#This is one of those books that might not qualify as “good” empirically but is definitely entertaining and thought-provoking

[whatireading]

Gee, I wonder where they got the idea for THAT scene?

There are also a LOT of ideas and terminology that appear to have been lifted straight from Star Trek (like, more than is automatically expected of all sci-fi written since 1966), but I am so hooked.

[lightdancer1]

Given that Rome is the father of Europe as we know it it does help to remember that the father and the child were slightly different:

This book charts the history of the Roman Empire from the late Republican civil wars of Gnaius Pompeius Magnus and Julius Caesar to the reign of Maximinius Thrax. In the course of those centuries the Republic's wars finally ended with the victory of Augustus via Agrippa at Actium, and the expanse from the Atlantic to the Rhine, the Balkans, North Africa, the western half of the Middle East, and up to the Black Sea was united under a single authority, ruled by hereditary military god-emperors the Romans called Augusti. There are closer analogues to this with Imperial China than the usual with European history, outside the very short-lived careers of Napoleonic France and in territorial expanse if nothing else, Nazi Germany, and the somewhat longer-lived career of the Carolingians.

This is also that era that includes the Gibbons view that at the height of the Empire under the Five Good Emperors humanity reached its peak of happiness. With the eye to social history and to reminding people how vastly different the world of 2,000 years ago was in say, communications and the effective control of so vast and culturally diverse an area by any rulers, hereditary god-emperor or not, Mr. Wells rightly disagrees more than a little with the Gibbons thesis.

One thing that starting the book with the late Republican civil wars does remind people, however, is that Bedriacum and the wars of the Severans and the Military Anarchy were not exceptions to a rule. To quote Chinese history, the empire might not have been able to be governed from horseback but empires were always won from it. The Chinese never solved this particular dilemma either even when their culture made a firmer separation of civil and military affairs than anything Roman would do until the Byzantine era.

8/10.

[therabine]

In case you were wondering why wordbuilding for Ravka feels so random

After going down the rabbit hole in my search for answers I've stumbled across this conversation on goodreads dated back to the November of 2013, where Leigh Bardugo replied to some reasonable criticism about her 'cultural inspiration"- https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1533856-has-bardugo-talked-about-the-russian-inconsistencies This conversation is quite long and miss Leigh gave about three replies to various questions from people that were deeply bothered by the very surface level research she did on the Russian cilture. Here are the major highlights, plus the other things I've found while goodling: 1) As far as I've understood - neither she nor her publishers expected the first book to blow up like this. So even though there was obvoiusy a lack of proper research and some mistakes variying from minor to insulting, now that she's an esteemed author Leigh claims all of it to be deliberate choices adding that "deliberate choices aren't necessarily good ones". She also tries to lift the responsibility off her shoulders, mentioning that her work "was reviewed not just by my editor, but by copy editors, proofreaders, multiple foreign editors, and foreign copy editors". Not a single word about actual Russian-speaking person/expert reviweing the text or helping her out with creating the Ravkan language though. The only person she's ever credited as the one who helped her out with creating Ravkan is Erdene Ukhaasai from Mongolia that she's been friends on Facebook at the time (source on this one - https://ageofsteam.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/genre-friction-what-is-tsarpunk-by-leigh-bardugo/ ). The Facebook page under this name currently doesn't exist and the only results that Google shows on this person are the mentions that Leigh Bardugo gave in her interview, so unfortunately I couldn't reach out for clarification on this topic. Still, it's highly unlikey that someone with zero publications under their name would be a proffesional linguist and therefore qualified for such a task. 2) Within your secondary world, unless you are writing satire, things should make internal sense. That world could not arize independently of its context. The problem with the Bardugo's Ravka is that it's based on Russian Empire alone, yet she claims that "it's only Russian inspired" without acknowledging that most people that are not familiar with the culture will take it in as authentic. She takes the words and objects out of the context, misgenders names and last names and creates new 'russian-sounding" words without understanding how the grammar works. Which is a shame, given how flexible Russian language is - the possibility for the word-building is endless and with the right guidance she truly could make some unique and meaningful terms specifically for the Ravka. Also on the alcoholic kvas issue - Leigh proudly claims this as a solution to be a vodka "substitute", because vodka would be too on the nose and too common (more on the matter here -https://www.leighbardugo.com/grishaverse/the-archives/tongue-twister/). What didn't cross her mind is that instead of turning a non-alcoholic drink into strong booze for "wordbuilding" it would be much better to use less known drinks whic do contain alcohol - braga, samogon, nalivka - just to name a few.

3) To elaborate on some of the specific issues with names and last names: Leigh doesn't seem to understand how gendered surnames work in Russian. That's why we get stuff like Alina Starkov (when it's supposed to be Starkova, because she's a woman) and Alexander Morozova (Morozov would be a correct form) etc. This system is never consistent - Mal Oretsev gets to have a male surname, but so does Genya Safin and Zoya Nazyalensky has a weird non-gendered kind of in between last name (very much in fashion of Natasha Romanoff, who would be called Natalia Romanova in Russian). Also must mention Ana Kuya - poor woman's name literally sounds like "why the f*ck" in Russian, that's about just as bad as naming your Asian character Whata Phuck. Again - none of this nonsense would happen if someone bothered to find a Russian-speaking person to read the text. Other Russian words she tries to throw in seem to be the result of a bad Google Translate, rather than a conscious choice: for example the word otkazats'ya that she uses to describe non-grishas is actually a verb that translates as "to refuse". The noun with the meaning of "the refused one" would be otkaznik or otkazniki for a plural form. Same with sobachka ("small dog") - the context from the book suggests this nickname to be an insulting one, so the word we're really looking for would be shchenok ("puppy") or shavka ("mongrel", "cur"). The list of those examples, honestly, goes on and on.

4) Leigh does mention that she "can acknowledge that the choices I made in building the language and culture of Ravka came from a place of insularity and a type of privilege". However she's more keen to talk about how she has "certainly encountered critics, but I've also had Russian fans"...Which to me sounds about just as bad as stating "I do have *insert a minority racial group* friends and they say that me doing *insert a dubious act* is fine". The problem is that Russian culture has been demonized and overlooked for so long that most people (myself included) tend to praise content creators for including even the most sterytypical "insprations". Just because some people are willing to excuse her voluntary ignorance, doesn't mean that it's okay.

5) No books on Russian culture that she's mentioned as part of the resarch were written by Russian authors. And while reading the SaB it becomes crystal clear that that the major 'cultural inspiration' Leigh got was not from those books, but from the monstrosity that is her tsapunk pinterest board - https://www.pinterest.ru/lbardugo/tsarpunk-inspiration/ . About 80% of the stuff there doesn't even relate to Russian culture and the rest is a mash of modern knockoffs.

To summorize it: Leigh very much knew about the concerns surrounding her "Russian-inspired" Ravka which were respectfully brought to her consideration by her Russian speaking fans back in 2012-2013. She said "I've taken it to heart and it's something that I've tried to be conscious of as I move forward in the series and my other work", apologized and then she did nothing to do better. She marketed Shadow and Bone as "Tsarpunk", fetishisizing Russian culture and using it as a unique setting to uplift a generic "light vs. dark" fantasy plot supported by the bland narrative of the Chosen One. There was an effort and will to make a change for the better, not a single letter has been changed for us. When I think about, I can't really remember anything that would ring as a thoughtful and clever element adapted into the story from Russian culture. If everything is always altered or twisted, if there is nothing true or authentic then should you really call it Russian-inspired? Should you really make profit off it and call this aesthetic tsarpunk?

Leigh Bardugo could have fixed the most jarring problems with the material while doing the adaptation from book to screen, but she chose not to. There was no effort made to include more people of slavic descent as a major part of production team or as background actors. Almost nothing of the production design or clothing was inspired by Russian culture. To elaborate: I'm not even mad. I'm just deeply sad and hurt by the indifference.

Some might argue that this book series was not written for Russians, that it was written for the western audience. But don't they deserve respectfully researched and authentic stories too?

[stark-tony]

today is my 22nd birthday so i’m celebrating by reccing 22 of my favorite fics and giving my general thoughts about them.

atla

 i'm still here by owedbetter (77.7, T, zutara) "You see me."And somehow, that makes all the difference.

thoughts: One of the first zutara fics i ever read and it’s still one of my absolute favorites. The characterization of all of the characters is superb and the gradual development of zuko and katara’s relationship is amazing.

 such selfish prayers by andromeda3116 (47.6k, T, zutara)  Katara's ambition, so long set aside for the good of others, breaks free and sets fire to her soul. Or, Katara has a vision of her canon future, casts it aside, and becomes a world-changing politician instead.

thoughts: while this fic is a zutara fic, the majority of this fic is centered on katara and her helping rebuild the world after the war and it does an astounding job of portraying just that. and honestly this probably has my favorite characterization of katara i’ve ever read in a fic.

 Southern Lights by colourwhirled (501.8k, M, zutara) A world where the Avatar has disappeared from memory. Where Sozin’s Conquest was successful. Where the unsteady order of the empire is threatened as members of the royal family are picked off one by one and lines are slowly drawn in the sand.One last chance for peace forces an unlikely alliance between a homesick waterbender, a carefree Air Nomad, a runaway Earth Kingdom heiress, and the fire lord's inscrutable son. Together they must learn to shed old enmities and become the balance they seek to restore to the world.OR:The avatar has four heads.x[[Chapter 4: "And always, his eyes, cautiously watching her. Even when he thinks she isn’t looking. It drives her mad"]]

thoughts: when i say i was unable to put this fic down i genuinely mean that. like i’m pretty sure i was hooked from the very first chapter and i never looked back.

bnha

  stickers and stars by aloneintherain (1.9k, G, gen) “Aizawa, are you sure I’m the best person for this job? There are a lot more qualified people on campus. People who have been teachers for years, and—”As All Might spoke, Midoriya Izuku crawled the length of the couch, ducked under All Might’s arm, and made himself comfortable on his lap. All Might’s hands rose into the air, as though unsure of what to with his arms now that he had a toddler curled against his stomach like a cat seeking the warmth of its owner.“Um,” All Might said.

thoughts: is it not enough to say ‘baby deku’ and leave it at that?

 Butterfly by aconstantstateofbladerunner (198.8k, T, gen) The first over-night trip off campus since the training camp was supposed to be a fun break from more intense work back home. But between a bleak introduction to chaos theory, a chilly reception from the locals, and the looming threat of a villain attack, Izuku has too much on his mind to properly enjoy the fresh air. But those worries are a light breeze compared to the hurricane that accompanies what he finds on the outskirts of town.Or rather, what finds him.

thoughts: it’s incredibly well written and the horror aspect is so good. also the dad might in it is top tier.

villain eradication plan 5C: let them attack budding heroes mothers, wait appropriate time for mother to defeat them (3.4k, G, toshinko)  Targetting the civilian families of hero students should be cakewalk. Pity they decided to go with Inko first.Or the one where Inko accidentally defeats the League of Villains.

thoughts: this fic is basically inko accidentally being a badass and it’s as hilarious and awesome as it sounds

 see it all in bloom by aloneintherain (57.2k, T,  tododeku, kiribaku, momojirou, bullying) Midoriya looked over the occupants of the room with butter soft eyes. “We should do this again. Seeing everyone in one place … it’s like we’re back in school again.”Todoroki said, “It feels like a family reunion.”(Social media fic, counting down the five months to Class 1-A's ten year reunion.) 

thoughts: this series deals with social media + the lives of class 1a after they become pro heroes and it is amazing.

 remember from here on in by aloneintherain (8.1k, G, gen) Aizawa glances from All Might to Midoriya quickly. It sounds impossible—he’s never heard of a quirk that can be handed down like a family heirloom—but at the same time, it makes perfect sense. Midoriya’s inability to use his quirk at the start of the year. The strange, familial relationship between All Might and Midoriya. The slow malnourishment of All Might’s body, like his power was being siphoned away.“You’re …” Aizawa begins.“I’m All Might’s successor.” Midoriya’s proud but shaky voice rings clearly down the empty corridor.Aizawa finds out about One for All. 

thoughts: this fic deals with one for all being revealed to aizawa + midoriya getting more quirks and it is amazing

could i but teach the hundredth part by terra_incognita (5.2k, G, gen) Ito Matsu knows three things about her neighbor, Mr. Yagi: he's very skinny, he's very kind, and he has enough children to overthrow the Japanese government.Or:All Might is retired, but his former students keep coming up with reasons to visit. 

thoughts: this fic is so lovely and i adore it so much

mcu

 the talk by parkrstark (3.1k, pepperony) “Wait, man, what’re you doin’?” Rhodey asked, leaning forward.“Giving the kid his talk before he goes off to college.” Duh.Rhodey blinked. “At 3am when you’re probably too drunk to even spell your name, months before he actually has to leave?”“Yeah.”Rhodey blinked again. “Okay.”

thoughts: this fic is absolutely hilarious and poor peter is suffering throughout all of it

 call you home by Madelinedear (19k, G, pepperony) sometimes family is who you're born with.and sometimes family is a spider boy, a rich not-dad, and a kickass aunt.(or; tony, may, and peter find a place in each other's lives)

thoughts: to me, this fic is the tony may co-parenting fic. like i honestly don’t think that anything can ever top it

I Never Lived 'Til I Lived In Your Light by losingmymindtonight (38.4k, T, pepperony, character death)  As the world shifts to make space for Morgan Stark, everyone around her shifts, too. (As it turns out, this also includes Peter Parker's sleep schedule.) 

thoughts: this fic is both fluffy goodness and heartwrenching angst and it handles both beautifully.

 Lazarus, come forth by iron_spider (47.9k, T, pepperony) Tony's mind is a chaotic mess but he remembers the moment—remembers his death, remembers the red hot pain and Peter screaming, Rhodey rushing to his side. How he knew he’d never see Pepper again—but they’d fixed it. They’d fixed the world, erased the lost time, set things right—and the kid was back. The kid was crying, the kid hated him for doing what he did, but he was back. He was alive.Tony Stark was dead. But now he’s breathing again, trying to think, gasping, hands tracing the box surrounding him, covering him, suffocating him.He’s in a coffin. He’s under the ground. He’s under the fucking ground.(Tony Stark dies defeating Thanos. But then he comes back to life. He has to find out how, why, and how to live again. And how to deal with the changes in the people he's coming back to.)

thoughts: although this fic was written and finished pre-endgame but to me this fic is the fix-it fic for film.

