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googledocsdyke · 4 years ago

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Do you have any thoughts/recommended texts for Cas analysis? I genuinely love the dean gender studies and I just wanna know what people might apply to Cas.

yes absolutely!! while dean studies is my first love i also deeply love cas analysis (casnalysis?) and wanna strive to do more of it. here’s some stuff off the top of my head:

1. gender, sexuality, heavenly embodiment

this is much more theological and less psychological than dean’s whole Deal because there’s so much fascinating stuff around how the angels in general experience express and conceptualise gender (@autisticandroids has a good post about angel gender & lily sunder has some regrets) but for cas in particular there’s this fascinating kind of collective fandom agreement (which i DO also agree with) that cas’ own gender kind of is gay man, that he actively chose gay manhood, but also that he’s kind of..... lacking the Insane Genderishness that dean exhibits at all times, even though he actively chose to engage in male gendering and became so comfortable housed Within Jimmy that he, as some post i saw the other day that i can’t find anymore said, “became his own body” when jimmy died.

like on the one hand there’s an almost-canonical transness to the whole process but it also never feels fully written-into because 1) the supernatural writers for all their insanity are sometimes very boring and *most* of the time only feel interested in narratively expressing angels As Their Vessels anyways and just like leaving convenient spaces around these questions (boldest thing they ever did was hot girl cas which i WISH i had the range to unpack) 2) there’s a vague inevitabilist shrug to the whole thing since they obviously weren’t gonna recast misha collins (though they HAVE tried to get rid of him) and 3) something amorphous about cas’ entire..... personhood? makes him Empty Of Gender as a contrast to dean’s Full Of Gender (i believe it was @deanwinchestergender who said this) and like is it just the juxtaposition to dean/jensen’s whole insane Deal? or something else?

like he actively chooses the terms of his own embodiment and yet narratively it feels like a shrug. and we’re all like “well obviously even though he’s a celestial being he was always a gay man” and like WHY. i love it idk idk much to think about! and yeah just in general the theological questions of possession and cas genuinely Becoming a man as he iterates himself consciously towards humanity it almost feels like. by doing the most boring things possible with his gender they made it interesting? idk if that makes sense.

2. discipline, free will, metanarratives

cas is like a tool (“i am not a hammer, as you say”) held in constant discipline and surveillance by the system that enmeshes him and it’s really, really fascinating to watch the way the angels hold each other to conformity. especially pre-god they kind of produce each other as foucauldian disciplinary subjects (which i posted about here) in perpetual visibility through angel radio, generating their own and each other’s conformity rather than being directly ruled through like a single centralised source of power. only the spectre of a god. and obviously cas’ whole thing is that he has ALWAYS disobeyed and the narrative affords him this psychological interiority never given to the foucauldian subject, an internal will and desire for freedom in a way that fits more with the liberal subject (super roughly and not with the same pro-capitalist implications but he has this internal drive for self-liberation.

and that’s also where the metanarrative comes in ofc! i think it was @dykecas who said that cas is a real person written by people who hate him, and there’s this crack in the narrative (mirroring the crack in his chassis) where cas gets in, over and over, despite all the order imposed by the show’s authorfathergod. like we’ve all seen the analysis about how it was Never supposed to be this way they DID try to fire misha collins in 2012 and yet this gay man literally cannot be stopped! i think actually his appearance in scoobynatural is a neat little distillation of this — he drops into this animated world originally with a singular purpose (Save Sam And Dean) the same way he dropped into lazarus rising with a single 3-episode arc (Save Dean). huge hammer behaviour. his “utility” diminishes within the narrative (he finds that he can’t fly in the scooby doo universe) and so he is no longer a tool/means to an end that salvation moves Through. and in the process (and huge creds to @lesbianyuugi for this) he does something ENTIRELY unrelated to his original cas-as-tool aim, and learns, like, the meaning of laughter from shaggy and scooby. WHICH brings me onto the third point

3. love, queer kinship, family-making

HE’S GAY AND HE’S A DAD! i feel like a lot of tumblr throws around the term “found family” in a very flat and tropey way (which is fine it’s cute and fun no matter what!) but like . GOD there’s so much specific stuff going on here. like the way that cas (unintentionally) obliterates the midwestern white christian nuclear family (made incarnate in the novaks) which like could be uniformly portrayed as an act of deep malice and villainy but instead grows to serve as a surrogate (if imperfect/complex, but DEEPLY loving) father figure for the gay daughter who has now escaped that nuclear family/seen it destroyed depending on how you read it? like he remasters the entire concept of fatherhood and it’s a very interesting (if DEEPLY) unintentional subversion of the homewrecking non-nuclear gay trope. cas is so good because his character arc doesn’t say “look, gay people can be normal and have perfect settled families just like you” it says “gay people DON’T have normal settled families actually and they are full of love anyways! or Because of the abnormalcy itself!)

