#and with that i conclude my dissertation on:

[queenlua]

When Tibarn calls for the bird tribes to unite as one nation in Serenes, Reyson is skeptical, and Naesala refuses outright. But when rising ocean levels threaten to devour the islands of both Phoenicis and Kilvas, none of them have much of a choice in the matter.

This fic is now finished at ~138k words!

If any of these pithy/snarky summaries sound good to you...

"the bird tribes should've had a Hague, probably"

"Naesala has a bad time & then Reyson has a bad time & then they make each other worse <3"

"Leanne gets a fucking gun knife"

...there's a decent chance you'll enjoy this story; take a peek :)

(Also: peep the latest chapters for some beautiful new @gloamvonhrym art <3333 THANK YOU FOR ALL THE BIRDPEOPLE VISUAL SPLENDOR)

[thefinestbrandofeefa]

clocked this one earlier than i did asexuality.. i think what im feeling is.. executive dysfunction… WHO PROMOTED THAT IDIOT AMIRITE???

recently its started to take me 2-3 business days to complete an action that would take 10 minutes and even then, sometimes there is delays in delivery and the package gets shipped elsewhere.. its a mess

[portraitofalinkonfyre]

Why Sky Wears Baggy Clothes: A Dissertation into Skyloftian Boner Culture and Outfitting Practices

So. Remember the infamous dick post? I have more thoughts, specifically concerning Sky's FAT COCK and how Skyloftian's specifically evolved greater vascular and hemoglobin systems in response to life in high altitudes. Prepare yourselves.

In my last piece, I calculated Skyloft's altitude of roughly 7,544.4 feet and covered how certain systems were affected to adapt to the climate, which eventually turned into a rant about Sky's dick, but now, I present to you: the reason Sky wears baggy clothes is to hide his altitude-induced, iron-man erections.

But first, let's explore the clothes themselves. Due to its high altitude, Skyloft is cold. Google AI has informed me that wind speed typically fluctuates, assuming the altitude is within the range of 6,000 to 8,000 feet, between 12 to 23 mph. On the Beaufort Scale, a chart used to estimate wind speed based on visual appearances, 23 mph is considered a "Fresh Breeze", and hardly a whisper to anyone from the Midwest. With this in mind, the standard temperature (excluding wind chill) of an area with a similar altitude to Skyloft is roughly 34°F or 1°C, which explains the multiple layers typically worn by many in-game Skyward Sword characters. Using both of these values and an internet wind chill calculator, we can conclude that the average temperature of Skyloft (assuming the wind speed is a comfortable 16 mph) is 24°F or -4°C, with a calculated range of 22°F or -5.6°C (23 mph, 34°F) to 25°F or -3.9°C (12 mph, 34°F).

With a wind-chilled air temperature of 24°F, Skyloft's layered, loose-fitting clothing standards make perfect sense, seeing as loose clothes are considered advantageous during cold weather because the small gaps between skin and fabric create pockets of space for body heat to gather, creating a pseudo-barrier against the elements.

Now, onto Sky's particular outfit. Based on this post by Jojo herself, Sky wears approximately four full upper-body layers (white, olive-khaki, chainmail, and mint tunic), one midsection layer (red sash), one lower-body layer (brown-green?? pants), and his embroidered sailcloth; he is prepared-prepared for chilly temperatures. As well as being a wonderfully adjacent nod to modern-day Tibetan culture, these clothes are perfect for conserving heat, and, concurrently, his life. 'But Fyre, we want the iron man dick-canons!' you may wail, but I'm not finished. There's quite a bit of debate in the skydiving community about whether tight or loose-fitting clothes are better, but many users state that loose-fitting clothes have the advantage of drag. But why is this good? In skydiving, and many of the Zelda games as a whole, control is essential; it's what allows us to feel safe, and thus allows for more logical, calm thinking due to adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones) reduction. By increasing the user's surface area, loose-fitting clothes create drag, which, in physics, leads to better midair control during free-fall. Compared to Skyward Sword, where free-falling is as common a game mechanic as swinging a sword around, specialized aerodynamic control via clothing is a crucial mechanism that the Skylofians would absolutely take advantage of, considering that many of them regular jump from the sky and ride giant pelican-bird-creatures. In addition, due to his evolutionarily enhanced circulatory and vascular system, Sky himself is more than prepared to handle any and all endocrine stressors due to falling, and his specific outfit design only backs the theory that the residents of Skyloft are not only equipped to handle life in the sky on an evolutionary level, but from a cultural and biological level as well.

Okay. That was a lot, so I'm going to reintroduce some scholarly degeneracy at its finest: the concept of Sky's iron-man erections. Keeping with the vein of Skyloftian's specifically designing their clothes to be advantageous in every sense of the word, it isn't too far-fetched that they would make a point to account for any and all bodily changes that may occur during free-fall, or simply life on a floating rock, which absolutely includes altitude-induced erections. Confused? Let me explain.

In the dick-canon post, I largely referenced the concept of "airplane boners" as a defining factor for why Sky is HUNG, because it has been scientifically proven that abrupt changes in pressure affect vascular expansion and contraction, which absolutely extends to the pelvic region, and, thus, shifting erective status of the penis. With this in mind, it can be inferred that a race of people with the same evolutionary traits would have also evolved culturally to deal with this conundrum, which perfectly explains the bagginess of Sky's, and every other resident of Skyloft's, outfit choices. For example, the looseness of his pants is likely to be a cleverly-disguised ploy to hide what is by all definitions a biological predicament shared by all members of the Hylian species. It's in the same vein as modern-day menstrual cycles. Oh no, you got your period? Just slap a pad on it! Except the pad is baggy pants to hide an erection you can't control because flying is your way of life. Apply this to Sky and you've got a good idea of why his outfit is the way it is.

But that's not all! In addition to concealing any potential erections, Skyloftian clothing is also specifically designed to protect against the elements, which, you guessed it, extends to male and female reproduction organs. Whether through the use of thick, temperature-impenetrable cloth, specific (down-low) enchantments, or specialized padding, it is almost undeniable that a society as developed as the Skyloftians would have a fail-safe method to preserve both their lives and modesty through practical outfit stylizations.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for: iron-man erections and what the fuck that refers to. I'm sure some of you are getting sick of the words 'vascular capacity' and 'erection of the penile region', but I promise you, this is where the magic happens. So. Sky is basically evolutionarily-predetermined to be hung. He has excellent hemoglobin and vascular system capacity, which would absolutely affect not only his body as a whole, but sexual functions as well, specifically in the fact that his erections are indestructible. Due to a combination of evolution, age, and gender, it's incredibly easy for him to become aroused, and, concurrently, incredibly difficult to 'take care' of his arousal in the same manner as the typical, non-evolutionized male would. That flagpole is raised and it is NOT coming down. This begs the question: how does he deal with this conundrum, specifically after some type of altitude-based activity, and what cultural practices are permitted in this context? Are all Skyloftian's serial masturbators or are they simply incredible at restraining themselves, which could act as a nod to Sky's typically unbothered attitude? In concurrence, if masturbation is socially acceptable, how does Sky find all that time to jack off? Does the rest of the chain know, or are they oblivious to his predicaments?!

In short, Skyloftian fashion and societal modesty culture is heavily influenced by the hilariously, yet closely related Skyloftian boner culture, in both outfit practicality and social norms, which is very likely to explain Sky's choice of clothes and, once again, why he is hung as FUCK. Thank you for witnessing my madness and Hylia bless.

