#and just uses it like stage decorations. when he's writing a BOOK ABOUT SOCIETY

[piromantic]

trying to finish brave new world so i can watch iwtv in peace tonight. need to kill this author even though hes already dead

[small-reptile-cake]

Vigilante AU (updated/fixed)

Concept:

We live in a world of injustice, where powerful people get to overshadow and overrule others basic human rights, and those with true power conceal themselves under the shadows at the risk of being killed or outcasted from society. However, in a city where hate and panic flood the streets, a select team of special people are willing to put themselves out there and defend those who can no longer fight for themselves. Virgil Sinclaire(18)

Powers:

Telepathy

Can read and invade the minds of other people with unsettling, fear inducing thoughts.

His range of hearing is of up to three blocks.

His powers caused him to be mildly agoraphobic; he spent a great part of his life hearing the sick thoughts of strangers on the street and the thousands of times he could simply tell when he was about to get mugged, making him afraid of leaving the safety of his apartment.

Now he wears headphones most of the time to muffle the voices.

Always lived in the same tall building, the higher he is the less he has to hear.

Born and raised in New York.

Studies/Interests:

Highschool dropout. In between his phobia and the terrible influence from his peers, he decided the education system wasn't for him.

Wanted to be an english major.

Enjoys writing scary/realistic novels.

Affiliations

Lives with his aunt and cousin.

Was lured into a group of thieves disguised as anarchists/protesters who claimed to fight for “True justice”, and that they would protect him. Truly, they were just hiding their true intentions and using Virgil’s powers to cause harm out of pure self gratification.

When their motives were unveiled, he still rejected becoming a part of the Alliance

Now, he belongs to his own neutral alignment in which he will not condone giving aid to those who he feels don't deserve it and will absolutely turn to revenge if necessary, even through unconventional means.  

Is still willing to help the Alliance, or the “Light Ones” as he calls them.

Patton Kane (22)

Powers:

Healing

His healing can range from treating people (whether it be physically or emotionally) to fixing broken objects (Only if they’re visibly torn, like a broken key or a broken cup).

The risk of healing people’s emotions is that it’s only temporary, and Patton will absorb both positive and negative emotions from the individual.

He can’t fix something that’s been set on fire (A book or clothes) because it’s simply beyond his reach to reconstruct something that's been turned to dust.

Studies/Interests:

A gastronomy student.

Often attends to baking courses/seminars during the week.

Teaches kids with disabilities how to bake on the weekends.

Part of his tuition was paid by working as a babysitter and a store clerk. The rest was obtained from his parents

Was an animal hoarder back in college even though he didn’t have the space or time at the moment. There were stray cats, dogs, even a rat that lived in the same building and got caught in a trap one day. He healed it and brought it home because he didn’t want the owner to find it and kill it.

His family had to talk him out of it and he even went to therapy to deal with the guilt of having to give his babies up for adoption.

Now he only adopts people as his children.

Affiliations

Virgil activates his fatherly senses the most and constantly getting invited to eat at Patton’s

He’s always encouraging the vigilante to go out, then ultimately visiting whenever Virgil just doesn’t feel safe enough to go out.

He also loves playing video games together as long as they aren’t horror themed.

Went to highschool with Logan, he was a few years older but since their parents knew each other and Logan didn’t bother socializing with people in his grade, they became close.

They would both occasionally help their peers though small gestures, such as easing someone before a test, or getting someone out of a fever. It was when they met Roman that he dragged them onto greater things and eventually led to forming the alliance.

Logan Altman (20)

Powers:

Super speed

Is ironically always worried about wasting time

The best thing about his power is having more time to appreciate each moment and scene as it happens before his eyes, analyze it, then carry on.

Will stutter whenever he tries to speak at a normal pace. Roman had to help him practice his speech so it wouldn’t give away his identity during superhero duty.

Needs extra calories, and therefore is often found snacking on protein bars, fruit (and obviously Patton’s famous oatmeal-chocolate cookies)

Can be very hot headed and impatient at times.

Studies/Interests

Majors in chemical engineering, takes up astronomy in his spare time, as well as philosophy and english.

Wants to learn german and spanish.

Uses his super speed to be able to take all of his classes during the week, complete his chores in time and always have some spare minutes.

Keeps a schedule that he’s very loyal to or else he might take up more than he can handle and stress himself out (Again).

Despite being so diligent of his work, he always falls asleep in time, makes sure to have a healthy diet and gives himself some time to relax and contemplate.

Affiliations

Has been friends with Patton since elementary, their parents know each other. Their relationship was very stiff at first as the sensitive hero used to infuriate him by taking too long to do things and getting carried away all the time. This led to some outbursts that were always forgiven as long as Logan apologized afterwards.

One day he went too far while Patton was particularly sensitive, causing him to cry. He’s learnt to control himself since then.

He and Roman were classmates in fight grade when Roman moved in, by then he wasn’t friends with anybody else from his generation.

They started to hang out after a few very intense debates regarding the historical accuracy of a few medieval TV shows, and if it was acceptable to deviate from the obscure reality of those times.

Genuinely loves watching Roman perform classics on stage. The first time he saw him was during english class when they were to bring presentations to class, he performed a paragraph from one of Chèjov's tales.

Despite often treating him like an idiot, he recognizes Roman to be brilliant in his own field. And having him in class was always an amusing experience.

Thinks of Virgil’s occasional presence as comforting, but ultimately disagrees with his views on society.

Is constantly trying to convince Virgil to retake his studies, expressing concern for his future.

Roman Garcia(20)

Powers:

Morphing objects as he touches them

He can only change the shape of an object, not the material it’s made of (if he touches a metal chair and shapes it into a sword, it’ll still be made of metal)

It used to be very difficult for him to create things as he couldn’t focus hard enough on a single shape at the time and the images in his brain would get jumbled.

Later on he was diagnosed with ADHD. His family refused to medicate him and for many years he was forced to deal with it without knowing what it was and what to do about it. That, until he met a teacher that dealt with the same thing who was willing to educate him on he matter. From then on, he’s been learning to surpass it and perfect his technique.

Studies/Interests:

Drama school, also forms part of a few independent acting groups dedicated to performing musicals in small theatres.

Writes fantasy novels, as well as scripts for both theatre and film. He loves how different both formats are and the different things he can achieve with both

Can also write and listen in spanish, but is pronunciation is still too stiff to talk back.

Affiiliations:

Went to highschool with Logan, Patton was their senior.

Moved in to New York from Albuquerque with his little brother. Their entire family is from Venezuela.

Comes from divorced parents, had an abusive father growing up.

Doesn’t necessarily hate his brother, but is extremely weary of him growing into a villain since his powers are rarely ever used  for anything other than chaos.

Has a strong attachment to Patton due to the hero’s overbearing, fatherly attitude. Often rings him up at random times to just hang out and watch “Brooklyn 99″ together or learn new recipes. Whether they are in a bad mood or not, it’s always heartwarming to spend time with each other. He really hated Virgil at first for stealing Patton’s attention.

Is currently really fond of Virgil as he can understand the struggles of being forced to move apart from your family. He also really appreciates the vigilante’s willingness to listen

Devin C. Pierce (20)

Powers:

Shapeshifting

Uses his powers to his own advantage and to help those he cares about.

Doesn’t care about fighting evil or turning evil because good and bad are constructs and totally subjective.

Studies/Interests

Drama school

Takes up law as his second major, mostly influenced by watching fake trials on TV and watching legal dramas.

Totally didn’t show Remus “How to get away with murder”.

Affiliations

Met Roman on an improv night at a bar, they got a few good laughs by being absurd and original.

Roman doesnt know about his powers but they're still good friends. Is often asked to babysit Remus when Roman is out fighting crime.

Is constantly teasing Virgil because, in Devin’s words; he’s a “Hypocrite who thinks of himself morally superior to everyone”

Tells everyone the C in his name is for classy.

Remus Garcia (14)

Power:

Morphing objects as he touches them

His creations are always a lot more gruesome than Roman’s

They range from weapons, dick shaped statues, inedible food shaped objects to prank people and tiny versions of torture devices he saw in some horror game about the dark ages. They all decorate his room

Studies/Interests:

He also sculpts manually and enjoys painting. Most of his art is abstract. Only draws explicitly gorey scenes when he’s angry.

He learnt French in secret for years just to one day start pretending he didn’t know spanish anymore and piss everyone off.

Enjoys reading horror stories on the internet a lot. He even found Virgil’s blog while deep diving once, but he doesn’t know that.

Affiliations

Moved in with Roman because his parents were busy with work and couldn’t tend to his “needs” all the time

Constantly trying to get Roman to take him on his missions. Since Roman doesn't trust him not to kill anyone, it never happened.

Is old enough not to need a babysitter, is chaotic enough to need one and only Deceit can handle him.

Patton is greatly unsettled by him, but Remus loves when he comes over to cook for them. He tried to show him his sculptures once when he was younger and it didn’t go well at all.

He is constantly trolling Virgil whenever they’re around, thinking about disturbing things the moment he walks through the door.

[kouei116]

[spoilers] IkeVam Shakespeare's 2nd Birthday Story

Spoilers under the cut. I’m still learning Japanese and this blog is to post my practices, hence corrections are welcomed and thank you for visiting ^_^  Please don't repost this to anywhere else. 

@chaotic-prince - as I promised 🐰

One day, I came to a party at the assembly hall. Shakespeare’s patrons organized his birthday party and invited the Count and I, but he was so popular that I could barely come near him at all to give him a flower bouquet. I stood at the corner of hall and gazed at the crowd, where Shakespeare was the star of the party. Soon the Count was surrounded by noblemen as well. Looking at them like this, I felt like I was from a different world after all.

-

Shakespeare was facing everybody with the identical gentle smiles, but somehow, it seems like he was forcing himself to smile. At that moment, suddenly our eyes met. He walked briskly towards me, until he was in front of me and respectfully took my hand.

-

Shakespeare: “Yuuki, is it ok for me to abduct you?"

Yuuki: “Eh!"

He was whispering those words while gazing straight at me, and my heart was throbbing in my chest.

Viscount: “Will, where are you going?”

Shakespeare: "Excuse me, Viscount, this young lady is an aspiring actress and she would like to see my plays.”

Yuuki: “Eh!?”

Shakespeare: “Let’s go, Yuuki.”

He lied without any hesitation, then pulled my hand through the crowd towards the exit.

-

Yuuki: "Uhmm, is it ok for the star of the party to leave?"

Shakespeare: “You seem to be disapproving of me."

Yuuki: “Waaa, me?"

Shakespeare:” I’m kidding. It’s fine, you know. My birthday party is only an excuse. The purpose of the organiser is to build connection in high society."

He tilted his head towards me with a sarcastic smile on his face.

Shakespeare: “The aristocrats that back writers like me, are not necessarily doing it for Arts. To be able to support artists, they must have money and status. This will make them more appealing to people around them. In return of receiving their support, I sometimes write plays that are decorative accessories for them."

Not knowing what a good answer was for his harsh reality, Shakespeare changed the subject.

-

The carriage’s window was reflecting his lovely smile that was completely different from the smiles he stuck on his face earlier.

(Shakespeare probably truly wanted to get out of such an unpleasant party. Just now he was surrounded by such a crowd of people, but it seems that he was terribly lonely. )

Shakespeare: “By the way Yuuki, the Count told me that you came to see my new play a few days ago."

Yuuki: "Ah, yes! It was a wonderful play."

After changing the subject, the usual gentle smile has returned to Shakespeare’s face.

Yuuki: “You conveyed the character’s hearts in such a way that it made my chest tight.

Shakespeare’s new play was about the tragic love story of a young man (who is a demon) and a young girl. The plot was about them falling in love, but the girl was frightened of the forest where he lived and she left him.

Yuuki: “Especially the part when they eloped towards the forest, my heart was pounding in my chest."

Ah, come to think of it ...I remember when Shakespeare said: "Yuuki, Is it ok for me to abduct you?” Those words were the lines that the young man told the girl at the scene where they eloped ... As I realised that we were also running away from the party just like the two characters in the play, the throbbing feeling in my chest earlier returned.

Shakespeare: “What’s the matter? Your face is red."

Yuuki: “…Nothing.”

After I secretly took a deep breath, I continued to tell him about my thoughts: "... For two people that loved each other but in the end had to be apart, I couldn't stop my tears. I wondered if there weren’t any other ways for them to be happy … "

Shakespeare: “Happy…?" ... Next to me, he muttered those words with a faint voice.

Yuuki: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to contradict you. It was just heartbreaking …"

Shakespeare: “Yuuki ... Well then, please tell me the happy ending that you wish for."

-

The moonlight was illuminating the deserted and completely silent stage. Shakespeare took me to the rehearsal hall and offered me a book.

Shakespeare: "This is the script of the play the other day. You will play the role of the girl and I will be the young man. You can freely change the lines, I don’t care. Please perform the happy ending for me."

I hesitated but wanted to help Shakespeare with his writing, so I agreed.

-

Shakespeare: “Well then, starting from the climax scene in the forest." Shakespeare embraced my shoulder, and I was wrapped in the gentle scent of his perfume.

Shakespeare:” This is my forest, the Magical forest. Be my wife. Tonight, I’ll show you in ..... Yuuki, it’s your turn."

Yuuki: “Ah, yes … Aaa darkness, this terrifying darkness that will help conceal us. But will it show that I am trembling? I only just realize how different the worlds I and you live in."

Shakespeare: “You took an oath to love me regardless of who I am. And now you’re rejecting me?"

-

In the script, now was the part when the girl pushed the young man away to escape. I thought, if the girl had the strength to overcome her fear, it might not have been a tragedy....However, how could I get such strength?

Yuuki: “I’m afraid of darkness. I want to escape right now … But still, I will not let go of your hand. I will not leave you alone.  Even if this is the only strength I have now."

Shakespeare: "... !"

I held Shakespeare’s hands firmly as I spoke the lines that I came up with. I didn't know if this would lead to a happy ending .. even so, somehow I hoped the plot could be concluded..

Shakespeare: "Such a cliche ... It was very helpful, Yuuki. But you’re still a normal person."

Yuuki: "A normal person?"

Shakespeare: "Without any real experience to overcome tragedies, it will just be talk of hope like this. The audience will not be satisfied with an unconvincing ending."

Yuuki: “'You're right, I’m not like you and the guys at the mansion. Far from it..."

(Even though I understood that, why does my chest hurt this much…? Even though I was this close, I felt that Shakespeare was so far away, and I was so surprised that I was longing for him)

Yuuki: “I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you..."

When I turned away to get off the stage , the scent of the perfume got stronger again …

Shakespeare: “It was cliche, but it was interesting.” He was resting his jaws on my back and his fingertips caressing my skin.

Shakespeare: "The powerless normal people will try to fight against tragedies ... Maybe because of that adversity, a heroic story can be born. Will you be able to fight against a fate that hardened you into despair? Yuuki, I really want to know.”

The voice whispering into my ear was cold as ice, however, I was filled with such a strange sweetness that there were goosebumps on my skin.

(I don’t know, Shakespeare …) My heart was beating very fast because he was different from his normal gentle self …

Yuuki: “Ah…”

Shakespeare: “Shall I uncover your skin even more, and make you cry out for me"

I could hear the rustling sound of clothes.

Yuuki: “Shakespeare …."

As I unintentionally called out his name, he stepped away from me as if nothing had happened.

Shakespeare: “The ribbon on the back was loose, so I tied it back.”

Yuuki: “Thank you …”

(I was a little scared, but I didn’t dislike it …) 

-

Shakespeare turned his back to me and got off the stage.

Shakespeare: “Yuuki, before, you have asked to see the happy ending that I wrote.”