Identity Saga by KitCat992 (400.7k, T, pepperony) An organically developed, platonic slow-burn of Avengers-fam dynamic with a heavy hand of Irondad & Spiderson. Throw in an overdose of whump, a couple of cunning villains and a big-bad hiding in the shadows, and you got yourself this hot mess.

thoughts: i just love the avengers dynamic in this series and the whump is medically accurate which is amazing.

college applications: the biggest meme by sagemb (3.3k, T, pepperony) Tony covered his face with both hands and screamed very gently. “Can I just bribe the school to let Peter in?"

thoughts: this series is absolutely hilarious and i love it

hp  

 The Changeling + Armistice Series  by Annerb (586.6k, M, hinny, rape) Ginny is sorted into Slytherin. It takes her seven years to figure out why.

thoughts: this fic is absolutely golden and i adore it so so much. the characters are so well written and the worldbuilding in this fic is fantastic and it actually has an original aspect of hogwarts (aka the parlor) that i practially consider to be canon at this point. also the depiction of slytherin house + house unity in this fic is just *chef’s kiss*

 boy with a scar by dirgewithoutmusic (208.7k, T, hinny, romione, jily)  A series of "what if" rewrites of Harry Potter, books 1-7. Cross-posted from tumblr (ink-splotch).

thoughts: every single one of these fics are exquisitely written and i wish that i could experience the beauty of this series again for the very first time.

  Hogwarts, to welcome you home by gedsparrowhawk (FaceChanger) (11.1k, G, ginny) “You understand, Professor,” Harry began, after a moment, “that I don’t have my N.E.W.T.s. I never even finished seventh year. Between everything, I never had a chance the first time around, and then afterwards there didn’t seem to be much point. Hermione argued for it, of course, but I was so tired of Britain. So technically, I am completely unqualified for the position.”“Quite a way to begin an interview, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said, dryly.Or, three years after the war, Harry Potter becomes Hogwarts' newest Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

thoughts: this is my favorite harry as dada professor i’ve ever read. no doubt about it

 And the Unethical Binding Contract by justafandomfollower (14.6k, G, gen) AU. What if the Triwizard Tournament took place in Harry's first year, not his fourth? 

thoughts: this fic is beautifully written and i love the relationship that forms between harry, cedric, krum, and fleur.

Regulus Black and the Way Things Changed: A Not!Fic by imaginary_golux (8.8k, T, wolfstar) What if Regulus Black, and not Severus Snape, ended up being the turncoat Potions Master of Hogwarts?A not!fic written in bullet points, ignoring the Deathly Hallows entirely because they annoy me.Beta by my immensely patient Best Beloved, Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw, and by the delightful starbirdrampant.

thoughts: this fic may be ooc at some points but it’s so funny that that makes up for it

spn

 Broadway Musical by Griftings (12.5k, M, destiel) This is the day that marked the Holy and Blessed Union of Dean Winchester and Jo Harvelle.The merging of prominent bloodlines is always a grand occurrence, but breeding pedigree hunter families like Winchester and Harvelle is something to be rejoiced. It is also something to be meticulously planned, which thankfully the Host is very good at.Or, the romantic comedy where Dean Winchester and Jo Harvelle are destined to get married, Castiel is given the task of playing matchmaker and fails terribly, the entire Heavenly Host becomes a sitcom audience, God warns against male pregnancy, and Jimmy Novak is incredibly unimpressed with angels in general.

thoughts: this fic is quite possibly the single most funniest thing i have ever read. like i was straight up cackling when i was reading some of the scenes.

  Down to Agincourt by seperis (1 million+, E, destiel) There is no such thing as a guarantee when it comes to war.The outcome's known. Why try? Return your rusty sword to battered sheath, bow your head and bend your stubborn knee. Why take the field when you cannot win the war? But Harry -- he went down to Agincourt.

--Harry Takes the Field by bratfarrar (AO3 link here.)

thoughts: this fic is an absolute work of art. the characterization dean and cas and all of the ocs is astounding the world building is immaculate and the writing is so detailed and in depth. a fair warning though to the first time reader as this fic can get very confusing at times but trust me it is worth it. 

[husbandograveyard]

The best gift - Crocodile x reader

One Piece of summer challenge - week 10

part of the challenge hosted by @doctorgerth​ & @laws-yellow-submarine​ I’m attempting all 11 weeks, 11 different prompts and 11 different characters! One to last one, a little later than it was supposed to come out! I cannot believe I managed to write things 10 weeks in a row already?? Enjoy!

Prompt: seashells - Character: Sir Crocodile  - Word count: 1.5k Tw: pregnancy !! oh and the seashell language is completely made up.  2nd person, female reader. 

Crocodile was away from home quite often. First hand check ups on certain branches of his organisation, missions that no one else could be trusted to do, other, miscellaneous business trips, the list of reasons to leave you home alone was quite endless. You knew this from way before the relationship started, from before you got together. You didn’t mind too much, you knew he was strong and that he would always get back to you. But this time was a little different still. 

You placed a hand on your lower belly, where there was no change yet, but there would soon be. The doctor, highly qualified like anyone on Sir Crocodile’s personnel, had left you with no doubt: you were pregnant.  The fact that your husband was away on a business trip made it a little easier for you to firstly accept the news by yourself. He was so sensitive to every little change in your expressions and mood, he’d have figured it out before you would have the time to tell him. 

But now your time to think about it and overthink it all was running out. Crocodile could be returning home any day now, or so you had been told. You had done quite a bit of research while trying to figure out how to break the news, and had eventually settled on some seashells. It seemed weird at first, but you found a book on the symbolic meanings of the shells, and the ones you had picked out were supposedly meant to bring good luck, signal fatherhood, new beginnings... besides, you loved the way they looked and they seemed best fitting for a gift to Crocodile. He didn’t like it when you spoiled him with big gifts, that was his job he said, but he did appreciate all the meaningful things you gave him, keeping every single one of them either on his person at all times or in the upper drawer of his desk, close whenever he was working. 

You were nervous, not sure what to expect. You didn’t expect him to be overjoyed, maybe he’d even be a little angry. But you had already stopped the figuring out who was to blame, and in the month you were by yourself, you had gotten used to the whole idea of motherhood. No matter the outcome of the conversation you were soon about to have, you had made up your mind that you would do whatever necessary to keep the child and give it a life where it could be as happy and healthy as possible. 

You looked at the little box containing the seashells, set aside your book and made your way to Crocodile’s office. You’d put the little box on his desk, and then when he returned and asked about it, you would break the news. 

You had not expected him to sit behind his desk as you opened the door, but there was no mistaking that large frame and the signature smell of his cigars, a habit you hoped he’d lessen a little around you, if he were to react positively to the news. You could feel your heart sink as you had hoped for a little more time to mentally prepare, and all the words you had practiced and wanted to say seemed to have packed their suitcases and moved out of your brain, leaving you standing in the open door frame, immediately informing your husband that indeed, something was wrong. 

He had meant to surprise you, but wanted to put away his paperwork and such from the mission, before going to seek you out. Now you were there, and he couldn’t help but frown when he called you over to his desk, an awkward silence as you stepped forward, closing the door behind you, and made your way over to him, going around the desk so you were now standing next to him, as he turned to you to face him. You were nervous, but you were not scared. You knew him better than that. He would never hurt you, even if you were to disappoint him with your news. 

“You’re back early” You broke the silence with the most steady voice you could muster. It would have convinced anyone but the one person in front of you.  “I told the servants not to warn you, I wanted it to be a surprise.”  You laughed. “well... you did manage to surprise me!” He seemed satisfied, maybe your nervousness did just come from the sudden surprise of seeing him there, while you were obviously on your way to plan something for him. He had already spotted the neatly wrapped up box in your hands. 

“Sorry for startling you and ruining... your surprise?” he blew away a puff of smoke behind him, and eyed the box you were now nearly crushing with your nervous grip. You held it out for him, laughing nervously.  “Let’s do this together, to make it less uncomfortable?” He handed you a similar-sized box, it had been on his desk, but you had been too busy collecting your thoughts to notice it sitting there.  You nodded as you took the box out of his hands, thanked him and then there was a moment of silence as each of you was opening their gift. 

The moment you laid eyes upon the content of the box, you frowned in confusion. There were numerous beautiful seashells, sharing similar meanings as the one you had given your other half, who let out a low chuckle at the gift in his hands.  “Wait.. you know? Someone told you? Who told you?” You looked up at him in confusion, only to see one eyebrow raise in similar confusion.  “Who told me what? I saw these and they reminded me of you, the lady who sold them told me they were the ideal gift for a long-standing relation.”  “Well yeah... “ you responded silently, “they stand for good luck, new beginnings, fertility...and parenthood.” You said, lifting up each of the shells as you named off their qualities. They were absolutely gorgeous and way more sturdy and pretty than the ones you had gotten him. He had gotten silent at your words, them sinking in rather fast. 

“So you’re..”  “yes” you answered before he could even finish his sentence, “I found out a week after you left..”  He took another deep inhale from his cigar, holding it in a little longer than he usually would, before blowing out another puff of smoke, again, away from you.  “You’re aware of the possible dangers that come with it?”  You nodded.  “And you know I won’t be able to just drop all this?” he gestured with his hook at the whole room, you knew he meant the whole empire he had built as a warlord.  You nodded again.  “Well, I know where you can stay, I can probably send Miss All Sunday with you for protection...” he was more talking to himself than actually to you and you felt the tears well up in your eyes. That was it, he was going to send you away and this would end the entirety of the relationship. 

He looked up from his murmuring and thinking only to see you completely devastated.  “I’m sorry” was all you could say before the first few teardrops spilled on your cheeks.  “What are you sorry for?” He reached out his arm, gently pulling you closer, as he noticed you were increasing the physical distance between the two of you.  You followed easily, wanting nothing more than having him close and sobbing in his chest, unable to form words, let alone sentences. Crocodile put one and one together, and understood how his thinking out loud might have given you the entire wrong impression. 

“Love, there’s no way I’ll be keeping you in a house full of assassins and such when you’re at your most vulnurable. The marines are not allowed any funny business because of my current status, but they will definitely not be happy to hear about the news and I wouldn’t want them trying anything. So I’ll be sending you somewhere safe, probably with Miss All Sunday to watch over you, when the time comes where you cannot move comfortably enough to protect yourself, she will do so. And I told you I cannot drop all this,” he gestured again, as you slowly lifted your tearstained face from his chest, “but that doesn’t mean I am dropping you either. I’ll visit you as often as I can, make it another sort of business trip where no one should try to interrupt me... I just want you safe.” 

The wave of relief that washed over you was immense, and you couldn’t help but tear up again. His hooked hand moved behind you, gently holding you close, so he could use his good hands to wipe those tears from your face.  “Now before we set that plan in motion, I believe this calls for a celebration.” 

[universejunction]

Midwayers, and problems of intended belief

A discord conversation (at first about fae and spirits)

Me:

I feel so far behind on learning about fae and spirits and such. When I thought The Urantia Book was more than a well-intentioned hoax it was easy to think fae and such are all just what it calls "midwayers". Now I'm... wide open to new interpretations. I know I'm not behind, I'm just where I am, but still...

A:

I would love to give you more of an idea, but I don't know a ton about the Urantia book or what you mean by midwayers.

Me:

Oof, okay. I don't expect much in the way of answers, I know I'll get what I get in time. But I will take this opportunity to share.

In the Urantia Book, it make a lot of distinction between spirit and matter, as you might expect. Mind is the means by which Spirit rules over matter, yada yada. It also has a ton of details on angels.

There's a ton of history in there too, which I'm now interpreting as metaphor at best, because it's sure as shit not factual with its racial skeletal types and what not.

Anyway... Y'know, I'm gonna give the summary and then see if I have the energy for the story, because I'm worn out.

Basically, midwayers are midway between material and spiritual (but they're not, like, pure mind), covering the gap between angels and humans. They're native to the world, but descended from super-humans. They're immortal and stick around until the "age of light and life". And there's 1111 of either all of them or that might just be the first group of them.

Midwayers also get attributed cases of demonic possession (but so does mental illness), though they're not supposed to be able to do that anymore since Jesus completed his experience of life and earned his sovereignty (which was... before his public work) as basically god of local creation.

There's so much in this book and I carved it into my brain and now I don't trust it but it's still so quick to mind 😩

Innkeeper:

Woof okay I just read this

This is....so much not correct at all but also weirdly accurate

Which makes sense considering my personal theories on bleedthrough but thats another topic for another time

Me:

"Bleedthrough" sounds so very likely correct even without knowing what you mean exactly. That's pretty much my theory on how the Absolutes stuff seems so probably accurate despite everything else

A:

I'm just going to offer that whenever you hear "superhuman," in a spiritual tome, your hackles should probably raise.

Like, it sounds like this is coming from the same branch of angelic and Christian occultism that recognize the Nephilim, but uh, just be mindful that rhetoric about "ancient superhumans" is almost ALWAYS used to sell bullshit about magic indigenous people

It sounds like you're mindful of that, but, heads up

V:

The midwayer concept is ringing alarm bells between "Magic White People From Outer Space" to "Eugenics"

Innkeeper:

^

The idea of a liminal concept, something that exists in between those two states, I feel that holds water

The idea of literally everything else is uh

Worrisome at best

Me:

I'll add more in a sec but y'all right

Me (later):

To be clear, I was raised on the Urantia Book and am now moving away from it. For reasons mentioned above, among others.

It does come very close to "magic white people from outer space" and definitely is like "eugenics is a good idea but no one is qualified to direct it".