to cite ziz lesbianyuugi again he DOES queer fatherhood in his parenting of jack particularly because it really is one of the ONLY parent-child relationships in the show that breaks the incessant cycle of abuse and control and cold indifference perpetuated by the authorfathergod (a cycle reified in 15x20 lol). like god’s treatment of cas and his siblings mirrors john’s treatment of sam and dean (particularly dean) mirrors victor’s treatment of krissy and her crew mirrors dean’s later treatment of jack. there is a CONSTANT reiteration of the story of authorfathergod (often a father tightly entwined in biological kinship) treating a child as a mechanism or a tool or a means to an end. and cas looks at ALL that he has suffered and all that he is ever known and chooses constantly to reject it with every piece of love he expresses for his child. and not to sound like the kind of academic people make fun of on twitter but there is an INHERENT queerness to that. gay love will pierce through [the veil of death/the thick silence of abuse/the mechanism of godly control/hegemonic american masculinity] and save the day

anyways here are some very haphazard recs on everything above for further reading:

angels in america (tony kushner)

histrionics of the pulpit: trans tonalities of religious enthusiasm

the public universal friend: religious enthusiasm in revolutionary america

discipline and punish (michel foucault)

friendship as a way of life (michel foucault)

the genesis of blame (recommended by @pietacastiel who has GREAT theology content in general

all about love (bell hooks)

the chapter “when hated characters talk back” in anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age (is actually explicitly about cas)

also cannot recommend enough following the ppl i tagged above!! most of the unlinked stuff is available through http://libgen.li/ and bookshop is a good alternative to amazon if ur american and want physical copies

#thank you so much for this ask it was a delight to answer #spn #casnalysis #making a tag officially #gendernatural #long post

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old-soul-new-bones-who-is-this · 4 years ago

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Mexico: Remade, destroyed, remade again

Aztec legends tell a tale of a cyclical world in which each age rises from the ruin of the last. New people rise from the remains of the old. Famous Mexican author, historian, and anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla wrote on this rebirth concept of the Nahuatl people in his novel The Aztec Image of Self and Society, published in 1992. (Hey, that’s as old as me!) Now, you might be thinking who are the Nahuatl? Weren’t we talking about the Aztec? In ANT 3212 we discussed the importance of the foundation of ancient Aztec culture in modern day Mexico and learned that, surprise surprise, Aztec is actually an umbrella term for multiple groups of people native to Mexico and Central America.

Modern day Mexico is in a state of cultural transformation where there are multiple movements towards the acceptance of an indigenous past and that of a colonial past. It is imperative to understand that Mexico is a large place, and that one person's indigenous heritage is not another's. Mexico is a true melting pot, brought to a simmer in the modern age as the people create new social policies and back new representations. Throughout this module I was reminded of the ancient rebirth legend, and how through ancient and modern hardship the peoples of Mexico have rebuilt their physical homes and cultural foundations on the bones of what was left after each devastation. How, though changed irrevocably through colonialism and shifting political boundaries, you can still find the Aztec people in Mexico even if some now speak Spanish and worship through Catholicism. As an Anthropology student it has me question this journey from ancient to modern day. How did the Nahuatl people fare in the Mexican revolutionary period? Do they have the same federal oversight as the North American indigenous peoples?

This information wasn’t covered in class, but when researching about how prevalent the ancient Aztec culture was in modern day Mexico I came across this. Oaxaca, Toluca, and Tlaxcala. Do these names sound familiar? These names are modern day places that can be found in Mexico and are all named in the Nahuatl language. My favorite is Tlaxcala which means “where there is an abundance of Tortillas.”

Word count:333

Readings:

Leon-Portilla, Miguel, and Klor de Alva Jose Jorge. The Aztec Image of Self and Society: an Introduction to Nahva Culture=Anti-Guos Mexicanosa a Traves De Sus Cronicas y Cantares. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Pr., 1992.

Peters-Golden, Holly. Culture Sketches: Case Studies in Anthropology. Dubuque, IA: CGraw-Hill, 2012.

Mexican Place Names in Nahuatl. Accessed April 19, 2021. http://www.mexica.net/nahuatl/placenam.html.

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theenjoninecollective · 5 years ago

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Hey, I'm just asking this out of interest because I want to understand other people's thoughts. So I don't mean to be rude or anything, ship whatever you want. But why did you choose to ship enjonine over enjoltaire, as the later is such a popular one?

Mod @viridescentlights

Is this your way of flirting, hmm? If it was, it’s not working the way you want it. That aside, you say you want to understand and that it’s out of interest, but if it was, why the question at the end? That’s downright condescending. Simply put, your ask never meant to respect our opinions, in the end. In what way does this benefit you at all, hmm? I ask this because the timing of this ask, though given in January, is suspect. Fandom activity in Les Mis has been quite low, but it always has been given the fluctuating interest of people towards it. Furthermore, there are different factions in the group, and I’ve observed that your group is very active. So why bother us, when your group has enough fan art, fanfic, and whatnot? We’re busy enjoying on our own. It does not matter if it’s popular because that is our interest. Unless you want another fic war because you’re bored? Pfft. You could’ve asked in a better way, you know? We could’ve organized a sort of fic exchange and whatnot! Instead you go ride on your high horse and be demeaning. It’s annoying already.