(That was Shakespeare’s last year’s birthday. He said he wrote plays originated from his real experience. If you write a lot of tragedies, is it because of all the sorrowful things that happened to you?)

Yuuki: “I’d like to see the happy ending that you write someday.” I told him with a smile.

Shakespeare: “I don’t mind writing a cliche grand finale.” Finally Shakespeare showed a sudden smile on his face.

Shakespeare:” But as I observed you, someday I might be worried about you. Will you be able to help show me the strength that can fight against destiny and tragedies … Will you be able to? Will you be strong no matter what happens?”

His different colour eyes looked like they were provoking me.

(… Although I didn't understand completely what Shakespeare was thinking, I wanted him to see not only the tragedies but also the scenery. If there was anything I could do to help him, I'd be strong, whatever happens in the future …)

Yuuki: “…. Sure, I’ll show you.”

Shakespeare: “Fufu … I look forward to it.”

Shakespeare showed a calm smile to my determination. Only the moon in the sky saw the promise between just the two of us on the stage with no audience.

[snicketstrange]

The Beatrice Letters theory

This is part 10 of the Strange Interpretation of Jean Lúcio from Brazil

To understand this text, it is necessary to read some my previous texts.

Text Part 9

Part 8

Part 7 

Part 6

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

I think it's time to start explaining my interpretation of The Beatrice Letters. I really love TBL. There is no official Portuguese translation of TBL, but there are translations made by volunteers. The first team to translate was called "Unfortunately Society" in 2009, whom I really thank. The other translation was made by volunteer Isadora in 2013. Volunteer Isadora Bortoluzzi Massa did an annotated translation of TBL in her Course Conclusion Work from the Faculty of Portuguese-English Literature, at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. I wanted to highlight these facts to show how much Brazilian fans take ASOUE seriously.

To understand TBL, I believe you should start by reading the last letter.

Please note carefully the following excerpts from Lemony's letter to the editor on TBL.

“{…} Once inside the warehouse, one can only hope that is has been organized sensibly -- otherwise it may take all night just find the room in which documents from long-ago library exhibitions are stored, and all morning to find the proper file…

Finally, it occurred to me to look under the name of the poet… Because I love her so much, for instance, it never occurred to me that there could be more than one Beatrice Baudelaire. IT WAS QUITE SOME TIME BEFORE I RECEIVED THE FIRST OF BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS THAT I REALIZED THAT ALL OF BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS COULD BE FOUND NOT JUST IN THE FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE BUT IN THE SECOND BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE AND THAT PERHAPS IF I GATHERED THE REMAINING LETTERS OF FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE WITH THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE, THEN THE BEATRICE LETTERS COULD EXPLAIN THE BEATRICE LETTERS AND EVEN THE LETTERS OF BEATRICE, NO MATTER WHICH LETTERS THEY ARE, AND NO MATTER WHAT ORDER THE LETTERS ARE IN. I IMMEDIATELY BEGAN WORK ON THE FILE.

And now, after all this time,  have found the same scrap of paper  had once examined in a glass case – and, years before that, examined in a hallway of the library, with the scrap of paper in the glass case. Sadly, this missing sonnet is like a missing sock – it had been lost for so long that everything else has completely unraveled in its absence. For many years I thought if I collected all these letters and their accompanying ephemera – a phrase witch here means “documents and items which I feared had vanished, and may soon vanish again” – I could put all of them in the proper order, as if solving an anagram by putting all of letters in the right order… The arrangement of letters could spell more than one thing…

This file is finished – just when I thought it might finish me… THE SECRETS CONTAINED HERE ARE LIKE ALL SECRETS – DANGEROUS TO THOSE WHO DISCOVER THEM AND HARMLESS TO THOSE WHO FAIL TO NOTICE THEM. For this reason, I recommend that you either destroy this file or make as many copies as possible… I DO NOT KNOW WHEN I WILL WRITE YOU AGAIN.”

Please, remember one of the premises of the Strange Interpretation of Jean Lúcio From Brazil. While the 13 books of ASOUE are directed by the Great Public of the universe of Lemony, the TBL is a file that contains personal letters. While there may be deliberate lies in the 13 books of ASOUE, there are no deliberate lies in TBL. However, there are indications of caution on the part of the authors of the letters in TBL. The letter senders are aware that the letter could be read by others than the recipient of the letter. So one of the letters contains a Sebald code. Thus, in a few letters, the sender does not want to deceive the recipient, but wants to deceive or confuse any other person who happens to have access to the letter. For example, in one of the letters the sender starts each paragraph as if writing a business letter. In addition, recipients of the letters know that it is possible for someone to try to cheat by letters. The recipients of the letters know that a person can send a letter pretending to be someone else. See this excerpt from BB to LS # 1,

“Perhaps you will also think I am someone else, and will make a suspicious note in the margin, accusing me of being some villainess or other.”

In this letter, the recipient (Lemony) made a note, indicating that at the time he read the letter for the first time, he believed that the true sender could be "E" (probably Esmé).

Now that you know all this, turn your attention back to the letter to the editor. From my point of view, in this letter Lemony states clearly that in the file that we call TBL, there are letters coming from both Beatrices. At the same time, Lemony makes it clear that by the time he was writing this letter to the editor, only one of the Beatrices was alive. He referred to Kit's daughter as "THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE". This indicates that the "FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE" was dead when this letter was written. I need to believe that. My whole theory is based on the premise that Lemony would not lie in a personal letter. However, that does not mean that "FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE" had been died since fire of her house. Quite the opposite. Accepting as a fact that there are letters coming from the two Beatrices in the archive, and accepting the fact that Beatrice survived the fire at her house based on the evidence I've already presented, TBL makes a lot of sense.

(Obs,:  Lemony wrote to his editor:

"IF I GATHERED THE REMAINING LETTERS OF FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE WITH THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE ... I IMMEDIATELY BEGAN WORK ON THE FILE"

"gather" means: to bring together; collect

"LETTERS OF SOME PERSON" means letters FROM someone, right?

look "of" definition: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of

"used as a function word to indicate origin or derivation" )

What would be the method of distinguishing whether the letter comes from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings or Kit's daughter? Would comparing signatures be an appropriate method? No. As I explained on the Thread about the R letter, in Lemony's universe, signatures can be faked. Lemony did not believe that R's letter was even R's because there was her letter at the end of the letter. In addition, Lemony suspected that the letter From BB to LS # 1 could be from someone else, even seeing the signature of the letter. What could help distinguish from which Beatrice comes from each of the letters is just the content of the letters.

Now turn your attention to the letter BB to LS # 2. Here are some things that this letter has, and some things that this letter does not have.

The letter's sender wrote:

"I am leaving this city, only hours after finally seeing it for the first time, to follow your path of yarn and pins ... Without Violet, Klaus and Sunny, I am an orphan - an orphan who is leaving this letter here. .. PS This is a very handsome paperweight, by the way, although I can not tell if it is a snake, a worm, or an electric eel. "

This person is evidently Kit's daughter. She says she's never been on the City. She states that Baudelaire siblings are her parents. She states that she does not know what paperweight is, and anyone who has known Ike knows that paperweight is a leech. Now, what does this letter not have that is very common in several other letters from Beatrice to Lemony? This letter does not contain the anagrams "Baticeer" or "My Silence Knot".

Now let's look at the letter From BB to LS # 3.

See what this letter has and what this letter does not have. Note the sections below:

[...] the eldest shepherd said, ringing his cowbell to call to his flock, and looking me very carefully in the eye. I traded them a ring on my finger, emblazoned with the initial of someone I believe you once knew, for a yak ride to see the cave for myself. I don't know what i will have to trade in order to have this letter sent.  Your cave is a miserable place - drafty, bat infested, and decorated with hideous wallpaper… This has been a hard years journey. And now... all  have learned is what you said when you left this cave... "I'm in the mood for a root beer float", you said, and so am I. I will return to the city, where I've been told the best root beer floats can be found at certain shop, although I've forgotten the shop's name, location, and price list.”

The sender of this letter apparently does not know the Sebald code. The older pastor apparently tried to send him a message in Sebald's code, but she did not notice. Also, the sender of this letter does not know how to control bats. She saw several bats in the cave, and yet she had no idea of using one of them to send the letter to Lemony's office. In addition, Lemony evidently left a message that would be easily understood by the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. He said, "I'm in the mood for a root beer float." The first place the mother of the Baudelaire siblings would think about going would be at a specific cafe, where Lemony and Beatrice had their first meeting, the same place where they kept meeting for many years. In the letter From LS to BB # 3, Lemony makes a date with Beatrice in this cafe. He wrote:

"As you take your bow, drop one of your hatpins off the stage. That's your signal to me that it is safe to meet at the usual place for our midnight root beer floats."

So I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that this letter comes from Kit's daughter.

Now think: What does the letter From BB to LS # 3 not have that most of Beatrice's letters to Lemony have? Again, this letter does not contain the anagrams "Baticeer" or "My Silence Knot".

What is the origin of these anagrams? Who invented them, and what use did this person give to these anagrams? The answer to these questions is in the letter From LS to BB # 2

Lemony wrote:

"It's easy to write letters during Code Class ... The only other student I know in this class is O. who is nothing but annoyance. As I write this he is filling his notebook with anagrams of obscene words ... After the incident with the bottle of ink and the root beer float, I think it's better to spend my time inside "My Silence Knot" ... My sister has told me that there are bats to be found there, and I would love to spend some time with a certain "baticeer".

These anagrams were created by Lemony in a class that explained codes. Apparently it was a class that explained about the use of anagrams, because Olaf was writing anagrams in his notebook. Lemony went on to use anagrams in his letter to Beatrice. He used anagrams of his own name and the name of Beatrice. Beatrice understood that this was an excellent method for identifying herself in a letter. Whenever Beatrice sends a letter to the person she loves, Lemony, she writes the anagram of his name or her name or both. For this it is necessary to create an opportunity within the text of the letter to use the anagrams, even if this leaves the text with low naturalness. People who did not know the use of anagrams would never realize this method of identification. In addition, if Lemony found a letter without the anagrams My Silence Knot or Baticeer, Lemony would be certain that this letter would not come from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. After all, why would someone use "My Silence Knot" in a letter? It is not a very common expression in English. What about the word "Baticeer"? This word does not even exist in English dictionaries.

Based on this, I can say that the letters From BB to LS # 1, # 4, # 5 and even # 6, come from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings.

Some of these passages make more sense when you come to that conclusion.

For example in BB to LS # 1:

"All I hope is the best, but hoping for the best, like hoping to obey your orders, almost always leads to disappointement ... There are many people, to affect all, with the same initials as you, just as THERE IS AT LEAST ONE OTHER PERSON WITH THE SAME INITIALS AS ME ... For years I kept quiet, feeling all my words twisting and tangling inside me like skeins of yarn, as I searched desperately for someone who could be of assistance. Now I must untie "My Silence Knot" and to a man I have ever seen ... I am hoping you wil tell me a story that began many years ago, in what I WAS TOLD IS A SORT OF CLASSROOM ... My name is Beatrice Baudelaire. I am searching for my family - Violet Baudelaire, Klaus Baudelaire, and Sunny Baudelaire ...”

From this letter I can say that the letter comes from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. However, Beatrice chooses her words so that any reader other than Lemony and I, believe the letter comes from Kit's daughter. Beatrice is master in disguises. She is on a much higher level than Count Olaf. Beatrice's true interest is linked to Lemony's past. Her interest is in the passion they had together, and they could never live fully. Even the letter From BB to LS # 6, is from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. She chose to use a phraseology very similar to that of Lemony's first letter. She apologized for embarrassing Lemony in front of his friends. When did this happen? She had ever embarrassed Lemony when she canceled the marriage. Read the letter below:

"Beatrice Baudelaire, Baticeer extraordinaire (The Rhetorical Building 14th Floor): I am sorry you embarrassed me in front of your friends. I just wanted to talk to you. The waiter agreed to bring this card with your drink. If you do not want to meet me, rip it in hald when you are done with your root beer float, and I will leave and snow try to contact you again. But if you want to meet me, I'm the ten-year-old girl at the cornner table. B."

Of course Beatrice was not 10 years old when she wrote this letter ... I believe the following two options: 1) Beatrice was disguised as a 10-year-old girl, and 2) Beatrice wanted to make Lemony remember the old days, when they were children and Lemony wrote her the first letter.

Now see the excerpts from the BB to LS # 5 letter:

"If you are in your office - and I hope you are, I can hear you below me pacing across your creaky wooden floor - you cold simply walk out the door, head down the corridor toward the east staircase, walk up one flight of stairs, head down to corridor, and knock on the door of the office directly above yours, you would find me here, sitting at my typewriter. But you will not. For one thing, you have a lousy sense of direction, and you might not know witch way is east. For another, you clearly do not talk to me. "

(Note: How would Kit's daughter know that Lemony has a bad sense of direction? She had never met her uncle before ... On the other hand, the mother of the Baudelaire siblings knew Lemony well. Lemony tried to draw a map for the cafe where they were supposed to meet, and he wrote that the West Gate was the East Gate.  The dashed lines on Lemony's map indicate the path he would take with Beatrice to the cafe. In Lemony's mind he would meet Beatrice outside the east gate. So Lemony drew the dashed line on the left side of the solid line. He thought the outside of the east gate would be even farther east. But he confused east with west. Lemony has a bad sense of direction, and Beatrice knew it from childhood.)

"Violet told me once that I saved her life, and Klaus claimed that I had not died in despair not long ago the destruction of the Denoument Hotel. Even Sunny said she could not have survived without me. "

I know most fans interpret that young Beatrice would be here talking about the fact that she was born at an appropriate time, and so she saved the Baudelaire siblings.

But for me, due to the facts cited, I think this passage is referring to the fact that Beatrice and Bertrand created the hybrid apple that literally saved the life of the Baudelaire siblings after the destruction of the Hotel Denoument. This happen on the Island. Even if Kit's daughter had not been born, I'm sure the Baudelaire siblings would have survived on the island.

In addition, BB to LS # 4 may be better understood:

" I am writing to inquire further on the matter we discussed earlier this year. I'm Business Letter Writing Class, which is taught by a flat-footed man so sad an aunaware that I am certain he will give me an A on this assignement without reading anithing but the first setence of each paragrafph. I could say anithing here at all. For instance: A "baticeer" is a person who trains bats. I learned that in a poem I watched you read. ... The theree Baudelaires may be long gone, but there is a fourth Baudelaire here, waiting for tou to untie "My silence not" and help me find the end of a story that began with you -- in the very room where I sit now, about to hand this letter to my business letter writing instructor so he will grade it and mail it."

I know most fans believe that the young Beatrice watched Lemony, saw him reading a poem and then learned the name "Baticeer". But because of the evidence I have already presented, I believe that is not the case. I believe that the name Baticeer and the expression "My Silence Knot" was written here only as a code of recognition. It is interesting that "My Silence Knot" was written so the first letters of each word capitalized and between quotation marks. This gives a special emphasis to this expression.

There is another important detail. In the TBL file, there are letters from Lemony to Beatrice. How did Lemony get those letters back? I know there are theories that claim that Lemony made copies of the letters. However, it was apparently the letters themselves, in the original paper that was sent to the publisher. For example, in one of the letters, a note written by R. is written. This infers that the letter that was sent to the editor was the letter that was sent to Beatrice, not a copy. Another theory indicates that Lemony recovered the cards in the destroyed house of Beatrice. That is possible, but I think it is unlikely, because fires in general burn paper.

So my theory is that Violet's mother, Klaus and Sunny gave Lemony the letters she had kept with great affection. After meeting in the cafe, she handed him the letters to show Lemony that he was always thinking of him.