Me (replying to A):

Adding on, yes, but it's like... Fix-it fic. There's this spirit prince for the world who rebelled with Lucifer (who was like... a local administrator, not a god or angel), but when he arrived they like... called 100 natives [of Earth], cloned them with power-ups, and put people from other worlds like ours into the bodies who served as the prince's staff in the task of cultivating culture. Those staff, through essentially spiritual sex, created the first midwayers. After rebellion, the staff split and the ones who stay loyal to the prince are called nephilim and start a line of (acknowledged in the text) big ol' nasty racial supremacists. They're also called Nodites (c.f. "Land of Nod")

Later, Adam and Eve show up to "upstep" human evolution (disease resistance, humor, art... yeah, magic white people) but because the prince rebelled and shit's fucked, they're having a hard time. Eve bangs a local tribe leader to get an alliance and fucks everything up (that results in Cain. Able is Adam and Eve's next kid). So now should-be-immortal Adam and Eve only have a few hundred years to live and their (already many) kids get the choice to leave and most of them do.

A while later, their first son, Adamson, goes off to start a new cultural center, meets a woman named Rata who "claims" to be the last pure-line Nodite. [They] have a bunch of kids, every 4th of which is invisible(???), and they make those kids get together (yikes!) and that's where the secondary midwayers come from.

And it lampshades all this like "many things in the spiritual development of a world are hard to understand." Uh, yeah! History is weird, sure, but as it's fan fic, it's creepy.

A:

So, I'm saying this with all the love in my heart, but you can only portray things as fiction which are not intended to be believed.

That's not a fanfiction, that's a religious text. That is a religious text with a fully realized theology and metaphysics, complete with creation story. I think it is harmful to approach it as anything else, or as a "generic" metaphysical practice. (Relatedly, there is no such thing as "generic witchcraft," which is a main point of this history of the occult book club).

Doing a little bit more research, it's a religious text associated loosely with the Urantia Foundation and written in 1955. I'm not seeing any indication at the moment that there's a formal power structure associated with the movement, which lessens the chance for cult behavior.

What I will suggest to you is that you need to approach this work like you would any other religious text. Set aside questions of whether the text is "accurate" or "true." If you are honestly interested in the metaphysical, you should be able to separate empirical reality and history for the metaphysical. If you can't do that, take five steps back in your practice and come back once you can.

So, setting aside questions of truth, does this cosmology reflect the things you believe about the world? Does it encourage a way of thinking about people that you think is good, virtuous, honorable, etc? Can this text be used to uphold values that you hold, or do the natural extensions of this text lead to certain conclusions? Are those conclusions harmful?

For instance, I believe that eugenics is totally and morally abhorrent, and that there is fundamentally "no such thing" as a person who could pull it off "correctly." There's no way to do eugenics "right," just like I believe there is no morally correct way to, I don't know, punch a baby.

As such, even your acknowledgment that the text accepts eugenics makes it worthy of rejection in my mind.

Maybe you are interested and capable of doing the apologetics to make this into a compassionate religious movement. I don't know. I am not interested in doing that. But I do not think you can "move away" from this text, in the same way that you cannot "move away" from the bible, only from interpretations of it.

At some point, you have to believe in a basic assumption. If there's something that "feels right," there's only so far you can push it without that basic assumption.

If you think there is a separation between mind, body, and Spirit, wonderful. I would recommend you find another text and another basic set of assumptions. For instance, one that doesn't involve angels making angel-possesed magic native people for the point of preparing the world for the "good races."

Me:

Yes, you've got it right. Except that my interpretation has moved from "I think this book is what it claims" to "I think this was (probably well-intentioned, but still) a hoax perpetrated by ex-Seventh-Day Adventists". But for whatever good intentions may've been involved, the fact that it's intended to be believed makes it very harmful. I talked about it today as a way of saying "wow, look at this crazy shit" and talking through the changes involved in my different interpretation / loss of faith.

I don't believe in midwayers anymore and don't know what to believe, I'm trying to do the work, as you say, of finding what parts are good and what's harmful, comparing with empirical stuff, etc. But, however ready I may've been to walk away from the Urantia Book, it's still a process of recognizing what ideas I have based on it and examining them in turn to see what's salvageable.

Innkeeper:

I think that's an incredibly respectful way to go about it, Toph.

When something is that formative to you as a person, it's rarely as easy as learning it's harmful and then moving on, entirely separated from the source material. There's a long process of digging up every assumption you know you have--and many you don't know you have, or don't have at all--and needing to challenge them in a newer, healthier framework. One of the most potent aspects of the danger of cults is that they're incredibly difficult to challenge that base assumption, and it can take years if not a lifetime to walk a path that steadily heads away from what was taught.

So to acknowledge something formative's deep capacity for danger and harm, and go through the long process of picking it apart piece by piece to ensure you don't retain its harmfulness as you separate from it, I think that's the best possible way to go about something.

[the-everqueen]

why i disliked “the traitor baru cormorant”

so...recently i read Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. i bought it thinking, Cool, an insightful fantasy series for me to get into while i wait to hear whether i passed my qualifying exams! i have some time before the semester starts! 

and then i absolutely hated it and spent every minute cataloguing what i thought Dickinson got wrong.

...uh, if you want to get the tl;dr of the liveblog i gave the gf, here’s the top three reasons i disliked this book:

1) not a fan of the “strong female character” trope

yes, Baru doesn’t sling around a sword or shoot arrows better than Anyone In The Whole World. but Dickinson IMMEDIATELY tells us (not shows, tells) that she’s good at math, she’s clever at picking apart strategic scenarios, she’s a savant. (tbh, i don’t love how he shows this, either, with the standard child-prodigy-who-catches-the-attention-of-a-powerful-adult trope.) in Dickinson’s crafted world, her math skills aren’t entirely unusual: women (for...some reason?) are stereotyped as being good at calculations, despite also being aligned with hysteria and too many emotions. this bothers me more than it’s probably supposed to, because the sexism in this novel doesn’t really seem to follow an internal logic. i guess it’s so we can have a woman as the protagonist? also...hoo boy...her “savant” characterization bothers me because...she’s heavily coded as South East Asian (...maaaybe Philippines or Native Hawaii, but as i’ll get to later, Dickinson doesn’t make a huge distinction). uh...model minority stereotypes anyone? yes, within the text, plenty of people associated with the Empire comment that it’s impressive someone of her background got into a position of power so young. at the same time, i’m sure that sounds familiar to so many Asian-identified people! the constant tightrope of being expected to perform to a certain (white, Western) standard while also being Othered. mostly this bothers me because Baru is also characterized as...a sellout for the Empire. sure, her stated goal is to undo the Empire from within, but [MAJOR SPOILERS] in the end it appears that her actual goal was to attain enough power that the Empire would let her be a benevolent dictator over her home island? and it’s only after a major PERSONAL betrayal that she revises this plan? [END SPOILERS] Baru also assimilates without much pain or sacrifice. she hardly ever thinks about her parents or her childhood home. she willingly strips herself of cultural signifiers and adapts to Empire norms (apart from being a closeted lesbian, which...yeah, i’ll get to that, too). and it’s not that Dickinson doesn’t TRY to make her a nuanced character, but...to me, it feels so painfully obvious that this is not his experience. it feels almost...voyeuristic. 

...much like his descriptions of wlw desire!

2) we get it, you read Foucault

the categories of sexual deviance are based entirely on a Western Victorian-era medical discourse around non-heterosexual forms of desire, but Dickinson ignores the network of sociocultural, religious, and historical contexts that contributed to that specific kind of discourse. he uses the terms “tribadism” and “sodomy” but those ideas CANNOT EXIST outside a Euro-American Christian context. yes, a huge part of the 19th century involved the pathologization of sexual and romantic desire (or lack thereof). but that in turn goes back to a history of medicine that relied on the “scientific method” as a means of studying and dissecting the human body--and that method in itself is a product of Enlightenment thinking. Theorist Sylvia Wynter (whomst everyone should read, imho) discusses how the Enlightenment attempted to make the Human (represented by a cisgender, heteronormative, white man) an agent of the State economy. every categorization of so-called deviance goes back to white supremacist attempts to define themselves as ‘human’ against a nonwhite, non-Christian Other. and IN TURN that was ultimately founded on anti-Black, anti-Indigenous racism. at this point it’s a meme in academic circles to mention Foucault, because so many scholars don’t go any further in engaging with his ideas or acknowledge their limits. but SERIOUSLY. Dickinson crafts the Masquerade as this psuedo-scientific empire that’s furthering erasure of native cultures, but...where did these ideas come from? who created them? what was the justification that gave them power? [MINOR SPOILER] blaming the Empire’s ideology on a handful of people behind the Mask who crafted this entire system makes me...uncomfortable, to say the least. part of what gives imperialism its power is that a lot of ordinary people buy in to its ideas, because it aligns with dominant belief systems or gives them some sense of advantage. 

also speaking of cultural erasure...

3) culture is more than set dressing

again, to reiterate: Baru does NOT think back to her childhood home for longer than a couple passing sentences at various points in the narrative. but even though the early chapters literally take place on her home island, i don’t get a sense of...lived experience. this is true of ALL of the fantasy analogues Dickinson has created in his Empire. i felt uncomfortably aware of the real world counterparts that Dickinson was drawing inspiration from. at the same time...there are basically no details to really breathe life into these various fantasy cultures. i HATE the trope of “fantasy Asia” or “fantasy Africa” or “fantasy Middle East” that’s rampant among white male sff writers. Dickinson does not get points from me for basically just expanding that to “fantasy South East Asia,” “fantasy Mongolia,” “fantasy South America,” and... “fantasy Africa,” plus some European cultures crammed in there. he’s VERY OBVIOUSLY drawing on those languages for names, but otherwise there’s no real sense of their religious practices, the nuances of their cultures, the differences between those cultures (besides physiological, which...oh god). part of that is probably supposed to be justified by “well, the Empire just erased it!!!” but that’s not an excuse imho. 

also...in making the Empire the ultimate signifier of the evils of imperialism...Dickinson kind of leans into the “noble savage” stereotype. Baru’s home island is portrayed as this idyllic environment where no one is shamed for who they love and gender doesn’t determine destiny and there are no major conflicts. (there is a minor nod to some infighting, but this is mostly a “weakness” that the Masquerade uses as an excuse to obliterate a whole tribe.) Dickinson justifies young Baru’s immediate assimilation as her attempt to figure out the Masquerade’s power from within, but given that the Masquerade presumably killed one of her dads and her mom maybe advocates a guerilla resistance...it’s weird that Baru basically abandons her family without a second thought. yeah, i get that she’s a kid when the Masquerade takes over the island, but...that’s still a hugely traumatic experience! the layers of trauma and conditioning and violence that go into this level of colonization are almost entirely externalized. 

(later it’s implied that Baru might qualify as a psychopath, and tbh that feels like an excuse for why we haven’t gotten any sense of her inner world, not to mention kind of offensive.) 

this isn’t exhaustive but...

it’s not that i don’t think white people shouldn’t ever address POC experiences in their books. just...if your entire trilogy is going to revolve around IMPERIALISM IS BAD, ACTUALLY, maybe you should contribute to the discourse that Black, Brown, and Indigenous authors have already done. reading this book made me so, so angry. i did not feel represented! i felt like i was being talked down to, both on a critical theory level AND on a craft level. there are SO MANY books by actual BIPOC and minority authors that have done this better. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy and her current Cities series. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy. Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House remains one of the more powerful novels i’ve read on how The System Is Out To Destroy You, That Is The Point. (Bardugo is non-practicing Spanish and Moroccan Jewish on one side of her family, and her character Alex is mixed and comes from a Jewish background!) 

...

there’s not really a point to this. i get a lot of people have raved about this book. good for them. if that’s you, no judgment. i’m not trying to argue IF YOU LIKED THIS YOU ARE PROBLEMATIC. i’m just kind of enraged that a white dude wrote about a Brown lesbian under a colonial empire and that THIS Brown lesbian under a colonial empire couldn’t even get behind the representation. also kind of annoyed that it’s the Empire of Masks and Dickinson either hasn’t read Fanon or didn’t see fit to slip in a Fanon reference, which like. missed opportunity. 

[annikasafternoonread]

So, Tempests and Slaughter. Sorry it took me a bit to get this together; moving is always more hectic than I realize. But I wanted to take the time and do this book justice. And there’s a lot to say.

To start off, my overarching thoughts would be... I love this world, I love these characters, I love so many parts of this story... but this didn’t totally feel like a story. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, it’s just an expectation of the form, but it just feels... weird. It reminds me of some of my comments on Independent Study, how the ending didn’t feel like an ending, just a place to stop between books. There isn’t really an overarching theme or conflict that comes to a head, there’s just... a conflict. Actually, it even more reminds me of the second Fantastic Beasts movie, where I didn’t realize that dramatic fascist rally thing was meant to be The Climactic Moment until it was almost over. We’d been building up to so much, set up so many plot points and questions and then resolved none of them. It just... ended. Felt almost like “oh this one is getting long, better throw in some kind of conflict and then switch to the next book/movie.”

We didn’t resolve anything with Chioké, or with Faziy, or with Musenda. And what’s up with Preet? I know gods work on a different timescale but it’s been almost two years! The concept of gladiators was an overarching conflict, I guess, but Kottrun came out of nowhere and nothing was actually resolved. I don’t expect ALL of these to be wrapped up in one book -- gotta leave something for the sequal haha -- but it doesn’t feel like there was any specific reason to cut it here as opposed to anyone else. Maybe around when we found Faziy would have made more sense. It’s not even the end of a term or year or a level of schooling, like how Kel’s books were cut. We just... stopped. I enjoyed all of the content, but the ending just didn’t feel like an ending, so it was a little jarring. 

The ending might not have been entirely satisfying, but the book itself is spot on. It’s right up my alley, as a massive nerd who likes learning anything I can get my hands on. And it’s also right up my alley as someone who is fascinated by how the dynamics of power and manipulation play our between people, especially leaders. And it’s also right up my alley as someone who is down to fight about different disciplines all being valuable in their own way. That basically covers all three of the main characters’ concepts (respectively: Arram, Ozorne, Varice) so there’s pretty much always something I’m interested in happening. 

