impurities—was not unrelated to the circumstances of her childhood. Isabel grew up, then, in several sorts of obscurity, her childhood a sort of purgatory and a test of moral fiber she passed magnificently. Such was long the accepted version of her early years; it was her own version. It is neither strictly accurate nor complete.

Arévalo, fifteen miles from Madrigal and like it a market town, is remembered as the best fortified of royal towns. There, her mother’s condition notwithstanding, Isabel spent her early years in great stability and familial warmth. For when she was two and her mother again pregnant, her widowed grandmother, Isabel de Barcelos, arrived from Portugal. Tellingly, when first mentioned in the chronicles Isabel de Barcelos is in her forties and sitting, at King Juan’s request, in his privy council. Contemporaries, among them the chronicler Diego de Valera, recognized in her ‘a notable woman of great counsel.’ Valera affirmed that after the death of the king, Isabel de Barcelos ‘was of great help and consolation to the widowed queen, her daughter’; and he commented that her death, in 1466, ‘was very harmful.’ Pulgar adds that Isabel missed her grandmother sorely. Surely Isabel de Barcelos ran her daughter’s household. And she it doubtlessly was whom the child Isabel took as model. It is revealing that later, as queen, Isabel of Castile enjoyed keeping about her elderly women of good repute and good family.

From all accounts, Isabel de Barcelos was a formidable lady of formidable lineage. She came of royal Portuguese stock with a history of going for the throne and of doing it with claims far weaker than would be those of her Castilian grandchild. Daughter of the first duke of Braganza, Portugal’s most powerful noble and an illegitimate son of the king, Joāo I, she had married her uncle, Prince Joāo, one of five sons Joāo I had with Philippa, his queen consort. Philippa too came of redoubtable stock. Her father was John of Gaunt, the English king-making duke of Lancaster, and her mother, Costanza, was a Castilian infanta. This lineage meant that young Isabel carried in her veins the royal blood of Castile, Portugal, and England. Doubtlessly too, she took dynastic pride in her own name, Isabel, repeated through seven generations of royal women and originating in her ancestor Saint Isabel, the thirteenth-century Portuguese queen canonized for her good works and miracles. Isabel’s aya, or nurse-governess, in Arévalo was also Portuguese. She was Clara Alvarnáez, married to Gonzalo Chacón, to whom Juan II had consigned his children’s education. Chacón was also the dowager queen’s camerero, the administrator of her household. Oddly enough, Chacón had earlier filled the same post for Álvaro de Luna, Juan II’s former favorite. Even so, Chacón and Clara Alvarnáez remained close to Isabel throughout their lifetimes.

- „Isabel the Queen: Life and Times”, Peggy K. Liss

[pasiomasters]

WELCOME TO PASIO ( 2 / 15 )

- Irida ( Pokémon: Legends Arceus ) - Ingo ( Pokémon: Game Series ) - Augustine Sycamore ( Pokémon: Game Series ) - Proton ( Pokémon: Game Series ) - Moon / Selene ( Pokémon: Game Series ) - Allen Sugasuno ( Paradox Live ) - Melody ( Original Character ) - Isabela Madrigal ( Disney: Encanto ) - Bruno Madrigal ( Disney: Encanto ) - Maleficent ( Disney: Sleeping Beauty ) - Sana Futaba ( Magia Record ) - Nanachi ( Made in Abyss ) - Shiki Misaki ( The World Ends With You ) - Neku Sakuraba ( The World Ends With You ) - Hythlodaeus ( Final Fantasy XIV )

DROPPED MUSES ( 2 / 15 )

- Zenos viator Galvus ( Final Fantasy XIV ) - Lillie ( Pokémon: Game Series )

[nael-opale]

Remember how he could not tell a hug from a fight in his vision about Isabela and Mirabel...?

Maybe he tried having a vision to see where they could be, but he did not wait for it to end, because he was so sure his mother would be too stubborn to listen to his niece, he just had to rush into action and save her from suffering what he went through

Encanto Spoilers

Bruno just... appeared from the thin air screaming like he knew Abuela was there with Mirabel, but how did he know it? Maybe he saw the pink piece of wool for Maribel, but Abuela? (And where he stole that horse 😂😂)

[graywyvern]

( me / @crookedcosmos )

The Tyger.