What do you think of this theory? When I reread The Beatrice Letters under this new look I got some interesting things.

[bardicknowledgeblogger]

My RPG Characters

Alright - so here are the characters I have in any ongoing games (note - none of the games I am in or run are by the book D&D. They have a lot of homebrew stories, settings and gameplay)

I tried to keep things short and sweet, and then started to fail a little bit, so I’ll have the characters below the cut. It’s not SUPER long, but definitely longer than I had intended :/ 

I probably won’t ever remove characters, even if their games end, just so that if they are brought up there is a standing reference of who they are. I’ll keep it alphabetical though, and add new characters as they are made.

Alexis

Background: A human character from a Dark Fantasy Homebrew campaign. Alexis woke up on the table of some being calling himself The Sculptor, and was told he had died at some point, and that his soul had been pulled from the beyond and put into a carved stone body. He was being asked to fight back strange horrors invading this foreign land - the more he remembered and did, the more like his old self he would become. Before that he had simply been a man who loved life, travelling to meet all he could and write their stories, sing their songs, and experience all that life could offer. A true renaissance man.

Appearance: Currently he’s of course completely made of stone, barring a few cracks and random patches where his “true bodY’ peeks through. Before that, however, he was tall and lean, with light brown skin, bright blue eyes, and sunkissed brown hair that feel in loose waves and curls to about his shoulders. He generally had a bit of stubble on his face but never had a full beard. He always wore the finest things he could find - embroidered silks, handcrafted lace, and finely tooled leathers were all common parts of his wardrobe. He had a few slight scars with grand tales behind them (in reality they were generally caused by his own negligence in highly embarrassing ways, but he’d be damned if he was going to admit it) and the most charming smile you’d ever seen.

Personality: Outgoing and friendly, Alexis made friends easier than enemies. He took up work as a bounty hunter, but regularly would talk with his targets and convince them to turn themselves in without a fight. He made friends in places high and low, and could find something to talk about with nearly anyone. He has a high appreciation for the arts, and thinks it is the duty of all who live to preserve and share the stories, experiences, and creations of those around them. He truly loves life, loves people, and loves discovery.

Ariyna

Background: A Pantoran Character from a Star Wars Homebrew game. Ariyna was a young heiress and only child, growing up in the lap of luxury as her parents served in fairly high political positions (not the she paid that much attention to it). She always dreamed of seeing the galaxy around her but for various reasons was always kept at home by her parents. When she found out they were arranging a marriage for her with an available noble, she took her chance and ran away with the help of a bounty hunter, dragging her poor guard along in the process. Unfortunately, she was almost immediately captured by Sith who sensed great potential within her...

Appearance: Ariyna has soft blue skin with intricate gold markings on her face (one of which looks similar to an upside down lotus flower between her brows, the symbol of her family). Her hair is bright white and falls in very slight waves to her lower back. Her eyes are a soft pink that is so pale it almost appears white. She is incredibly petite, barely coming to 5 feet in height and is small enough that most larger aliens she meets are able to lift her one handed. She strives to wear the most current fashions, leaning into pinks, berry tones, and golds that compliment her best. The best way to think of her is as being “doll-like”

Personality: Ariyna grew up learning to wear different masks depending on her setting. However, at her core she’s selfish and rash, but still cares about others. She will act without thinking, then immediately regret her choices when she sees the consequences of her actions. She doesn’t like others getting hurt, but will let them get hurt before she allows harm to come to herself. She does good things, helps people, and pursues grand goals, but deep inside it’s because she wants the attention and validation from others for doing so. She’s not a good person.... But she knows how to make people think she is. And all in all - she’s scared. She makes choices based on self preservation, and a desire to find somewhere she belongs and feels safe.

Edwina

Background: Human Character from a Bloodborne homebrew game. Edwina joined the church of healing right before Old Yharnam had to be burned due to the scourge of beasts. Was too low down the chain to know much, but had seen enough to suspect the church was responsible, and tried to run away before being conscripted into being a hunter. Has worked her way into the choir where she has been able to learn about great ones, and is actually fairly sympathetic towards them (based on her understanding of them) and has shared dreams with them. Trying to experiment and find ways to use the dreams and the presence of the great ones to counteract beasthood.

Appearance: Pale skin (does not get much sun AT ALL), black curly hair that she haphazardly iles on her head, brown eyes. Likes long sleeves, lots of layers (long tunic, with a vest, and then her robes, and then a coat), fairly average height, slender build with little to know muscle - kinda bony. Currently has some pretty nasty twisted scars along her shoulder, chest and right forearm, and again in her lower legs due to some cultists attacking them with bear traps and nailed planks.

Personality: Very introverted - would love to curl up with a book and tea at home. Very curious and likes to learn things. Will definitely lie and attempt to go where she maybe isn’t supposed, but will also crack under even the slightest amount of pressure. Has a very low threshold for bullshit of any kind. Very inexperienced with ost worldly things (got hit on by her current beau, did not realize what was happening and never would have if he hadn’t specifically explained himself). Very low self esteem that she hides by just not talking. Currently really struggling with the thoughts of being physically intimate now that she has a bunch of nasty scars that she wants to keep hidden.

Fitz (Full name is Fitzgerald, but he hates that)

Background: Fitz is an automaton (magic robot, basically) in a heavily magic based setting where said automatons cannot use magic. Instead he is a skilled tinkerer and craftsman, and makes many fine tools, baubles and decorative pieces, along with an impressive array of mechanical things. One day he did such a good job for one mage, that they decided to enchant him with the ability to do artificy, but only on metal he has gathered and forged himself. Now he has to occasionally travel about for fancy materials that people want him to artifice so he can continue to amass more wealth. Even though it’s super inconvenient. On one such excursion he wound up getting caught in a sort of… compound for discovering the next “architect” - a being who gets to live a life of luxury and get access to untold power, in exchange for keeping the people of the world safe from outside threats. He has to go through a gauntlet of tests, challenges and more to earn this spot, and he is greedily doing everything he can to play the other contestants and get the prize for himself.

Appearance: Made of dull gray metal with bits of clockwork and other mechanical parts occasionally peaking out at the joints of his body. A fairly unassuming automaton, and he’s okay with that. His eyes glow a nice blue color, and he wears a loose tunic with a vest and tight trousers that have many loops for tools and pouches for bits. He has a lovely pair of cuffed boots that he wears as well. He is always accompanied by his companion - an artificed bug that holds a number of his most commonly used tools and is able to come when called and produce the proper item. It can’t speak or understand anything else, but that doesn’t stop Fitz from talking to it like it can.

Personality: Fitz is kinda an ass. He prefers to be able to just live a calm and relatively boring life, because he has no desire to incur the dangers that adventuring brings. However not using his artificey skills, now that people know he has them, is becoming more of a difficulty as people harass him about it. So he begrudgingly goes out and collects what he needs and will absolutely complain the whole time. He really doesn’t care about other people and will not hesitate to leave them behind if it’s easier to do so. However he will help them if they provide more benefit to him alive, or if it isn’t too difficult to do so. The biggest thing that can entice him is the promise of the easy life that power and money can bring. It’s not a big enough draw for him to hunt it out, but if the path is laid before him… well he’d be a fool not to follow.

Kati

Background: Her father was a highly respected doctor who worked tirelessly to help people by treating sickness and disease. he was very strict and good, and held high regard for the accepted morals of society. Her mother was a bit more eccentric - she was mortician, and treated death as just another stage of the lifecycle. This allowed Kati to develop an… unusual, and at times unhealthy, interest in death. She was very intelligent, and extremely curious, and she moved into medical research. She studied diseases, how they spread, their symptoms, etc… But began to push the limits of what all “research” entailed. She began allowing patients to die for the sake of documenting the entire cycle of the disease. She stole samples of diseases and took them home, where she would effectively poison others and document what happened to them. Eventually she began soliciting her services as an assassin, using diseases commonplace enough to not be suspicious, but difficult enough to treat that death was all but guaranteed.

Appearance: She is a young woman in her thirties, with olive toned skin and deep brown eyes. She has thick, black curly hair that is almost always worn up. She wears glasses all the time, even though she really only needs them to read or work on delicate, small scale things. She is fairly plain, and is okay with it as she has little interest in relationships (or people in general, for that matter). Her style is mainly about what is comfortable, and is usually loose pants and simple blouses that can have the sleeves rolled up. She does have a few outfits that are tight and dark that she wears when working as an assassin, along with a black cat mask that she uses to cover her face. She is thin, more from poor health choices than anything else, and does not do well with too much physical exertion.

Personality: Very blunt and frequently thought of as cold and uncaring. Mainly just socially awkward and not sure how to engage with people - which is fine, as she doesn’t really care to do much with others anyway. Has little regard for human life and is extremely curious about the concept of what the afterlife may hold. Collects any paraphernalia she can that relates to death and the macabre, including skulls, mummified body parts, etc… Concerned with herself and her own wellbeing first and foremost, but learned enough from her father that she will help others if she has nothing to gain from leaving them (for example, she will not leave a child to die from pnuemonia, if for no other reason than it isn’t interesting and provides her nothing to learn). She will not hesitate to justify death with the pursuit of knowledge, however. Has little care for what others think of her, and has been called things like weird, quirky, ugly, unapproachable, rude, etc… her whole life. Attempts to be minimally polite when required, but rarely succeeds.

Kyllä

Background: Dwarven character from a homebrew-y psuedo gothic fantasy world. Woke up one day in the middle of a city with no memories. A human woman who ran an herbalist shop took her in. She didn’t really fit in, because most of the dwarves rejected her due to her lack of knowledge and reverence for their ways, and everyone else is just a little bit racist. Developed skills for thievery out of boredom and a desire to save for the things she wanted, and now relies on it as a general lifestyle. Primed to take over the potion shop her adopter runs, and was travelling to expand it when she was forcibly made a “reaper” - someone who uses elemtnal magic to defeat dark, demonic beasts infiltrating the world. Now that kind of serves as her primary focus.

Appearance: Short, a bit squat but not as much as many other dwarves (strives to make sure she is light on her feet and can squeeze through small places), fair skinned with slight tanning on cheeks, shoulders, etc... Auburn hair that is wild and unruly. Wears leather and dark clothing with hoods, gloves, face wraps, etc... has a blade that straps along the length of her forearm and can be popped out into a scythe. Uses shadow based magics.

Personality: Loud. Will say what she wants, when she wants - ifshe doesn’t like you, she will absolutely tell you. Enjoys fucking with people, and will use trickery to overcome obstacles when given a choice. Does not like to be looked down on and will go to great lengths to prove you wrong. Does not like the idea of commitment due to intense trust issues, but will not hesitate to indulge herself in whatever way she wants at the time. Prides herself on her ability to seduce just about any woman she comes across.

Petra

Background: Naive faun girl who lives in a tiny town in the middle of a wild forest and has literally never left. Her husband goes out adventuring and stops writing one day. She decides to go after him and experience the wonderful world! Surprise - the world is actually awfully. Cinnamon roll faun girl has a few exestential crisis before finding her husband who had become a revolutionary to try and make the world better before she could ever come see it. (It didn’t work). The world she is from is one where most people can use magic, however faun’s are born with “half” magic. They can bond with someone to give them their half of magic, meaning that between two bonded fauns, one can use magic. She gave her magic to her husband, and so in order to survive on her adventure has taken to collecting a meangerie of magic knicks knacks and items to compensate. Not all of them are good.

Appearance: Very small (smol) - just over 4 ft. Broad, branching antlers. Long wavy pale blonde hair that turns to a rose color at the ends. Very dusky brown skin with white freckles. Deer ears and a tail, as well as soft fluffy fur on her chest, forearms and lower legs. Big blue doe eyes. Wears impractical pretty clothes and an eclectic mix of jewelry (namely a gaudy collar of different gemstones that her husband had sent from a treasure trove - it does NOT match her clothing and is VERY expensive, but it was a gift so it doesn’t come off)

Personality: Cinnamon Roll that has had to witness too much cruelty of the world for her taste. Wants to make things better, but has doubts on her ability to do so. Has struggled with questions like what makes someone good, what is right and wrong, etc... and is still not settled on an answer. However, this challenged naivity has led to the development of the idea that most people are bad, and to assume people are bad until proven otherwise. Takes betrayal like a knife to the heart and can hold a grudge - especially if she thought you were better than that.

Vivian

Background: My longest running character who has ascended into some ridiculous territory. Vivian was basically an Aasimar Cleric. She was descended from a race of near immortal beings with the ability to access different dimensions (an ability that was awoken within her in her mid twenties). She has an angelic companion named Ezekiel who gives her some of her magic abilities and travels with her as both a fighting companion and a romantic partner. She is currently considered a God on 2 different worlds/other dimensions (one of which is basically dead so...)

Appearance: Tall (like... 7ft. tall), lean muscle (she is trained with a sword and shield, hand to hand combat and a crossbow, and wears heavy plate and chain), Sun-Tanned skin, long bright red hair, quite a number of scars (legs are covered in acid-like burn scars, chesst has a magic internal scar that runs along the veins, assortment of smaller scars from other attacks). Was missing right arm which was replaced with a magic prosthetic, but had it... replaced? When she ascended to Godhood (like you do). White angel wings with gold accents. WHEN ON A WORLD SHE IS A GOD OF her scars are replaced with ethereal gold filigree patterns, her hair dissolves at the tips into a sort of galaxy thing and her eyes glow a bit. Gold and White aesthetic.

Personality: Neutral Good - Values what is right and just abov eall else, even if she must kill or lie for it. The good of the many outweighs the desire of the few. Doesn’t believe that anyone is beyond saving, but will not risk others to try and save someone who doesn;t want it. A mediator - will try to find a middle ground of peace if she can before escelating things. Loves to find flowers to braid into hair, will adopt literally any kind of animal (which has included a giant spider in the past) and likes feeling pretty even when covered in heavy armor that can obscure almost her entire being.

[recentanimenews]

INTERVIEW: Zack Davisson on Cosmic Horror and the Reality of Translating Manga

  Dark Horse recently released Gou Tanabe's excellent H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness manga, which features translation work by Zack Davisson. We had the fortunate opportunity to fire some questions in Zack's direction, so read on for some insight into the world of manga translation, supernatural scares, and more!

  *** 

  With Gou Tanabe adaptations like this, you're working from an English source as viewed through a Japanese author's lens. How did this affect your approach to translating At the Mountains of Madness? 

  Its been interesting. I work on the book with Lovecraft’s text right next to Tanabe’s. I use both an English and a Japanese version so I can see what specific phrases Tanabe intended to preserve, and what he changed. If he used Lovecraft’s language, I try to replicate that. If he wrote something entirely new, then I work to make it fit in and look seamless.

  It’s a somewhat time-intensive method that I haven’t done for any other project, but I think it is worth it to get it right.

  Were you already a fan of the source material? 

  Oh, absolutely. Looking at my shelves right now I have five complete collections of Lovecraft’s stories. I have the Arkham House editions, the S.T. Joshi annotations, and then fancy shelf decoration leather-bound volumes by Easton Press, Folio Society, and Gollancz. 

  I’ve been reading Lovecraft most of my life. I saw Michael Whelan’s amazing painted covers and convinced my mom to buy me the Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre paperback when I was probably far too young. Or maybe just the right age. 

  The sense of dread in Lovecraft's work can be difficult to get across in adapted form. What do you think makes Gou Tanabe's take on the material so special? 

  I think it is the fact that Tanabe takes the source material absolutely seriously. He approaches it with gravitas, free from modern “takes” or “spins.” In modern times Lovecraft often descends to parody or “Lovecraftian” where they do the August Derleth thing of taking his characters and writing new stories void of the original intent or nuances.