Additional queries:

Does Priapism exist in Skyloftian society? Yes and no. The term 'priapism' refers the prolonged erection of the penis (4+ hours), often without any sexual stimulation, which cements it as a fairly common medical condition for humans. However, due to their unique vascular biology, it is unlikely that this condition would be viewed at the severity it is in modern-day humans, which begs the question: is it even an issue at all? Increased circulatory and vascular capabilities indicate a greater blood flow, whereas priapism is the persistent lack of appropriate blood flow, meaning that, due to their biology, priapism may very well be an indicator of old age in the same manner loss of vision or a general slowing down is for humans. On the other hand, if it were to possess the same significance as it does with modern-day humans, what

@skylover69 come feed bestie

[eretzyisrael]

Every week we are reading about professions that are pushing out Zionist Jews from their fields.

In the field of international law:

...The professor saw a trend among the topics Israeli and Jewish colleagues were pushed to pursue. Those who continued their academic work in international law either wrote about Palestinians as victims or Israel’s violations of humanitarian international law. “Israelis would either write about IP law or business law, or about how Israel is being awful, violating human rights and all of that.”

This stood out because the professor noticed their colleagues from Latin America and China weren’t expected to work on topics that criticize their home countries as a condition for receiving faculty support. Yet when it came to Israelis, it was “clear to us this is what we need to deliver on.”

In the professor’s discussions with the senior faculty, especially the progressive liberal Jewish faculty, it came through clearly that support for Israeli students was conditioned on being the right type of Israeli, “and there were fellowships and scholarships and grants available to students who are willing to do that. In Hebrew we say that a person knows which side of the bread is buttered, right? So it’s pretty clear what pays off is to distance yourself from a mainstream Israeli kind of discourse.”

Understanding who holds the power and influences decisions is important in any profession, the law included. “You need to have the support and the mentors to advance in your career,” the professor explained, “and for that, you look for cues on what should I do, how do I make these people like me. Why would you bother, why would you take the risk of saying something that is controversial or put yourself in the position of protecting Israel or speaking on behalf of Israel when there is only a price to pay for that?”

“For example, there is an institute that gives out scholarships to doctoral students who are writing dissertations about Israel. I was advised not to take their money because then it’s going to be on my CV and people will interpret that as if I don’t have the right kind of politics. So even when there are economic incentives to write different kinds of scholarship,” under the current academic incentives, the professor concludes, scholarships and point-interventions will not work “because it’s more about selection and authority and networks and connections and less about economic incentives.”

Mental health professionals:

The anti-Zionist blacklist is the most extreme example of an anti-Israel wave that has swept the mental health field since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and the resulting war in Gaza, which has seen the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. More than a dozen Jewish therapists from across the country who spoke to Jewish Insider described a profession ostensibly rooted in compassion, understanding and sensitivity that has too often dropped those values when it comes to Jewish and Israeli providers and clients.

At best, these therapists say their field has been willing to turn a blind eye to the antisemitism that they think is too rampant to avoid. At worst, they worry the mental health profession is becoming inhospitable to Jewish practitioners whose support for Israel puts them outside the prevailing progressive views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Authors:

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

It feels like history is repeating itself.

Jews founded the Jews' Hospital in New York in 1855, now known as Mount Sinai Hospital, partially as a response to the need for a place that Jews could be treated without feeling like outsiders, as every other hospital at the time was aligned with various Christian groups. It followed the founding in 1850 of the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati. When Mount Moriah Hospital Mount Moriah Hospital opened in New York in 1908, the Forward reported that Jews "can open the door and enter as if to your own home without a racing heart and without fear."

Brandeis University was founded in 1948 "at a time when Jews and other ethnic and racial minorities, and women, faced discrimination in higher education."

Jews who were facing discrimination formed professional associations and schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for physicians, scientists, and trades, like the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York and the Kehillah which attempted to be an umbrella of professional and educational associations in New York (and that the antisemite Henry Ford railed against.)

It appears that it is time for Jews in the professions where they are being blacklisted must start to form Jewish professional organizations, educational networks and institutions anew, where Jews can network and publish as they want without having to please the "progressive" crowds.

But the arc of history is going backwards, and this is only a Band-Aid. The problem is with America and the world itself, and Jews cannot solve this problem alone - the dangers of the progressive bigots are a threat to the free world and that needs to be addressed at the macro level.

[gunsandspaceships]

Many degrees of Doctor Stark

It is widely known that 616 Tony has several doctorates. The number varies from 3 to 7, but it doesn't really matter whether he is 300 or 700% Doctor. He is one. And he doesn’t use his title 99.999% of the time.

Ok, but what about the MCU?

It is never mentioned whether Tony has a PhD or even a master's degree. Kinda weird. Both the absence of mentions and lack of degrees, since Tony is so smart and productive.

Let’s check, maybe he actually has some.

Here we have a file from a deleted scene from The Avengers (2012):

As we can see, the work is sloppy – there are inaccuracies in his hair color (it’s not black, it’s brown), and the fact that he speaks French was not included. Can we rely on this paper? Let’s not 100%, but we can still use things that don't contradict the movies.

The fact that he received his BS in Engineering from MIT does not contradict this, so we can mark it as valid. He started in 1984 when he was 14 years old and graduated in 1987 when he was 17.

We see no further education in the file. But we know something that this file doesn’t. We watched the movies.

Remember, in Civil War at 0:13:25, in the scene where Tony sees his parents for the last time, Maria tells Howard, “Be nice, dear, he’s been studying abroad”. Tony is 21 here, this is December 16, 1991. Looks like he is on winter break.

But wait… Didn’t he graduate in 1987 and stop then? Well, Maria tells us he continued.

Between 17 and 21 there are 4 years. What could he have done in these 4 years? A lot, right? He is smart and productive, we know that. A master’s degree usually takes 2 years. Tony could earn it in 1. 1 or 2, we still have 2-3 years that we need to fill with some kind of studying. I doubt he just went back and got another bachelor's or master's. That said, he was working on his PhD.

We don't know where. “Abroad” is a very broad concept. Maybe he went to Europe to study at Oxford? We do not know. Perhaps he stayed at MIT and just went somewhere else for the fall semester. We do not know. But he did go somewhere for (most probably) a PhD.

The question is: did he finish it?

Well, his parents died in Dec 1991, and we know from the first Iron Man (0:04:50) that Stane was the interim president of Stark Industries from that date until 1992. Most likely, Tony became CEO before his birthday, that is, May 29, which corresponds to the stated age of 21. He had a few months between.

We don’t know where he was in his degree at that time. But we know he is smart and productive. He doesn’t need 4 years to write a dissertation.

So, there are 2 options:

1) He did not complete his doctorate and devoted himself entirely to the company;

2) He completed it in the few months he had and then took over the company.

Here’s the evidence for the second option:

“Confusing matters more, a recently deleted LinkedIn profile for Tony Stark indicated he received doctorates in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.”

Source: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/who-iron-man

Given all the information and analysis we have, as well as a little logic, we can conclude that Tony has a Ph.D. Even two. He had time to do them. Why doesn't he use his title? Well, maybe for the same reason 616 Tony doesn’t? He doesn’t usually brag. Check out this post if you have any doubts about my statement.

Here are some additional hints:

He gave lectures at scientific conferences (IM1 and IM3 - Bern 1999).

His scientific expertise was not limited to engineering and his company's affairs (all the movies, but specifically I can point you to IM3– the scene with Maya Hansen and her Extremis-enhanced plants in Bern).

“He must have graduated after 1990, because the '90 Brass rat was the first one with the skyline on the edge.” MIT alumni commentary https://alum.mit.edu/slice/who-iron-man

Conclusion (actual): call him Doctor Stark, guys, he deserves it. Despite his modesty about his scientific achievements, Dr Stark has a couple of master's degrees and at least two PhD degrees in the MCU - in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.