"She did not think of wickedness as wickedness, but rather as the stuff people were made of, like flesh." --Laura (Riding) Jackson (via)

Preacher and the Bear.

5-square-ordered poem in rhime (‘In Memoriam’ stanzas)

1.

able was i ere this language drew chartreuse from bright viridian Mothra from Zelig Godzilla Terra from its counter planet

2.

should we be found to end the plague let hist'ry not applaud this game a feeble & deluded mage to found his city on a stilb

3.

firebreak of olibanum tutelary anodyne i sent off for a friendsome dolphin dolphin came & bore a sonnet

4.

clowncest pleas too often terse & our stone lords brimful inertia ragged in the chilling vault madness flowing out like water

5.

eyes glued to the cryptic tire light glyph a few days after Samhain firelight veils what creeps beyond like a palindrome in Latin

6.

forecasts devolve to brute enigma ev'ry throng is penult judgment cubic city, vale of bismuth navigated by fedora

7.

all that won’t become a book the books themselves all growing dark yet sometimes for a moment’s grace my focus sharpens on some glare

8.

i cast my mind on second Sirius castle in a corner, rook whose speech is only snap & glitch & waft of day-enaged patchouli

9.

these days i seem to be a noun trapped in the four walls’ sinister logic i pass on the pilgrim trail each cairn that leads me through this foul Maremma

10.

circle in an open field raise a hum above the veldt long i pondered this old meaning Zeitgeist-blurb is all would come

11.

purlieus of the orange cone our houses glass, our follies stone new petroglyphs adorn the gneiss where eagle nests come into being

12.

zugzwang specialist out of sync threshes in the nascent cage moves the stone from out the Kaaba only for the thinnest nectar

13.

where sun encounters skein of ice & this is where soul enters grammar –stick, so many years, lost jasmine not mine held, nor mine to cede

14.

burning times with syzygy pillbug disorder of our senses beautiful tick-dusted with pale saffron sulfur children fed on Olga’s Paradox

15.

marigolds of elder coinage sizzle in the knit alembic meme unshareable sans one comma yodels like a burning peacock

16.

his name a girl’s name now, in code that proves to be a moment’s guest visiting our abject airspace few enough conceive as lack

17.

madrigals on tainted air rooms i stewed in Tarot myrrh did any poem survive the quest was no ear else to grok the call

18.

all the cancelled futures merge & we are each its broken pilgrim on a windswept plain of Pluto utterly against the wall

19.

on the bonfire planet your hero’s badge will buy you little leeway, probably a fanfare sonnet of glimmering subfusc giving up cars when the others do

20.

it’s over but there’s little closure night absorbs its share of ebbing what depiction worth the candle leaves you with perfected yearning

21.

i stay here among my dead or maybe just a threadbare dream to know what can be wrought from clay even in a gulch in Baja

22.

perhaps i was a thrackled grackle northblind, beholden to nobody but the season in the thorn & the ever-jiggly lingo

23.

yet pause to argue o'er a rune our passions in impending storm the closing of another library earthlike world around some star

24.

earning & spending, the only kind of magic in the ontic dimness crowned by walls & floors of concrete drifting on a dying ocean

25.

red-faced at the Barmecidal luncheon on your plate a lone cicala hybrid sales are in the black smoke of burning blots the sapphire

Sunrise.

"i'm going out the sound of moths follows the moon"

--@poem_exe

Ain't No Sunshine.

[tanunigans]

I just saw your Madrigal Paradox, and I wonder who is Rafael exactly, because he looks like Dolores, or Camilo, especially with these colors...

Rafael is actually a descendant of Dolores ! (4 generations down), which places his timeline to our current time . Good job for catching this !