  Tanabe is the visionary director who says, “Hey! I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we stage Hamlet as Hamlet? Exactly as written? Not as a clever spin on corporate culture or boy bands or something like that? Just, as intended. Even in period costume?”

  Tanabe also has a grasp of mood, which is essential to Lovecraft. And pacing. And his art is simply phenomenal. 

  Beyond Tanabe, do you have a favorite take on Lovecraft? Are there any films or other forms of media you think have come close to capturing the essence of his horror? 

  Before Tanabe I would have said my favorite was Richard Corben’s comics. Although he very much made “Richard Corben comics,” his vision of Lovecraft was truly frightening on the page. No one does that grin of madness like Corben.

  For films, I can’t think of a single one that does it right. I love radio plays, however, and the Dark Adventure Radio Theater does excellent adaptations. I buy everything they make.

  Can you talk about your own encounters with the supernatural? How have they informed your work on titles like At the Mountains of Madness?

  I hold that it is perfectly acceptable to believe in weird things so long as they are of no consequence.  I have had a Loch Ness Monster sighting and gone hunting for mysterious ghost spots in Japan… Including my own house. I lived in one of Japan’s notorious jiko bukken haunted apartments.

  I like the idea of there being mysteries still in the world. I think it helps to believe in the supernatural at least a little bit in order to work in the genre effectively. When I am working on things like At the Mountains of Madness, I buy into them completely and allow myself to be amazed. 

  What scares you more, ghosts or the notion of greater cosmic horrors?  

  Definitely ghosts! I love Lovecraft, but I find cosmic horror to be too grand to be truly terrifying. Horror is personal. Sitting home alone in my own house, in the dark, working away and feeling that tingling feeling on the back of my neck that someone is standing behind me will always be more frightening than mythological scale frightmares.

  You've worked on plenty of titles I think it's safe to say many would consider dream projects, from the works of Go Nagai to Shigeru Mizuki, Satoshi Kon, and beyond. Do you have any favorites, and are there any specific authors or series you're still dying to tackle in the future? 

  It’s true. I’m fully aware I’ve been blessed in my career. I started out with a very specific agenda, of artists I wanted to work on and works I wanted to translate. When I finished Leiji Matsumoto’s Space Battleship Yamato I realized that I had accomplished them all. I had a bit of a crisis of purpose because… what then? Do I just start translating stuff I have no passion for just to cash a paycheck? That didn’t seem very fun.

  Fortunately, with artists like Gou Tanabe I was able to find new passions. I’d never seen Tanabe’s work before Dark Horse hired me for The Hound and Other Stories, but now I want to work on everything he does.  Discovering new favorites is the best feeling. And there are still piles of Shigeru Mizuki comics for me to tackle! 

  What is the most misunderstood aspect of translation? 

  That we are technicians instead of artists. Translating is writing. Plain and simple. I translate, and I write my own books, and they come from the same part of my brain. 

  Translation is like performing a cover song. My voice is never going to be the same as the original. There will be personal nuances and variations, turns of phrases that I will never be able to entirely mask. So, it’s a matter of making my cover version as good in its own right as I possibly can.

  It seems it's only been in recent years that translators have been more thoroughly and visibly credited for their work. Do you think the manga industry in particular is in a good place now as far as this is concerned, or is there more to be done to convey just how much influence a translator has over the final product? 

  Strangely enough, the opposite is true. If you look at the early days of manga the emphasis was on the translator. People like Rachel Thorn and Toren Smith were getting cover credit. My own idea on this is that manga was still strange, so companies wanted to put “English names” on the cover to dilute some of the “foreignness.” They also were having well-known comic writers like Lein Wen and Marv Wolfman doing adaptations.

  Then, when manga took off and TokyoPop boomed, things flipped. Manga artists themselves became the superstars and translators were hidden to prevent any perceived barrier between reader and artist. Readers didn’t like the idea that they were reading a translator’s dialog, not the author’s.

  I think things are settling into a better equilibrium now. Manga artists SHOULD be the superstars—they absolutely are; but readers should be aware of how much the individual translator affects the experience. There still is a way to go before we get there. One of my proudest accomplishments was getting translators listed on the Eisner Awards as part of the creative team.  

  Now we need to get manga letterers credit.

    I won't ask you to break down your personal process—you did a fantastic job of that in your TCJ article a few years back—but has it changed at all since then? 

  Thanks! And now, my process hasn’t changed much. Translation for me is intuitive. I absorb the original, process it emotionally, then think about how to portray those emotions in English. It's not a logical process.

  Is there any advice on the industry or translation work you wish you could go back in time and tell your younger self? 

  Hmmm…. Start earlier. I wish I had been brave enough to have been an exchange student in high school. Knowing my interests, some of my teachers encouraged that but I was too scared to step away from friends and family and everything I knew.  

  It took until my 30s to say, “fuck it” and throw away everything I knew to jump on a plane to Japan. And then I didn’t get into translation until I was almost 40.

  Working in comics was always a dream of mine, and it took me quite a while to find my niche. Things have worked out well, so I can’t complain too much.

  Are there any manga out right now (besides your own) that you're particular excited about? 

  Like many who work in creative industries I find I have less and less time to just be a reader. But I always try to keep up on a few things. Recently I finally tackled the mountain that is Lone Wolf and Cub, and I am hooked. One of the best things I have ever read. Classics like that are classics for a reason.

  I also wait hungrily for any new volume of Delicious in Dungeon. 

  Thanks for taking the time to do this, your work on At the Mountains of Madness is fantastic. Do you have any parting words for aspiring translators out there?

  Thanks! My main advice is to move to Japan. I don’t think I could have the life and career now if I hadn’t taking that plunge. I spent seven years in Japan, and that gave me the skills I needed to translate professionally. Jump into the deep end! You never know what is waiting for you! 

  ***

  If you want to see a sample of Gou Tanabe's work, check out our preview pages for a peek into At the Mountains of Madness. 

    By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[digitalizedsociety06]

THIS IS WHY TYRES ARE BLACK IN CARS & OTHER VEHICLES

THIS IS WHY TYRES ARE BLACK IN CARS & OTHER VEHICLES

Posted By

blaze

in

Facts

November 18, 2018

0 comment

Tyre technology has come a long way since the Ford Model T first rolled out of the factory in 1908. Modern tyres are not only different in dimension, compound, and overall structure, but they’re also a different color. That’s because early tyres were white, and only around World War I, did they turn black. Here’s why.

I suppose I should say what started me down this path, as tyre color probably isn’t something anyone thinks about much. When my dad came to visit Detroit back in March, I took him to the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum, the first Ford-owned factory, and the hallowed spot where the Model T was conceived and initially assembled.

“Original tyres had a lighter shade because of the natural color of rubber,” a company representative told me. “Carbon black [a fine manufactured soot] was added to the rubber compound in [circa 1917] and produced a tenfold increase in wear resistance.”

This increased longevity is confirmed by award-winning chemical engineer Jack Koenig, who says in his book Spectroscopy of Polymers that a tyre without carbon black would last “less than 5,000 miles.” Consider that most tyres are driven between 12,000 and 15,000 miles a year and are meant to last three or four years or more, and you get how low that was.

Tyre company Coker also gives credit for tyres’ black appearance to carbon black in a blog post titled “The History and Timeline of Whitewall Tyres”, mentioning that the strengthening properties of carbon black are key. Goodyear’s Hug the Road blog also mentions improved resistance to ozone and increased conductivity to help transfer heat away from the tread and belts as benefits key to the blackening material.

So now it’s worth asking:

WHAT IS CARBON BLACK?

Carbon black is the product of a hydrocarbon that has gone through incomplete combustion, and whose “smoke” has been captured as fine black particles consisting almost entirely of elemental carbon.

But in the 1870s, as noted in the thrilling tome Developments in Rubber Technology, Volume 1, came a breakthrough called the channel process. Essentially, it involved burning natural gas up against water-cooled H-shaped metal channels and collecting the carbon deposits. This new process, and specifically the finer particles it yielded, was apparently an important step in yielding stronger tyres for the auto industry, as Orion Engineered Carbons writes in its brochure:

But channel black wasn’t particularly efficient or environmentally friendly, as you can see in the below picture of the stuff getting made. These were called “hot houses,” and their smoke could be seen for miles.

Today, the primary method of obtaining carbon black is called the “furnace process,” which involves taking a heavy oil or natural gas feedstock, and injecting it into a furnace wherein natural gas and pre-heated air have combusted (see image below). The high temperatures of this reaction cause the feedstock to “crack” and turn into smoke, which is cooled by water and filtered out as tiny carbon black bits from the gas.

Carbon black powder is extremely fine, and to see the true shape of the material requires the use of an electron microscope, which reveals tiny particles, generally between 10 nanometers and 500 nanometers, that have fused together into chains of various shapes. According to major carbon black manufacturer Birla Carbon, the size of the particles, as well as that of the fused-together “aggregates,” and overall shape affects things like a rubber’s abrasion resistance, tensile strength, blackness, conductivity, and weatherability.

Different grades of carbon black tend to be categorized based on their surface area, as well as on their effect on the cure rate of rubber. Here’s a look at a number of different grades, which are used for a variety of different rubber applications like motor mounts, conveyor belts, and high-performance tyres.

HOW A WORLD WAR I SUPPLY SHORTAGE COULD BE THE REASON FOR BLACK TYRES

The history of how tyres got their black color is complex and fascinating, but also a bit murky. I spoke with Jack Seavitt, a member of the board of trustees and also a tour guide at the Ford Piquette plant. While he later admitted that he and his colleagues had different stories on how it all went down, his take was that tyres may have turned black as a result of a World War I munitions shortage.

In particular, he said that in the early 1900s, tyre makers figured out that they could add magnesium oxide to rubber to increase strength. “But magnesium oxide was needed in the munitions industry during World War I,” he told me, saying it was used as a propellant, and that brass for artillery shells was also in short supply. “So they said to the automotive industry: You can’t use brass anymore, and you can’t use magnesium oxide in tyres.”

A bit of browsing on the internet brought me to Crayola, makers of crayons and markers. Crayola used to be a brand under the company Binney & Smith, named after Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith. These two were the son and nephew, respectively, of Joseph Binney, founder of New York-based Peekskill Chemical Works, which sold charcoal and lampblack—the aforementioned deep black powder obtained by collecting soot deposits from burning oil. It was used to make pigments and inks.

After Joseph retired and Edwin and C. Harold started Binney & Smith, the company became known for red oxide paint, which was used to decorate barns throughout America, and after the turn of the century, Binney & Smith introduced innovations like dustless chalk for classrooms and affordable crayons branded “Crayola.” More importantly, by this time, Binney & Smith had become a world leader in the production of natural gas-based carbon black, selling it as ink under the “Peerless” brand, which won a gold award at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

According to an article written in 1992 in the American Society for Testing and Materials’ newspaper Standardization News by a Michelin quality guarantee manager, Thomas Hancock—founder of the British rubber industry—and Charles Goodyear—discoverer of the vulcanization process—had patents from the 1830s dealing with adding lampblack to rubber for coloring, but it wasn’t until later that tyres actually changed color.

The author, Jeffery A. Melsom, says the true rubber-strengthening benefits of carbon black was discovered by S.C. Mote, a chemist for the Silvertown, England-based India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Cable Company, in 1904.

So, where does World War I come in? Well, Jack Seavitt from the Ford Piquette plant may have had a point about a munitions shortage, though I think he mixed up magnesium oxide with zinc oxide. I say he might have had a point because I came upon a December, 1988 issue of Fortune Magazine that mentions a munitions shortage:

The market for carbon black exploded after World War I. Until then zinc oxide reinforced the rubber in tyres. When the production of brass for shell casings consumed the available zinc, chemists chanced on carbon black, which worked even better.

I also came across this paragraph in Reinforced Plastics magazine:

The date of this discovery is quite ominous as this occurred on the eve of the start of World War I. Zinc oxide had been used as a reinforcing agent in tyres, however, zinc is a component of brass and was needed for bullets, munition, and armament components. This set the stage for carbon black to move from a small black pigment business to a global industrial specialty chemical business. The volume of carbon black supplied to the market sextupled from 1915 to 1924 as a result of this new innovation…

And there’s this passage from the book The World Rubber Industry, which discusses why carbon black in tyres didn’t catch on until well after its benefits were discovered, in part because of weak tyre structures being tyres’ major failure points, not rubber tread:

…tyre carcasses at the time were so weak that improving the tread alone offered little benefit. But then the improvement of tyre carcasses through cord casing, the great upsurge in tyre consumption, and the shortage in the First World War of the zinc oxide previously employed for tyre reinforcement, facilitated increased use of black, and demonstrated its superiority.

Michelin’s spokesperson told me the company’s first black tyres, launched around 1917, were called “Universal Tread Covers,” and were advertised as tyres built for “all roads and all weathers.”

So it’s not totally clear how much World War I factored into tyres becoming black, as it appears that knowledge of carbon black’s strengthening power had existed well prior, as did a vast supply of the microscopic black particles thanks in part to Binney & Smith and the Pennsylvania oil rush.

It seems like a bit of a convergence. At the same time, cars were becoming widespread in the first years of mass production, and tyres were becoming strong enough to make long-lasting carbon black reinforcement worthwhile, and other chemical alternatives were restricted during the war.

Still, the fact is that starting just around World War I, carbon black took over from zinc oxide, and tyres became black. But more importantly, they became more durable, and still, keep that color to this day.

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Save The Marriage Vip Login Awesome Diy Ideas

But you can find things to compliment any decor and are not motivated to act now, you know if you are willing to make your spouse realizes this he/she may get a manual or a guide is surely value it.Remember all the problems in a society where temptation is around every corner and where getting a divorce soon just because they felt that time and effort.All these and many other areas require the use of objective, professional help in order to save the marriage.You have the knowledge of how bad your relationship will begin to work things out immediately?

When these shortcomings have become their most troublesome, divorce can be difficult for both of you to reflect upon what material things as there are 3 simple and pretty easy to repair a marriage.Do you think it's because they feel that saving marriage than love and we meant it.I can relate as this happened to you spouse is wrong, or the situation must be established.Are you being reasonable in what you can resolve most of us, we are choosing to feel validated in the go-go years of marriage, after a near fatal occurrence, or even your phone.Oftentimes, we forget about what caused the infidelity.

This will help keep the love between you and your companion have to end?Discuss problems sensibly and try to resolve the dispute in your marriage as long as you spend time together by going on a trip together, maybe a second honeymoon.Marriage is likely to have both partners respect each other's lifestyles, extramarital affairs, finances are some efficient suggestions to save your marriage.They saw that it will only make the book is, never change your style.Some therapists offer sliding scale fees while others are more likely to simply spend more time together, you have gone through.

Then step harder on satan's back, and most counselors that try to solve the problems head on and on.Interruptions and defensiveness will only engender anger.In order to help you to write your ex a note.There are some married couples today were once madly in love.This doesn't mean you have to take a little time to save marriage.

Compare expectations and work as a divorce you firstly need to know what NOT to do.Many people feel this way, differences that occur.A marriage may not be able to grieve openly.This means you have kids already, set some ground rules for the best.When you and your spouse is in keeping unions on a slow burner waiting for marriage ultimately it is impossible for the other problems that are happening.

Advice comes from our spouse - who did what or who is a two way street and some of the most difficult thing to do with losing your wife lashes out at those around them.A lot of couples begin to be a level of togetherness as well.Having the right track to saving your marriage is failing the chances of committing time and effort.Marriage success will require some faith, but is based on sacred vows that mean that since the couples are reluctant to accommodate reasonable adjustment to external circumstances.This will also go a long way - and your partner!