[atticsandwich]

SPOILERS FOR THE NEWER LESSONS IN NIGHTBRINGER - careful fellow followers of this blog <3

i love the current lessons so much actually because there is honestly so much underlying angst / potential for it! i doubt the devs will go that deeply into that direction and i don’t think it would translate well within the game anyway but just imagine mc getting more and more concerned about their own powers that also shape their relationship with everyone else… sure everyone loves mc but dia/barb and solomon have entire realms to protect and therefore wish to have mc on their side if push comes to shove (which has been a recurring topic in nb)… mc getting increasingly insecure / afraid that they’ll be seen as a tool / weapon first instead of a friend… i mean especially after being used as bait??? solomon showing his shady side again??? AAAH!!! THINK OF ALL THE POSSIBILITIES!!!

Yes yes YESSSS

also i love that we're given the option to be mad that the people mc loves are being used as "bait" to draw out their power. obey me has been very passive about how mc responds to situations sometimes that them being mad is a great thing!!

re: angst, yeah, i get you, they haven't really hit the mark on really leaning into angst yet, and although i doubt they'll hit this one, i still have high hopes about how it's going to conclude or how they'll handle the situation (the fact that they got teleported to babel + michael's texts to simeon makes me think raphael is FINALLY going to burst and let out all the emotions he's been bottling for literal millenia)

SPEAKING OF RAPHAEL. again, i love that tlhe's the side character focus on a season with the underlying fact of simeon's transformation to a demon - his reactions and avoidance of the situation, even though he's already made aware of it by michael, coupled with the fact that he still has hidden guilt over what happened during the celestial war....... MANNNNN IM SOO EXCITED FOR RAPHAEL DEVELOPMENT AND EXPOSITION..... hopefully this means mephisto and thirteen will also have their own time in the spotlight soon regarding glimpses of their backstories and developing realtionship with the cast (and mc in particular)

ON A SIDE NOTE. anyone else catch how barb reacts after solomon and mc chooses to keep the reason for mc's growing power a secret??? yeahhhhh he defo knows. dude raised solomon and is the demon of time, of course he'd know. knowing him, he probably just wants to see how it plays out, considering he's powerful enough to mitigate any real catastrophe from actually happening (hellooo he was literally contingency plan number 1 from the sf final) love the thought of him just going. heh. this'll be fun to watch :>

ANYWAYSSSSSS im gonna stop yapping now thank u for asking anon and for anyone reading my thoughts. granted i know a lot of these are very tip of the iceberg but i would rather not do a full dissertation on tumblr. knock knock tumblr staff can u add voice notes. no relation to me wanting to yap whatsoever................) (<- says the guy who made and posted an essay about celestial realm parallels to irl catholicism and power structure. WHATEVER!!!!!)

[olderthannetfic]

The main problem that I have with Youtubers who attempt to approach media analysis and fandom through theory and academia is that the vast majority aren't academics. Just being in undergrad isn't actually enough, contrary to the thoughts of many. Reading a Wikipedia article and reiterating what one may find in some Google, even Google Scholar, searches. Ideally, these would be topics approached by people involved in academia as a profession, people with doctoral degrees, who can discuss complex topics in a way that is easily understood by the masses. "What is the negotiation between gender and sex in BL?" "How does CMBYN articulate/complicate hierarchal roles within the gay novel?" "Could SnK express an alternative reading of the formerly isolated Japan?" These are complicated questions they attempt to answer in their video essays when they seldom ever understand the theories they employ.

Yes, I understand this can sound elitist, but as a Black afab person who is currently in a doctoral program for literature, there aren't "easy" answers to any of the questions they attempt to pose, and many Youtubers who primarily make long-form video essays lack the life experience and expertise to sufficiently discuss anything. They're usually too set in their thoughts to answer or explore the broader implications of their claims. Defending a dissertation forces you to do this. Forming a committee of experts in various fields and convincing them to aid you in the development of your dissertation forces you to do this. Being in academic and cordial communication with your peers from all over the world in your field forces you to do this. It's not easy to constantly intake new information from various eras and nations (depending on your topic), meld this information into a coherent essay, and continually make edits as you learn new information, thus changing your outlook on things. Also: it's really petty of me, but it's also incredibly annoying to grade poorly researched undergrad essays who, after some prompting in office hours, say they got these ideas on books, movies, and shows from breadtubers like Somerton, SZ, FD Signifier, or hbomberguy. Cue: me going to watch their videos and realizing they have no idea what they're talking about 88% of the time in terms of theory and application of said theory. Even the ones who frame themselves on being educators in real life, like Signifier, lack any nuance, depth, or media literacy to make a compelling argument if you know even the slightest bit of information. On the bright side, I now know why I've encountered several students with ideologies that are basically conservatism with a veneer of progressivism, or "conservatism in a queer hat."

This concludes my long-winded way of saying "Don't turn to Youtubers for media analysis. You're better off just reading articles by people who have to actually know what they're talking about. The majority of Youtubers (especially the breadtubers) don't have the bandwidth to discuss anything more complex than an episode of Blue's Clues."

--

I mostly agree, but I'd point to a slightly different problem. I'm hesitant to say that the PhD itself is the deciding factor, but I do think a lot of video essayists are insufficiently prepared.

I'm a big fan of Folding Ideas who does have some formal schooling in film, but I don't think it's that education per se that makes him great. He sets himself apart from other video essayists by actually doing his research and having an in-depth approach to his subjects. He doesn't resort to clickbait, and—here's the key—he often takes months or even a year to work on something.

Honestly, I think that's a big part of it: the hoops most youtubers who want to make a living at it have to jump through involve a lot of clickbait and pandering and a fast production schedule. They don't involve reputable peer review except by the court of shriek-y public opinion on twitter.

They'd like to present themselves as documentary filmmaking (which is essentially what Folding Ideas' longer videos are), but they don't actually live up to any of the usual standards of that either.

I think it can be elitist to say that someone needs to have certain letters after their name, yes, but what really strikes me about your average youtube media analysis type and the fanbase is that they want shortcuts.

Exploring the whole history of the gay novel so that you have enough background to talk about CMBYN means reading quite a few novels. Even if you decide to throw out all past scholarly opinion on the topic (which you shouldn't), if you're going to have a meaningful personal theory, you need to have read a lot of novels first. How can you hope to be the person providing the neat overview of the whole genre if you haven't familiarized yourself widely with said genre, and not just through a summary by someone else? That amount of reading doesn't happen overnight.

The trite, surface-level media analysis online is often from people who want to be hailed as great intellectuals but who aren't willing to put in the years it takes to do all the background reading and to develop their skills in argumentation, writing, etc.

Grad school is a convenient and probably faster way to go about all that, but I think you could do it outside of a formal framework... But you would need to actually do it.

I think it's driven by a bunch of people who were The Smart One in grade school and never learned how to work hard on long-term projects instead of pushing through in a sprint. They're used to relying on being the smartest to cut corners and do things before they get bored, only they probably aren't the smartest anymore anyway, and they mistake being smart at one thing for being smart at all things.

There's a real lack of respect for the entire concept of expertise.

[onepiecereactions]

Marine Academy chapter 8

Note: Chapter 8 on 28. Akainu X OC. OS is called Murphy.

THIS CHAPTER IS NSFW ! It's soft but still NSFW.

Please, do not forget, English is not my mother language and translate this kind of scene is pretty hard for me, sorry !

Marine Academy Part 1 Chapter 8

"Left on a mission, no return date".

Murphy reread for the hundredth time the letter written in hurry by Sakazuki an hour after his second departure. It was not planned at all.

She was supposed to take her physical exam at the end of the third semester and spend the evening with him to tell him how catastrophic her sword handling was.

The blonde had nearly failed her exam, within one point, allowing her to validate her semester, only thanks to the intense training session the previous weekend with Sakazuki.

Murphy still remembered how, the next morning, before she started the exam, a soldier she had once seen around Sakazuki, had discreetly gave her this letter. She had learned later that indeed, about ten second years had been called on a mission with the third years. This choice had been made at the last minute. Sakazuki had no choice but to write this letter in hurry during the night before leaving, to inform her.