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

The Atlantic’s December Issue: “The Making of an American Nazi” Profiles the Disturbing Evolution of Daily Stormer Publisher Andrew Anglin

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/the-atlantics-december-issue-the-making-of-an-american-nazi-profiles-the-disturbing-evolution-of-daily-stormer-publisher-andrew-anglin/

The Atlantic’s December Issue: “The Making of an American Nazi” Profiles the Disturbing Evolution of Daily Stormer Publisher Andrew Anglin

Washington, D.C. (November 14, 2017)—Andrew Anglin’s website, The Daily Stormer, has been called the leading hate site on the internet—and Anglin himself is the alt-right’s most effective propagandist and most vicious troll. But who is Anglin, and how did he develop such a following? The cover story of The Atlantic’s December issue, “The Making of an American Nazi,” takes a riveting and deeply disturbing look into the world of Anglin and the alt-right one year after the election of Donald Trump. Reporter Luke O’Brien spent nearly a year uncovering previously unknown details of Anglin’s past, charting his strange evolution from an antiracist vegan teen in Columbus, Ohio, to a neo-Nazi—including a bizarre foray into a remote jungle in the Philippines. In a companion piece, author Angela Nagle explores the evolution of the alt-right in ���Brotherhood of Losers,” asking what drives young men to radicalize in this way, and whether the backlash against the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, will fracture the movement.

Also in this month’s issue: The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health editor, Ross Andersen, journeys to China, where the government has built the world’s largest radio dish for the purpose of detecting extraterrestrial communications; tech writer Alexis Madrigal questions whether we should let children build emotional bonds with robots; and author Leslie Jamison visits the virtual realm of Second Life.

The Atlantic’s December 2017 issue is online in full today and on newsstands this week. A selection of pieces from the issue are linked and summarized below.

COVER & FEATURES

The Making of an American Nazi, by Luke O’Brien Andrew Anglin’s website, The Daily Stormer, has been called the leading hate site on the internet, and Anglin himself is the alt-right’s most effective propagandist and most vicious troll. He “doxes” minorities, women, politicians, members of the LGBTQ community, journalists—publishing their addresses, phone numbers, and emails, and pictures of their spouses and young children—so that the underbelly of the internet can wreak havoc on their lives. And he’s done more than anyone to organize and radicalize a new generation of white supremacists, sometimes with tragic consequences: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, was a Daily Stormer reader. Luke O’Brien comes closer than any other journalist in charting Anglin’s bizarre and delusional evolution. Anglin’s story shows that, like many members of the alt-right, he was drawn to white supremacy more for a sense of belonging and status than as a result of any deep ideological conviction. The Atlantic’s cover story is a haunting profile of a violent, deeply disturbed, paradoxical, and at times drug-abusing individual—one who has been emboldened by the election of President Trump. O’Brien writes that during the election, “Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been.” When candidate Trump was asked by CNN about the death threats and harassment leveled by Anglin’s army, Trump’s response was: “I don’t have a message to the fans.”  

Brotherhood of Losers, by Angela Nagle The alt-right has offered angry, unmoored men a sense of belonging. But it wasn’t until the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August that it leapt from private forums and online chat rooms into a form that most Americans could finally grasp as a real, and unambiguous, political movement. Charlottesville revealed the new movement’s true ugliness, leaving many of its adherents horrified, and once again adrift. Where did the alt-right come from, and what’s next for its fractious ranks? Angela Nagle, who has been observing the evolution of rightist groups for eight years, details the chilling inner workings of this resurgent facet of society, attributing its antiestablishment, antifeminist appeal to a desire for belonging and even trolling for the fun of it.

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?, by Ross Andersen As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial life, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose. And so, if another civilization’s faint radio whispers were to come down in the next decade, China may very well be the first to hear them. The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health editor, Ross Andersen, travels to China to see for himself the enormous dish—which is the size of five football fields and large enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human on Earth—and to ask what the consequences would be were a signal from a distant intelligence to reach our planet. Would China go public with the signal? Would the government respond? Or would China withhold the signal’s origin, even keep it a state secret? Andersen also meets with Liu Cixin, China’s foremost science-fiction writer, with whom the Chinese government consulted on the project. He asks Liu to imagine the Chinese Academy of Sciences calling to tell him that it had found a signal. Liu cautioned against sharing with extraterrestrial life a too-detailed account of human history: “It’s very dark. It might make us appear more threatening.” But, writes Andersen, “I reminded Liu that distant civilizations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats as any advanced civilization surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.”