Ozorne in particular is such a fascinating character. I would say his plot also appeals to me as a sucker for a redemption arc, but we all know he’s not going to get one. That’s the thing with prequels; the ending is already written. Which again, isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- it almost makes it more interesting, to see how well Tamora can make us root for him and empathize with him even when we know what he’s going to become. I guess that still does tie in, because really villains just fascinate me in general. No one (or almost no one) thinks they’re a villain. They think they’re doing things for good reasons. But what qualifies as “good” is different between different people. Or their reasons might be based on flawed assumptions. Or even if their reasons are good, their methods might still be unacceptable to us. But understanding what’s going on in their minds, what makes them tick, what motivates them -- I find that kind of character immersion fascinating. 

I mentioned when I started this that I see a lot of parallels between Arram and Caleb Widogast from Critical Role, but I didn’t really comment on that at all in my reading (I’m honestly really bad at predicting what I’ll comment on XD). I still think there are parallels in the broad strokes, but they don’t really come out in the plot too much. Maybe Ozorne is almost the stronger parallel, since he’s the leader and he’s the one with the corrupt, murderous, lying teacher who wants to manipulate and control and groom him for power (oops did I say that out loud). It’s very possible that Arram could have been a Caleb, in a different world with different influences. Caleb (or rather, Bren) wanted to be good. He wanted to be a good student and a good citizen of the Empire and a good worker and god he just wanted to be good. He really did. And being good was what destroyed him.  

Arram wanted to be good, but the people who guided him had less murderous or fanatical definitions of “good”. Maybe he would have been different anyways; he was always gentle and sympathetic, but it’s not hard to imagine that being trained out of him -- if they got him young, if they built up to it, if they normalized it, if they didn’t give him a choice. Ramasu and Yadeen and Cosmas and so many others, they always prioritized Arram’s consent. They always asked to share his power, made it clear that he could say no, encouraged him to speak up if he was uncomfortable -- he was always in control of his choices, he was always empowered to choose his direction. They pushed him, challenged him, encouraged him, but it was his call. And if something was in contrast to his morals, then he didn’t do it. 

Except Chioké. Except that one day on the field, when Chioké insisted Arram throw fire when he didn’t want to, saw a battlefield future for Arram that nauseated him. He didn’t want it, but Chioké didn’t care. Chioké wanted power, wanted to increase his own power, wanted to control others’ power, wanted more always more. He would be happy to break Arram, or bend him to his will. I really wonder, with Faziy, did they force her to cast the spells? Did they use her knowledge then get rid of her so she couldn’t tell? Was she just a frame opportunity and had nothing to do with any of it? All of those possibilities fit with how Chioké uses and abuses power, his own and others’. 

I think that’s all the main points I can think of for now. I’m sure there’s more I could say -- I could write several essays on this shit -- but off the top of my head, I’m tapped out. Feel free to let me know if there’s anything you think I missed, or anything you’d like to hear my thoughts on. I probably have thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts. Almost as many as I have feelings. 

Anyways, I work tomorrow evening so I’ll probably start the next book on Wednesday. That means this is your last chance to weigh in! Should I discover Gideon the Ninth, will I re-explore the Wings quintet, or is it time for Most Likely? Let me know!

I’ll see you soon :)

[hutchhitched]

Social Commentary in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Part III

Part 3. Yeah… There’s a whole lot going on in the last third of the book, and I may have had to put it down a few times because I got really excited about how she wove the new book with the original trilogy. I know some people thought Part 3 was over the top, but I found it purposeful and deliberately on the nose, and I think that’s why it works. If you want to see my thoughts on the rest of the book, here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2.

 Major spoilers below:

Tagging some who asked me to and/or are interested: @the-tesseract-wrinkling-time​, @shesasurvivor​, @everlarkedalways​, @xerxia31​, @infinitegraces​, @panemposts, and @endlessnightlock​. Some others are tagged throughout.

 Before we move on to Part 3, I have to backtrack to something from Part 2 I forgot to include in the previous meta (I blame being up till 7 am and only getting four hours of sleep for that). In Chapter 18, Reaper stabs and rips the Panem flag and then uses it to cover the fallen tributes. The reaction of the mentors is shock and horror that the flag has been treated in such a manner. There’s a lot to unpack here. First, desecration of the flag in the US (and I’d guess most other countries, too) is almost always guaranteed to get a reaction. There have been attempts to pass a constitutional amendment to make it a federal crime to burn the flag. Others argue burning the flag is something protected as freedom of speech. Yet, official guidelines for how to treat the flag are broken all the time by letting it touch the ground, not lighting it, not taking it down during inclement weather, and turning it into a massive symbol of patriotism by holding it horizontally on a football field. I saw someone make reference to the outrage against NFL players kneeling during the national anthem as being disrespectful to the flag (even though that was a suggestion of a military veteran, as opposed to sitting during the anthem instead) rather than being outraged at the actions those players were protesting (police brutality against African American men). So, who is it that rips down the flag? Reaper, the tribute from District 11. Rue and Thresh were District 11, as were Chaff and Seeder. All were portrayed in the movies by African American actors. It’s fairly clear in the books that it’s a predominately black district. In other words, it’s likely Reaper is also a black man who tears down the flag of a country that oppresses him so he can provide cover and give dignity to the dead tributes. Now, think about it from a “rebel” perspective, and imagine that’s a Confederate flag that was ripped down. I know in the books that the Districts are the rebels and the Panem flag is more connected to the Capitol, but still. The debate over the (mostly successful) removal of the Confederate flag from former slave states has raged in the US in the past decade. Probably the most famous image of that debate is when a black woman climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina Statehouse and ripped down the flag. Remove the flag of the government that oppresses you, which is what Reaper does.

 Something I find really interesting is the lack of technology in this book. Panem obviously has advanced technology, but it’s not nearly as present as it is in the trilogy. I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that’s a result of the depressed economy, and by the time we get to the 74th Hunger Games, the economy in the Capitol has recovered and been used to develop new technologies and products that make life easier for citizens. That’s a post-World War II/1950s consumerism analogy if I’ve ever seen one. Post World War II affluence in the United States was a major factor in the development of new weapons and technology. Because American workers were making more and had savings and wages rose 100% between 1945 and 1968, Americans spent more, bought more, and paid more income tax. The solidification of capitalism as America’s economic system helped the US “win” the Cold War against the Soviets. Because Americans made more and were subsequently taxed more, the government had more money to develop new weapons and technologies. The first computer, the hydrogen bomb, vaccines for polio and smallpox, NASA, and the development of ICBMs all took place during this era. A strong economy typically makes people think the nation/government is strong. Not coincidentally, an early counterculture developed during the 1950s that protested against increased consumerism and senseless spending. The Beats/Beatniks/Beat Generation disliked that Americans spent so much money on frivolous things while others (African Americans, the rural poor, and so on) suffered. Sounds a lot like the Capitol citizens who spent lavishly and didn’t care about the districts. As a slight aside, Allen Ginsberg, one of the Beat Generation’s poets, wrote Howl, which calls out capitalism and repression. I wrote The Cry for @promptsinpanem’s prompt Howl in homage to that. Someday, I might actually expand it.

 In Part 2, I wasn’t sure who had the power, and I really couldn’t figure out Highbottom. That’s mostly cleared up for me by the end of the book. I was intrigued by Pluribus Bell’s (many bells, I love it!) story about Highbottom and Snow’s father before Snow left for District 12. It was the seed that let me hope we’d get more information, and we did. Crassus Xanthos Snow is Snow’s father. Crassus was a member of the First Triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus) and helped transition the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (from pre to post Hunger Games). He also gained power and influence as a soldier during the slave uprising of Spartacus (became a hero during a rebel uprising). Also, Xanthos is a city in Turkey that’s been conquered repeatedly but always recovers (Snow lands on top!). Highbottom’s first name is Casca, who was one of Caesar’s best friends, but he ends up being the first person to stab Caesar during his assassination. The break in the relationship between the two men is clearly why Highbottom turns on (young) Snow, and the explanation about how the Hunger Games come to be is a pretty big allegory to the betrayal of Crassus (Caesar) by Casca. Also, that explains why Highbottom didn’t ever really seem to be supportive of the Games, even though he was credited as their creator. ( @everlvrks)

 There are a lot of references to Roman names and places in this book and the trilogy. The Capitol seems pretty obsessed with the Classics and wants to reflect that type of lifestyle and elitism. During grad school, one of the books I had to read discussed the obsession America’s Founding Fathers (Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and so on) had with the Classics. They emulated Greek and Roman ideals. The District of Columbia (Washington, DC) is named after the Roman goddess of Liberty. Jefferson’s and Washington’s homes use classical architecture like domes and columns and many of the federal buildings (the Capital and White House) reflect that. Add on the Washington Monument (an obelisk—which are found all over in the ancient world) and the columns of the Lincoln Memorial and the dome and columns of the Jefferson Memorial, and well… The Founding Fathers were Deists who revered the Classics, which is why I (a religious historian) always laugh when people tell me the US was founded on religion. Yeah, and the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery, either.

 Before this book, I would never have thought about Snow having a history with District 12 or a stint as a peacekeeper. I even looked ahead to the title for Part 3 and still didn’t realize that was going to happen, but it makes sense. First, Snow seems to have known Katniss much better than can really be explained. Her hunting outside the fence and her escapes to the Lake were never really solitary because he knew the area. He’d been there before. He’d visited Lucy Gray in the Seam, been to the meadow, and so on. Some people may see that as too much, but it absolutely fits with the draconian oversight of the Capitol during Katniss’ time, and it indicates why Snow was so intrigued and obsessed with her. Second, Snow’s experience in the military would have worked wonders for his political career. He won the Hunger Games, served as peacekeeper, visited the districts, became the youngest person to qualify for officer training, and went to the university. That’s a stellar resumé for a budding politician. Clearly, he was exceptional. Terrible, but exceptional (which is said about super-villain Voldemort in Harry Potter, too).

 I had to stop and put the book down and wiggle with glee when the tree appeared in the distance. I didn’t think we’d get the actual Hanging Tree in the book, but that might have been the most thrilling part for me. It wasn’t overt. She didn’t name it. She just set the scene, but I knew what it was. And then to have the hanging and the man yell out to his “love” and the mockingjays pick up his cry and for Snow to see a mockingjay and immediately hate it… Oh, good night, nurse. It’s just too much. That’s when I made this post. I’ll admit, I have a thing for lone, massive trees. My dad has one on his farm, and there’s a huge, very old Burr oak that’s a local tourist attraction close to where I went to college. I felt like I was driving down the road and seeing it rise from the distance, which I did way too many times during undergrad and grad school.

 References to the Covey having traveled and planning to again travel north were clear indicators that District 13 was alive and well (sorry for the on the nose pun) even back then. It seems obvious to me that Snow kept that information in the back of his mind as he took power and anticipated an eventual attack from there. The fact that his family’s fortune was destroyed in District 13 makes it even more appropriate that the final rebellion came from there, too.

 I didn’t like Lucy Gray in the first two parts of the book, and I’m still not completely taken with her. There’s just something about her I don’t quite trust, and I’m not convinced she was completely in love with Snow. Sejanus thinks she is, but I’m also not sure I trust him to be the most perceptive person either. I’ve discussed this briefly already with some others, but I’m still on the fence about her. I acknowledge that she doesn’t have the same power as Snow does, so it’s not possible by definition for her to play him, but I do think she’s manipulative. Peeta is, too, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does indicate she’s not exactly who she says she is. Lucy Gray’s job as a performer gives me even more pause because her living is made by putting on a show, by performing, by convincing an audience that what she’s doing is authentic. For lack of a better way to put it—If Lucy Gray is a performer, how would Snow ever know what’s real and what’s not real? Sound familiar? (This part’s for you, @lovely-tothe-bone.)

 The songs:

Deep in the Meadow—It’s a lot disconcerting that Katniss’ lullaby to her sister is a song Snow’s heard before out of the mouth of the woman he once loved. Equally disturbing to know that he’s been in the meadow, and I really thought that the song was going to be about Lucy Gray and Snow together there. I’m glad it stayed a lullaby and not a love song. I think it’s fabulous that Katniss and Peeta reclaim the meadow for themselves as a place where their daughter dances. It’s a little bit (a lot) poetic.

 The Hanging Tree—Well, now that we know where that story comes from, I like it even more. The only part of the book I didn’t really like was Snow thinking he had something figured out and then rethinking and then changing his mind and so on. There was a little bit too much of that as he tried to decipher song lyrics, and particularly with this song.

 The public domain songs—I grew up singing these songs (although with some slightly different words), so they all brought a smile to my face. Probably my favorite rendition of Keep on the Sunny Side is from the movie Oh Brother! Where Art Thou? The entire soundtrack is very bluegrass, and good bluegrass is delightful. And it’s nice to know what the Valley Song really is.

 Unnamed—Okay, so my favorite was the first one at the Hob (pp. 362-364). I’m no songwriter, but I could hear the tune, and it was very Lumineers (maybe crossed with the Dixie Chicks?). Upbeat and peppy and feel good, all the way. I also find it interesting that music and concerts are outlawed in District 12 once there’s a new base commander. An allegory on the tendency to cut art programs first? On the power of art as a motivation for action? Both?

 Which brings us to the star-crossed lovers of District 12, or something. Obviously, this brings up images of Katniss and Peeta, but probably the most famous reference is in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the star-crossed lovers taking their lives. That’s often read as them being fated to die, which is something Snow seems to follow. He mentions his destiny and fate many times and doesn’t do a very good job of recognizing his choices. There’s one time during the Games when he resolves to do the right thing, but otherwise, no. Shakespeare does also say in Julius Caesar that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves (which John Greene used in his book title). Snow doesn’t want to take responsibility for what he does. He chooses to follow the rules instead of what is right. He’s legalistic instead of ethical. There’re a lot of philosophical and religious undertones to that, but I’ll let that float for a while.