It had been five long months since he had left. Once again, no letter or call but she now understood why.

But the moment had been particularly badly chosen given the events of the day before he left, when they had exchanged their kiss after training. And as usual, she had smiled at him and left , leaving him under the stars on the training ground. But when she remembered that he had responded vigorously to her kiss after a few seconds, it reassured her.

She stuffed the letter in her pocket, took a deep breath and pushed open the doors.

The jury was waiting for her, sitting on a bench. Murphy took a seat behind the desk, took out her thesis and began reading it.

Once the physical and theorical exams were over, she had entered the fourth semester where she was beginning scientific research.

Her semester had focused mainly on the theory of the various medical specialties and she had to select a topic from one of the specialties to develop a second-year dissertation. It was obviously only the first steps of real scientific research, but the blonde had invested herself body and soul in this file. She had obviously chosen a problem related to emergencies.

"Emergency care in patients with a Logia-type devil fruit, approach and particularities." Murphy began in front of the particularly attentive jury.

Her presentation lasted half an hour, as requested. Her file was clear, supported by scientific data and her experience during her various internships since entering the Academy.

"Thank you." Concluded one of the jury members whom she recognized as the head doctor of traumatology at the Marineford's Grand Hospital Marineford. She left the room in silence, letting the jury fill out their evaluation form discreetly.

When she closed the doors behind her, Claire, and Emma who had already made her presentation the day before, were waiting for her impatiently.

[...]

"Another bottle!" Emma yelled throughout the tavern.

The waiter arrived immediately, placing a bottle of sake in the center of the table, skillfully picking up the other empty bottles.

The brunette's descent was now known to the entire Academy, she was unbeatable. Claire, however, remained close to her, ready to grab her hair in case of an emergency exit... Murphy, for her part, was content to watch the scene, laughing, her yellow cocktail in her hand.

"Well, ladies." The brunette began in a brief moment of lucidity, as she tried to open the bottle with her bare hand.

"I want to congratulate us all on our exams! And good luck to our brilliant friend Claire, who is going to start her very last semester and cowardly abandon us."

The redhead had also finished her fifth semester exams and was going to start the final semester of the third year before finishing her studies at the Marine Academy.

The dorm would seem particularly empty without Claire's wisdom and calm.

As they were clinking glasses together, enjoying these last moments together, a soldier invited himself to the table of the three students. Emma had already grabbed her new bottle, ready to smash it on the soldier's skull, but was held back by Claire.

"Good evening Murphy. I was asked to warn you of Sakazuki's return. They arrived at the port half an hour ago."

Emma's eyes lit up, a psychopathic smile on her lips. "Murphy, do you hear that? It's time to wrap things up, my dear! Otherwise he'll slip through your fingers as soon as he finds another pretty blonde at the port!" The brunette yelled, drinking her glass of sake in one go.

The blonde, embarrassed by her friend's yelling throughout the tavern, hid her face in her hands. But she couldn't hide the smile that had just appeared on her lips at the announcement of Sakazuki's return.

"Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!" The brunette continued to yell throughout the tavern, quickly followed by complete strangers who were just as drunk as she was. Claire rolled her eyes at the whole mess and made discreet signs to the blonde to invite her to leave through the back before things got completely out of hand.

Murphy didn't need asking twice. She took her bag and slipped discreetly out of the tavern. The cold of the night bit her skin, she had forgotten her jacket in the bar. She jogged down the streets to warm up and stopped in front of the window of a store that was strangely still open at this hour.

She widened her eyes when she recognized the storefront.

"Jackpot!" The blonde said as she slipped inside. Her heart warmed in an instant when she smelled the aroma of cakes. Murphy bought two slices of cake, thanked the vendor and set off again at full speed through the streets. The snow was starting to fall. After a good ten minutes of running, which for her was an achievement despite the intensive training she had received from Sakazuki, she slipped through the back door of the large building.

She knew this parallel and discreet path from sneaking up with Sakazuki. She finally arrived in front of his bedroom door, a few snowflakes still in her hair, her dress slightly soaked with alcohol or snow, she wasn't sure.

Her hand hit the door twice, trying not to drop the box of cakes. She hoped that the man had come back directly from the port and hadn't been delayed, so that she could take refuge near her radiator.

No response. Murphy pressed her ear to the door and heard the shower water running. He probably hadn't heard it. The young woman tried to operate the handle and miraculously, it wasn't locked. The blonde slipped into the room, announcing her arrival anyway.

"Sakazuki! It's Murphy! I'm coming, I'm freezing!" The blonde said, putting the box of cakes on the coffee table. She heard the shower water turn off.

In the meantime, she curled up in front of the radiator, sighing with relief when the gentle heat warmed her frozen hands. "I hope you don't mind me coming in, but it's freezing outside and we're not all made of magma..." She continued, laughing.

She felt the man behind her approaching. Murphy turned to greet him but stopped short. He was half-naked, a simple towel around his hips, soaking wet. One of his legs was covered with a scar that had barely healed. His face was closed, no emotion appeared.

This cold face was no longer familiar to her. As they spent time together his features had softened, he had lowered his guard little by little and she no longer felt like she was facing a robot. But that cold face transported the blonde two years back to their first meeting.

She hesitated for a moment. Maybe she had crossed the line? Like Emma had told her, maybe he had met another pretty blonde on a port and their whole story (which was not that long after all) was already in the past for him after these five long months of absence…

"If I bother you I can come back later". Murphy whispered as she slowly got up. She felt like a hummingbird facing a cat ready to jump on her.

"I brought you a cake for your birthday." She continued, pointing at the snow-covered box on the coffee table. Smoke was coming out of Sakazuki's soaked chest, who still hadn't moved.

"I know your birthday was last month but since you weren't there I thought we could still..." The blonde didn't have time to finish before the soldier jumped on her.

She reflexively stepped back, her back lightly hitting the radiator. She felt the man's torso fall on top of her. The young woman found herself completely lying on her back on the carpet, at the foot of the sofa. She felt soldier's body envelop her, his warmth covering every inch of her skin, his right arm sliding down her back to press their two bodies together, his left hand getting lost in her blonde hair. And finally his lips pressed to hers, ardently asking for the right of entry. The man's burning body warmed her frozen body.

She responded in a few seconds to the man's burning kiss, her hips sticking to those of Sakazuki, her back arching under his caresses.

Her heart exploded at this mixture of emotions. Fear and surprise had given way to a burning pleasure of finding the man again and the desire to stay glued to his skin for hours. His kisses migrated to her neck, allowing her to breathe briefly. His left hand went down to her chest, passing under her dress. She shivered as she felt the man's powerful and warm hand caress her while he devoured her neck. As she felt herself completely weak and giving herself body and soul to the man, she stopped for a second, her forehead pressing against his.

"On the bed." She ordered.

She then felt her body take off from the ground quickly. She found herself almost standing, still in the arms of the man who continued to devour her, going from her lips to her neck. She wrapped her legs around his hips. He put his right arm on the woman's buttocks to better support her. He carried her to her room and did not let go of her for a single second as he laid her down on the bed, their lips remaining sealed. She took advantage of the fact that he was above her to lower her hands to her towel which she untied in a second. The proximity of the blonde's hands made him shiver. He hurried to take off the woman's dress for good, admiring the blonde's immaculate skin for a moment. His face went down to her chest while his hand went down to the woman's intimacy. Another burst of heat invaded the young woman when he caressed her. She buried her hands in his hair, her body burned with pleasure.

"Saka..." She whispered.

The blonde's murmur of pleasure excited the man who could not wait any longer. She was perfect, offered in front of him, and begging him. He could not hold back any longer and entered her slowly, his excitement at its peak as she screamed his name with pleasure with each of his thrusts. He felt all control leave him as she screamed his name, arching under him.