So, if you want an exchange, just let us know, mate. It’s not that hard to do. Plus, it’s fun. I’ve been able to do one with a good friend who ships enjoltaire. Why destroy when we can make art, mate? Let this be our enemies-to-friends-to-maybe-partners story, yeah? Haha. But seriously. Do not do this rude ask again.

Anyway, I’ll let my friend do the nuanced discussion. Ta.

Mod @decembersiris:

Just because a ship is popular that does not mean I’m going to ship it. Often times now most of my ships are not the popular ones because in the fandoms I am in, the more popular ones end up being really toxic, I have found. And this includes Les Miserables and the enjoltaire ship as well.

Why I don’t ship enjoltaire: the ship itself

I have watched the musical and read the book. I have also watched multiple films and TV series such as the 2012 movie and the French 2000 miniseries. Of course there are more out there and more that I have watched but I’m not going to go into detail, because the point is that I am well reversed in the mediums of the story itself. And in all that I have watched and the book that I have read, the ship does not appeal to me. In the book, it is explicitly said that Enjolras hates Grantaire. And that immediately puts me off against the ship because why would I ship a couple where one of them completely hates the partner. That does not tickle my fancy, regardless if Grantaire loves him. I understand that there are multiple Greek references to homosexual couples to represent Enjolras and Grantaire, but frankly, I don’t care. And I’m allowed to not care. For me, just because there is symbolism, that does not mean the ship is without a doubt canon. Because as Hugo wrote, regardless of the symbolism, Enjolras hates him.

As some enjoltaire shippers throw at enjonine shippers, that we are homophobic because it is written in the book Enjolras has not interest in women. Yep, I understand that that is there. However the way Hugo shapes this information leaves a lot to be interpreted. Enjolras may not be interested in women RIGHT NOW because he’s so focused on his revolution. That is very possible and very real, that he may not want to establish a relationship because he knows what is at risk, that pursuing a relationship will only lead to further tragedy because he knows what he is doing is putting his life at risk. The way I interpret this sentence though is that he is not interested right now because of the revolution and also because Enjolras, to me, is asexual. Just because he isn’t interested in women DOES NOT MEAN (and many enjoltaire shippers willfully ignore this point) he is interested in men. Enjolras could very well be asexual and not interested in anyone at all.

As for the musical, I appreciate the friends dynamic and I enjoy the interactions they have. But for me, that is not enough for me to ship them. Often times friendships and especially male friendships are default labeled as homosexual which to me is erasure of genuine male friendships which isn’t right. So I appreciate the friendship between them, but that isn’t enough for me to ship them.

Why I don’t ship enjoltaire: the shippers

A huge reason I do not ship enjoltaire has to do with the shippers. At first I could tolerate the shippers but as they became more and more harassing of pretty much the smallest ship in the Les Mis fandom, I began to get pretty frustrated with them. Which resulted in my hatred of the ship as well. Granted, not all enjoltaire shippers are intolerant fucks, but a lot love to overstep their boundaries. They, for some reason, cannot stay in their lane, and continuously harass enjonine shippers and infiltrate the enjonine tag with their bullshit. It’s almost as if they’re so insecure because not everyone ride or dies with their ship that they have to go and ridicule the enjonine shippers. And they frame in the guise of “enjonine shippers are homophobes!” and cry about it in our tag. Calling us homophobes just because we don’t ship their ship is incredibly ludicrous because shipping is FUN and HARMLESS. I don’t care what you ship as long as you stay in your lane and don’t try to force your ship onto others! Those who can’t differentiate between real life and fiction and real life and shipping need to take a step back and reevaluate their lives.

I think it’s funny because many enjoltaire shippers call us queer erasure in an attempt to come off as “woke” which is quite hypocritical on their part because they know that many of us enjonine shippers either view Enjolras as bisexual or asexual. For them to call us that, to me, shows just how ignorant and pigheaded they are; they are fake woke, bashing us for not believing what they do when people are allowed to have different opinions. They’re the ones blatantly ignoring the possibility that Enjolras is asexual or bisexual or even both which, I could turn onto them and call them acephobes and biphobes. But I don’t go to their tag and post a plethora of reason as to why I hate enjoltaire and call them acephobes and biphobes.

Regardless of whether or not enjoltaire is implied in the text, that does not mean I have to ship it either! The ship does not appeal to me. Even if they frickin kissed in canon, the ship would not appeal to me. Victor Hugo could rise from the grave and scream that Enjolras and Grantaire fucked and I would not care. I would not ship them because I don’t like them! For some reason, enjoltaire shippers have their heads so far up their asses, demanding we ship their ship because it’s “canon” through symbolism. They critique us for “not have comprehension skills of the book” but guess what, there are so many people who don’t ship canon! There is nothing wrong with that! And enjoltaire isn’t even confirmed as canon! As far as I’m concerned, it’s all headcanon because nothing confirms a solid relationship. Symbolism can be interpreted. The great thing about literature is that everything is up for interpretation and not everyone has to believe the same thing. There are so many ships out there that go against canon but for some reason enjoltaire shippers think they should get a free pass and everyone needs to ship their ship because their ship is homosexual. But that’s not how fandoms work. Enjoltaire shippers do not have the right to ridicule enjonine or any other ship just because they think they’re more woke than others for shipping a gay couple.