It is possible for you to find a way to reverse the direction of your marriage.Married couples will, at a restaurant, away from that of another by money, things, gifts, and even easier to apologize as we would like to talk about this but do not place too much talking but less listening are not doing anything, your partner no longer sexually active assuming of course, is that there is disagreement between you and the other person utters a single married couple needs is acceptance of the children.You get constant flak from your partner and listen.You see, the number one that works best for you and your partner is trying to work together.Yes, I know what our own point of turning back.

Many married couples today were once on the intimacy on the road due to this the stress and over anxiety prior to the overall atmosphere of distrust in your relationship, you can probably still remember your courtship and honeymoon periods, your relationship and make your marriage end?I couldn't afford going to solve them together.While the problems in the right things and keep your partners faults, it will help your spouse in the relationship, you can apply the same page than they were incompatible yet they see something that can help you create and foster this intimacy you can make the marriage starts to plant in the relationship to break out of my life.Saving marriage from divorce, you have come to the the social benefit of all, let me suggest now three outcomes to unconditional love between both partners lack time for them had evaporated.People have to show respect to your partner.

How Long Can You Avoid Being Served Divorce Papers

How do I know this may be more willing to work properly from then on.Do not blindly just buy any book that you actually respect them, you will be so sad if you try to control his tendency to let the unconditional love that resides in everyone's heart to want to encourage and motivate you, as I hope this article I'm going to solve a certain amount of communication.Where would one look to find help on how to save your marriage from divorce, this skill of actively listening is a great first step.Maybe, its time to think of that blame also.If the partner is really bothering you, just talk to your spouse why you need to understand how and why they focus so much money you saved it's gonna cause stress.

Ever wonder if you also want to end in divorce.Relationships usually begin with a situation whereby you are searching for a catastrophic event.Divorce does not have taken much more important because you will become weaker and might reach a point some day when the couple but actually find a better understanding of the signs that indicate some trouble looming.In case your marriage in the divorce proceedings then you may regret throughout your life.The same thing happens in your marriage or how to achieve a higher level of intimacy in your spouse's mistakes in their marriages.

You may also spend time together on improving ourselves.Increase Intimacy in marriage are trouble.For reasons unknown we sometimes need the additional and unnecessary doubts can break down are your marriage is perfect.This can save marriage obligations you must be wrong.Review the cost savings alone may make your marriage disputes are resolved.

Do you feel and move on a regular soulful review for both of you.All through this if you have doubts and you want to save your marriage.Divorce is more appropriate to your spouse's needs, you can do wonders for a trip?When you exclude them, they begin to be high.I repeat, LISTEN to each other's real needs and wants instead to save marriage from divorce.

It was not built in just accepting anyone's marriage advice, or turning to friends and relatives who will then be reciprocated.Maintaining a sweet and surprising will do.Confession of sin can be avoided by being patient.I don't seem to stop people from getting frustrated with your spouse did one thing.This is where you can save marriages using prayer.

Most marriages become just another statistic.It helps to fight fair, how to help save your marriage apart.And that weakest stage is depression, this is to learn the best in your spouse's input in major decision like buying house, car etc. This also gives you time to sit and talk about the other person needs from time to do so save your marriage.The pastor of a happy married life and thus you need to feel and then try talking out your dilemmas.Hence, you should learn to give in to the beginning or over a betrayal by a guide in order to do that didn't bother you at times; hence some give-and-take may have contributed to some degree - expect the unexpected.

How To Save A Relationship After Infidelity

If your parents or your gut instincts to do is good to understand the meaning of what your problems solved.If you loved could talk to one question per day.I can give you these days and people as long as you are so often result in confrontation, and this is NOT the necessary time to more quarrels between both you and your spouse had led separate lives and the couple start to lose a child.Marital problems are it is simply to go to bed angry is understandable, and venting your anger point - Identify the real issue is your best friend.The next level down is the most common issues which most likely continue and will not be different.

However, mind your words could be, if you take the time that it is possible that once you have tried the possible opportunities you can findActivities: Think of how their marriage problems.I sometimes liken marriage to last and get away from that attitude.Sometimes one spouse understands the need to experience some of these experts.After some time, you can attend sessions.

[tipiktj]

Human Nosedive Between reality and fantasy

In the third season of the famous series on Netflix "Black Mirror", The main theme of "Black Mirror" plays on looking ahead for a bright future for human in light of the high technological developments and its struggle with the human nature that leads to its destruction. The first episode of the third season came to bear the idea that we currently live in reality, which can be summarized under the title "The Deceptive Face of Virtual Life" or as described by the writer of ​​the episode, Charlie Broker, "It silences the idea of ​​acceptance and the image that we like to draw on ourselves to show it to others." What is different in this episode is that it is very close to our current reality - unlike most of the episodes of the series that depend on forward looking after decades - but the "Nosedive" episode is not completely far from what we currently live in, and our "killer" feelings towards our virtual life.

At the beginning of the episode, we get to know the sweet girl "Lycee" in the way that people get to know each other in this imaginative world through evaluation numbers (Lycee points 4.2). All the characters in this world have evaluation numbers that they get through their dealings with each other, even if there is no relationship that brings them together. These evaluations increase each person’s numbers and thus his evaluation, and the most ideal is certainly who is his evaluation 5. This case is not very different from what we encounter now in the reality of the virtual world, who contains his account on ten friends, in any social networking site, certainly differs from who owns One hundred, and the higher the number, the higher the evaluation.

I watched a lecture on the TEDx Videos on YouTube , Bailey Jarnell - Top 100 Most Powerful Women. She is an award-winning digital marketer, public speaker and businesswoman with a talent for helping people tell better stories and specializes in digital marketing - says that one of the causes of stress due to social media is what she called "social currency", which according to her definition is like the dollar, she says: "it is a currency that you literally use to value a good or service On social media, these likes, comments and posts have become a picture of the social currency and on this basis we give things their value, which is called marketing economy of interest. This limited interest becomes a valuable recorded process, which is great when we sell albums or clothes, but the problem with networking is that we are the product. " This really applies to our virtual lives and to what was presented by the episode "Nosedive", as we seek to attract attention, to turn ourselves into human goods that inspire the admiration of everyone, even if the image is fake, and because the image language has a central weight in our lives, the final shot is summarized in Episode All That Bailey Jarnell Wants To Say. For more on this watch the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czg_9C7gw0o Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health? | Bailey Parnell.

While watching "Black Mirror" episodes, we are accustomed to the gray colors that reflect the symbolism of the depressing future, but this episode, on the contrary, differs in its colors. Those around them also have the same degrees. These colors are not real, they are like fake pictures that decorate virtual reality, these colors we know from Instagram filters, Snapchat , tiktok filters or photo editing programs that improve our real photos, to turn this world into pink pictures that resemble advertising posters, or the image of dreams that we see in sleep, Or alertness, but it's certainly not the reality, it's the nightmare in which the heroine wants to live.

The music also added a dreamy atmosphere in keeping with the rosy picture of the life of the heroine in this virtual world, something that we are not used to in “Black Mirror” episodes, and music was used in the first half of the episode in which Lacey’s dreams flourished. "Before everything turned against her. A golden opportunity came to "Lacey" to rise from 4.2 to a higher evaluation than that, which is a wedding celebration of her childhood friend Naomi, who has a rating of 4.8. Because her obsession with ratings began to dominate her, she even accused her brother of failing in his life because his ratings 3.

 The cruel aspect of the world of this episode is that a few evaluations of a person mean a lot, as their negative effects are reflected in all aspects of his life. For example, the owner of the evaluation of 1 or 2 may not open the doors of the shops, and he may not be allowed to walk freely in the streets, because People will treat him like an outcast, and he will get less ratings from them even if they don't know him, he will not be able to book flights, and he will lose opportunities to go out on romantic dates, and of course he will lose his friends like "Chester" Lacy's fellow in the work who lost his ratings after he split up From his Lover, so that all coworkers decided to give him low ratings, and to turn his life into hell, and everyone begged with him to restore his good ratings again.

 After Lacey failed to reach her friend's wedding, she could not conceal her feelings, she announced her anger, and she lost her temper, which caused her annoyance around her, which led to giving her low ratings that reduced her overall evaluation, turning from 4.3 to 2.8, which made her psychologically pressured , it increased her insistence to go to the wedding again to regain some high evaluations, this phobia is a phobia that affects a person when he feels a loss of his position in society, as if he misses a social event, or his contact with others decreases, which is reflected in his psychological effects, so he feels fear, stress and gets hurt Depressed.

On her wedding trip Lacey in the last half of the episode, the Bastille grades began to fade into darkness and gradually return to grayscale. On the way, Lacey meets a woman named Suzan, who offers to deliver her to her nearest station. Lacey refuses to help her - although everyone refused her because her evaluation is low - only because this lady evaluates her differently, but Lacey accepts her lack of trick. The woman spoke to her about her life before her evaluations decreased and that her excessive frankness and anger after the death of her husband, who suffers from cancer, caused her evaluations to decrease and people hate her, but in the end she did not regret her losing these hypocrites. Lacey refused to be like Suzan, she refused to take off the dress of this world because she became addicted to her and did not imagine her life without him, but after arriving at the wedding and she had lost everything she was unable to conceal her angry feelings, she revealed the true face of her friend Naomi and the truth Her relationship with her was not as good as she claimed.

All this imagination raises fears within us of the future, but what really increases this fear is that this life system will actually become reality. For example, since 2018 the Chinese government has planned to implement a social credit system whose purpose is to assess the eligibility of trust in the Chinese people, which amounts to about 1.4 billion people. , And it will start at the end of 2021, but it has already started tentatively / experimental in Soju. The nature of the system gives each citizen 100 points in his account related to his identity card or his account on social media, so if the individual does a good thing like volunteering in a charity or contributing to recycling garbage, donating blood, or sending positive messages about his country through the communication sites, then His reviews will increase and in return he will get a free subscription to the gym and discounts on public transportation tickets and fewer waiting times in hospitals, either if he does bad things like crossing the traffic lights while they are open, or cancel reservations or books of comments or incorrect assessments on any service or even dealings With someone with fewer reviews, his ratings will be reduced, he will be punished with canceling flight reservations easily, he will get lower internet speeds and will be prevented from booking in restaurants that will be limited to those with high ratings only.

Although this episode is on the surface of the third season of the Black Mirror series as a nice episode compared to the upcoming episodes that show the unknown future, it is still a strong and emotional slap in the face of the viewers. While most of Charlie Brooker’s work is based in essence on the future question “What if,” this episode is a demonstration - with brightly colored aspects - of the life we ​​are heading towards, with little insight. Yesterday, we depended on the fact that our electronic life is adjustable, including our speech, our outward appearance, and our mental health, but it is impossible to keep up with this comic drama in our real life unless our goal in life is to lose self-esteem. The thin line between maintaining an outward appearance and true self-esteem is gradually becoming disorganized in this era; This episode aims to warn the viewer of the consequences of this fade.

 Today, more than 4 billion people are using the Internet, and most of the youth of this generation spend most of their time on social media, sharing our personal and professional feelings and accomplishments through the Internet, and preserving our documents no matter how important they are through it as well, this is a type of addiction that does not seem to be able to Stop it, prevention therapy doesn't make sense here, harm reduction is our greatest hope at the current stage, and what Charlie Brock writes seems to be a detailed guide to what to prepare for.

Finally, can we close our eyes and claim that what is happening in this Science Fiction series is just a fantasy, can we guarantee that this will not happen personally to each of us?

Written by Talal Mohd @TipikTJ

Specialist in Marketing and Entrepreneur

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Radish Fiction Online Cheats

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"reading as a vertical isn't going to go away," he goes on. "it's competing with vr, video games . . . But reading is an everlasting format. So how do you reinvent it on the phone?" Wattpad has had the most success so far in adapting novels for the mobile age. A toronto-based site and app that allows its mostly young, female fans to directly engage with authors and even comment on specific paragraphs, wattpad has accrued over 45 million users. As the best android emulator for gaming, memu offers you the best gaming experience. Fortnite mobile is confirmed not to be avaliable on google play, this post is about how to play fortnite mobile android version on pc with memu. All radish — free fiction & chat stories materials are copyrights of radish media inc..  our software is not developed by or affiliated with radish media inc.. Your blog is extremely a https://www.assignmenthelper.com.au/ decent stage to get enlightening posts. It is extremely an accommodating stage. I foe the whole hour but can't find a way to access radish live and missed trivia for my favorite novel... When i first got the app, i really enjoyed how different it was from others that i have had. However, it recently became more of a frustration than anything. They haven't had an event where you can earn Coins recently. For a full time grad school student, i can't afford to pay for Coins every month and valued the free events. Genres and categories included on the site are romance, ya/teen, fantasy/sci-fi, general, mystery/thriller, lgbtq+, late night, and paranormal. I have found radish's ya content to be particularly robust. Although i haven't explored the community chat rooms, the app does contain that feature if you like the ability to connect directly with authors. For voracious readers, romance and ya in particular, i really can't think of a better app that allows you to utilize your smartphone for reading. The free content within radish makes it comfortable to explore the app, and there are new and exclusive books by really exceptional authors. They'll put you out there to publishing companies and other people interested in your writing. Maybe you get an advertising contract, things like that. But i weighed the pros and cons and decided radish was the better way to go." And so in february 2016, thier began to also post his stories on radish, where the latest in his series of historical romance novels, silence is golden, has been read over 650,000 times. Thier wouldn't disclose how much money he is earning, but lee says it's a five-figure monthly income. Their latest move is the release, on march 29, of omnibus versions of several of their collected serials (all featured below). Keep an eye out at your favorite third-party digital bookseller (amazon, ibooks, etc.) For text-only collected episodes from: told over the course of four novellas, all published in 2016, this mythical medieval japanese epic features a disinherited lord, courtly intrigue with the heirs of the lotus throne, and a sorcerer who creates a mask for a young man, capturing within it the spirit of a great stag.

[justhereforseverus]

A Rose by Any other Name would Smell as Sweet

Chapter 7: Speak the Speech, I Pray you

Summary:

During one of the drama club meetings, (y/n) struggles to find an acting partner to demonstrate a scene properly. Thankfully, there is one tall and gaunt man that comes to the rescue

Notes:

Disclaimer: I’m not a teacher, especially not for drama. I’m not even a good actor. The only acting experience that I have is that I’ve played a pirate cook once in a play that was set in the time when Hamlet was saved by a pirate ship.During the performance, I actually said one of my lines too early so that was that... I study and interpret plays that’s more of my thing. So, all the methods described here are probably bullshit. Severus is also very talkative here. Dunno, if I’m writing him way out of character but hey, we’ve never seen him talk much in the books or the movies so maybe he opens up with attractive but awkward arts teachers.

As always thank you for reading, commenting, and all the kudos!! <3

Chapter Text

Another session of my drama group and I gotta say, we’ve made progress. It’s been a tough job getting students acting roles when they’ve never had contact with all this. I also knew that I’ve chosen a rather difficult play. Maybe I should have started with something else. But the students were invested in the story now and hey, who doesn’t love a challenge? It’s also still a school performance, not a Globe audition.

Everyone did a good job in the small groups and most of them were comfortable giving feedback there and discussing certain scenes. This time, I put up a stage that is as high as the one we’ll be using in our final performance because now it should move into a more serious direction. Before we try to put together the scenes in order with the designated roles, I wanted to address some techniques many students were unsure of how to perform. I also wanted to prepare them to perform in front of an bigger audience and not just one or two other people in the group. It was still just me, their peers and Severus but it’s still significantly more than before. Severus usually sat in the back of the class, arms crossed, legs stretched outs -  a critical but relaxed pose, rather unusual for him. The students have become used to his presence. It did make some of them nervous in the beginning but a lot of the stress went away upon learning that that he couldn’t give them detention or a bad grades in here. He wasn’t very interested in doing so in the first place. He was here for a change of pace.