She obsessed him, he had dreamed of this moment since she left, his needs guiding him further and further into his fantasies. Holding out for so long without being able to touch her had been a real battle, he had to manage alone all this time, and this night was going to be the realization of all his fantasies. He gave one last thrust, releasing himself inside her at the same time as her as she screamed his name in a final orgasm. He collapsed on top of her carefully, pulled the covers up over them, taking her in his arms so she wouldn't get cold and let sleep take them.

[jpeg-dot-jpeg]

i want to ask about all of those SO BADLY lmao. but i'm most intrigued by Homo et Draconia 👀

ngl, i kinda completely forgot i had this wip going until this tag game lol

Homo et Draconia is a Tim Drake-centric fic (shocker /s) in a kemonomimi type world where people have a secondary species. Tim is, of course, a dragon, and develops typical dragon hoarding tendencies, except the thing he hoards is people. It's a low-key high-key stalker!Tim character study, but the fun part about writing it is that most of the exposition is provided by in-universe sources, like blog updates, articles in scientific journals, elementary school writing assignments, etc. Here's a little snippet!

It is important to acknowledge the extent of profiling within the psychiatric community in regards to second species. It is tempting to attribute certain behaviors to an individual’s latent non-homo sapien DNA, but even behaviors that are commonly associated with a certain second species can have causes completely unrelated to genetics. However, it is still essential for individuals to be aware of any health risks that may be associated with their particular second species. There is a delicate balance to be struck between predisposition and socialization. For example, in popular media and general public opinion, Homo et Draconia are heavily associated with behaviors of kleptomania, hoarding, and anti-sociability, but according to a study done by the Haynes-Davis Clinic, less than 13% of individuals with draconian DNA are convicted of any type of theft between the ages of 18 and 65. There is insufficient data to conclude whether social isolation is more the result of personal preference or discrimination. In fact, the condition draconian-humans are most often diagnosed with is OCD. An estimated 75-80% will suffer from OCD-related symptoms in their lifetime. Dr. Teagan Blackmore theorizes that this could be related to primal instincts that have outlived the situations they evolved for. Where kleptomania and hoarding were once methods of survival in times of resource scarcity, modern day draconian-humans with all base needs met might find these urges persisting to the detriment of the individual. Obsessive thoughts, feelings of anxiety, and repetitive compulsions are experienced by the large majority of this population, often focused in one specific area that varies depending on the individual. Unfortunately, Homo et Draconia is a species on the verge of extinction. Following the 15th and 16th century Dragon Genocides, the population has remained small and continues to steadily decrease. This scarcity of subjects and hesitance of draconian-humans to risk public exposure makes Homo et Draconia difficult to study. Nonetheless, further research is imperative if we are to fully understand the scope of psychiatric conditions among other Reptilia. The Intersection of Second Species and Mental Illness in Chordata Reptilia Chapter 2 of a dissertation by Lee Nguyen

thank you so much @ladytauria and @krizariel for taking an interest in my smorgasbord of wips <3

[jeannereames]

Hii😄, could you talk about Alexander and hefestion's skills? Whether militarily or diplomatically, I heard that Hephaestion was better at politics, diplomacy and logistics, and that in some ways his and Alexander's skills complemented each other.

I'm always a tad amused when my own research is quoted back to me as a bit of general knowledge. 😂 That's not at all a slam, btw! I'm quite pleased it's escaped out of academia to become part-and-parcel of what people know about Hephaistion. Means I made an impact on rehabbing his career.

But yes, those things are true. I wrote about them first back in 1998, in my dissertation, then published it as part of an academic book chapter in 2010, titled "The Cult of Hephaistion" in Responses to Oliver Stone's Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies, P. Cartledge and F. Greenland, eds. Complete with tables! Follow the link to read it.

I am now, some years later, returning to Hephaistion's career with the current monograph I'm working on. I've altered my opinion about some things (primarily details), and modified my take, but it remains largely the same. I've even convinced a number of my colleagues, so Hephaistion as logistics officer now appears in most summaries about him. Now, if I can just convince them he wasn't either incompetent or the quarrelsome bastard he's often made out to be.

He did have diplomatic assignments too, although he's hardly the only one. Erigyios, Perdikkas, Ptolemy...they were also used for diplomatic purposes. Plutarch (in a long contrast with Krateros) says ATG employed Hephaistion for business with the "barbarians" and Krateros for business with Greeks and Macedonians, because Hephaistion agreed with ATG's "Persianizing" whereas Krateros kept his traditional ways. From Plutarch, that's not necessarily a compliment for Hephaistion. It's also not stated so anywhere else beyond Plutarch. I have some theories I'll be discussing in the book.

IF we can take the disproportionate assignment of logistical/diplomatic assignments as any indicator, it would seem that Hephaistion was more skilled in that realm than in combat command. That isn't to say he was no good at combat command, mind (I've had some read it so, as if "not as good" = "bad" because middle ground apparently isn't permitted).

It also doesn't mean he wasn't a decent fighter. He probably was, as he seems to have been assigned to lead the agema (Royal) unit of the Hypaspists, e.g., the king's personal guard in battle. According to earlier accounts of the origin of this unit, Philip created them to cut across regional divisions, picking the largest men and best fighters. The agema was, if Waldemar Heckel is correct, drawn specifically from the sons of Companions (Hetairoi). That would back up Curtius' description of him as "larger in physique" than Alexander. (That's what the Latin actually says, not simply "taller.") But keep in mind, the best fighters are only occasionally equally good at command. Those are two different skills.

Finally, his choice as Chiliarch may also underscore some of what we've already seen in his assignments. But it's this appointment that leads some scholars to conclude that he rose due to Alexander's favoritism, not actual ability on his part. That, however, seems to me to stem from several (erroneous) assumptions.

IME, competent people surround themselves with other competent people, at least for any length of time. Flatters may be tolerated, but they're not continually advanced. It's dictators who surround themselves with yes-people (and not all of them; they also need competent individuals). Alexander may have been called a "tyrant" by the Greeks, but he wasn't. He was a king. The Greeks/Athenians/Spartans/Others were playing politics. Macedonian kings had to court their courtiers. If Alexander had been manifestly unfair in his appointments, his men would have rebelled against those officers. They rebelled...but not for that reason. They wanted to go home.

For those who regard Alexander (and Philip) as tyrannical, and/or the enemy of (Greek) freedom, and/or megalomaniacs, and lucky rather than competent, then sure. It would follow that ATG would surround himself with asslickers. But if one thinks he was actually good at what he did (which is a different thing from approving of conquest, mind), and a halfway decent politician--then no, it doesn't follow that his top officers were yes-men. Curtius bluntly tells us that Hephaistion was freer than anyone to "upbraid" the king. Doesn't sound like a yes-man to me.

I think Hephaistion was appointed as Chiliarch for two reasons: Alexander trusted him AND he could do the job. Too bad he didn't live long enough for us to see what he might have done with it.