There was a point where I came close to multishipping Enjolras with Grantaire as well as with Éponine but that concept sank so quick. It’s because of intolerable enjoltaire shippers that I refuse to ship Enjolras with Grantaire and ship him with Éponine even harder.

Why I ship enjonine

In all the different mediums of consuming Les Miserables, I always found myself absolutely adoring Éponine and that’s because I found myself relating to her more than any other character in Les Mis. She is an endearing character with many flaws, feelings, and complexities about her. When I actively found myself liking a character, I’m most likely going to find a ship for that character because I want my characters to be happy and paired. I was also drawn to Enjolras for the very reasons his friends are drawn to him. He’s inspiring, charismatic, and someone who has his flaws as well, who has done wrong for what he believes is right. Both characters are complex because of their beliefs and who they are and I adore them for that. Because of this I want them both to be happy and why not let them be happy together? Éponine could not be happy with Marius because Marius loved Cosette. She could find that happiness with Enjolras! Yep he might not be interested in women because he is focused on his revolution, but the beauty of fanfiction allows authors to tweak canon to suit their fantasies. And there is nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole purpose of fanfiction. The idea of having my two favorite characters get together makes me happy and anyone who thinks they can police my happiness can fuck right off. This ship has gotten me through some of the toughest times of my life and I’ll be damned if I let other peoples’ shitty and harmful opinions devalue that.

The fact that both of these characters have not interacted makes things even more interesting because of the potential they have! I also believe that if they had interacted, their dynamics would be very interesting to see unfold. Because they are both so headstrong and firm in their beliefs, it would make for such engaging fics and it has. I’ve read many enjonine fics and they are so well written and so fun to read because they feel so genuine and sincere to the characters that it makes me ship them even harder. While sparse, there is beautiful enjonine art out there and as a shipper, it makes me giddy.

Not only that, I have met some very sweet and interesting people in the fandom. While very small, most enjonine shippers are so openhearted and encouraging and because of this ship I have met beautiful people made a few friends as well. They have been nothing but kind and have helped me grow as a writer. Because of them my love for enjonine is as strong as it is. While I may not actively participate in the fandom for now, enjonine is the hill I’ll die on. They are my otp because they have helped me through such hard times and as a result made me so happy. So what if I don’t have canon to validate them? So what if other people adamantly despise the ship? If they despise me too, fine by me. I don’t need that negativity and toxicity in my life. I’ll do me and ship what I please and that’s enjonine.

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years ago

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Yesterday, the world watched in open-mouthed horror as Notre Dame Cathedral, an 800-year-old monument in Paris, France, burst into flames. As the Paris fire department scrambled to saved the priceless relics and artworks inside, French officials gradually started to take inventory of what had been recovered from the wreckage and what had been lost forever, with many — particularly Catholics, who had flocked to the city to celebrate Holy Week — gathering outside to sing hymns and mourn.

But while the spire of the building — which famously dates from the 19th-century restoration, not from medieval times — and much of the roof are destroyed, the iconic facade, the three large stained glass rose windows, and much of the internal structure, as well as many of the priceless artworks and relics contained within, appear to have been saved. “I have to say, it’s terrible, but it also appears it could have been much worse,” says Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor of art history at Harvard University whose research focuses on the art of the High and later Middle Ages.

The fact that the building did not collapse — a concern in the hours immediately following the blaze — serves as a “powerful testimony to the skill of medieval builders,” Hamburger says. He credits the survival of the structure to the building’s iconic rib vaulting and flying buttresses, which prevented collapse. “It’s worth remembering why they went through the trouble building it this way — it wasn’t for aesthetic reasons, it was for fire-proofing,” Hamburger says. “In a way, what we have here is proof of concept.”

In the wake of the destruction, French billionaires such as Francois-Henri Pinault (perhaps best known in the United States as the husband of Salma Hayek) and Bernard Arnault, chair of luxury goods brand LVMH, have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward the reconstruction of the cathedral, and Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron has issued a public statement on Twitter vowing to rebuild. Yet the damage wrought by the Notre Dame fire has also raised important questions about the cathedral’s symbolic significance in an increasingly divided France, and how to rebuild (or which version of the cathedral should be rebuilt) going forward — and in some ways, these questions are one and the same.

Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.” As Armogathe points out, it is also quite literally the center of Paris: a gold star outside the cathedral marks Point Zero, the supposed center of the city.

But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times.

Despite politicians on both sides of the French political spectrum discouraging people from trying to politicize the Notre Dame fire, it would be a mistake to view the building as little more than a Paris tourist attraction, says John Harwood, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto. “It’s literally a political monument. All cathedrals are,” he says. For centuries, the cathedral was the seat of the bishop of the Catholic Church at a time when there was virtually no distinction between church and state. “It was the center and seat of political power not just in Paris, but in France,” he says. “And that remained the case even after the French Revolution and through successive revolutions and political power and regimes.”