The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future, by Leslie Jamison Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram came along. Of the 36 million Second Life accounts that had been created by 2013, only an estimated 600,000 people still regularly use the platform. What happened? In a new report, Leslie Jamison explores the evolution and current state of the world of Second Life (and its future) in an era when social media reign supreme. She observes: “If Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead. As I learned more about Second Life, and spent more time exploring it, it started to seem less like an obsolete relic and more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us live in.”

The stories of the people who escape into Second Life, and the world they’ve built, illuminate the promise and limitations of online life. Jamison joins the inhabitants of Second Life, and the more she explores, the more questions the online realm raises “about where unfettered fantasy leads, as well as about how we navigate the boundary between the virtual and the real. As virtual-reality technology grows more advanced, it promises to deliver a more fully realized version of what many believed Second Life would offer: total immersion in another world. And as our actual world keeps delivering weekly horrors … the appeal of that alternate world keeps deepening, along with our doubts about what it means to find ourselves drawn to it.”

DISPATCHES:

My Son’s First Robot, by Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who covers tech from its epicenter, in Northern California, wrestled with the decision of whether to buy his son a toy robot for his fourth birthday. Would he know what to make of it? Would his little sister destroy it? What are the consequences of inviting into the house a(nother) “smart” thing? The robot, Cozmo, produced by the company Anki, must be fed, repaired, and played with, and can use the full breadth of its animated repertoire to summon particular feelings in its owner and foster emotional bonds. Sure enough, when Cozmo lost a few rounds of a game, it showed frustration, prompting Madrigal’s son to say: “Don’t beat him! You’re making him sad.”

“If you neglect him, you feel the pain of that,” says Anki’s CEO. Madrigal writes: “When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win.” But this technology is happening. It’s here. Now it becomes a matter of understanding it and its interplay with our world. This leads Madrigal to conclude: “I feel about [robots] as my parents did about computers: It will be necessary to understand these machines to comprehend the world. So now we have our first robot.”

Big In … Turkey: Plaid Jackets Ever since then–Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan voted for himself in a presidential election in 2014 wearing a garish, oversize blue plaid suit jacket, the piece has become a staple of Erdoğan’s wardrobe—and a spreading trend. As Erdoğan has consolidated power, members of his government have begun following not just his political lead but also his fashion cues. Photos of the leader flanked by subordinates, all matching, have gone viral.

Can Unions Stop the Far Right, by Vauhini Vara Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union  held strong in the recent elections against its far-right opponents in the Alternative for Germany party—and it was Germany’s working-class voters who may have stopped a full hard-right turn. According to Vauhini Vara, a combination of market forces and a strong social-safety net has kept most people feeling satisfied with their government. Because Germany’s economy is driven by manufacturing exports, a high percentage of citizens work in that sector, and they have become a powerful political constituency anchored by strong unions. German workers’ sense of security and belonging mitigates the fears that have fed right-wing populism elsewhere. Can—and should—the United States learn from Germany’s example?

Conservatism Without Bigotry, by Peter Beinart Is American conservatism inherently bigoted? While the debate over conservatism and bigotry is not new, the argument has become particularly fierce in the age of Donald Trump. As Peter Beinart observes, Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and his equivocal condemnations of white supremacists, have sparked outrage at perceived conservative bigotry, which now animates American liberalism more than it did in preceding administrations. Beinart argues that in order to move forward, Republicans must now reckon with their policies’ racial effects, but liberals also must stop carelessly crying racist. He writes: “Halting the downward spiral will require other politicians to take risks as well. And it will require scores of commentators, activists, and voters to support them when they do. Liberals and conservatives each know the other side is capable of hatred and scorn. They both need to demonstrate that they are capable of empathy and courage, too.”