 On page 386, Lucy Gray tells Snow, “You’re mine and I’m yours. It’s written in the stars.” I’ll be honest, I almost dropped the book when I read that. In Catching Fire, Katniss says the same thing about Gale, but she doesn’t end up with him. They aren’t fated. She ends up with Peeta, who she chooses to love. I should have known from that point that Lucy Gray and Snow would not end up together, but I still wasn’t sure how that was going to happen. I really did think she was going to break up with him or betray him somehow because that was the only thing I could think of that would make him stop loving her and turn into what he becomes. A broken heart is a really good reason for revenge, but what actually happens so much worse. ( @mtk4fun  and @norbertsmom )

 Snow and Lucy Gray decide to run away together, just like Katniss and Gale were going to in the original trilogy. Lucy Gray is worried the mayor’s going to kill her, and Snow doesn’t want to live without her. Except he realizes really quickly that he doesn’t like life on the run. It’s beneath him. He deserves better. He’s entitled to and fated for more, he thinks. On top of that, he’s passed the officer’s training exam, and suddenly there’s a way out of the pit into which he’s fallen. And then he lies to Lucy Gray.

 Lucy Gray’s said all along the most important thing to her is trust, and then he lies to her. He doesn’t tell her he had a hand in turning in Sejanus. He doesn’t tell her because he’s afraid of losing her, which is a selfish reason, not one to spare her feelings or to protect her. He lies to protect himself. By the time they get to the cabin at the lake, he’s decided he’s not going with her, and she’s realized he’s lied to her. And then the weapon he used to commit murder (for her or him?) is there. Snow snaps quickly after that. There’s a metaphor, I’m sure about him losing his hold on reality and self-control when he’s past the boundaries of civilization, but he falls really, really quickly. He goes from wanting to tell her he’s changed his mind to attempting to murder her. The only thing that really stops him is the snake bite, which is not fatal, but reminds me why I didn’t trust Lucy Gale. Was it deliberate? Did she leave him on purpose? Does she escape him, or does he manage to cut her down? Either way, he doesn’t choose love. Love, which is a selfless act, isn’t his end game. He chooses himself. He chooses being selfish and looking out for himself instead of others. He doesn’t like being vulnerable. He clinically plans to marry someone he doesn’t love, so he never feels exposed again. In short, he makes the opposite choice Katniss does, and that makes all the difference.

 A few other things because this is way too long at this point:

 Peacekeepers: Boot camp for peacekeepers was interesting and strongly resembles the process of the military stripping down differences and making each soldier part of a machine. Haircuts, uniforms, routines, and so on are all about stripping away his identity, and he hates every second of it. He’s too good for that, and there’s entitlement all over the place. That’s very different from the peacekeepers from the districts who join the military as a way out of poverty. I mean, Snow does, too, but only because he’s forced.

 Betrayal: Recording Sejanus and Snow justifying it was hard to read. It was harder to read about the execution. And then to have the Plinths take Snow in after he returns to the Capitol is absolutely the worst. Despicable behavior.

 Poisoning Highbottom: It doesn’t surprise me, and it’s exactly what the rumors in the original books were. Snow kills his rivals to ascend.

 Snow’s role in the Games: The Hunger Games change dramatically between the 10th and the 74th. It’s clear Snow has a significant role in how and why that happens. The tributes aren’t caged and are housed in luxury. The cattle cars are replaced with a high-speed train with lots of food. The tributes get stylists and prep teams instead of being unwashed and dirty. In other words, the treatment of tributes becomes more humane, which becomes even more problematic. At least Lucy Gray knew she was being offered up as a sacrifice. No one lied to her about what she was. The implementation of these ways to fatten the lambs up for slaughter is horrific and cruel and very Snow.

 Finally, the purpose of the Hunger Games changes for Snow by the time we get to the end of the book. They are no longer just a way to punish the districts. They’re a way to exert controlled warfare instead of a messy war between the Capitol and the districts. It’s still kids being forced to kill kids. The tributes are still kids in cages. They’re still “not from here.” The Capitol kids are to be protected, but the parents in the poor areas aren’t able to take care of their own. It’s all deliberate. Collins doesn’t pull punches about the treatment of migrant children in cages or the murder of schoolchildren. What she does is point out that we don’t really mean what we say about protecting children. We’re only outraged for our own, not for those who are different. Suzanne Collins doesn’t have time for white privilege, American elitism, tyrannical government, excessive capitalism, or excuses, and her book reads that way. I loved every word of it.

[dailyaudiobible]

08/18/2021 DAB Transcript

Esther 1:1-3:15, 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, Ps 35:17-28, Proverbs 21:19-20

Today is the 18th day of August welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is wonderful to be here with you today as we begin some new territory. So, we concluded…well…we read Ezra and then we read Nehemiah. We concluded Nehemiah yesterday and there’s so much in Ezra and Nehemiah for us and we explored that. So, we’re not really leaving stories from the exile, but this is a totally new complexion and it's so wonderful when we arrive at this place, the book of Esther.

Introduction to the book of Esther:

And what we’ll learn is that…well…the story of a Hebrew girl named Hadassah and she was orphaned in the exile, and her cousin, his name was Mordecai. He took her in and raised her as his own. He was of the tribe of Benjamin. And, so, Hadassah, she is in exile in Persia and so they can have a different language and different naming scheme. And, so, she takes on the name Esther, which means Morning Star or Star in the Hebrew tradition. So, what we will find is that the Persian king has a falling out with Vashti, his Queen. She embarrasses him, really humiliates him and rebels against him in a way, and as it turns out she is put away, which is what eventually allows Esther to come onto the scene. A search throughout the land for beautiful maidens that would qualify, like they would if chosen, become the Queen. And as it turns out Esther is beautiful, like stunningly beautiful, gorgeous. And just inside and out has a quiet temperament and is kindhearted and not arrogant or condescending, and she is chosen to be, you know, kind of in the final group where a lot of different women are being given lots of different beauty treatments and cared for and being taught the ways of the palace and how to be before the king and all of the customs of royalty. And Esther was taken into the harem as it were and began to go through all of this and she found favor everywhere that she went, but she kept the fact that she was Jewish a secret. She didn't say her ethnicity and that turned out to be pivotal. We’ll also meet someone named Haman who rose to great prominence, basically second in command in the kingdom. He was in Amalekite. He descended from King Agag. He becomes kind of the antagonist in the story because the Amalekites and the Hebrews have been enemies actually all…all the way back to Jacob and Esau. And it was Samuel, the Hebrew prophet that executed the king Agag the Amalekite. It was the Hebrew king Saul that had defeated Agag but had spared him and then…well…Samuel then didn't spare him. So, much later now Haman’s got this brewing, seething rage towards the Jewish people and he’s risen to prominence in Persia and so he plans the...the extermination of the Jewish people throughout the entire empire. So, this is a short book but it's pretty high in drama. And in the end it establishes a festival in the Hebrew culture that is lasting until today, the festival of Purim. And we’ll find…we’re gonna love Esther. It's a great read. It's a great story. It's a short story but it's a beautiful story. But as we overlay it with our lives there’s so much there. God against all odds is present. Circumstances don't always work out the for the worst or the way that we think that they might. Everybody has a role to play in the story because God brings people into things and assigns them to do things for such a time as this. And, so, let's…let’s dive in and enjoy Esther. We’re reading from the Good News Translation this week. Esther chapters 1 through 3 today.

Prayer:

Father, thank You for Your word. We thank You for this…this new territory, the book of Esther that we find ourselves in. Thank You for the story of a valiant beautiful woman who rescues Your people for such time as this. And we look in our own lives and look for these scenarios where we find ourselves in a situation and maybe we’re not the Queen and maybe we’re not gonna rescue an entire people group, but there are such times that we are the one that's in the right place to do Your service. Help us to recognize that even as we continue with the story of Esther moving forward tomorrow. Come Holy Spirit we pray into all that we've read we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it’s where you find out what's going on around here. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app you can find out the same things using the app, there's a little Drawer icon in the upper left-hand corner of the app screen that opens up a Drawer and then you can access things like the Community section, or the Daily Audio Bible Shop.

Check out the Daily Audio Bible Shop. There are a lot of resources in there for the journey through the Bible in a year, things to read, take the journey further, things to write on, things to write with, which also takes the journey deeper as you journal your way in your own hand through a year in your life, as well as things to wear and things to listen to. And…yeah…just check out the Daily Audio Bible Shop and wear your colors proudly as we continue our journey, the adventure of a lifetime through the Bible in a year in community. So, check out the resources in the Shop.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, thank you humbly. Thank you. If this mission to read the Bible, fresh every day and give it to anyone who will listen to it anywhere on this planet any time of day or night and to build community around that rhythm so that in life or in the Scriptures we know we’re not on a solitary endeavor, we’re not alone. We are in this together. If that brings life in your…into your life than thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address, if you prefer, is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement, you can hit the Hotline button in the app, which is the little red button up at the top, can’t miss it, or you can dial 877-942-4253.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hey guys this is Lazarus calling. For those that have followed me over the years, this is it. Finally losing everything and it's OK. I'm extreme pain. I put off the surgery on my shoulder for two years and now it's beyond bearable. I was near suicidal earlier this week from the pain. On a new pain scale, it’s level 17. So, anybody wants to jump on board with that one come on. I'm just putting together a list of all the things that I have to sell with what I have left and try to figure out a way to make it to a surgery that I can't afford. So…and losing my company, losing everything. So, not sure how to deal with loss but Jesus is there. I can do anything with him. And I'm just trying to reconnect with His fire. So, for those of you who are in pain or loss or whatever, I feel for you. I am there with you. Just know that He's there and when it's dark…I've been dark…He gives you a flashlight and points you in the right direction. So, please keep the faith. I have no idea where I'm going to be, where I'm going to be living, if on the street or whatever, but I'm in his hands and I'm doing His will. So, I give it all up to Him. So, thank you for your prayers. Over the years and I pray I'm around to talk to you in the near future and with a praise report or any report. God bless you all I love you all. Thank you Brian, I’ve loved you for years brother.

This is Peggy in Texas and as a grandmother I ask you to pray for my 15-year-old grandson. He's suffering some from some type of trauma. The doctor has told us this. We do not know what it is at this point, nobody does. He has shut down, he's pulled in, he's evidently feeling very lonely…is…he's alone in many ways in this world and he is filled with anxiety. And, of course, all this leads to depression. Will you please ask our Lord to grant his parents and me…he's staying with me as…beginning in a few hours for now for several days and then his parents are taking a daughter to college. We ask for wisdom, ask for strength ask for peace in the mist of upheaval, please. Ask for direction, that…that we'll all be able to pull together, and the need will be met, that God will be honored. I am 87 and, of course, you can probably tell in my voice that I'm experiencing some anxiety and restlessness and just longing and for help. Anyway, I thank you for praying with me as I pray with you for your concerns. Oh man…heavenly Father, hear us and direct our paths and heal our hearts and our minds and our…our children for His honor in His glory. Thank you for hearing this request. Thank you for praying with me. Blessings. Bye- bye.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family this is Sheena from Saskatchewan Canada. I wanted to send a prayer out to Quiet Confidence in Virginia and just…just letting you know that there's no shame in anxiety and depression. And I get it. But I just wanted to let you know that when the enemy is telling you that you're backsliding or that you're going against your faith it's just…it's…it's not true. And you are strong, and you are loved, and I just hope that I can provide you some encouragement with that prayer. I called in a little while ago, so thank you to those who prayed for my situation with my boyfriend being wrongfully accused of a crime. We’re doing alright this week. We've…we have our next court date which unfortunately isn't till February. So, please continue to pray for us as we prepare for this preliminary hearing. Couple people I want to send shoutouts for, Lorenzo, you’re such a blessing to our DAB community. I pray that as you go back to school that God will grant you strength to continue in your faith and wisdom to do well at your new school. Holly Heart your commitment in praying for all of us is inspiring. Thank you, Lord for Holly and her faith and service to You and the rest of us. And Esther from Kissimmee, I pray the Lord continues to shine on you and to be gracious to you. Your passionate prayers for all of us lift my heart and restore my faith in the world and it makes me want to do better. Thanks DAB family. I'm hoping that I can make this a regular thing, calling in and praying. Have a great day. Love you. Bye.

Hi DAB family this is Jessica from California. Tonight, I'm calling in to say a prayer for Dave from Indiana. Actually, the prayers for his son Lucas who has been a rehab for 28 days because he has an alcohol problem, and he has a wife and two children, and he somehow maybe had a relapse. And I just want to say a prayer. So, here we go. Dear heavenly Father, we just come before You Lord. You know what it is that Lucas is trying to drown and what void he's trying to fill with the alcohol Lord. And I just pray that in his quiet Time Lord that You speak to him and You pour Your love and Your anointing oil all over his mind and his body Lord, that You heal him from the inside out from all that's troubling him, whatever it is that he's choosing to use alcohol as a vice for Lord, that You just…You remove that splinter from his heart Lord and You heal him up Lord. And I just pray this on his father's behalf and also his wife and his children's behalf Lord because this not only affects him it affects his children and his whole family. I just thank You Lord that You are going to do this for Lucas and because he is a praying father and…and that You love him and You have wonderful dreams for him and I just want to encourage you Dave that the Lord healed me from…in Jesus’ name I pray Amen…that the Lord healed me from a drug addiction. And he had to heal me from emotional things first. So, I just pray that he heals your son from any emotional problems that he has. And…and thanks for calling in and putting your faith in the Lord Dave. Have a nice day. Bye.

Hi, it's Tom here calling from the UK just calling to ask for prayer for my left eye. I have a condition called recurrent corneal erosions and basically what that means is that wake up in the middle of the night with really excruciating eye pain. It's red, it's streaming, and I've just got to use eye ointment and eye drops and eye wash and usually it just settles down but for the past two days it just hasn't and my eyes quite swollen and it's just very painful. I'm over in Ireland the moment and it's my godsons christening and I really want to make it for Sunday. It's Friday today but at the moment I'm contemplating going back to the UK to…to get treatment. On top of it I'm also a doctor myself. I'm a surgeon in training and I need my eyesight. And I just really would covet your prayers, that my eye would be healed and that this condition would go and I'm thanking Jesus already for the healing and I just…yeah…I would just really appreciate prayer for it, that this pain would go and that I would get 2020 vision and this condition would just go away completely. So, thank you once again. Take care.