Notre Dame acquired even more overtly nationalist symbolism following its renovation in the Nineteenth century by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who is widely considered the godfather of modern historical architectural restoration. Viollet-le-Duc sought to restore the edifice’s Gothic past, a style that was largely unpopular at the time; his restoration that accounts for the western facade, the (now-destroyed) spire, as well as modifications to the choir and the additions of gothic stained glass-windows.

Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration of the church was highly controversial, and to an extent still is today. “His approach to restoration was not, ‘Let’s fix the building as it is and put it in decent structural condition,'” says Cesare Birignani, assistant professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. “In fact, he acted in a much more inventive and problematic way, because he claimed to reestablish or restore the church to an image that it may never have had. [It was] his own reinvention, or his own idea of how the church may have existed at the beginning of the 13th century” — an idealized version of French history that arguably never existed in the first place. The restoration also led to the reappraisal of the Gothic style as “a kind of the ultimate symbol of French architecture,” says Birignani. Unlike Renaissance-style architecture, the Gothic style was something the French people could claim as their own, which led to it becoming “a kind of collective symbol…[or] a collective creation of the French people,” he says.

What it means to be “French,” however, has obviously changed a great deal over the past few centuries. While France is still predominantly Christian, the number of practicing Catholics has fallen year after year, from 64% in 2010 to 56% in 2012, according to one census figure. The number of Muslims in France is also growing, comprising more than 5% of the population (up from 3% in 2006) giving rise to rampant Islamophobia and the birth of far-right extremist parties like the National Front, headed by extremist Marine Le Pen. A profound income gap has also led to the explosion of protests from so-called “yellow vests,” a movement primarily made up of lower-middle-class and middle-class youth on the left who have vandalized many similarly historically significant French monuments (and whose latest actions Macron was expected to comment on in a scheduled press conference, which was postponed when Notre Dame started burning). In fact, in the hours following the fire, many started blaming the accident on the yellow vests; there was also a flurry of Islamophobic posts on social media attributing the fire to Muslim extremist terrorists, despite the fact that all evidence currently indicates that the blaze was accidental.

Despite the lip service many French people and politicians have given to the symbolic significance of Notre Dame in the hours following the fire, Birignani says that as France has changed, so too has Notre Dame lost some of its weight as a totem of national identity, and is skeptical of some of the effusive rhetoric that has been borne from the flames. Now that the world has rallied in support of the rebuilding of the cathedral, however, and donations have started pouring in from all over the world, there’s likely to be renewed interest around the cathedral as an emblem of French history and culture. For some, this is deeply concerning. “One of the things that worries me about this event is that in a country that is deeply divided right now like France is and having this assumption of [Notre Dame] serving as a bedrock institution, it creates a hole and you have to imagine what it has to become again and who does the imagining, and that is a really loaded question,” says Harwood.

Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

Hamburger, however, dismisses this idea as “preposterous.” Now that the full extent of the damage is being reckoned with — and is less than many initially feared — he sees no reason to not try to rebuild and preserve one of the few remaining wonders of medieval architecture. “It’s not as if in rebuilding the church one is necessarily building a monument to the glorification of medieval catholicism and aristocracy. It’s simply the case that the building has witnessed the entire history of France as a modern nation,” he says. “[You] can’t just erase history. It’s there, and it has to be dealt with critically.”

#notre dame

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redscarf6 · 2 years ago

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In the current world political local weather, where suspicion and demonization of science and medication have been widespread, this prescient picture has gained new resonance and topicality.

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The Khmer Rouge outlawed the humanities, music, theater, movie, and different types of cultural cultivation.

Following Claire's summer season internship, she accepted an extension of employment as a Contributing Writer and continued writing how-to's for BHG.com remotely.

When it got here to Dylan, she texted him a super-long message, “like, a novel,” to tell him why she hoped he would do it. And for Sadie, Taylor appreciated the concept of casting her because she hadn’t seen her play a romantic lead before. Thankfully, for each of them, it didn’t take much convincing. Red Scarf Revolution strives to raise consciousness of the Cambodian people's tragedies, atrocities, and cultural destruction from 1975 to 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge regime and the way that interval affects us today.

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Claire Harmeyer is an Ecommerce Writer who has been contributing to digital Dotdash Meredith brands since she joined the company as an editorial intern in 2018. She has written purchasing content material for People, InStyle, Travel+Leisure, Real Simple, Shape, and Health. At BHG.com, she wrote SEO-driven tales and video scripts and assisted with photo shoots. Following Claire's summer season internship, she accepted an extension of employment as a Contributing Writer and continued writing how-to's for BHG.com remotely.

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tinapaulick · 6 years ago

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In Part 1 of my Interrailing in Germany series I gave some advice on how to travel around Germany, with specific tips for travelers with vision impairments. This post is about our brief stay in Frankfurt am Main, the starting point of our trip. We decided to start in Frankfurt because Ryanair offers cheap flights to Frankfurt Hahn. All I knew about the city was that it is the financial capital of Germany, so we expected modern skyscrapers. There are definitly a lot of glass and steel buildings, but Frankfurt also has an old-style main square and interesting history.