From the Culture File:

Shark Tank Nation, by Caitlin Flanagan: The genre of capitalist reality television began with our president, who realized years ago that TV contests based on people’s ability to sing, dance, or get along with a houseful of losers on the CBS lot were small-time. According to Caitlin Flanagan, The Apprentice was about winning where it counts: in business. Since then, shows such as the long-running Shark Tank, and the newer and more offbeat The Toy Box and Steve Harvey’s Funderdome, show a mesmerizingly shallow view of American entrepreneurship. Of ABC’s The Toy Box, where a panel of children decide the fate of an inventor’s financial future, Flanagan writes: “There is something exquisitely cruel about watching adults who have literally bet their house on an invention be dismissed by bored kids. She looks creepy!, one little monster said about a doll whose creator—a black woman who had wanted a doll that looked like her own daughter—had spent 30 years and more than $300,000 trying to bring it to market.”

Books: The Rise and Fall of Rolling Stone, by Rich Cohen: Jann Wenner, the longtime editor of Rolling Stone, traded the hippie dream for pop-star friends and luxury. One witness to the early days of the magazine, as they devolved into out-of-control excess, was Rich Cohen, who was supposed to have written Wenner’s autobiography on three separate occasions—. Cohen has praise for Sticky Fingers, the biography of Wenner by New York magazine’s Joe Hagan, even if he feels Wenner’s charm and spirit are lost in this definitive telling. He writes: “It’s the book I could never have written. I know too little and sympathize too much. I like Wenner, and Hagan is remorseless … A funny thing happens when a part of your life becomes official history. No matter how good that history is, the writer can’t help getting a crucial aspect wrong. All the facts might be correct, but the spirit is lost. The effect is like a body without a soul.”

Books: Inventing John Wayne, by Stephen Metcalf: In the new book Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger argues that “the masculine ideal, as championed by Ford and embodied by Wayne, is still salvageable, honorable even.” But this is not the whole story, writes Stephen Metcalf in his review of the book. “Schoenberger has hidden a provocative thesis inside a Christmas present for Dad. She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as Ford presented it in his very best films. And yet, from the bulk of the evidence here, masculinity (like the Western) is a by-product of nostalgia, a maudlin elegy for something that never existed—or worse, a masquerade that allows no man, not even John Wayne, to be comfortable in his own skin.” Metcalf continues: “Schoenberger makes the case that we are confused about masculinity because we cannot accept men like Wayne as heroes. In flight from machismo, we have largely given up on adult male self-mastery. But isn’t it also true that, allowed at last to be confused about masculinity, we no longer accept men like Wayne as heroes?”

With the holiday season quickly approaching, the December issue’s Big Question asks: “What was the most significant event to happen on a holiday?” The 1914 Christmas Truce of World War I, the Yom Kippur War, and Alexander Graham Bell filing his patent application for the telephone on Valentine’s Day in 1876 are a few of the most historic happenings—as told by historians, authors, and Atlantic readers.

###

Original Article:

Click here

[nael-opale]

"You're the real gift, kid."

- Bruno to Mirabel in All Of You

Can we talk about how true that is ?

Do you realize Mirabel did everything she said she would do in Waiting On A Miracle...?

❂ "I would move the mountains"

She literally opened a path to the past, breaking the mountain between them and the river where her grandfather was killed

❂ "Make new trees and flowers grow"

She helped Isabela discover the extent of her plant-making powers and find her true self along the way

❂ "Someone please just let me know where do I go"

She found Bruno. He was just as lost as she was, but he helped her realize the most important thing : she is exactly what the family needs

❂ "I would heal what's broken Show this family something new"

She stood up for her family when she confronted her grandmother, something none of them dared doing until then. She listened to them, she repaired their broken bound, she showed them they were more than just their gift... She gave them support and freedom.

❂ "Bless me now as you blessed us all those years ago When you gave us a miracle Am I too late for a miracle?"

You are the miracle, Mirabel. You were the miracle they needed all along...