[iam93percentstardust]

so for the last four years, my pi has been complaining about a set of figures that she thinks are a bad representation of the data i'm trying to present. i can't provide a picture because it's unpublished data, but it looks kind of like this but silver and with little colored squiggles coming out of it.

she doesn't like the squiggles. she wants them to be balls instead.

and for the last four years, every time she's brought it up, i've told her "i don't know how to do that" and she's either told me to look it up in our past group papers, none of which contained anything like what she wanted, or passed me off to one of my other group members, none of whom knew what it was that our pi wanted or how to do that. so the figures haven't gotten done.

a couple weeks ago, she got huffy about them again (and of course only "remembered" that she'd asked for them in the past, not that i don't know how to do them). once again, i told her i didn't know how to do them, and then she bitched me out about not telling her that i didn't know how to do them which whatever, i'm used to her selective memory at this point. so after bitching me out, she passed me off to another group member yet again to teach me how to do them. turns out, once i described them, that this group member didn't know how to do them either but, unlike any of the others, she was willing to help me figure it out.

so, in sequence, here's what we discovered: 1. none of the programs that our pi has told me could do the balls over the last four years are actually capable of doing the balls. 2. none of the papers that our pi has told me to refer back to that were supposedly published by our group that would have examples of what she was looking for were published until three months ago so unless she sent me the drafts (and she hadn't) i was never going to know what they looked like. 3. the only software that is capable of doing the balls isn't compatible with a mac system (the only computers in the lab). in fact, it only runs on a linux system, which i could probably learn if i had more time but my dissertation needs to be sent off to my committee in two days. 4. it is possible to manually draw circles on the protein (it's just time consuming) but every paper that our pi has published using the actual software has had, at max, 7 balls on the protein. 5. i would need between 80-175 balls on my protein. look at that picture. imagine 175 circles on it. imagine how crowded that would be.

so after attempting to manually draw circles on the protein and getting through about 5 of them, we both realized that our pi was going to absolutely hate the representation and make me redo it anyway.

and that's where this saga concludes: after four years of listening to my pi complain about this figure, i've decided that fuck it, i'm not doing that, i'm submitting my dissertation as is, and she can get over it.

it's not like she's read my dissertation anyway.

[yamayuandadu]

I don't know how well versed in Canaanite or Phoenician stuff, but if so, what's the deal with Tanit? Did she originate in Ashtart, or was a separate goddess? I keep finding a lot of conflicting information on her, and the fact that she's associated with supposed child-sacrifice means a lot of the stuff I find on her has an air of sensationalism

I won’t claim it’s a major interest (recall that the only strictly Canaanite deity whose wiki page I wrote is Baalat Gebal) but I think I can help. However, bear in mind there might be significant gaps in my knowledge esp. regarding the various colonies across the Ibernian peninsula, Sardinia etc.

Saying anything firm about Tanit is not exactly easy since virtually all attestations of her are brief dedicatory inscriptions, theophoric names, toponyms (ex. Aqtanit, Aitanit, Kfar Tanit) and symbolic representations. No hymns, no myths, no theological speculation, not even much in the way of sources hinting at how her cult was organized. Such a body of evidence doesn’t let one do much beyond concluding she certainly was an actively worshiped deity.

There are multiple proposals regarding her name but as far as I am aware most if not all come from authors whose methods leave a lot to be desired, so I’ll leave that out. It��s really not possible to say much beyond the fact she was clearly regarded as the tutelary goddess of Carthage. There is also evidence for some degree of worship in Sidon from the sixth century BCE onward, Kition from the fifth (references to a group of devotees, theophoric names) and in the Mount Lebanon range (a single Carthaginian inscription mentions “Tanit in Lebanon”; see Spencer L. Allen, The Splintered Divine, p. 243-244 and 302). The only connection between Tanit and another deity we can be sure about is that with Baal Hammon, presumably her spouse. It’s best reflected in her epithet “Face of Baal”, found almost exclusively in sources from Carthage, the main exception being two attestations from Constantine in Algeria. What exactly this title entails is difficult to tell, though (The Splintered Divine, p. 242-243). An interesting Neo-Punic inscription pairs Tanit with Kronos, which would indicate the author was familiar with the interpretatio graeca of Baal Hammon, which goes back at least to Sophocles’ times (The Splintered Divine, p. 57).

Out of necessity the rest of the response will largely focus on explaining who Tanit certainly wasn’t. 

For starters, she definitely was not Ashtart in any shape or form. Aren M. Wilson-Wright in Athtart. The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age (the book isn’t open access, but you can find the dissertation it was based on here) points out that authors seeking to prove they’re related treat data from different locations and time periods as fully interchangeable, without taking into account deities change across time (p. 7). 

Ultimately the only real argument comes from a text discovered during the excavations in Sarepta dated to the sixth century BCE. It contains the compound name “Tanit-Astarte” (The Splintered Divine, p. 241). The problem is that the two were clearly viewed as distinct in Carthage, as evidenced by roughly contemporary sources. (The Splintered Divine, p. 244). 

Allen notes we might be dealing with a situation like Tanit being worshiped alongside Astarte and the double name designating her as an “associate” of sorts, or that similarly as in the case of Neo-Assyrian compound theonyms the double name indicates a form of Tanit with Astarte’s attributes, like how “Ashur-Enlil” was a designation of Ashur as the king of the gods and not an indication he was merged with Enlil (The Splintered Divine, p. 241).

Even with Ashtart out of the picture, the dreadful specter of interchangeability of goddesses refuses to leave the room, though. There’s an even more nonsensical proposal, namely that Tanit is, somehow, Asherah. We have Frank Moore Cross of Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic to blame for this one. As outlined by Steve A. Wiggins in A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess (p. 131), subsequent publications making the same claim just rely on Cross, with no new material added. The equation is utterly baseless since it depends on assigning symbols to “Asherah” (really to Ugaritic Athirat) based on the pure vibes school of scholarship. Alleged leonine connections rest entirely on the deeply puzzling equation with the sparsely attested Qudshu (or however we’re romanizing her name this week), conclusively proven to be an Egyptian invention (see Christiane Zivie Coche, Foreign Deities in Egypt, pages 4-5) and thus irrelevant to this discussion.

It’s worth noting the only reason why forced attempts are made every now and then is that since Q. appears once - on a now lost stela, lol - with Anat and Ashtart - she CLEARLY must be a northern goddess of equal standing which somehow means Athirat (hardly attested outside Ugarit, and even then, Shapash, Nikkal, Pidray, the collective Kotharat are all equally if not better attested…). So, in other words: the Tanit link here was built on multiple levels of unsound foundations.

[nonstandardrepertoire]

Parashat Bəshalaḥ: יִדְּמוּ | yidəmu

And so perhaps these future-tense verbs, these verbs of incompleteness, come to teach us that the terror and the crossing are linked, that neither one can end until both end. As long as our movement is a source of petrifying dread to those who are Not Us, we will never finish our crossing. As long as we cross with the purpose of conquest, destruction, and dispossession, we will never reach the other shore. Only when those we must share this beautiful Earth with have no cause to fear our crossing will we be able to complete it. We will never get truly free if we attempt to build our freedom on the corpse of others’. It’s all of us or none of us.

I don’t remember ever being taught to read and write English. I know it must have happened, but it happened so early that I cannot recall a time before I had those skills. It’s part of the bedrock foundation of my mind, like blinking or breathing.

I do remember, however, being taught about vowels. Specifically, I remember being taught a little rhyme to remember them: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W. The presence of W on this list has always perplexed me, as it probably perplexes you. I’m not in touch with anyone from my preschool class at this remove, but other people around my age have reacted with bewilderment when I trot out this extended version, as the version they learned stopped, sensibly, at Y. The only thing I can conclude is that somewhere in the American Heartland was a dedicated but not particularly effective Welsh revitalization activist.

Still, this mysterious W does point us towards today’s topic. Because it turns out, when you really try to dig into it on a technical level, it’s not trivial to pin down exactly what a vowel is, and different definitions can lead to different evaluations of edge cases like the second syllable of table or the word yarn.

This often happens, in my experience, when you start to dig into the fundamentals of a given field. Explaining what a loanword is takes a few sentences; explaining what a word is takes dissertation after dissertation with no end in sight. Proving the quadratic formula is possible with robust middle-school math; proving that one thing can equal another thing is an absolute nightmare. There is a certain squishiness to the world, it seems to me, that resists the project of translating fuzzy intuitive understandings into rigorous formalized specificity [a].

[a] Or, more properly: The squishiness is not in the world, but in us and our squishy human brains.