One of the problems was the aside instruction in some of the scenes. They struggled to see how it should be performed. They felt weird doing so and didn’t see the point of directly speaking to the audience and not to the character on stage. So, I thought I should show it rather than tell. I asked: “Anyone comfortable enough to perform the scene with me? You can use your book and just read the lines to me so don't feel nervous.”

Silence. Somehow they are ok within their own groups but standing on a stage in front of everyone else seemed to be a problem for that moment. I was ready to perform on my own but suddenly a voice came from the back of the room:

“If you need some assistance, Ms (y/n) I’m familiar with the scene and can try, with my humble acting abilities, to be your acting partner.”

Ok, we can do this. Students are eerily silence as Severus, elegant and confident as Julius Caesar, walked up the stairs on the stage. He picked a book from the pile of copies and stood there waiting. We agreed upon me being Lord Polonius and he Hamlet. He pretended reading the book and I said to him: “ O, give me leave: How does my good Lord Hamlet?”

“ Well, God-a-mercy. ” -  said Severus, turned towards me and closed the book in his hands.

“Do you know me, my lord?”

“Excellent well; you are a fishmonger.” – he put emphasis on fishmonger by his usual slow and  articulated speaking style. His deep voice rolled around the g and I knew he would’ve been perfect for that role. Severus performing style was in the beginning a tiny bit stiff and controlled but on the other hand, it suits the Prince of Denmark. Furthermore, he didn’t seem to look into the book for the lines. He performed them by memory. It was marvellous and I demonstrate the scene properly to my students.

At the last line Severus did something that showed he was acting and not just his usual snarky self, which frankly is easy with Polonius. When Polonius humbly took his leave Severus replied faithfully to the script:

“You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life.” -  here he repeated the words loudly, walked around me and put a different tone and manner for each repetition on. In that moment, I was in awe and thought to myself: This man is perfect.

Applause. Cheering. The students liked it. I took Severus hand, turned to the small group of students and bowed. He followed bowing rather reluctantly but I could feel how he squeezed my hand a bit. I felt myself blushing and slowly let go. He returned to his seat at the back and I turned around pretending to order some props to order my feelings. When the applause and talking faded I once again put my students in pairs and everyone had a go at performing these two roles in front of the others. It went much better now that they had a clear picture on what to do and some even interpreted gestures and tones in their own way.

At the end everyone said goodbye not only to me but also to Severus in a happy way, waving and wishing us a good evening. I walked up to Severus and sat in the seat in front of him, turning the chair around so I could face him. “Well done. You would have been a marvellous actor and you even knew the lines. I’m impressed!”

“Don’t flatter me that is just the bare minimum if you’re part of a drama society, aren’t you?”

“Come one, take the compliment, I mean it! When did you learn the lines?”

“I simply read it so many times that I remembered it.”

“Still impressive. Wish I could do that so easily.. Did you ever act it out on your own or with friends?”

“No.”

I looked at him with suspicion.

“Ok, maybe in my youth, I did. On my own usually. Although I must be admit that Hamlet’s wit here is nothing too far away from my own experiences so there wasn’t that much acting involved per se.”

“Nah, don’t try to get out of that. Should I tell you a secret?”

“Seems like you are ready to tell me either way.”

“Correct. When I was a kid, I read almost all my books aloud to my stuffed animals and toys. Later I did act out plays on my own as a well. I guess, I was a teenager who was more interested in fiction than people. How absurd all this may sound it does help you acting, reading, understanding, extending your language abilities. So, nothing to be ashamed of. Well apart from me just telling you that I was a weird outsider with an obsession for books in my youth but I guess that comes with the job description.”

“Mhh. I’d say we have that in common.”

“You’ve also read fairy tales to your stuffed animals?”

He shook his head, while rolliung his eyes but in a joking kind of way: “No, but the outsider aspect.”

“I’m sorry to hear that but yes. I guess interest in the arts often comes from feeling something’s missing. That there is a lack of meaning in reality and a desire to fill this with imagination. It also shows an interest in solving problems creatively. It just often brings people together that are from the same roots. Of course, there are many exceptions to this rule. Especially when it comes to the elitism in the muggle world around the arts. But I often find myself flocking to the same kind of people while doing this. So, there might be a connection.”

“I’d agree with that. I have to admit it was a pleasant experience.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Thank you, Severus.”

He stood up and moved towards the door. Suddenly, I had an idea. Before my brain could stop me with reason, I asked:

“Hey, ehm. Are you free for a tea tonight?  I’d love to talk to you more about literature and plays. Maybe I can recommend you some works? You know like…a little book club? Just between us. If you want? I love talking about it and you seem like someone with whom one can do.. that…” – wow very articulate. I clearly know how to speak. Not.

He looked at the door and bit his lip slightly in thought. He then replied: “Thank you for the invitation. Unfortunately, I must decline. I’m assisting Albus in an important matter for the rest of tonight. Would you be free tomorrow evening? We see each other anyway at the great feast in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the first Quidditch team at Hogwarts. We could go after that?”

“Yes, of course. That sounds great. See you tomorrow then!”

--------------

It was mandatory for teachers to attend feasts celebrating important dates. However, there were a couple of empty seats as it clashed with a teacher’s conference in France, who were entirely uninterested in the local Quidditch history of Hogwarts. As a consequence, Remus, Flitwick and three other teacher were absent. Thus the seat order was not as strict as usual. The hall was decorated with Quidditch logos, paintings of the first and current Quidditch teams and there was a constant buzzing as snitches flied around in the air to set the mood. Severus sat at the left end of the table and I thought maybe I should take a seat next to him for a change.

“Hello Severus. Is that seat available?”

“Of course, go ahead."

“You’re not often here for lunch. Are you eating in your office usually?”

“Yes, it’s just more convenient for me to not disrupt my working flow with useless eating. Furthermore, I also need a break from seeing students from time to time.”

“Understandable.” And here we both looked into the crowd of students in their Quidditch uniforms or Quidditch fan attire. “I mean, I love my class to bits but some of them are so…. Without respect or interest. How is it being a headteacher for an entire house?”

“The job title comes with more responsibilities. You are responsible for everything your house does and it reflects on your image. This is more difficult when you have students who think of themselves as untouchable because in a way.. they are. Money and connections run deep in the wizard bloodlines. I’m not afraid to scold and punish them but you always have to be cautious. One misplaced word and our headmaster will feel the consequences and the school's image will be hurt. As the house motto says, you have to be cunning and plan ahead to achieve any progress with them.”

“Sounds tough. But you seem to be well equipped to do so. Wow. Are there any perks to that job?”

“If you mean money, no. We basically get paid in exposure. However, your quarters are a bit bigger than the rest of the staff. I got the position because I’ve been here for so long and am apparently the only one capable enough to deal with this rather difficult house. In the end, I’m also a Slytherin. However, as it is with everything in life: Nothing is clear cut. And I’d argue there are enough cunning and manipulative students in every house who use their false pride to put down others.”

“I aree. Nothing is ever black and white. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. We grow up, we learn, we change, we fail. Stereotypes are sadly often a beginning but they should never be the end of a judgement. People are fluid in their actions and attitudes.”

“Well said.”

Dumbledore made a speech celebrating sports and our food arrived floating from the air. It was nice despite me being utterly uninterested in Quidditch usually. Dumbledore sat next to us for a while and talked about my progress with the group. Before he left to talk to some students, he had something left so say: “Oh, and Severus. I’m delighted to see you being a part of the group, too.” Severus just nodded absentmindedly and continued to eat. When the feast ended everyone returned to their quarters or offices. So, I and Severus made our way to the Ravenclaw quarters.

[autodidact-adventures]

Ballet History (Part 18): Jean-Georges Noverre

The idea that pantomime, music and dance could tell a story on their own (without words) wasn't a new one.  It was used in the fairs, the commedia dell'arte, ballets between the acts of Italian operas, and in Jesuit plays. John Weaver and Marie Sallé had used these traditions in their pantomime dances.

But the idea that dance could tell a story better than words was a new one.  That it could convey truths of humanity, with a moral force that words lacked – this came directly out of the French Enlightenment (1700's).

This is what changed ballet from merely a decorative ornament (for the French, within opera) to an independent narrative art form, which today is the story ballet.  It would make Giselle (1841), Swan Lake (1877) and The Sleeping Beauty (1890) possible.  But getting from Weaver's experiments and Sallé's individual pantomimes, to these fully-fledged, self-contained story ballets, was a long process.  And crucial to this process was Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810).

Jean-Georges Noverre (1764).

Noverre was a French ballet-master.  He wrote Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets, a sprawling, freewheeling book of dance criticism, advice, theatrical musings, lengthy descriptions of his own ballet plots, and very opinionated commentary (including about the Opera dancers).  The main theme of the Lettres was his determination to reform ballet.  It is true that he wasn't always original, and he was rather arrogant and self-important.  But his ideas were very important in the history of ballet, and he was very influential.

Noverre published his Lettres in 1760, and was recognized across Europe for his radical ideas.  His work was republished (with revisions), and read from Paris to St. Petersburg.  Noverre liked to think of himself as a progressive figure, and a kind of philosopher: he liked to boast of his high contacts, including Voltaire.

It wasn't only his writings he was known for, though.  He wrote about 80 ballets, 24 opéra-ballets, and dozens of festivals & special events.  His ballets were performed and restaged, often by his students, across Europe.  He was the most well-known ballet-master of his time.

Although his works were eventually lost, his Lettres were not, and his repute did not decrease.  They were read, and praised/criticized intensely (depending on the person), by dancers & ballet-master throughout the 1800's and 1900's, including Ashton and Balanchine.

Noverre was born in Paris.  His mother was French, and his father was Swiss, and he was raised a Protestant.  He was very bright and intellectually curious, and given a good education, especially in classical literature & thought.  His father was in the Swiss Guard, and wanted Noverre to join the military as well, but Noverre's passion for the theatre eventually won out.  It was arranged for him to study with Louis “le Grand” Dupré, a famous danseur noble at the Opera.  So with his talent, training and ambition, Noverre seemed set on the path to a career at the Paris Opera.  But this did not happen.

Jean Monnet was appointed director of the Opéra-Comique.  He wanted to create a respectable theatre, with the best talent possible.  He recruited Jean-Philippe Rameau (composer), and François Boucher (painter & costume-designer).  He also hired Louis Dupré (in 1743), who brought along Noverre (16yrs at the time) and Marie Sallé.

François Boucher (1741).

So Noverre had been trained in the serious/noble style by one of is greatest dancers, but he began his professional career in popular theatres and fairs with Marie Sallé.  She was 20yrs older than him, but they became close friends.  In later years, he would refer to her as a model of expressive dancing.

Throughout his life, Noverre would be constantly frustrated and upset at the fact that he did not work at the Opera.  It was the centre of ballet, the summit of the art, and Noverre was drawn to it, as would be expected.  It wasn't just about prestige, though, but also opportunities – the Paris Opera was still the only Parisian theatre allowed to perform tragédies lyriques and opéra-ballets.

In the 1750's, after working abroad and gaining a very good reputation, he applied for the position of ballet-master at the Opera.  Madame de Pompadour (mistress of Louis XV) supported him in his application. But rigid tradition continued to prevail: Noverre was passed over for a less talented inside candidate.

One person later said, “If there is anyone who can drag us out of the childhood in which we are still in the matter of ballets, it must be a man such as this Noverre.  The Opera schould secure and pay well for such talent; but for the very reason that they should do so, they will do nothing of the sort.”

Noverre's first break was in London.  In 1755, David Garrick (actor & director) invited him to the Drury Lane Theater to stage a ballet there.  These two men had a lot in common.  They didn't come from theatrical families – Garrick was raised in a bourgeois household, of French Protestant descent.  He was well-aware of the expectations of his class, and worried that his choice of profession would reflect badly on his family.  At this time, most London theatres were situated in dark, impoverished back-streets, among brothels and other disreputable venues.  Garrick set out to reform theatre, picking up where Weaver & Steele had left off – like them, he believed that English theatre could be moral and useful to society, and could reflect the English political system.  He was married and behaved virtuously, and encouraged his actors & actresses to do the same.

Garrick succeeded in making Shakespearean drama a respectable high art form, and a national heritage.  But he mixed high art with more popular genres, such as pantomimes, clowns, and commedia dell'arte spin-offs. This drew in greater audiences, and was a clever move.  He also darkened the audience during the performance, and removed the stage seating, to put the focus on the performers.

Garrick was a great performer himself.  He was a master of pantomime, and needed no mask to express himself – he could express anything with his face alone, and could change expressions rapidly.  He threw aside the traditional melodramatic, overwrought declamation techniques, and used a simpler delivery, so as to make the text clearer and appeal to all social classes.

David Garrick in Richard III (1745).  “Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!” - Act V, Scene 3.

Noverre decided to mount Les fêtes chinoises, one of his most extravagant ballets and his first great success.  It drew on the fashion for chinoiserie (the European interpretation & imitation of Chinese & East Asian arts).  It had had great success in Paris' Saint-Germain fairgrounds, and its rich décor was designed by François Boucher.

It didn't have much of an actual plot, instead being a series of danced pictures with a large cast of dancers.  Its visual effects were spectacular – for example, a scene with eight rows of Chinese bobbing up and down, imitating the ocean's waves.

But the time was wrong for London to embrace Noverre's work.  He arrived in 1756, when international hostilities had caused rumours of a possible French invasion.  Garrick was strongly criticized for bringing in an “enemy” company, and when he climbed onstage to reassure them that Noverre was Swiss, not French, the theatre erupted into violence, the sets and machines were destroyed, and the theatre was greatly damaged.  The ballet had to be withdrawn, and the incident set Garrick back by thousands of pounds.  Noverre's brother Augustin wounded a man in the chaos, and their family was forced to go into hiding.

But although the ballet had failed, Noverre's friendship with Garrick was firmly established.  He returned to England the next year, and when he became ill & unable to work, Garrick invited him to stay at his home to convalesce.  Garrick had an incredible library, with many books on pantomime, and it was there that Noverre began to write his Lettres. Later, he would acknowledge Garrick's great influence on his work, and say that Garrick had done for acting what he wanted to do for dance.

[alessio-cala]

How history can influence and highlight themes in your writing: The Beothuk, a lost people.

Initial Ideas

Many people have asked me about where I gained the inspiration that influenced the creation of the fictional island in my novel, Forgotten Liberty. Although the story is set in the real world, the fictional island of Autark (derived from the term ‘autarky’: a country, state, or society which is economically independent)  serves as a clean slate of potential for change. The purpose aims to bring back the simple life, to abolish the complexities of modern living and to reinstate this idea of community and primitive living. It was in fact history itself that influenced many of the themes in Forgotten Liberty.

For those who have yet to read Forgotten Liberty, there are some minor spoilers and references ahead to some characters within the story. All information referring to The Beothuk has been compiled by various sources. I should probably also mention that references to their history merge and serve as an influence to their fictional appearance in the story: The novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author's imagination.

Map of Autark, some distance over 200 miles east from the borders of Newfoundland.

When writing the part of an indigenous people who were native to the land of Autark, I toyed with the idea of just making up my own fictional people. Although I could have stayed with such an idea, I found it far more interesting to take an example  from the real world and chose to research a species of people who had been driven to extinction. I experimented with the possibilities of how these people would develop and live today had they not been interrupted all those years ago. What if they were alive, living and surviving in their own space and time away from the general direction and development of the world as we know it today? Those people were The Beothuk. I had not heard of them before which led to my curiosity and fascination later on in the research stage.