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

The Atlantic’s December Issue: “The Making of an American Nazi” Profiles the Disturbing Evolution of Daily Stormer Publisher Andrew Anglin

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/the-atlantics-december-issue-the-making-of-an-american-nazi-profiles-the-disturbing-evolution-of-daily-stormer-publisher-andrew-anglin/

The Atlantic’s December Issue: “The Making of an American Nazi” Profiles the Disturbing Evolution of Daily Stormer Publisher Andrew Anglin

Washington, D.C. (November 14, 2017)—Andrew Anglin’s website, The Daily Stormer, has been called the leading hate site on the internet—and Anglin himself is the alt-right’s most effective propagandist and most vicious troll. But who is Anglin, and how did he develop such a following? The cover story of The Atlantic’s December issue, “The Making of an American Nazi,” takes a riveting and deeply disturbing look into the world of Anglin and the alt-right one year after the election of Donald Trump. Reporter Luke O’Brien spent nearly a year uncovering previously unknown details of Anglin’s past, charting his strange evolution from an antiracist vegan teen in Columbus, Ohio, to a neo-Nazi—including a bizarre foray into a remote jungle in the Philippines. In a companion piece, author Angela Nagle explores the evolution of the alt-right in “Brotherhood of Losers,” asking what drives young men to radicalize in this way, and whether the backlash against the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, will fracture the movement.

Also in this month’s issue: The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health editor, Ross Andersen, journeys to China, where the government has built the world’s largest radio dish for the purpose of detecting extraterrestrial communications; tech writer Alexis Madrigal questions whether we should let children build emotional bonds with robots; and author Leslie Jamison visits the virtual realm of Second Life.

The Atlantic’s December 2017 issue is online in full today and on newsstands this week. A selection of pieces from the issue are linked and summarized below.

COVER & FEATURES

The Making of an American Nazi, by Luke O’Brien Andrew Anglin’s website, The Daily Stormer, has been called the leading hate site on the internet, and Anglin himself is the alt-right’s most effective propagandist and most vicious troll. He “doxes” minorities, women, politicians, members of the LGBTQ community, journalists—publishing their addresses, phone numbers, and emails, and pictures of their spouses and young children—so that the underbelly of the internet can wreak havoc on their lives. And he’s done more than anyone to organize and radicalize a new generation of white supremacists, sometimes with tragic consequences: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, was a Daily Stormer reader. Luke O’Brien comes closer than any other journalist in charting Anglin’s bizarre and delusional evolution. Anglin’s story shows that, like many members of the alt-right, he was drawn to white supremacy more for a sense of belonging and status than as a result of any deep ideological conviction. The Atlantic’s cover story is a haunting profile of a violent, deeply disturbed, paradoxical, and at times drug-abusing individual—one who has been emboldened by the election of President Trump. O’Brien writes that during the election, “Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been.” When candidate Trump was asked by CNN about the death threats and harassment leveled by Anglin’s army, Trump’s response was: “I don’t have a message to the fans.”  

Brotherhood of Losers, by Angela Nagle The alt-right has offered angry, unmoored men a sense of belonging. But it wasn’t until the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August that it leapt from private forums and online chat rooms into a form that most Americans could finally grasp as a real, and unambiguous, political movement. Charlottesville revealed the new movement’s true ugliness, leaving many of its adherents horrified, and once again adrift. Where did the alt-right come from, and what’s next for its fractious ranks? Angela Nagle, who has been observing the evolution of rightist groups for eight years, details the chilling inner workings of this resurgent facet of society, attributing its antiestablishment, antifeminist appeal to a desire for belonging and even trolling for the fun of it.

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?, by Ross Andersen As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial life, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose. And so, if another civilization’s faint radio whispers were to come down in the next decade, China may very well be the first to hear them. The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health editor, Ross Andersen, travels to China to see for himself the enormous dish—which is the size of five football fields and large enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human on Earth—and to ask what the consequences would be were a signal from a distant intelligence to reach our planet. Would China go public with the signal? Would the government respond? Or would China withhold the signal’s origin, even keep it a state secret? Andersen also meets with Liu Cixin, China’s foremost science-fiction writer, with whom the Chinese government consulted on the project. He asks Liu to imagine the Chinese Academy of Sciences calling to tell him that it had found a signal. Liu cautioned against sharing with extraterrestrial life a too-detailed account of human history: “It’s very dark. It might make us appear more threatening.” But, writes Andersen, “I reminded Liu that distant civilizations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats as any advanced civilization surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.”