You may have encountered the claim that verb tenses in Biblical Hebrew are somewhat squishy. Often, I think people make too much of this. It’s true that the so-called past tense in Biblical Hebrew isn’t always and exclusively used to refer to events that have already happened, but that’s true for English, too. If I say, “It’s 2050. A coalition of people of goodwill thwarted the fascist tide and laid the foundation for a just and sustainable society in its wake...”, we understand that I’m describing something in the future even tho grammatically, most of the verbs I’m using are past tense. And, in the reverse, I can use future-tense verbs to talk about the past, as if I wrote in a memoir, “Soon I will go off to college and lose touch with all these people. I will forget most of their faces, and all of their names...”. Linguists, being good academics, love to categorize things and come up with clever taxonomic labels to flag usages like this, but these usages aren’t particularly mysterious, and nor do they mean that English verbs don’t really have tenses.

It’s certainly fair to point out (and dig into) the fact that Biblical Hebrew verb tenses work differently than English ones — in particular, it seems clear that Biblical Hebrew verb forms are much more tied to completion or duration than English ones are (the Hebrew past tense indicates an action that is completed or that happens in a moment in time, whereas the future indicates an action that is incomplete or that happens over a longer span of time, with these indications often carrying more weight in determining the form of the verb than the temporal location of the action compared to the moment of narration) — but by and large at the 101 level, I think it’s not wrong to treat Biblical Hebrew’s two full tenses as pointing towards the past and towards the future [b][c].

[b] It’s worth noting in passing that one can make a distinction between the conceptual issue two languages thinking about time differently and the translational issue of using different verb tenses in the target language than in the source language to capture the same temporal framework. Temporal relationships in a sentence can get quite gnarly — consider the back-and-forth pileup of “Yesterday, I thought I would go to the store this morning, but then it was sleeting, so now I’m going on Thursday” — and it’s not surprising that different languages should take different approaches to tying convolutedly connected moments in time to forms of a verb. [c] If you want the full skinny on what the heck is going on with tenses in Biblical Hebrew, I can do no better than to steer you to the eighty-odd page discussion of it in Paul Joüon and Takemitsu Muraoka’s Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, which is unexpectedly readable despite its daunting technical density, and is also mostly free of untranslated Latin.

So now that I’ve expressed my irritation with people raising a fuss about Biblical Hebrew verbs’ non-English relationship with grammatical tense, I’m going to go ahead and raise a fuss about Biblical Hebrew verbs’ non-English relationship with grammatical tense.

In Shəmot 15:16, we read, in the Song of the Sea, בִּגְדֹל זְרוֹעֲךָ יִדְּמוּ כָּאָֽבֶן עַד־יַעֲבֹר עַמְּךָ יי | bigdol zəro’akha yidəmu ka’áven ad ya’avor aməkhe [haSheim] | “by Your mighty arm, [all who dwell in Kaná’an] will be inert as a stone until Your people cross, [haSheim]”. I’ve translated the verb I want to spend time with today, yidəmu, as “will be inert”, and that’s already a bit of a fudge: This verse is a very clear temporal clause, and really just means that the stillness was incomplete until the crossing was — a classic case of Biblical Hebrew deploying a future-tense verb to describe an incomplete action more than one that has yet to occur. I don’t think it would be wrong to translate this as “they were inert until Your people crossed”, and I wouldn’t argue against someone who put forth the claim that that translation more closely matches how this text would have been understood when it was first composed.

But that very incompleteness strikes me. We’re reading the Exodus story now; we’ll encounter it again in a few months’ time at Pésaḥ, and then a few months after that at Shavu’ot. We read references to it twice a day during the Shəma, and bind excerpts from it to ourselves in təfilin most mornings. Liturgically, we are, in a sense, never done with the Exodus. We’re always in the middle of it, it’s always incomplete. We are always mid-trudge on an exposed seabed, a ferocious wind blowing around us, terror seizing those the Torah thinks are our enemies. No one can move; everyone is stone; we are stuck in this liminal moment forever.

And so perhaps these future-tense verbs, these verbs of incompleteness, come to teach us that the terror and the crossing are linked, that neither one can end until both end. As long as our movement is a source of petrifying dread to those who are Not Us, we will never finish our crossing. As long as we cross with the purpose of conquest, destruction, and dispossession, we will never reach the other shore. Only when those we must share this beautiful Earth with have no cause to fear our crossing will we be able to complete it. We will never get truly free if we attempt to build our freedom on the corpse of others’. It’s all of us or none of us.

This is, admittedly, reading very aggressively against the text. But what of that? We have been blessed to multiply like fish; is it any surprise if we sometimes swim upstream?

[This has been an installment of One-Word Torah. You can read the full series here.]

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Hope for the present, not the future

Reading the previous post on this blog by Christina, I can’t help but feel… a lot of déja vu, actually. I don’t mean to be blasé at all, because everything that Christina alludes to and talks about in that article is concretely, depressingly relatable. From this side of the Atlantic, I’ve been grimly avoiding looking too deeply into what “Project 2025” entails, because honestly? If it happens, it will happen and I won’t be able to do anything even if I know every up-to-date detail about it, so why borrow the trouble? I have enough in my own life (and country’s politics) already, but being geographically situated next to America is really uncomfortable, in that their problems are almost simultaneously ours, and if they’re not, the entangled political-economic-sociocultural mess makes it that way. And yet my reaction to news of upheaval, disruption, and impending doom is to say “okay” and then go back to my little solarpunk ways of living and being. Given all of the strife that bombards my consciousness on a daily basis, why am I still writing hopelessly naïve articles about compassion and optimism et cetera on the internet? It’s a serious question, not really a rhetorical one. I wrote this article to see if I could come up with an answer; I think I recognized a few different factors, but I’m curious to know what you think after reading through the article. Let me know in the comments.

My father is quite sure that Trump is going to annex Canada,* given our reservoirs of freshwater, and the fact that history is rhyming pretty hard right now in his view as the child of immigrants who left their home after the ravages of World War 2. That one started with Germany annexing Austria, and look how that went. He’s not alone in that opinion, either. However, and perhaps this is the anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants speaking, wars have happened before, a lot, and are happening now, a lot, and people living and dying violently happens pretty much every day; it might just be our turn next. Sucks to suck, but that just seems to be the way of the world, and living on this planet means running the risk of The Bad Thing Happening. Hm, maybe it’s post-car-accident trauma or whatever, but random happenings (not even malice aforethought!) ruins peoples’ lives every day and that’s the way of the world.

Maybe I’m more positive because my family (both sides; my Oma and Opa lived through the war as well before coming to Canada) lived through an apocalypse** that was a political violent upheaval and war in Europe; they were poor farmers already, they had nothing when the politicians decided that the war had ended, and they still managed to make a pretty good life for themselves and their families in the aftermath. So I’ve seen that people can live through these things, and their lives do get better. Eventually. You have to scrimp and save and deal with racist bullshit and work menial jobs for a good long while, but I am programmed to believe that you make it there in the end, because I am living proof of it. So I might be biased, and too focused on that end result.

Or it might be because I recently spent six years studying post-apocalyptic fiction and have read through a myriad of imagined ends … as well as the imagined worlds that come after those ends. Grant you, a lot of those worlds are pretty terrible places to exist! But they do exist. And there are people (the protagonists that we follow) who are working to make it a better place. Kind of like solarpunks are now, actually. To tl;dr the takeaway of the fourth chapter of my dissertation in a very blasé way, horrible death is already a foregone conclusion in the post-disaster/-apocalypse scenarios, so the best thing to do is to make life as good as possible for the people around you for as long as you can to the best of your abilities until you expire.