Getting There and Accomodation

It is an almost hour bus journey from Frankfurt Hahn Airport to Frankfurt city. ��The main airport is closer but also more expensive to fly to. I booked one bus ticket for €15 online from the website of the bus company Flibco. I emailed the customer support copies of my ticket and my German travel pass and recieved the second ticket for free. Getting a free „assistant“ ticket was not offered on the website, but I usually ask anyway. The bus leaves only once an hour and we only got it because the special assistance at the airport skipped the queues with us. The journey to Frankfurt along the river Main is quite scenic in parts and brought us right into the city centre near the train station.

View from the bus crossing the Main

Where to Stay

We got a double room in the Easy Hotel Frankfurt City Centre for €50. The location was definitely central, which also made it a bit noisy. The onsuite room was tiny but clean enough, which is all you can expect for that price. The staff were helpful and we could lock our suitcases in the store room after check out.

Getting Used to the City

After check-in we went out to get a feel for Frankfurt. The area around the main train station is probably not the best place to be. There are a lot of small shops and takeaways. We used our canes most of the time and never had any problems. Frankfurt is a multicultural city. We heard a lot of Turkish being spoken on the streets and our noses led us to a kebab place. Most kebabs in Germany are really good quality.

The Main Train Station

What are all these people doing here?

With over 700,000 inhabitants Frankfurt is a large city, but I thought there where unusually large numbers of people in bars and on the streets. I forgot to bring toothpaste, so we decided to find a shop. There is a massive crossing outside the main train station, which is really confusing for people with vision impairments. We asked another pedestrian for help and finally made it to Königsstráße, the main shopping street and google maps directed us to the next supermarket.

Inside it was as if the whole country would soon run out of beer and crisps. The cashier kept shouting „next, next“ at the top of his voice. He wasn’t going to help us in our quest for toothpaste, so we went further into the shop to try and find it ourselves. Germans are normally helpful enough, but when they want something (in this case obviously alcohol) they can be ruthless. We wondered around for a while, touching random items to see what they were, when an older guy in a white tank top asked us if we needed help. It turned out the shop didn’t sell toothpaste, but he helped us to get water without gas, which can be hard to find in Germany. While cueing, I asked the guy in German why everywhere was so packed and he told me, that the Frankfurt Soccer team was playing against Munich in Berlin tonight. They didn’t expect to win, but it was a reason to party anyway. We had managed to arrive on one of the busiest nights of the year, but we couldn’t have known that, since we have no interest in Soccer. The cashier still behaved like a drill Sergeant and I was relieved to get out of the shop. In the end the guy who had already helped us even walked with us all the way back to the train station and showed us a drugstore where we finally got our toothpaste. We decided to go back to the hotel to rest and to use our toothpaste for which we had fought so hard.

Breakfast

We usually don’t avail of the breakfast buffet at budget hotels. I would have to go really close to the food to see what’s on offer and people sometimes complained that I smelled the food. In the past I just grabbed random items from the platters and hoped for the best. Now, I ask staff for help and usually they are helpful. Still, the breakfast is continental and I would not pay more than €8 for it unless I’m very hungry or stuck for time. There are lots of excellent bakeries in Germany where you can get two fancy roles, 2 strong cups of coffee and a slice of cake to share for €10. Every larger train station has a bakery with seating.

Healthy Breakfast

“Free” Walking Tour

The best way to get a feel for an unfamiliar city is to go on a Hop on hop off bus tour or a guided walk. Sitting in a car makes me sleepy and I find things move past the window too fast, so I can’t see them properly, never mind taking pictures. We are huge fans of free walking tours. They are a great way to experience a city without having to figure out where to go next and having to google what the buildings around us are. Free walking tour means that there is no fixed rate per ticket. At the end of the tour people decide how much money they want to give depending how they found the tour. I think that is a fair concept. In our experience the guide makes sure we don’t lose the group, either because they are nice or because they haven’t got paied yet. For some tours you can book free of charge online, but most people simply show up. Finding the meeting point can be a bit of a challenge depending on the directions on the website, but it’s not as risky as paying for a tour in advance and than not finding it.

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Red Lights and Skyscrapers

Benjamin our guide was from Frankfurt and he spoke fluent German, Spanish and English. I think one of his parents was from South America. He got us interested in a city that is mainly known for it’s airport, banking and the red light district. By the way, the red light district with its sex shops is a bit of a tourist attraction in itself now. It is policed, and prostitution is regulated.

The banking quarter with its shiny glass and steel high rise buildings is only a few blocks away from the red light district. The architecture here looks very American, which is why Frankfurt is also called Mainhattan, after the river Main that divides it. After the Second World War the US dominated not only the West German economy but also the building style.

One of the most famous sky scrapers is the 150m high Euro Tower housing the European Central Bank. The free-standing Euro sign in front of it is probably the most photographed attraction in Frankfurt. There has been a competition among companies who built and occupied the tallest building in Frankfurt. At present this “title” is held by the Commerce Bank Tower. With a Hight of 260m it is the second highest building in the European Union, but not in Europe.