The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future, by Leslie Jamison Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram came along. Of the 36 million Second Life accounts that had been created by 2013, only an estimated 600,000 people still regularly use the platform. What happened? In a new report, Leslie Jamison explores the evolution and current state of the world of Second Life (and its future) in an era when social media reign supreme. She observes: “If Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead. As I learned more about Second Life, and spent more time exploring it, it started to seem less like an obsolete relic and more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us live in.”

The stories of the people who escape into Second Life, and the world they’ve built, illuminate the promise and limitations of online life. Jamison joins the inhabitants of Second Life, and the more she explores, the more questions the online realm raises “about where unfettered fantasy leads, as well as about how we navigate the boundary between the virtual and the real. As virtual-reality technology grows more advanced, it promises to deliver a more fully realized version of what many believed Second Life would offer: total immersion in another world. And as our actual world keeps delivering weekly horrors … the appeal of that alternate world keeps deepening, along with our doubts about what it means to find ourselves drawn to it.”

DISPATCHES:

My Son’s First Robot, by Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who covers tech from its epicenter, in Northern California, wrestled with the decision of whether to buy his son a toy robot for his fourth birthday. Would he know what to make of it? Would his little sister destroy it? What are the consequences of inviting into the house a(nother) “smart” thing? The robot, Cozmo, produced by the company Anki, must be fed, repaired, and played with, and can use the full breadth of its animated repertoire to summon particular feelings in its owner and foster emotional bonds. Sure enough, when Cozmo lost a few rounds of a game, it showed frustration, prompting Madrigal’s son to say: “Don’t beat him! You’re making him sad.”

“If you neglect him, you feel the pain of that,” says Anki’s CEO. Madrigal writes: “When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win.” But this technology is happening. It’s here. Now it becomes a matter of understanding it and its interplay with our world. This leads Madrigal to conclude: “I feel about [robots] as my parents did about computers: It will be necessary to understand these machines to comprehend the world. So now we have our first robot.”

Big In … Turkey: Plaid Jackets Ever since then–Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan voted for himself in a presidential election in 2014 wearing a garish, oversize blue plaid suit jacket, the piece has become a staple of Erdoğan’s wardrobe—and a spreading trend. As Erdoğan has consolidated power, members of his government have begun following not just his political lead but also his fashion cues. Photos of the leader flanked by subordinates, all matching, have gone viral.

Can Unions Stop the Far Right, by Vauhini Vara Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union  held strong in the recent elections against its far-right opponents in the Alternative for Germany party—and it was Germany’s working-class voters who may have stopped a full hard-right turn. According to Vauhini Vara, a combination of market forces and a strong social-safety net has kept most people feeling satisfied with their government. Because Germany’s economy is driven by manufacturing exports, a high percentage of citizens work in that sector, and they have become a powerful political constituency anchored by strong unions. German workers’ sense of security and belonging mitigates the fears that have fed right-wing populism elsewhere. Can—and should—the United States learn from Germany’s example?

Conservatism Without Bigotry, by Peter Beinart Is American conservatism inherently bigoted? While the debate over conservatism and bigotry is not new, the argument has become particularly fierce in the age of Donald Trump. As Peter Beinart observes, Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and his equivocal condemnations of white supremacists, have sparked outrage at perceived conservative bigotry, which now animates American liberalism more than it did in preceding administrations. Beinart argues that in order to move forward, Republicans must now reckon with their policies’ racial effects, but liberals also must stop carelessly crying racist. He writes: “Halting the downward spiral will require other politicians to take risks as well. And it will require scores of commentators, activists, and voters to support them when they do. Liberals and conservatives each know the other side is capable of hatred and scorn. They both need to demonstrate that they are capable of empathy and courage, too.”