[your-turn-to-role]

new opinions of the cerberus assembly (etgw spoilers!!)

somewhat inspired by the conversations the other day, bc it’s reminded me i have a lot to say about these motherfuckers

let’s start with the obvious:

Master Trent Ikithon, Archmage of Civil Influence (Chaotic Evil Human)

Book Text: [Trent is respected as the acclaimed Propagandist of the empire and the third oldest member of the assembly. Once an instructor at the Soltryce Academy, he only returns every few years to collect young students for his experiments in the mental conditioning that he calls “awakening.” Many of these students go mad and are locked away, but those who endure become zealots for the assembly and join the Volstrucker, an elite group of arcane thugs commonly known as Scourgers, who perform the assembly’s dirtiest work under Trent’s direction.]

Most of this we knew. I hate this guy. Though, as a point of interest - Caleb’s for sure not the first person this has happened to. They account for a certain number of aspiring Volstrucker never completing the program, Caleb was just another statistic. Which means somewhere in Vergessen is a lot of other people with the same backstory who never managed to escape. That’s, something worth looking into, maybe.

Martinet Ludinus Da’leth, Archmage of Domestic Protections (Lawful Evil Elf)

[Ludinus is the oldest and only original member of the assembly, as well as the master of warfare and conflict. Charged with overhauling the military structure of the Dwendalian Empire, Ludinus directed the construction of the garrisons on the Xhorhasian border and often oversees their maintenance. He was one of the mages who survived the destruction of Molaesmyr and fled to Bysaes Tyl, but he saw the opportunity to achieve greatness within the empire and left his culture behind to continue his arcane pursuits. Wise, if emotionless, he bears a deep hatred for the Kryn Dynasty and spares no effort gathering information on their weaknesses and secrets. Ludinus spends most of his time developing arcane weapons of war and shoring up the military might of the empire, while subtly challenging the leadership of Crown Marshal Damurag.]

This guy’s old. That's the scariest thing about him really. Like, this guy's been in the empire since it was half its current size. This guy saw the destruction of Molaesmyr, and knew many of its residents. But he also rejected that society, purely for his own ends. He's at least 400 years old, more likely at least 500, and for the past 3-4 centuries has been focusing entirely on magic and warfare. That's a long time to hone those skills. Ludinus may say it's hard to compare power in the Assembly, but if I had to pick one of them for an end game boss, it would be him, no question. Trent's more of a wild card, sure, but he's only like 60, 70 years old. He's a baby compared to Da'leth. Keep an eye on this dude, and under no circumstances trust him.

Lady Vess de Rogna, Archmage of Antiquity (Neutral Evil Half-Elf)

[A public recluse for most of her life, Vess is both a brilliant mage and dedicated historian. She assumed this post after replacing her criminal predecessor, Lady Delilah Briarwood. As an instructor at the Soltryce Academy for over two decades, Vess has studied and unraveled a number of historical mysteries and pre-Calamity riddles — and hoarded some of the spoils for herself. Always eager to pursue forgotten lore and artifacts of eons past, Vess has been known to quietly vanish to Xhorhas for weeks at a time, returning with fewer guards and more uncovered secrets.]

Canon confirmation that this is who took over from Delilah Briarwood, and from what we’ve seen, they’re rather similar people. They're both scientists and historians, ruthlessly efficient, far more concerned with what they can learn and what they can do than what's good or safe for those around them. Liable to be found breaking the law in the name of science and progress. At least Vess has lasted longer than her predecessor.

Headmaster Oremid Hass, Archmage of Cultivation (Lawful Neutral Earth Genasi)

[The current headmaster of the Hall of Erudition in Zadash, Oremid is tasked with watching and grooming the next generation of mages and arcane specialists outside Rexxentrum. While he himself is a gentle soul who adores animals, he puts on the façade of a strict man with no sense of humor, which is further enhanced by the elemental influence of his earth genasi blood. He teaches students that failure is not an option, and that emotion is a barrier to one’s true ability. Equally feared, respected, and privately loathed by the students (and some instructors), Oremid personally dismisses those who break under his school’s curriculum and heaps joyous praise on those who endure their training.]

So, I've had teachers like this. And they stick in your mind, because, even a decade later, I still have a hard time getting over their instilled fear of failure. I can believe that, in general terms, Oremid's not a terrible person. I think he looks the other way on a lot of things, which precludes him from ever qualifying as good in my books, but he hasn't committed any major acts of torture or murder himself. Still though. You don't teach like that if you view your students as people. You teach like that if you view your students as potential assets. So like.... not as bad as some of his colleagues. Potentially someone they could work with if they had to. But still probably someone to stay away from.

Headmaster Zivan Margolin, Archmage of Conscription (Lawful Neutral Human)

[Zivan Margolin inherited the position of headmaster from his father, the late Jorma Margolin. Zivan has been the headmaster of the Soltryce Academy in Rexxentrum for nearly twenty years. Calm, patient, and quietly imposing, Zivan walks the halls of the Academy with a keen eye for talent. He is in charge of the curriculum and also watches for any latent powers that may be worth grooming as future allies of the assembly, dangers to be monitored, or prospective minds for Ikithon to conscribe into the Volstrucker. Zivan has rarely had the opportunity to demonstrate his full power, for he is typically busied with keeping the peace between the feuding members of the assembly. Those who have witnessed his true might, however, now know that his words are backed by some of the most powerful magics within the Cerberus Assembly.]

I think @lostsometime said it best, having the archmage of conscription be in charge of your elite magic school really sums up everything wrong with the empire. Like, if that's out in the open, your problems are unfixable. Get a new government. Jeez.

Master Doolan Tversky, Archmage of Dysology (Chaotic Neutral Gnome)

[The second-oldest member of the assembly, Doolan is in charge of the study and understanding of abnormal creatures and deviants of arcane creation that might threaten the empire’s way of life. She is an absentminded yet brilliant gnome who is obsessed with all beasts, aberrations, and creatures of legend. Doolan imports creatures from around the world to study, disassemble, and use in her attempts to revolutionize magical practices. She resents the Library of the Cobalt Soul, as her reputation has caused them to bar her from their facilities. She wishes to catalog the unstudied horrors of Xhorhas and has covertly obtained the services of the Myriad to retrieve new specimens.]

Now, Doolan is fascinating to me, not because I think she's a good person, but because she's just so delightfully weird. She's probably done some evil as fuck shit but she's also a gremlin of a gnome who loves weird fucked up arcane experiments and magical meteors that created eldritch ducks and all sorts of bizarre things like that. I'd love to see more of her, because there's always room in fantasy stories for more weird morally ambiguous old ladies who are banned from libraries on the grounds of "is about as likely to eat the books as she is to read them" and "last time we let her in here she somehow combined five forbidden rituals and created a new species of demon that haunts the halls of the rexxentrum archive spreading toxic slime everywhere and we can't figure out what it wants or how to make it go away".

Lord Athesias Uludan, Archmage of Diplomatic Union (Neutral Good Human)

[Athesias’s charm and bombastic personality serve him well as a diplomat. His duty is to foster a positive relationship with people of power both within and beyond the borders of the empire. He was originally one of the most effective instructors at the Soltryce Academy, but his penchant for spectacle and his rampant narcissism made him a difficult ally to trust with state secrets. When the office of Diplomatic Union opened, he was quickly and quietly reassigned. Athesias finds great pleasure in ruining or usurping the plans of his counterpart in the Crown’s employ, Emissary Lord Zeddan Graf.]

We’ve talked a bit about Uludan already - the Gilderoy Lockhart of the group for sure. Though I’m sure he has layers to him, so I’d be interested to find out what exactly they are.

And, saving the most interesting for last,

Baroness Jenna Iresor, Archmage of Industry (True Neutral Doppelganger)

[One of the younger members of the assembly, Jenna is known for her business acumen and her extravagant lifestyle. By hiding her nature as a doppelganger and using memory-altering magics at a young age to fabricate a false past, Jenna constructed her human persona from the ground up, leveraging her powers of deception to essentially write herself into history as a Clovis Concord expatriate. She helps oversee central guild business in Rexxentrum under Guildmaster Kai Arness, and helps Exchequer Aethia Drooze organize the collection of tithes through starostas across the empire.]

I am, insanely curious about how a doppelganger ended up in the Cerberus Assembly. She’s definitely ambitious for sure, doppelgangers already have a fair bit of innate magic - they’re natural shapeshifters and have a fair amount of psychic powers (like reading minds of anyone who happens to be near them), but to get here she had to be extremely committed. Which means she probably has plans for this position, or had plans that she’s already put into motion. Very interested what those are, especially for the archmage of industry.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THEN IT'S MECHANICAL; PHEW

Nor, as far as I can type, then spend a week cranking up the generality may be unsuitable for junior professors trying to get tenure, but it's always better to read an original book, bearing in mind the eventual goal: to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how he'd qualify it. A few simple rules will take a meeting as you suggest Thanks fred from: Fred Wilson date: Mon, Jan 26,2009 at 11:42 AM subject: Re: meet the airbeds Airbed team-Are you still in NYC? But you ignore them because they need a job. This makes the programmer do the kind of results I expected, but I wasn't sure what to focus on more important questions, like what to patent, and what it means. I don't think it's because they want impressive growth numbers. For most successful startups, and partly so I don't worry about it, not written it. If you're an amateur mathematician and think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and debug Aristotle's motivating argument. Pick the right startups. The situation is different in phase 1.1 Investors have different risk profiles from founders.2

Any public company that didn't have clear founders. A round if you do it. Even people who hate you for it believe it. What we ought to be better at picking winners than VCs. It would set off alarms. No.3 Html#f8n 19.4 Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long on each sentence as you want. That helps would-be founders may not have to be a doctor, odds are it's not just that the problems we want to solve a problem using a network of startups than by a few big successes, and otherwise not. Starting a startup will change you a lot.5

Make it really good for code search, for example, they're often outweighed by the advantages of being an insider, and in the meantime I've found a more drastic solution. One is simply that they understood search. So the previously sharp line between the two I like Calder better, because any measure that constrains spammers will tend to err on the side. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for them. The Suit is Back.6 If you don't know who needs to be protected from himself. Of course he would say that hapless meant unlucky. Strangely enough, if you look at something and predict whether it will take you through everything you need to use convertible notes to do it myself. One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to the local public school.7

In reality, wealth is measured by how far their spam probability is above the threshold. You have to at least look at the page. Partly because they can threaten a counter-suit. Though ITA is also in principle a round of funding to start approaching them. This probably indicates room for improvement here. It was not until Perl 5 if then that the language was line-oriented.8 There's an initial phase of negotiation about the big questions.

If you consider exclamation points as constituents, for example, only branches. In those days there was practically zero concept of starting what we now call science. In a few days beforehand, I'll sometimes play it safe. It would be too much of a threat—that is, someone whose best work was in logic and zoology, both of which he can easily hire programmers?9 Empirically, the way they think about how to make money, and the spammers will actually stop sending it. By the 1970s, we've seen the percentage of people who weren't already in it.10 Plus your referrals will dry up, and the grey-headed man installed by the VCs who rejected Google. Why the pattern? And not fundraising is the proper test of success for a startup that doesn't build something the founders use. But really it doesn't matter—that is, to grow about ten percent a year. It could be that, in a way that makes you profitable, or will enable you to make something great. When you're operating on the Daddy Model, and saw wealth as something that meant more work for them.11

And that's what the professor is interested in a company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with control, and they pay it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now he's a professor at MIT. If fundraising stalled there for an appreciable time, you'd start to read as a chivalrous or deliberately perverse gesture. He didn't choose, the industry did.12 Art History 101. There is no shortcut to it. In 1997 I got a call from another startup founder considering hiring them to promote his company. This is an instance of scamming a scammer. So don't underestimate this task. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a real estate developer building a block of foam or granite.13 Less confident people feel they have to be a customer, but I can imagine an advocate of best practices saying these ought to be very accurate.

What if one of your own. Viaweb succeeded because we were smart. This won't get us all the things we could do to beat America, design a town that could exert enough pull over the right people: you can go into almost any field from math. The sticking point is board seats. A historical change has taken place, and to Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Hylton, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, Joshua Reeves, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. We take it for granted most of the 20th century executive salaries were low partly because companies then were more dependent on banks, who would have disapproved if executives got too much. Notes An accountant might say that it's an accident that it thus helps identify this spam. So the total number of new startups. Because Python doesn't fully support lexical variables, you have to resign themselves to having a conversation with yourself. Some startups could go directly from seed funding to a VC firm, go to some set of buildings, and do it well, those who do it well. So make a list of the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be that a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if they're doing something completely unrelated.14 That shows how much a startup differs from a job.15

Notes

Though most founders start out excited about the topic.

The reason we quote statistics about the Airbnbs during YC. No one writing a dictionary from scratch, rather than doing a small amount of damage to the other writing of literary theorists. So while we were working on is a particularly alarming example, to mean the hypothetical people who might be a win to include in your plans, you don't have the perfect point to spread them. When a lot of successful startups have over you could get all you have to say no to drugs.

Exercise for the ad sales department.

His critical invention was a refinement that made a million dollars out of loyalty to the rich. 1886/87. Vision research may be overpaid.

Above. Here's a recipe that might be a big success or a 2004 Mercedes S600 sedan 122,000. The moment I do in a traditional series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was the least experience creating it. The founders want the valuation is fixed at the time.

Photo by Alex Lewin. Some want to keep the number of users to observe—e.

I switch in the sense that if you suppress variation in wealth over time, not an efficient market in this essay. If they're on the group's accumulated knowledge. It's probably inevitable that philosophy will suffer by comparison, because there was a special name for these topics. SFP applicants: please don't assume that the site.

Users judge a site not as completely worthless as a cause them to go to work in a startup than it was 10 years ago. Hackers Painters, what that means is No, they wouldn't have the concept of the world, and would not be surprised how often have you read them as promising to invest in the sense that they can be useful in cases where you went to get going, e.

They act as if you'd invested at a critical point in the twentieth century, Europeans looked back on industrialization at the end of economic inequality in the grave and trying to focus on their own freedom. Pliny Hist. I even mention the possibility.