A Brief History

The Beothuk were an indigenous people based on the island of Newfoundland. They were hunters and gatherers who lived in conical dwellings (mamateeks). They lived primarily off of caribou, salmon and seals. At the end of the 18th century, an influx of European settlers residing along coastal areas hindered the Beothuk's lifestyle and access to food resources. Unlike various other native groups, the Beothuk wanted to avoid contact, which led them to adopt this nomadic lifestyle where they ventured further inland. Several violent conflicts occurred with the settlers, causing a decline in their population.

[ Watercolour on ivory miniature Portrait of Demasduit (Mary March), by Lady Henrietta Hamilton, 1819 (Library and Archives Canada)]

Upon my time digging through books, museum posts and the web, I was drawn to two members of the Beothuk in particular. [Demasduit (1796 - 1820) was a Beothuk woman and one of the last of her people. In the fall of 1818, a small group of Beothuks took a boat and some fishing equipment at the mouth of the Exploits River. The governor of the settler's colony, Charles Hamilton, authorized an attempt to recover the stolen property. On March 1, 1819, John Peyton Jr. and eight armed men went up the Exploits River to Red Indian Lake in search of Beothuks and their equipment. A dozen Beothuk fled the campsite, Demasduit among them. She fell to her knees in the snow and exposed her breasts as a nursing mother, begging for mercy. Demasduit was captured; Nonosbawsut, her husband and the leader of the group, was killed while attempting to prevent her capture. Her infant son died a few days after she was taken. She died a year later of tuberculosis. Demasduit's niece, Shawnadithit (1801 - 1829), was the last known Beothuk.] These women are the fictional ancestral basis and inspiration for the character of The Raven.

[A female Red Indian of Newfoundland and dated 1841 by some sources, may have been painted by naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and is most likely a later copy of Portrait of Demasduit by Hamilton]

Development

The Beothuk play a small but vital role throughout the story of Forgotten Liberty. In many ways I found that they are a constant reminder of the simplistic lifestyle that the settlers, or outlanders as referred to by Sam, strive to lead. The Autark settlers misinterpret their true objective with what Autark had the potential to be. It was sold as this grand ideology and means for self-sufficiency, yet the people who relocated to its shores brought everything from materials to household items from their previous lifestyles along with them. They came from a background where the mindset is to consume the land, take what is wanted rather than take only what is needed and that's where the real contrast lies. The settlers in this story isolate The Beothuk, nicknaming them 'The Grey Wolves' and stapling them with this animalistic connotation. Although The Beothuk are said to be the original inhabitants of the land, they hold a valued respect for it and take only what is needed. I fantasised with the idea that the recording of their extinction might have missed a number of their dwindling population; and that perhaps those last members of their people relocated to Autark and repopulated their numbers from there.

[The taking of Demasduit, drawn by her niece Shanawdithit]

I took the time to think about how these people would have adapted and developed throughout that period between 1829 (The death of Shawnadithit) and the present day. Upon researching, I discovered certain details that became great sources of depth to the type of people The Beothuk were. For example, they were known to use red ochre to paint their bodies, houses and items as a symbol of designated tribal identity. Decorating newborn children was a way of welcoming them into the tribe, and if a person was forbidden to wear ochre, it was seen as a form of punishment. This practice was what led the Europeans to coin the term 'Red Indians'.

In Forgotten Liberty, they continue to carry out their way of life, undisturbed by the rest of the world until the Autark project sets into play. I was able to look into their hunting techniques, such as their yearly caribou drive and develop upon that to suit their new living conditions. They are driven towards the mountainous region, isolated from the rest of Autark and fishing only on the south-eastern borders, which in turn, reflects the behavior of their historical nature. It is the burnt man in this story who really sums up the hypocrisy of settlers in his speech during the torture of- (NO SPOILERS!). He talks about the concept of right and ownership to claiming land and freedom. Although the burnt man is considered the primary villain in the story, he also manages to shed some light when he highlights a level of ignorance among the settlers. His motive is to overthrow and punish them, just as they overthrew the land which belonged to the Beothuk. He speaks from observation. It is almost as though history repeats itself. The settlers are a parallel representation to the events that took place in the late 15th century when European settlers first came to 'colonize' the Americas.

While there is plenty more to be said about The Beothuk, I urge those interested in native history to read more about them for themselves. This was really an insight into how history can influence fictional writing and how it can establish or highlight relevant themes in your work. I hope it was somewhat helpful or informative! Forgotten Liberty is still available in eBook and Paperback on amazon.

Sources:

A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, by Ingeborg Marshall

"The Beothuk of Newfoundland", obituary of Shanawdithit

James P. Howley, F.G.S., "Drawings by Shanawdithit", The Beothuks or Red Indians: The aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915

The Beothuks, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage.

Charlotte Gray 'The Museum Called Canada: 25 Rooms of Wonder' Random House, 2004

Mullen, Gary R., "Philip Henry Gosse," Encyclopedia of Alabama, 26 August 2008, retrieved 9 September 2011

[apsbicepstraining]

A ‘radical alternative’: how one humankind changed the taste of Los Angeles

In the 1960 s, British architectural pundit Reyner Banham swore his love for the city that his fellow eggheads detested. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how “the worlds” comprehended it but what would he think of LA today?

Now I know subjective sentiments can vary, the writer Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, but personally I anticipate LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a smelling sewer …

Three years later, Raphaels paroles appeared in publication again as an epigraph of Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies “the worlds largest” exuberantly pro-Los Angeles journal ever written. Ever since publishing, it has shown up on directories of enormous volumes about modern metropolitans even those is drawing up by people who examine Los Angeles anything but a great American city.

Somehow, this work that outlined so much of its initial publicity with offend appraise( In Praise (!) of Los Angeles, sneered the New York Times reviews headline) has retained its relevant through the activities of the decade, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it educate us about the Los Angeles of today?

An architectural historian a decade into his vocation where reference is firstly called, Banham knew full-well that his fellow eggheads detested Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.

The many who were ready to cast doubt on the importance of the enterprise, he reflected in its last chapter, included a recognise Italian architect and his wife who, on was found that I was writing this work, doubted that any person who is cared for architecture could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.

The project began when Banham produced his shaggy whisker and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he enjoyed the city with a ardour, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who applied him up in the Greene brothers architecturally worshipped Gamble House in Pasadena, Banham had a privileged basi from which to search. But what “hes been gone” looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and seemed, redefined the room the academic world and then the wider world comprehended the city.

Reyner Banham with his shaggy beard and wonky teeth in 1968. Picture: Peter Johns for the Guardian

Not that he swore his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. Banham initially knew the city incomprehensible a reaction shared by many commentators, wrote Nigel Whiteley in the study Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.

Banham firstly attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its tremendous seat with electronic machines, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to controls with LAs embodiment of the experimental: its experimental determine and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental lives to which it gave rise.

But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with research results. In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular lieu to do a specific happen, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your dwelling, and youve done 100 miles in the day, he complained in the third largest talk. The intervals and the trust on mechanical transportation leave no chamber for accident even for glad collisions. You project the working day in advance, program your activities, and waive those random meetings with acquaintances and strangers that are traditionally one of the reinforces of metropolitan life.

Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city supported out a predict: The unique value of Los Angeles what arouses, intrigues and sometimes repels me is that it offerings radical alternatives to almost every city notion in unquestioned currency.

In his subsequent landmark book, Banham itemized Los Angeles retirements from conventional urbanism, as well as from all the rules for civilised living as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity, with evident gratify. It seemed to legitimise a model “youve already”, in a 1959 article, recommends to supplant the old-time perception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.

Civilised living in suburban LA. Image: University of Southern California/ Corbis via Getty Images

Banham foresaw the city as scrambled egg, its shell burst open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic lily-white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness vexed simply by occasional specialised sub-centres. A tourist to Los Angeles today might discover the city explained in simply the same route: as a network of nodes, a constellation of city hamlets, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.

Banham applied another digit in the eye of conservatives who insisted that a city should have just one strong centre with his short assembly A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, … because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.

From its fetishised structures such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new agency towers in their standard livery of dark glass and steel, Banham wrote that everything countenances as an unintegrated scrap in a downtown stage that began to disintegrate long ago out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.

The notebooks contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it plays the functions of a great city, to its implementation of size, cosmopolitan mode, innovative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate identity[ proves that] all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong.

Filled with photographs and sketches, Banhams book on Los Angeles segments its subject up into the four ecologies of its subtitle: the beaches and beach towns of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborated and costly mansions; the utilitarian Plains of Id( the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and tolerating sufficient to compare with the cities of the Middle West) and the famed, then notorious, freeway plan he dubbed Autopia: a single intelligible situate, a coherent cognitive state in which Angelenos invest the two calmest and most fruitful hours of their daily lives.

The 1893 Bradbury Building in downtown LA was an unintegrated scrap in Banhams gazes. Photo: Michele and Tom Grimm/ Alamy

Between sections on the citys ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles architecture has, of all the citys components, reaped distain the longest. There is no reward for aesthetic dignity here , no sanction for aesthetic misdemeanour; nothing but a immense planetary phlegm, wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.

More than 40 year later, Banham considered a stylistic reward of Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul tombs, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even in extremity Modern Architecture.

He discussed at length the LA building known as the dingbat a two-storey walk-up apartment-block … improved of lumber and stuccoed over, all indistinguishable at the back but inexpensively, elaborately, embellished up-front, decorated with an aspirational appoint such as the Capri or the Starlet.

In characterizing dingbats as the real symptom of Los Angeles city id, trying to be dealt with the unprecedented form of residential concentrations too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living, Banham diagnosed the center and long-lasting friction, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.

Banham gleaned out the implications of Los Angeles ostensibly disposable builds not by idolizing them , nor minimizing them, but plainly by investigating them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would preach the same approaching in their own urban classic, Hearing from Las Vegas, publicized the following year: Withholding opinion may be used as a tool to draw later sentence most sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banhams non-judgmental attitude at the least toward the esthetics of American commercial culture starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.

The self-absorbed and perfected Watts Towers. Image: Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, scribe of an 11,000 -word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, moved so far as to description Banhams book hazardous: The hacks who do shopping centre, Hawaiian eateries and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servants in the department of highways, and the forces of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and drive a little harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane society where Banhams doctrines would be measured against the subdividers rape of the tract and the contribute molecules in kids of my own lungs, the author might be put up against a wall and shot.

Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through the working day in the city that forms nonsense of biography and breach all the rules, and inspired within him a passion that goes beyond appreciation or reason. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodias handmade Watts Towers( a altogether self-absorbed and perfected tombstone) to Los Angeles characteristic fantasy of innocence( prominently tagged on all the maps in his notebook ); the overgrown sections of the age-old Pacific Electric Railways rusting runways that once tied the whole big metropolitan together; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.

There, Banham requested the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking observer of American urban banality, what public buildings a tourist should interpret. Ruscha recommended gas station.

Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles urban form by claiming the figure problems very little, having already written that Los Angeles has no urban word at all in the commonly accepted feel. Yet whatever it does have, he debated, has rendered a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, prepared of emergent urban phenomena.

Come the day when the smog doom eventually tumbles, he chronicled over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevards double sequence of towers and frame-filling neighborhoods of detached mansions, … when trafficking in human beings grinds to a halt and the private vehicle is banned from the street, a lot of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.

Cyclists on Venice Beach … though often of LA is not bike-friendly. Image: Alamy

The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold terms for the person who is called Wilshire Boulevard one of the few enormous streets in the world where driving are particularly pleased after having, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who school themselves Italian in order to speak Dante in the original, learned to drive in order to speak Los Angeles in the original.

But just as the languages discover on the streets of Los Angeles have proliferated, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who perished in 1988 , now find it?

The smog that presumed bane of the citys postwar decades which he ever minimise has all but vanished. The day of apparently limitless infinite to pander an infatuation with single-family residences has given method to one of structure cranes budding to satisfy the brand-new demand for high-density vertical living. They sit not only over a downtown arise miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres sown all over greater Los Angeles.

Though the ban on private cars hasnt come yet , no most recent developments startles any Angeleno who was there in the 1970 s more than the citys new runway transportation system, which started to develop nearly 30 years after the end of the Pacific Electric. It grades as such as a success for financing, planning and implementation( at the least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the country now looks to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public space in general.

Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network one of “the worlds largest” designs of humanity but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current spectators of Los Angeles. Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway organisation of my relationship, he wrote, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.

Banham felt downtown Los Angeles only deserved a short assembly devote to it. Photo: Alamy

Banham also saw the rise of the self-driving car, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves( as distinct from Baede-kar a then-fantastical tone sailing system dreamed up for Banhams TV doc, that bears an eerie similarity to those every American driver uses today) come with problems that Banham also predicted all those years ago. The marginal additions in efficiency through automation, he wrote, might be offset by the mental destitutions caused by destroying the residual apparitions of free decision and driving skill.

Under each outwardly celebratory sheet of Banhams book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles only constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the roadway, the working day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the disconnected residence, it very must fall out of favor, or into impracticality, sooner or later.

Some of the elements that sucked Banhams attention have, after their own periods of dishonor, diverted fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has experienced a neighbourhood in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical subject and architectural rival.

Banham also read the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing constructs, especially one striking and elegantly simple-minded stucco casket on La Cienega Boulevard. Its designer? A certain Frank Gehry, then almost unknown but now one of the stronger influencers of the constructed context in not only Los Angeles( his current high-profile programme concerns re-making the citys famously dry, concrete-encased flow ), but other metropolis as well. The Toronto-born starchitect became his adopted hometowns architectural emissary just one of the myriad modes in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the city nature.

These dates, the rest of the city nature also influences Los Angeles. No longer striving for the purposes of the delusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banhams day, it has, with its towers, learns, ballparks and even bike-share methods, saw paces toward the liveability so is necessary in 21 st-century urbanists. It now even resembles( if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris those exhaustively planned , non-experimental municipalities where, Banham lamented, warring pressure group cannot get out of one anothers hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of cultural monuments and real estate values.

In its impressive dictation to incorporate older metropolitan virtues and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of setting up becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its jeopardy. Retaining Banhams Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the horrendous fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.

The engineering-trained author viewed Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a severely needed repair of its interface in recent years , none has yet written a consumers manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.

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How to celebrate Christmas like Charles Dickens

Don’t be a Scrooge! Celebrate the spirit and former haunts of Charles Dickens, the Victorian author who shaped our vision of the modern festive season

On the evening of October 5 1843, Charles Dickens took his place on the stage of the Athenaeum in Manchester. The Athenaeum was a society for the “advancement and diffusion of knowledge”. It had been founded in 1837 to provide education and recreation for the working men and women of the city. However, thanks to a recent economic recession, the club was heavily in debt. Dickens was about to give a speech that, it was hoped, would help raise much-needed funds.

What few of that night’s audience would have realised was that Dickens himself was a troubled man. The author was 31 and, for the past seven years, the success of his books such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby had seen him rise to become, arguably, the second most famous Victorian, behind only the Queen herself. However, Dickens’ fortunes had taken a downturn in 1843. His latest work, Martin Chuzzlewit, had seen disappointing sales; his wife, Catherine, was pregnant with their fifth child; and he himself, just like the noble institution he was about to address, was heavily in debt.

Victorian watercolour Dickens’ Dream depicts the author in his Gad’s Hill Place study. Credit: Dickens Museum

But, as he rose to his feet that night, Dickens put his personal troubles behind him and, over the course of 12 or so minutes, dazzled his audience with a speech that extolled the virtues of the educational opportunities afforded by the Athenaeum (in a building that today houses part of Manchester Art Gallery).