From the Culture File:

Shark Tank Nation, by Caitlin Flanagan: The genre of capitalist reality television began with our president, who realized years ago that TV contests based on people’s ability to sing, dance, or get along with a houseful of losers on the CBS lot were small-time. According to Caitlin Flanagan, The Apprentice was about winning where it counts: in business. Since then, shows such as the long-running Shark Tank, and the newer and more offbeat The Toy Box and Steve Harvey’s Funderdome, show a mesmerizingly shallow view of American entrepreneurship. Of ABC’s The Toy Box, where a panel of children decide the fate of an inventor’s financial future, Flanagan writes: “There is something exquisitely cruel about watching adults who have literally bet their house on an invention be dismissed by bored kids. She looks creepy!, one little monster said about a doll whose creator—a black woman who had wanted a doll that looked like her own daughter—had spent 30 years and more than $300,000 trying to bring it to market.”

Books: The Rise and Fall of Rolling Stone, by Rich Cohen: Jann Wenner, the longtime editor of Rolling Stone, traded the hippie dream for pop-star friends and luxury. One witness to the early days of the magazine, as they devolved into out-of-control excess, was Rich Cohen, who was supposed to have written Wenner’s autobiography on three separate occasions—. Cohen has praise for Sticky Fingers, the biography of Wenner by New York magazine’s Joe Hagan, even if he feels Wenner’s charm and spirit are lost in this definitive telling. He writes: “It’s the book I could never have written. I know too little and sympathize too much. I like Wenner, and Hagan is remorseless … A funny thing happens when a part of your life becomes official history. No matter how good that history is, the writer can’t help getting a crucial aspect wrong. All the facts might be correct, but the spirit is lost. The effect is like a body without a soul.”

Books: Inventing John Wayne, by Stephen Metcalf: In the new book Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero, Nancy Schoenberger argues that “the masculine ideal, as championed by Ford and embodied by Wayne, is still salvageable, honorable even.” But this is not the whole story, writes Stephen Metcalf in his review of the book. “Schoenberger has hidden a provocative thesis inside a Christmas present for Dad. She asks us to remember the beauty of masculine self-mastery as Ford presented it in his very best films. And yet, from the bulk of the evidence here, masculinity (like the Western) is a by-product of nostalgia, a maudlin elegy for something that never existed—or worse, a masquerade that allows no man, not even John Wayne, to be comfortable in his own skin.” Metcalf continues: “Schoenberger makes the case that we are confused about masculinity because we cannot accept men like Wayne as heroes. In flight from machismo, we have largely given up on adult male self-mastery. But isn’t it also true that, allowed at last to be confused about masculinity, we no longer accept men like Wayne as heroes?”

With the holiday season quickly approaching, the December issue’s Big Question asks: “What was the most significant event to happen on a holiday?” The 1914 Christmas Truce of World War I, the Yom Kippur War, and Alexander Graham Bell filing his patent application for the telephone on Valentine’s Day in 1876 are a few of the most historic happenings—as told by historians, authors, and Atlantic readers.

###

Original Article:

Click here

[tanunigans]

Decided to make an AU//fanfiction of my boy Rafael, but as a Madrigal.

Having grown during our era, a couple generations after the events of the movie, Rafael is gifted with the ability to stop time. However, with time-related gifts, unprecedented events tend to happen, leading to disasters. Thus, the teen accidentally finds himself flung into the past, forced to hide. Rafael must find a way back to his time without altering the fate of the Madrigal family… Or his own. The fanfiction is here : https://archiveofourown.org/works/63079456/chapters/161541325

[tanunigans]

Maybe I would mention that I have started posting it last week, and I just dropped chapter 2/6

Decided to make an AU//fanfiction of my boy Rafael, but as a Madrigal.

Having grown during our era, a couple generations after the events of the movie, Rafael is gifted with the ability to stop time. However, with time-related gifts, unprecedented events tend to happen, leading to disasters. Thus, the teen accidentally finds himself flung into the past, forced to hide. Rafael must find a way back to his time without altering the fate of the Madrigal family… Or his own.