Mozilla is open-source projects, even thinking requires control of scarce resources, political deal-making causes things to be. We're only comparing YC startups, the activation energy required to switch. Analects VII: 36, Fung trans. Cit.

Investors are often surprised by this standard, and you might be an anti-dilution provisions, even if it's not enough to do this would probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. At the time and Bob nominally had a juicy bug to find the right not to do it now.

This seems to have figured out how to succeed at all. Actually it's hard to say hello on her way out. That's why there's a special title for actual partners. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them.

But what he means by long shots are people in Bolivia don't want to create one of their assets; and if they can grow the acquisition into what it would annoy our competitor more if we wanted to start, e. The second biggest regret was caring so much worse than he was 10.

The other reason they pay so well is that most three letter words are independent, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things.

That name got assigned to it because the rich. If an investor is more efficient. Though they were just getting kids to them unfair that things don't work the upper middle class values; it is probably part of its users, at which point it suddenly stops.

[jeannereames]

Ok, important question about both DwtL and your academic work. What drove you to study the character and impact of the man who rose steadily to be second-in-command of the empire (in a way) by the time of his death?

I wouldn’t qualify him as second-in-command “in a way.” *grin* By his death, he was chiliarchos, which is the Greek translation of Persian hazarapatish, literally the second-in-command (Grand Vizier, later).

Why Hephaistion? Excellent question. My rather rambley answer…

I’m still not entirely sure what piqued my interest in him when first reading about Alexander. To be sure, the histories I read either overlooked him or actively dismissed him as no one of real importance in himself, only as Alexander’s buddy and/or lover. Yet something made me think, “He’s not getting a fair shake. Why is that?”

Several scholars attributed quarrels to him that, when I read the ancient sources, weren’t at all clear that he was the instigator, and at least in Curtius, he was made to sound rather diplomatic. I found odd this disconnect between the way the sources described him, and the way the secondary modern literature talked about him. My initial assumption was that modern scholars–mostly older white men–were homophobic … only to learn later that my assessment was too simplistic and reductive. I do think homophobia is at the root of it, but in a more complex way.

W. W. Tarn certainly tried to “save” Alexander from any intimation of same-sex liaisons. Yet others, Badian, Green, Bosworth, Schachermeyer, Hamilton, Hammond, tended to assume he had boys (eromenoi), perhaps including Hephaistion. If some wouldn’t necessarily have thought that a good thing, others—at least as an intellectual exercise—didn’t care.

I’ve said before, I know (or knew) several of these scholars, and their reactions were not because they were Bible-thumping conservative sorts. Quite a number would tick as atheist-agnostic intellectual liberals. Yet we are still products of our social upbringing, and it can be hard to ditch subconscious assumptions and discomforts, and intellectuals especially dislike thinking of ourselves as acting in an irrational fashion. *grin*

This complexity only makes it all the more interesting.

My conclusion is that we’re dealing with several layers. The first involves how our ancient sources talk about him; he’s emphasized primarily for his relationship to Alexander and the impact his death had on ATG. This is (if you notice) the same way most modern Alexander biographies approach Hephaistion, as well. Unconscious influence.

So there’s that. Then comes modern straight male discomfort with what two men might do in bed together, even for those who’re supportive of gay marriage and have gay male friends. They may not even be much fussed to see two men holding hands or trading a quick goodbye kiss at the airport. But sex…that’s different. I think it’s easiest to get at this with a quick comparison between how straight male readers react to gay male sex scenes in novels vs. how straight women readers react to lesbian sex scenes.

Quite a few straight guys have told me they skim gay male sex scenes, even if they otherwise like the book and didn’t mind more “romantic” m/m elements. Yet I know few straight women who do that with lesbian sex scenes. Admittedly—but telling—my sample is made up of largely progressive, liberal readers, including readers under 30. For Dancing with the Lion in particular, I’ve had at least two guys say they liked the book but didn’t think I needed to write the two sex scenes between Alexander and Hephaistion, especially the (more graphic) second one. I asked whether they thought I’d needed to write the sex scene between Alexander and Kampaspe, and you know what? They’d both completely forgotten that sex scene was there! Why? I suspect it’s because they perceived it as “normal,” so it didn’t trip a wire.

Hmmm.

Back to Hephaistion. This sort of subconscious bias can be present even in men who are fairly progressive. Ergo, yes, I think homophobia does drive some negative perceptions of Hephaistion, but it’s more subconscious than intentional. And having it suggested is usually not welcome. 😉

Just consider some reactions by liberal white “woke” folks to being shown they’re not as woke as they think they are. It’s rarely, “Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I did that…” but “No! That’s not at all what I meant/thought! You’re misunderstanding me on purpose!”

But we’re ALL biased in some way—usually more than one. I think of our lives as a journey, finding our blind spots and learning to see better. I have them still, you have them, we all have them. We live in our fences of skin and are not telepathic. We have to learn to listen, and not get defensive.

That’s hard.

But I’ve gone off on a tangent again, haven’t I?

My own interest in Hephaistion is driven by another type of curiosity, too. Not just why modern scholars had overlooked him, but curiosity about this man, who—if Curtius can be believed—was a true best friend of one of the most powerful men who ever lived.

I’ve harped on that before, but it really IS what pulls me in. Powerful men don’t, often, have a genuine best friend. Alexander did. So I wanted to find out as much as we could know about what made Hephaistion tick, and to assess his career, not just their friendship. The more I delved into his career, too, the more I wanted to DIVORCE his friendship with the king from his role as an officer. I became convinced that he didn’t succeed because he was ATG’s lover or friend. He succeeded because Alexander trusted him, and he was good at his job.

In one of the several blogs I wrote for the books’ release, I talked about Hephaistion’s personality. While (good) historians try to avoid psychoanalyzing dead people, we still have suspicions about what sorts of people they might have been.

For Hephaistion, almost from the beginning, I viewed him as a gamma male, not a beta as he’s usually perceived. He went his own way, which would have made him catnip to Alexander. I think he’d have needed a very strong personality, but Alexander clearly didn’t feel threatened by him. I think the bulk of historians are inclined to attribute that to being a follower and yes-man. He’s not uncommonly portrayed that way in fiction, too. But for me, that makes no sense. Such a friendship wouldn’t, in my experience, have lasted long, nor would such a person have dared to rebuke Alexander, as Curtius says he did, even if in private.

Speaking as a professional historian, I can’t prove that, given the paucity of our sources, only suggest it.

But that’s the beauty of fiction. Obviously, I had to spin from raw wool a lot of his background, family details, etc. But his personality in Dancing with the Lion…? No, that I didn’t make up. It’s what I do think he was like. I’ve lived cheek-to-jowl with him via research since the early ‘90s. That’s almost 30 years now.

[harryweaver]

Baseline

Individual Point of Perception is Dependent on Conditioned Mode of Thought.

Our conditioned mode of thought is determined by a number of aspects including:

our formal educational conditioning;

our cultural background;

the perceived power personalities that influence our sociological conditioning;

...to name a few.

I originally began this article with a view to confining it within the first classification of educational conditioning, but by way of natural process all seemed to apply.

Then, as it felt presumptuous and unwieldy to force a subject scope worthy of a treatise into a blog format, I have had to restrict the situation to how science has influenced and placed limits on our thinking.

Very much in shorthand....

All of science is based on direction defined by philosophy and Rene Descartes appears to have been the pivotal point in this instance. He introduced a way of perceiving things that took an observable entity and broke it down, analytically, into its individual unit parts. Dualism and other aspects, illuminating then, seem second nature to us now.

The evolution of this form of thinking was passed on into the capable hands of Francis Bacon who, in turn, hand balled it to Isaac Newton, both of whom provided substantial modifications to advance this concept of fragmentation. What we have inherited is what might be termed the 'Doctrine of Direction' for the entire westernised civilisation.

What these theorists neglected to consider and what Quantum theory is in the process of giving back, to those of us who care to take note, is an appreciation of the 'links' or aspects of interrelationship between these basic building blocks of fragmented, alienated entities. An aspect every bit as important as the 'units' themselves, as it is only by way of these continuously, communicating interfaces that we arrive at wholistic entities that are greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Unfortunately, we still model our mode of individual and collective advancement on the thought structures that built Empires that have long ago ceased to exist. Momentum, obviously, is capable of carrying us too far in the wrong direction.

I don't wish to appear to be a detractor of the theories of these giants of our past, or even of the ones who 'stood on their shoulders', who took those theories and gave them application within the sociological framework. What I am attempting is to show how the limited style of scientific mindset, that is drilled into us by way of our current educational process, has engendered our individual and therefore collective point of perception. This in turn has determined our current life situation. Man is a reflection of his environment, yes, but the opposite is every bit as true.

We have made fantastic advances with our 'scientific' thinking. We can gauge, almost to the centimetre, where we can land a rocket on the moon, over an almost unimaginable distance, with a mind numbing number of variables all taken into account. And after that, bring it back again. We are communicating concepts through mediums such as we are employing at this very moment, as you read this, and there are a myriad of other examples.

But, there is a dark side.

Having adopted, through conditioning, this mode of perception, we have alienated ourselves from our environment, from each other and even created alienation within our very selves. Our 'self' from this viewpoint, by way of illustration, does not include our body. 'I' am a separate entity and my body is a mere physical, mechanical housing, when in fact our bodies are a fully incorporated aspect of our 'selves'.

'Us and Them' is destroying 'Us'.

Take a look at what our alienating point of perception is doing:

(1) to our shared environment. We consider our 'selves' to be a separate entity to our environment, rather than an integral, interacting aspect of it, so any harm we inflict on the environment has no real effect on our situation, we surmise. (The comparative example of this would be that of a race of people, traveling through endless space, systematically destroying the space ship they are traveling in.) There have been highly qualified, dissenting voices to this supposition. Even economists, like E.F. Schumacher, who advise that, "If we ever find ourselves in the position of winning our battle with nature, we will automatically find ourselves on the losing side". Conditioned thought structure, however, pays little heed to logic, unless it is incorporated into an 'approved' educational process and therefore transposed into the paradigm;

(2) to our estranged sense of interrelationships. By over emphasising the self concept, to compensate for a social structure that appears intent on drowning the individual in a sea of homogenised anonymity, we automatically place almost insurmountable barriers to interpersonal integration;

(3) within our fragmented personal selves. In this context, the major effort appears to be the creation and continuous maintenance of a self image rather than the cultivation of the actual personality. A self image that bears little relation to the real person hiding within, who sadly perceives the camouflage to be more socially acceptable than him 'self'. Applied to extreme, the individual places so much personal energy into the maintenance of this persona, that he 'starves' himself. A major cause of mental dis-ease and what can amount to total breakdown of the individual existence.

Relationships can only exist between personalities. Relationships are not possible between facades, which are essentially illusions, so the illusion that they do doesn't exist for any length of time. This somewhat pointless exercise only exists because many believe that it's all they have to offer, as the real entity is seen as being insufficient to the situation.

One of the many sociological phenomena that appears to endorse all this is the fact that, in all westernised countries, divorce statistics come close to equaling marriage statistics and quite commonly surpass them.

It's a little unfair, however, to endow philosophers and scientists with the full responsibility of our present life situation. There are other buttressing influences. Sir Isaac Newton's writings within other fields were for all intents and purposes totally ignored, as they still are. The bias of thought at that time was all for the new clockwork bent that held so much potential for industrial advancement, as it still does. An illustration as to how long the industrial lobby, by way of political sway, has been placing paradigms on the full spectrum potential of our advancement as a species.

So, just while we are in the vicinity:

A corporate entity doesn't have a personality, other than the one on loan and frequently patched from the public relations departments, so don't look for human qualities;

The corporate ideal is to be in the position of dictating to the marketplace (yes, that's you!) and they never sleep in the pursuit of this goal;

Corporate entities see themselves as being subject to only one law and that's the law of economics. When economic precept shows any potential to limit short term profit, they're not above bending that out of shape either.

This latter point requires a little expansion, I feel.

Feel free to disagree.

According to the science of economics, there are two varieties of resource: rivalrous and non-rivalrous. A rivalrous resource is one that can be used up faster than it can be replaced, if it can be replaced at all, e.g., fossil fuels and the natural environment. A non-rivalrous resource, on the other hand, is a resource that is inexhaustible, i.e., it can't be exhausted as it is continuously replacing itself at a rate faster than it can be employed.

Now, considering the fact that human beings breed their own replacements, in the sort of volumes commonly described as 'population explosions', which of these two categories do you imagine employees slot into, within the corporate mindset, in these days of outsourcing?

`Safety before Production’, is the corporate catchphrase, but it will never be the reality because it doesn't need to be. An appearance is put up in order to establish a good 'Employer Brand Name', yes, but mostly because other powerful economic entities like insurance companies 'persuade' them to do so. And insurance companies are only prepared to do that because it has direct bearing on their own economic status.

This automatically creates another translation of the 'Us and Them' syndrome, the 'Divide and Rule' format. Musashi's 'The Book of Five Rings' and Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War', amongst other treatise on war strategy, make their way into every board room these days under the arms of those who would subordinate their productive work force to their will. Strategies that work within one set of environmental circumstances don't necessarily translate well into others, however, and 'Divide and Rule' is a classic example. When looking at a combined productive exercise, it simply isn't profitable to view and treat your production sector as though they are the enemy. This will automatically cost you money and the longer you persist with a faulty strategy, the more it will cost you. The variety of tactics employed, to gain the 'ascendency', are far from what is required to assist in establishing a sense of cooperation and self worth within the individuals that make up the bulk of westernised populations. And a sense of self worth is the foundation stone of a happy individual. A happy employee is more productive and produces a better quality product, so the strategy is obviously flawed.

Our mode of technological advancement has cost us dear, obvious in the stultified mental and spiritually bereft realms we have allocated to ourselves, from a set of values that is blinkered to the full spectrum definition of wealth. I have met people who, having worked continuously for, say, $500.00/week for a number of years, don't even consider pressing for more when their mode of employment changes, because they have been conditioned, over time, into believing that $500.00/week is their sum total worth as a human being. The comprehensive definitions of degradation and defeat are achieved when the victim is persuaded.