Euro Sign outside the Euro Tower

Stolpersteine

Benjamin showed us Stolpersteine (Stumbling stones), which can be found in different locations in various German and European cities. Stolpersteine are stone plaques to commemorate Jewish citizens who were deported and in most cases killed during the Nazi regime. The stones are placed in the pavement outside the person’s former house and contain information about their life story. To me the message of this project is much more powerful than conventional monuments. It highlights the victim’s individuality and links them to the place where they lived. People can come across one when they least expect it. So have a look out for them when you visit Frankfurt or another city in Germany.

The New Old Town

Our walking tour ended in the Neue Altstadt (New Old Town). This area with its half-timbered houses and churches provides another stark contrast to the banking quarter. It is called the new old town, because the majority of the houses were only built between 2012 and 2018. The original market square and its neighboring streets were completely destroyed during the 1944 air raid on Frankfurt. In the 1970s modern buildings were built instead. Some of the new houses are reconstructs of the originals. It’s a lovely square and we listened to a Glockenspiel (Chime). There are also little figurines coming in and out of the top window of the tower similar to a cuckoo clock, but we both could not see them.

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There was a great atmosphere in the city, because as I mentioned earlier the local soccer team had surprisingly beaten Munich and the team was due to return home for celebrations at the main square. However, we did not want to be in the middle of a crowd in an unfamiliar city so we made our way back to the train station.

Lunch and an Unusual Complement

We had lunch at Feinkost Paradies. It was near the shop Goldexchange on Kaiserstraße where we had met earlier for the walking tour. We wondered in to ask if this was the right place and the owner sold us delicious Turkish apple tea for a very good price. We had a chat and he told us that for him Frankfurt is a great place to live and very few people were racist towards his family. He was very helpful and said my eyes have a beautiful colour. Some women might find that creepy, but I think it’s a nice compliment. Part of my eye condition is called Nystagmus, which means that my eyes cannot focus properly and move around. Sometimes people stare at me, making me feel very self-conscious. I was thrilled that for the first time someone remarked on the grey-blue color of my eyes, rather than pointing out that there was something “wrong” with them.

Fazit

We enjoyed our stay in Frankfurt. The city has more to offer than two airports and good rail connections. Unfortunately, we did’t get a chance to walk along the river Main, so we would like to come back. We recommend spending one or two days in Frankfurt. Other towns near by worth visiting are Marburg and Heidelberg.

Interrailing in Germany – Part 2: Frankfurt am Main In Part 1 of my Interrailing in Germany series I gave some advice on how to travel around Germany, with specific tips for travelers with vision impairmen…

#Accessibility #City Break #Frankfurt #Germany #History #Interrailing #Sightseeing #Travel #Walking Tour

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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What Kevin Garnett taught me about basketball

Remembering the brilliance of Kevin Garnett.

Beyond the manic intensity and primal screams, revealed a player devoted to his craft and the art of winning

You had to watch Kevin Garnett to really appreciate him. Anyone could see the tomahawk dunks and belligerent blocks coming from a mile away. It’s not like you couldn’t hear his profane screams rising over the din of 18,000 people.

The Garnett that most people know was a howling banshee, and about as subtle as an elbow to the back of the head. His election to the Basketball Hall of Fame was a no-brainer, a fitting epilogue for the career of one of the greatest players of all time.

You didn’t need to be Hubie Brown to know KG was special. There may not have been a more complete basketball player in his era. Just watch the video of him destroying his Team USA teammates in 2000.

But there was another side to Garnett that to my eyes revealed the true measure of the player. The way he moved on defense to cut off angles before they appeared, how his quasi-legal screens edged farther and farther out, bending the rules to create his own. How his concept of team never wavered, even when everyone wanted him to be more selfish, just this once.

There was a rhythm to KG that was not all bellicose bluster. It was consistent and measured, even artful. His jump shot could be as pure as Ray Allen’s, provided his timing was just right. His passing, while not as mesmerizing as Rajon Rondo’s, was more on point and direct.

Even on a team with two other Hall of Famers and an in-his-prime all-star point guard in Rondo, Garnett’s presence for the Celtics was vital. He was the alpha and the omega, yet he yielded the spotlight to everyone from Paul Pierce to Glen “Big Baby” Davis.

That was the KG I watched night after night with the Celtics. From Garnett, I learned the game of NBA basketball. He was my teacher and my muse, providing a wide-open canvas to paint an intricate portrait that was never quite finished; each stroke revealing new pathways to explore.

I really didn’t know much about how NBA defense actually worked until I saw Garnett provide the backbone for one of the great defensive units the game has ever seen. He covered up mistakes and barked out instructions. He was always available for the big assignment, but managed to be even more impactful away from the ball where he could direct the action.

On offense, he would happily hang out on the perimeter and knock down 20-foot jump shots all night long if the defense allowed him the space. Had Garnett come along 10 years later when the three-point line took prominence, he’d be the unicorn against whom all the others are measured.

When the spirit moved him, Garnett could work the low block with the best of them. He’d give that right shoulder fake, pivot and shoot over his left with such ease it was a wonder he didn’t do it more often.