Looking at the news, it’s easy to conclude that the world is full of doom and gloom and awfulness. Just following the reports coming out of Gaza and the Congo alone makes it pretty hard to imagine humanity acting worse than we already are. But it’s not actually all of humanity committing war crimes and exploiting children and adults with literal slave labour. There happens to be a lot of people who think that behaviour is abhorrent, and are organizing against the inhumane treatment of others (including earth others); there are, in fact, many communities of caring individuals who will stand up for human rights. I don’t think it’s incendiary to say “Hm, maybe you shouldn’t hurt someone else even if they’ve hurt you.” I feel like this is something we try to teach our children and bake into our narratives of who is actually heroic and who isn’t.

The people in charge might be okay with the cost of their political agenda being human suffering, but it helps to keep in mind that, in many cases, they’re a pretty small percentage of a pretty large amount of people. It’s true that in a lot of the so-called democracies we have in the Global North right now, there is a lot of support for terrible people with terrible ideas - but it is also good to keep in mind that the political systems we operate in are, each of them, abysmal. As the saying goes, “democracy is the worst political system, aside from all the other ones.” Jokes aside, reading about the stats of First Past The Post elections, voter suppression, and more can be at the same time disheartening as it is encouraging: there are good people in the world, but a lot of their votes do not count for much … if they can vote at all.

Despite that, I think it is important to participate in one’s political system, no matter where they are located. Especially at the municipal level - that is where I find that some of the most progressive, exciting work is being done. In my opinion, if you aren’t especially thrilled about government, it’s not really very smart to disengage from it, because involved or not, you’ll still fall victim to those who manipulate the political system and you will not know how to fight back. Sun-Tzu says to “know thy enemy” and I’m not suggesting you embark on an entire political science degree, but if you have the capacity for it, participating in direct democracy, attending council meetings, volunteering with a local union or political organization will give you the skills you need to understand and become familiar with the policies affecting your life … and also give you the tools with which to change things. This piece (article and full poem “To Throw a Wrench in the Blood Machine”) by Kyle Tran Myhre discusses voting as just one tool in a toolkit in more detail, in a very nuanced although US-politics centric way, and the line “But those who fight monsters have taught me: short-term and long-term thinking are not mutually exclusive” is very relatable. Solarpunk is about both-and, not either/or.

People survive dark and dangerous times by organizing, by reaching out to each other, by enacting practices of care. Maybe caring for you takes the form of making a poster for your local tenants’ union and NOT going to the rally. Maybe it’s watering the little tree next to your bus stop in a heat wave. Maybe it’s organizing a neighbourhood potluck, or just showing up to the one that someone else organized, signalling solidarity with your presence. I have found that being a body that is present is often such a boon to an organizer, regardless of whether or not your participation goes beyond that.

This essay is rather wander-y and I hope not too Pollyannaish. But I’ve had the sinking feeling that life was only ever going to get worse since I was 23; that’s over a decade that I’ve had to get used to this expectation of future ruin psychically, so perhaps that’s coming out. I don’t really expect things to get better, and I don’t know that I ever have. The only thing that really interrupted my internal narrative of cynicism and doomerism was solarpunk! And I still have to dose myself up with it, deliberately choose to reframe my mindset, whenever I start to spiral. Because I do, a lot, when I think about futures. There’s a reason I’m medicated - there’s nothing off with my brain chemistry, though; instead, everything’s off with the world. I marvel that more people are not clinically depressed or diagnosed with anxiety given the state of things.

As far as I can tell, my hope is thus a very present one: it is sparked by other humans who get together in groups to make life better for other people right now. Life can be terrible, miserable, and dark. The universe can seem vast and uncaring. But somewhere there’s a soup kitchen, and a coalition of people writing their government officials for more affordable housing supports, and they’re caring in this moment about the things that are also happening in this moment and the people who live around them now, and they are not deciding not to act because of a calculation based on a possible future outcome (although certainly that is part of their assessment of the situation, it is not the deciding factor). So I might not be part of those groups, but just knowing that they exist and are working towards justice but also being just now and kind now and acting with compassion now… maybe sometimes that’s what I need to hold on to in order to keep the dark at bay.

I want to write one more paragraph that talks about why then, for me, solarpunk is more oriented towards the now, not to the future. I think I needed to start with a solarpunk that dreamed of possible futures so that I could actually begin to see how I could work in the now, and solarpunk futurism gives me a goal. But personally, solarpunk presents is where it’s at.

—-

*I find it darkly funny that our next prime minister is almost guaranteed to be the alt-right-courting Conservative politician Pierre Poilievre, who has on many occasions criticized our current PM for weakening / destroying / doing bad things to our relationship with America (economic/political/etc). If Trump gets in, Polievre will have to deal with him first hand - and he will either welcome foreign troops with open arms (as many Canadians wish they were Americans, oddly enough) or bumble his way into being bravely run over by tanks.

**I remember interviewing my Beppe in grade three about her childhood experience of WWII and she talked about evacuating down roads where there were dead and bloated cows and human bodies (mostly soldiers) torn apart on the side of the road. Before the end of the war they were eating tulip bulbs and potato peelings in the basement of their home while Nazi troops occupied the main floor. Very apocalyptic. I figured everyone’s grandparents had stories like this, though, and by the time I was fourteen I was so sick of hearing about World War Two, because our history curriculum seemed kind of obsessed. I got it at home AND at school. Ugh, apocalypse, whatever, let me get back to reading my Animorphs plz.

[somethingclevermahogony]

Talk about your writing and editing process?

(For the ask game) :)

Oof, I could give you my ideal process or I could give you what my actual process was/is. I'll go with the actual thing.

Start planning out the world, fill a bunch of word documents and journals with seemingly random bits of lore and doodles. Do this while you should be paying attention in your very expensive university classes

Create a script and numeric system. Scribble inane nonsense on the whiteboards during club meetings.

Lose the journals where said system was kept

Start writing in fits and bursts

Wait for an excuse to spend days and hours feverishly writing...say a pandemic?

Write one or two chapters every night, read those chapters to your partner while they're tired and just want to get some sleep. Marvel that they still agreed to marry you

Finish your first manuscript, it's 120,000 words long, maybe a bit long for your first, but that's okay.

Get a wee bit intoxicated and tell your groomsmen about your WIP at your bachelor party.

At the urging of your partner don't touch the manuscript for 3 months so you can start editing with a fresh mind.

Research literary agents even though that is months (years) away.

Meanwhile keep coming up with more lore. Remake the language and calendar. You're not even done with book 1, start plotting out sequels and prequels

Start a tumblr

Start editing! You plan just to do basic stuff first, looking for plot holes and gaps, spelling errors

Oh god, who let me write? This is ninety percent typos

"Editing" turns into just rewriting the entire thing.

Repeatedly add and remove the same character.

Finish a year later. You think you've been cutting out unnecessary stuff but somehow you've gone from 120,000 words to 230,000 words. How?

Move to another country, everything gets turned upside down, you forget most of your journals.

University and DnD takes up most of your time so you don't get back to the manuscript. Most of your writing related to your WIP is the stuff you post about on Tumblr

Finally get back to the manuscript!

Conclude that you just can't fit everything you want into one reasonably sized book, split into three.

Congrats you just gave yourself more work, start writing book 1 (luckily a lot of that can come from part one of the old book)

You're supposed to be writing your master's dissertation but you want to work on WIP. Procrastinate on both. Tell yourself you'll start really working on your dissertation tomorrow (I will, I swear this time)

Stay up until 2:30am responding to Tumblr asks

Profit?

[saviourkingslut]

me: has to hand in an introduction and dissertation outline in a month or so, should be handing in written pieces by now

me actually: almost in tears trying to figure out how to explain to my supervisor that ive been doing more source research as they asked to do to figure out my methodology and that i have now concluded that the project she hastily wrote with another professor and which i applied to nonetheless remains as structurally unsound as it was when i first mentioned this 5 months ago