If western civilisation (sic), would just halt its frenetic, lemming-like race to the cliff edge long enough to look at the life philosophies of the various indigenous cultures on this planet, we would be in a position to provide ourselves with the requisite wholistic life perception required to save ourselves, and those same indigenous communities, from that inevitable extinction that we are imposing on other species at this very moment.

A different way of seeing is there, for our adoption, any time we want it. We find it not just in the wholistic, indigenous community and environmental Gaia mindsets, but in the most obscure of niches as well as the most obvious of places.

By way of an 'obscure' example, I recall reading Aleister Crowley's 'Magick' in the dawning of my adolescent rebellion, somewhere between Enid Blyton and 'The Russians'.

Wholly from memory:

`The practitioner of Black Magic employs his art to raise his level of existence above that of his environment’ - which doesn't sound so bad really, does it? Just looking round, it appears to be what everybody is doing, or attempting to do. Yes/No?

But then he goes on to say:

`Whereas the practitioner of White Magic employs his talent to raise the level of his environment, and in so doing raises his own level of existence’.

A totally different translation of existence, richer by far, achieved by a mere shift in perception.

As a natural extension of our adopting this different definition of existence, the changes within our culture would be dynamic to say the least. Mental health institutions would almost cease to exist, as the dysfunctional personality is no more than a symptom of the dysfunctional group. The dysfunctional group, no more than a symptom of a dysfunctional social order. Primary catalysts of physical ill health, such as stress, would almost cease to exist also, along with associated overloaded hospital systems and massive requirement for, along with associated abuse of, medication.

Street people would not feel a need to retreat to the streets anymore, but would see a form of society that they would want to be a part of. A form of society that they could see themselves as being a part of, alienated no longer.

Dare I mention prisons?

I could continue, but I'm sure you get the gist.

All aspects of our social and personal direction are compromised when we operate from a biased or false premise. Our proud, emphatic (dare I say, arrogant?) denunciations of 'this is wrong', or 'that's not right' appear as shallow as mainstream media. Any observation from a false premise can only produce an inaccurate end assessment. A silk purse don't come from no sows ear, boy!

Therefore it naturally follows that judging others, or even ourselves, by our own standards is automatically a travesty of natural justice and nothing more than a gross, if unintended, hypocrisy. Because we, unquestioningly, inherit standards of judgment also.

It is possible to establish valid existence only by exploring the depths of established standards, understand where they stem from and, by doing so, determine as to whether they still have relevance in regard to personal existence, now, in our current environment. Retain the standards that do have relevance, rid ourselves of false standards that represent the crippling detritus in our lives, and adopt any new standards that are seen to promote required existential standing.

This is normally considered to be the philosophers function, yes, but a little philosophy won't hurt any of us if it results in our finally reaping the substantial rewards of a valid sense of social responsibility. We have that duty to ourselves, each other and toward our shared environment. Wholistically.

The answer to all the worlds' problems lie in the future within our children, but we need people qualified to teach them how to move the world, through a paradigm shift, from here to there. There's only one way to achieve that, so we need to get to work on ourselves, individually, very quickly.

[blackgirlsreadromance]

Review: The Right Swipe

The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai

*Warning: This review contains mild spoilers*

CW: anxiety, grieving, sexual harassment

Categories: M/F, interracial relationships, contemporary romance, rivals-to-lovers

My review:

Soooo I said I was going to do Girl Gone Viral, the second book in Rai’s Modern Love series, next, but I decided to go in order and do first things first. Besides, I actually like The Right Swipe a bit more than Girl Gone Viral, although I thoroughly enjoyed both. So, here goes:

The Right Swipe is the story of Rhiannon Hunter, the creator and owner of a successful online dating up called Crush, and her quest to buy a competitor’s matchmaking company to grow her business empire. And, of course, the story of the gorgeous man she meets along the way.

Samson Lima is a Samoan American ex-football player and the nephew of the owner of the matchmaking company Rhiannon wants to buy. He’s also the guy she **spoiler!** had a one-night stand with a few months ago. After one perfect night with tons of hot sex, she agreed to step out of her comfort zone and see him again, and then he GHOSTED. So by the time they meet again, in a business context, she wants nothing to do with him.

I really love both of our MCs in this book, but especially Rhiannon. She’s a Black woman in her late-thirties, so that already made me happy because so often we only see young(er) characters finding love in books. And you know how I feel about my Black heroines! The thing that makes Rhiannon great is she’s complex in ways that make her so real to me. She’s driven and ambitious, has trust issues, and can be prickly. She’s also generous and loyal to a fault. But the most interesting thing about her, the thing I think Rai did so well, is fold into Rhiannon all these stereotypes of Black women and businesswomen -- they’re aggressive, they’re not “feminine,” they’re not qualified, and, of course, the age-old insult that “they’ve slept their way to the top” -- but threw them back at us in a through-the-looking glass sort of way.  

For example, Rhiannon’s apparent aggression or lack of femininity are purposeful choices she’s made to succeed in business (early in the book, she recalls a former mentor telling her that as a woman in business, she can never let anyone see her cry). She’s not stereotypically feminine (she would dress entirely in hoodies and sneakers if she could) but she also loves pink because it makes her happy, so she decorates her private office in it, where she can enjoy it without judgment. She’s super-qualified, and always on edge and ready to prove it to those who challenge her, but she’s also learned that some people will dismiss you or have made up their minds about you from go and it’s not worth your time to engage with them. 

And then there’s the “sleeping her way to the top” dig. She didn’t -- she worked her ass off and one thing that comes through over, and over, and OVER while reading the book is how hard Rhiannon works. But there are rumors about her in the industry, spread by a former employer, and she’s had to deal with a fair amount of backlash and struggles that she just wouldn’t face if she were a man, especially a white man.

All these layers help make Rhiannon fascinating. She wears her businesswoman persona like armor, but she also needs her own personal brand of armor -- her favorite hoodie or a good, tight hug -- when she faces her toughest moments. She doesn’t trust easily, due to some incidents in her past which do get explored later in the book, and that is part of why it was difficult for her to agree to see Samson again and so hurtful when he didn’t follow through. But he spends the rest of the book trying to make it up to her, and proving that he sees her through all the armor and thinks she’s f*cking brilliant. He’s super supportive, there to run interference or provide a hug or hot, rough sex, if that’s what she needs to clear her mind. Even when he’s dealing with some personal issues of his own he makes it a point to be there for her, and he allows Rhi to support and soothe him, too. 

Their chemistry is off the charts, and the story around their business interests and how it might affect their relationship is interesting, intense, and well-done. The story also does a pretty thorough examination of the characters’ family relationships and some difficulties they each have there, which I really appreciated. I think this is a great, layered romance and I was so happy when these two got their HEA!

Review: 5 kisses! 💋💋💋💋💋

[reviewpri]

Beware-Alt Right is claiming GoT

I do not think DnD set out to do that...no, but it is happening.

and I do not think that all the people coming out to give a positive spin on season 8, in particularly, justifying Mad Dany are Alt-Right inserts- but some are.

How is Alt-Right claiming GoT? Well, they are spreading misconceptions about Daenerys solely based on the show in order to convince people that fighting for a more just society is misguided.

(not the same people, but on the same level of those who keep crying over the fact that selfish Dany is going to these places, liberating slaves while ignoring their culture...whatever that means.)

Note those claims are wide enough to convince normies and some leftists also that being a revolutionary equals being a tyrant.

1- Daenerys is a white savior.

Wrong. The trope that we are dealing with is actually “ going native”- a white person embracing and being embraced by other people/culture.

(in this case, Dothraki- and that they were presented as almost irredeemable savages is on GRRM )

Moreover, she rules over a very racially diverse population who had been ruled by a racial elite that Daenerys is no part of- meaning, she does not think her race makes her superior to the underclasses-  the Ghiscari, on the other hand..

2- Daenerys is an imperialist.

Wrong.

I am not going to touch on the fact that we are speaking of a 20th-century concept when speaking about a piece of fiction depicting a magical medieval world.

Daenerys' intentions have never been set up an Empire with her as Head. What she wants is to end slavery. Period. This will also explain her taking over the Dothraki, not only because she wants an army, but because the Dothraki are great suppliers of slaves.

She stays in Meereen because first if she leaves before the transition is way underway, they Ghiscari Elites will enslave the people she freed again. And, she wants to learn how to rule.

3- Daenerys is bloodthirsty

Wrong.

This is a show invention. Daenerys first impulse is NEVER to “ burn cities to the ground”, but she is constantly advised to do so.

4- Embracing Fire and Blood is the first sign of her tyranny.

Doubtful. 

Daenerys is compared to Aegon, the Conqueror.

Aegon was not a lunatic who kept burning things. Quite the contrary- despite having the obvious advantage of three dragons, Aegon would give his enemies a fair warning before he went to war.

Most probably, Daenerys will repeat the two events that set Aegon to be King: the Field of Fire ( season 7) and burning the Red Keep ( as an analog for Harrenhal)

5- Daenerys going crazy is GRRM ending.

Doubtful.

First, DnD cited the “ she is a Targ and they are crazy” reason for her meltdown, which is bullshit. 

Second, they retconned the whole thing in addition to changing the dynamic of Daenerys and her advisors. 

SEASON 8 HAS NOT BEEN METICULOUSLY PLANNED SINCE SEASON 5- the retroactively going through scenes, changing their meaning or actually inverting their meaning, show just that.

Examples that impacted the story:

a- Theon did not make fun of Tyrion when they met in season one- it was the opposite- They retconned it because they made Tyrion, who is a bloodthirsty man with daddy issues who cares nothing about the smallfolk ( and was portrayed as that for four seasons) to be a pacifist. In that scene, they wanted to remind us that Tyrion is a nice guy, who can be a bit emotional. A turn for the character who, at season 4 had screamed that the populace of KL should have died during Stannis attack.

b-Daenerys did not force Jon to give up his Crown for her to go North- the one who made this demand was Cersei. But this is the version of the story that is in the mouths of the northern Lords- and neither Daenerys nor Jon rectify the mistake because, voilá---the writers decided that Daenerys IS Cersei now.

c- Targaryens never went North to fight against Starks, like Tyrion said they did, so really, the northerners could not still remember it because the fact never happened. ( and this episode, of the King Who Knelt, is in the History and Lore section- so, it is TV Canon)

d- Jaime had already told Brienne the truth about his actions during Robert´s rebellion when they weer at Harrenhal and why he killed the Mad King, but by season 8, that scene never happened- or Jaime had lied back then for no reason whatsoever.

e- Daenerys and Jon never spent time together during their childhood, but by season 8 she is telling him about when they were young and she could not count till 20...something that would only make sense if the dialogue was written for Jaime and Cersei.

f- The House of Undying vision of Daenerys had already been fulfilled by season 7. Daenerys had literally the chance to take the Iron Throne, but she chooses to go cross the Wall and go North. She gives up her plan to blow up the Red Keep- shown in the vision with a Seven-Pointed Star, meaning it was a “what could have been” they elected to retcon ( which can be attested because Daenerys, in the original version of the scene, mentions it as a difference between her vision and the reality.) to save Jon Snow North of The Wall.

Season 8 they inverted the chronological order of the vision to fit their plot- Daenerys is North and, instead of resting her troops, she goes South and for some reason ( madness) she destroys the whole thing with dragon fire, but miraculously, The Iron Throne remains. Drogon then sets fire on the Throne, which melts? ( why has not melted before? same reason Tyrion manages to find and recognize the corpses of his siblings- because logic does not matter.)

As their infamous Austin panel shows, DnD confirmed they were interested in writing scene for scene, not necessarily characters arcs or themes. They also said that they divorced the books since season 5, that they made GoT theirs, that the magical elements were downplayed and finally that they simplified the scope of ASOIAF to a “ Power is everything” mentality.

Power being their concern explains why the series is called “ Game of Thrones”, which is just the name of the first book. 

GRRM is often quoted as not believing in heroes...but in fact: he does. What he does not believe in are in perfect, never at fault heroes:

“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results... but it is the effort that's heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.” 

Note that DnD gave this definition of hero- the ones who try to make the world a better place- a sentence that Daenerys repeats at least a couple of times during seasons 6 and 7.

and again..while GRRM gives space for his heroes to “win or lose” ...and admits that most heroes “ had mixed results”...he does qualify them- the dreamers- as heroes nevertheless.

Therefore this vision...this black and white vision of Daenerys as Hitler with Dragons (incidentally- Alt-Right has been known to make claims that nazism- as in national socialism- was, in fact, a far-left movement.) that just because she started out freeing slaves by force, it never meant she was in fact, a hero, but a misguided despot in the making...is not GRRM, but Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss.

To place things in context, the producers of GoT are members of the Elites. Of course, they sympathize with characters like Sansa and Tyrion ( their admitted favorites) who are members of Elite- in case of Sansa, the Starks are what one could call benevolent aristocrats- but aristocrats nevertheless- and to them...it does make incredibly sense that a person who is willing to go as far as to challenge the Elites for the well being of the underclass by using violence ( Daenerys) would be a step away from being a Tyrant.

Am I saying that GRRM does not intend to make Dany crazy? I am not saying that. I cannot say what his intentions are. What I can say is that, in his own words, not only Daenerys, but most of the characters are going to be Darker in the next book. Possibly, keeping with the tone of the series, this means Daenerys will go grey. 

Grey could very well choose to go for the Red Keep, as Aegon went to Harrenhal, despite innocents are being held there. Some people will call her crazy...others will see the actions as simply a part of a war.

I think he intends to allow readers to decide.

Personally though...I am not sure I am up to it anymore. By making Daenerys a victim of rape, one who not only survives and thrives, but chooses to fight against such inequalities instead of becoming the abuser ( Cersei) that he might use such character to discuss the limits of being a hero...I find it distasteful.

As of now, ASOIAF is shaping out to be one of many standard fantasy series. It has been sold as nothing of the sort, but as an inclusive, realistic portrayal of a generational saga where the main characters would have to contend with the mistakes of their fathers...but GoT leaves the impression that ASOIAF is, indeed, just white men´s wank.