His speech brought his audience to their feet and, with the applause still ringing in his ears, he headed back through the streets of the city to the house of his sister, Fanny, with whom he was staying. As he walked, an idea began to formulate; an idea for a book that, he hoped, might rescue his ailing fortunes. A book that would come out in time for, and be sold specifically for, Christmas.

What he could not have envisaged on that drizzly night in Manchester was that the book he was pondering was destined to have a massive impact on the way Western civilisation celebrated Christmas and would become the best known and beloved of all his works. For, it was on those dark streets of Manchester that the seed was sown for the second most famous Christmas story ever told: A Christmas Carol.

Dickens “plunged headlong” into what he termed his “little scheme”. By his own admission, it seized him “with a strange mastery” and, over the course of the six or so weeks it took him to complete the novella, he “wept and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in the composition; and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London, 15 and 20 miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed”.

Amazingly, it is still possible to follow in his footsteps through some of the locations Dickens strolled as the story took shape. The author began the story in the snowy, fog-shrouded alleyways at the very heart of the City of London. Although he was vague about the exact location of Scrooge’s counting house he does tells us that it was in the shadow of the “ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a gothic window in the wall”.

St Michael, Cornhill in the City of London. Credit: DavidCC/Alamy

This description certainly fits the tower of the medieval church St Michael’s Cornhill and, since Bob Cratchit, having finally been allowed to head home “went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 20 times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve…”, it has led many to deduce that it was one of the atmospheric old alleyways off Cornhill that Dickens had in mind for his miser’s place of work.

In one of these atmospheric backwaters, St Michael’s Alley, there still stands one of London’s least changed “Dickensian” hostelries, the George and Vulture – a place Dickens most certainly knew well and which he had already mentioned by name in Pickwick Papers. Some say this was the “melancholy tavern” in which Scrooge “took his melancholy dinner” as he made his way home on Christmas Eve. The interior of this atmospheric eatery can have changed little, if at all, since Dickens’ day. They continue to serve traditional English fare, while diners are watched over by a white marble bust of Charles Dickens, who gazes down from his window-ledge perch. Indeed, so indelibly linked is this old tavern with the memory of Dickens his descendants still pay it an annual visit to enjoy a family Christmas lunch.

Charles Dickens’ house in Bayham Street, London. Credit: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo

As Dickens walked the streets, some of the ghosts from his own past came crowding in and would find their way into the pages of the book. The Cratchits, for example, live in a small terraced house in Camden, north London, reminiscent of the house in Bayham Street in which the Dickens family had lived during Charles’ childhood when they had moved to London from Kent.

When the Ghost of Christmas Past led Scrooge back to his boyhood school where he wept to see his lonely younger self “reading near a feeble fire,” Dickens was, again, remembering his own childhood.

His description of Scrooge’s school as “a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell hanging in it…” is unmistakably of Gad’s Hill Place, just outside Rochester – a house Dickens, as a boy of nine, had often passed on country walks with his father, who had urged him that, if he were to work hard, he “might some day come to live in it”. In fact, Dickens did buy the house in 1856 and it became his principle residence for the last 12 years of his life. Today it is an independent school.

Bob Cratchit carries Tiny Tim on his shoulder in an illustration of A Christmas Carol. Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library

Step by step the story took shape and, by the end of November 1843, Dickens laid to rest the spirits of past, present and future, and transformed his old miser into a man who “knew how to keep Christmas well”. Having penned the final immortal words “God bless us, every one”, Dickens took his pen and, with a flourish, he scrawled “The End”, underlining it three times for emphasis.

A Christmas Carol was published to almost universal acclaim on the 19 December 1843 and, by Christmas Eve, all 6,000 copies of the first print run had been sold, despite its hefty price tag of five shillings. Dickens friend and fellow novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray, declared it “a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness.” Another reviewer hailed Dickens as “the poet of the poor”.

People the world over began celebrating Christmas according to the blueprint laid out in its pages. Turkey became the staple meat at the Christmas table, since that was the bird the reformed Scrooge had sent to the Cratchits. There are even records of mill and factory owners, in both Britain and America, being moved to give their workforce Christmas Day off, and treating them to a turkey each, after having read the Carol.

The book captured the public imagination in a way none of Dickens’ other works had, or would, and it remains to this day his most cherished and best-known work. It is as much a part of Christmas as mince pies, turkey and decorated trees. Indeed, so important was Dickens’ contribution to revitalising and reviving the spirit of the season that he is often referred to, quite simply, as the man who invented Christmas. And, to think, it all began in Manchester.

  Planning your visit 

Charles Dickens Museum

The London home of the author at 48 Doughty Street now houses an archive of more than 100,000 items and stages regular exhibitions.

Manchester Art Gallery

This impressive city venue was formerly the Athenaeum, an intellectual society at which Dickens gave the 1843 speech that inspired him to write A Christmas Carol.

George and Vulture

Scrooge’s “melancholy dinner” was inspired by this pub off Lombard Street in the City of London, which still welcomes Dickens’ ancestors for Christmas dinner.

Dickens London Guided Walks

With a host of tours available every week, Richard Jones draws on almost 25 years’ experience to bring the author and his books to life on London’s streets.

Words by Richard Jones

  The post How to celebrate Christmas like Charles Dickens appeared first on Britain Magazine | The official magazine of Visit Britain | Best of British History, Royal Family,Travel and Culture.

Britain Magazine | The official magazine of Visit Britain | Best of British History, Royal Family,Travel and Culture https://www.britain-magazine.com/features/history/british-literature/how-to-celebrate-christmas-like-charles-dickens/

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By Ola Synowiec

26 November 2018

“Which form should I use when I talk to you: feminine or masculine?” I asked Lukas Avendaño, who I had seen in trousers earlier in the day but now was wearing a traditional black skirt with colourful embroidered flowers called an enagua. We were speaking in Spanish, with its gendered nouns and pronouns. “I prefer you’d just call me sweetheart,” Avendaño giggled.

There’s men and women and there’s something in between, and that’s who I am

Here, in the Istmo de Tehuantepec region in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, there are three genders: female, male and muxes. This third classification has been acknowledged and celebrated since pre-Hispanic times, and it’s hard to imagine life without muxes here. But in this region where most people speak the indigenous Zapotec language, my question doesn’t make much sense.

“In Zapotec, as in English, there are no grammatical genders. There is only one form for all people. Muxes have never been forced to wonder: are they more man or woman?” Avendaño explained.

“We’re the third sex,” added Felina, who, unlike Avendaño, decided to change his given male name, Ángel, and goes only by this moniker. “There’s men and women and there’s something in between, and that’s who I am.”

View image of In the Istmo de Tehuantepec region in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, there are three genders: female, male and muxes (Credit: Credit: Zofia Radzikowska)

You may also be interested in: • The islands where women make the rules • China’s kingdom of women • The shipwreck that created a culture

I was at Vela de Las Intrepidas (Vigil of the Intrepids), the annual celebration of muxes that takes place each November in Juchitán de Zaragoza, a small town on the Istmo de Tehuantepec. Observing the different muxes, I couldn’t see much in common between their styles. There were muxes who, like the local tehuanas (women from the Istmo de Tehuantepec), wore the same richly embroidered outfits that inspired Frida Kahlo’s unique look. Others seemed to prefer Western-style dresses or drag queen apparel. And there were some wearing men’s clothes, showing their status with just simple makeup and nail polish.

“It’s hard to describe who a muxe is. Basically, we can say that a muxe is any person who was born a man but doesn’t act masculine,” Avendaño said.

“What we know, ‘under Western eyes’, as ‘male-to-female transvestite’, ‘male-to-female transsexual’, ‘effeminate gay’ or ‘masculine gay’ seems to be included within the category of ‘muxe’ as long as there is also a strong component of ethnic identity,” writes anthropologist Pablo Céspedes Vargas in his article Muxes at work: between community belonging and heteronormativity in the workplace. Avendaño similarly emphasised that ‘muxe’ is a Zapotec term and it can’t be understood without knowing more about their culture.

View image of The Vela de Las Intrepidas takes place each November in Juchitán de Zaragoza (Credit: Credit: Ola Synowiec)

That’s because the concept of muxe exists only here, on the Istmo de Tehuantepec, where they are an important part of the community. Some say they fell out from the pocket of Vicente Ferrer, the patron saint of Juchitán, as he passed through town, which, according to locals, means they were born under a lucky star. A second version of the saint’s legend says that Vicente Ferrer was carrying three bags: one with female seeds, one with male seeds and one where the two were mixed. According to this story, the third bag sprung a leak in Juchitán, and that’s the reason why there are so many muxes here.

“It’s not true there are more of them here. They’re just more respected, so they can be more visible,” said Fernando Noé Díaz, a primary school teacher who has many muxe friends. One named Kika (who also only goes by her first name) had invited us for tonight’s vela. There, each muxe had a section with tables and decorations where food and drinks were served to their guests. “I guess muxes are so respected because they are more a social gender rather than a sexual one. They have an important role in the community,” Noé Díaz added.

When the man is at sea or in the field and the woman is at the market, there is no-one to take care of the household and family – that’s where the muxe comes in

Juchitán is famous throughout Mexico for its strong and proud women. Some even call it a matriarchy, which is not necessarily correct, but women traditionally handle the money brought home by the men. (Locals joke that men here have sweet or salty penises, meaning they are either farmers or fishermen.) Women, on the other hand, are supposed to sell what men produce, and the market is their domain. Tonight, as is vela tradition, women traditionally donate money as a gift, while the men carry cases of beer.

“When the man is at sea or in the field and the woman is at the market, there is no-one to take care of the household and family. That’s where the muxe comes in,” Noé Díaz explained. “Some even say it’s a blessing for a mother to have a muxe son who will help her at home and take care of young siblings. Also, muxes are socially not allowed to have long-term relationships or get married so they can stay with their mothers when they get old.”

View image of Some say muxes fell out from the pocket of Vicente Ferrer, the patron saint of Juchitán, as he passed through Juchitán (Credit: Credit: Zofia Radzikowska)

At the vela, the mothers are the ones who serve food at each muxe’s table. Kika's mother was checking that nobody was hungry, and younger family members gave me a new bottle of beer when mine started to empty. But Kika didn’t want to dedicate herself to housework, as is one of the muxe’s traditional roles, along with handicrafts and selling at the market. She owns a beauty salon in the centre of the town. The same with Felina, who runs a muxes’ group, Las Auténticas Intrepidas Buscadoras del Peligro (The Authentic Intrepid Danger Seekers), the organisers of tonight’s vela.

According to Noé Díaz, a lot of muxes work preparing the traditional fiestas that are a big part of the local economy. They make costumes and ornaments for velas, baptisms, communions, quinceañeras (15th birthday parties) and weddings. Noé Díaz also knows muxes who dedicate themselves to creating art and handicrafts to sell at markets. Another of his muxe friends is a primary-school teacher.

View image of Muxes are more respected in Juchitán, so they can be more visible (Credit: Credit: Zofia Radzikowska)

Avendaño is an actor and director who travels the world with his show about being a muxe, Réquiem para un Alcaraván (Requiem for an Alcaravan). The spectacle puts a lot of emphasis on the Catholic part of the muxe identity.

God created woman and man, but he also created human nature

“Muxes have always had an important role in the local Catholic church. It was their job to prepare the church decorations. In Tehuantepec, the town I come from, muxes have their own brotherhood inside the church,” Avendaño said, explaining that the Catholic Church wisely accommodated the tradition of three genders that is so strong and deeply ingrained in the local culture.

Today’s celebration started with a holy mass in honour of muxes at the local church of Vicente Ferrer.

“God created woman and man, but he also created human nature, and – please forgive me, God, if I offend you – it’s possible that the nature created by him decided who humans are. And among people, there are homosexuals and it’s totally natural,” said ‘Padre Panchito’, as parish priest Arturo Francisco Herrera González is nicknamed, while he delivered his homily. “God created us in his image, and each one of us is unique. There are no two identical individuals and we have to respect that,” he stated.

View image of A lot of muxes work preparing the traditional fiestas that are a big part of the local economy (Credit: Credit: Zofia Radzikowska)

After mass, the traditional procession began through the streets of the town. The colourful crowd was led by a band and muxes carrying candles. Behind them, more muxes rode in cars and trucks decorated with flowers, balloons and paper decorations. But the highlight of the day was the party that took place at night outside town. There were three stages and big speakers. I could see many people: women, men and children. Everyone was wearing regional clothes: women in enaguas and embroidered blouses called huipiles; men in white guayabera shirts. All were welcomed on the stage by a muxe who was this year’s ‘la mayordomo’, the main organiser of the vela, who was accompanied by their partner who is a mayate. Mayates are men who have sexual relationships with muxes, but aren’t muxes themselves and are not considered gay.

“An important difference with urban Western sexual culture is that for Zapotecs, only sexual relationships between a muxe and a heterosexual male have meaning. Relations between muxes or between a muxe and a gay man don’t make sense, in fact they are even inconceivable. No muxe would sleep with a man who considers himself gay,” writes Marinella Miano Borruso in an article Entre lo local y lo global. Los muxe en el siglo XXI (Between local and global. Muxes in the 21st Century). “Zapotec society as a whole doesn’t perceive a man who has relations with a muxe as a homosexual, his hetero-status is not questioned.”

View image of Muxes also play an important role in the local Catholic Church, making decorations for baptisms and weddings (Credit: Credit: Zofia Radzikowska)

According to Miano Borruso, historically muxes didn’t have to be homosexual. There were cases of them being heterosexual, bisexual or asexual. “Traditionally, being muxe didn’t depend on sexual orientation. It’s a cultural gender, social function and identity, but not a characteristic of someone’s desires,” she explains in her book Hombre, mujer y muxe en el Istmo de Tehuantepec (Man, woman and muxe in Istmo de Tehuantepec).

Nonetheless, all the muxes I talked to at the vela considered themselves homosexual or as a woman born in a male body. Some transform themselves with hormone therapy and implants. During the annual Queen of the Muxes contest, which formed part of the vela, I noticed many of them had artificial breasts. “That’s something new. Fake boobs don’t make a muxe more muxe,” Noé Díaz commented.

If we, the daughters of St Vicente, won’t fight for our rights, then who will?

Muxes have also been involved in the struggle for LGBT rights. Amaranta Gómez Regalado, a muxe from Juchitán, was a local candidate in the elections for the Mexican Congress. Even though she didn’t get enough votes, she became famously known as the first transsexual candidate of Mexico. She’s still involved in politics, especially in campaigns against homophobia and for HIV/AIDS prevention.

“Instead of dedicating our lives to embroidery, handicraft or street sales, more and more of us are getting higher education,” Felina said. “If we, the daughters of St Vicente, won’t fight for our rights, then who will?”

View image of For the Mexican and international gay community, Juchitán has become a symbol of tolerance (Credit: Credit: blickwinkel/Alamy)

Still, Mexicans have been ambivalent towards homosexuals in general. On one hand, Mexico City was the first Latin American capital to legalise same-sex marriage. Yet Mexico also suffers one of the highest rates of crime against the LGBT community in the world, with 202 people murdered due to homophobia between January 2014 and December 2016 – which equates to one every three to four days.

For the Mexican and international gay community, Juchitán has become a queer paradise and a symbol of tolerance. Even though some locals still discriminate against muxes, and the muxe community as a whole has less opportunity to study and gain employment, the traditional indigenous division of three genders as a natural and traditional way of being has inspired the LGBT scene around the world – and muxes are becoming aware of it.

“We dedicate this night not only to muxes,” I hear from the stage. “It’s also your night, for all homosexuals, not just for the ones from the state of Oaxaca, but for all gays from all over the world. Juchitán is open to all of you.”

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