That was the thing with KG. As great as he was, there was always a thought that he could have done more. But to demand that would have been to deny the man his essence. He lived for the concept of team and he carried himself that way on the court at all times.

A favorite tic: When Garnett did make one of his rare mistakes, he’d raise his arm to acknowledge the error and keep it up there for everyone else to see. It was his way of doing penance and accepting responsibility.

***

I admit to having a lifelong fascination with KG. He was my entry point into the league after I was assigned a profile for Boston magazine during the 2008 playoffs. The story I wrote was fine, but it missed so much that I spent the next four years of my life tracking his every move to learn the finer points.

My education was complete during the 2012 playoffs when Garnett willed an over-the-hill team to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals on a strict minutes count. The Celtics were so dependent on KG that they cratered without him on the floor, getting outscored by 24 points per 100 possessions when he was on the bench.

That KG was nothing like the 2004 MVP Garnett that took the Wolves to the conference finals, or even the 2008 version when his debut with the C’s resulted in a championship. This 2012 Garnett was economical and precise. He made the most of every second on the court and conserved his energy when he sat, exuding a form of zen stoicism that was the antithesis of his hyper-active Big Ticket persona.

There may have been better versions of Garnett, but I doubt there was ever a more inspiring one. It was as if he had taken everything he had learned over the years and condensed it into six-minute bursts of activity, giving the game exactly what it needed at that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.

I made a point of appreciating Garnett in my work and I’d like to think we had a connection. He didn’t curse me out as much as the other writers, and he occasionally made time for me when I approached. One particularly surreal day stands out. After a Saturday practice when everyone else was busy doing something else, KG sat down and nodded for me to come over.

We talked about what it meant to be a Celtic, and he began a long, winding dissertation about what it meant to be a writer. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of it was that if I sat down at the desk of a famous writer — Beverly Cleary, say — and typed on the same typewriter then I couldn’t help but be inspired to write better. That’s how he felt about playing under the banners and retired numbers.

That was really his example, by the way. Beverly Cleary.

Over the years I’d ask people who had been around Garnett a simple question: Was there more to KG, or less? The answers ranged from those who suspected there was much more to the man than he allowed publicly to significantly less. I never could figure it out.

Perhaps it’s better not to know. Given the tremendous amount of pride and care he put into his craft, he defined himself as a basketball player in such stark terms that there wasn’t much point in confusing the matter.

In the end, Garnett stood for winning. It was so pure, so real that trying to make sense of his occasionally bizarro behavior and stream-of-consciousness quotes was entirely beside the point. He gave you everything he had on the court every night, and that answered all your questions, so long as you bothered to look.

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anniekoh · 7 years ago

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I have been slowly reading up on the role of credit rating agencies as part of research on how financialization and financial regulations shape urban policies. Jason Hackworth’s 2007 book The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism was my entry point into thinking about how financial mechanisms like credit ratings undergird destructive austerity politics.

On my to read pile currently. Josh Lauer’s Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America and Adair Turner’s Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance look at the impact of credit at the individual/household, national and global scales. As a quick intro

"There are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. There's the United States and there's Moody's Bond Rating Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody's can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. And believe me, it's not clear sometimes who's more powerful." - Thomas Friedman, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (Feb. 13, 1996). Cited in Frank Partnoy (1999) “The Siskel and Ebert of Financial Markets: Two Thumbs Down for the Credit Rating Agencies” 77 Wash. U. L. Q. 619

How credit ratings agencies rule the world (2012)

The lower their outlook, the more likely Moody's thinks the UK government is to default on its debts – and the less likely it is that people such as me will want to lend it money. The lenders that do remain will be more nervous about the prospects of getting their money back – and so they'll charge higher interest rates. And the higher the interest rates, the steeper the government's debt repayments, and the more likely it is to default. And so it goes on.

It is an Escherian cycle, and one in which the credit ratings agencies – many argue – play too powerful a role. "I am no fan of conspiracy theories," said Rainer Bruederle, a former German economic minister, after S&P threatened to downgrade 15 EU countries in December, "but sometimes it is hard to dismiss the impression that some American ratings agencies and fund managers are working against the eurozone." But Europeans aren't the only ones up in arms. "S&P has shown really terrible judgment and they've handled themselves very poorly," said US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner after S&P downgraded America's AAA credit rating in August. "They've shown a stunning lack of knowledge about basic US fiscal maths."

Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America Josh Lauer (2017)

The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing. In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.

Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance Adair Turner (2016)

Adair Turner became chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority just as the global financial crisis struck in 2008, and he played a leading role in redesigning global financial regulation. In this eye-opening book, he sets the record straight about what really caused the crisis. It didn’t happen because banks are too big to fail—our addiction to private debt is to blame.Between Debt and the Devil challenges the belief that we need credit growth to fuel economic growth, and that rising debt is okay as long as inflation remains low. In fact, most credit is not needed for economic growth—but it drives real estate booms and busts and leads to financial crisis and depression. Turner explains why public policy needs to manage the growth and allocation of credit creation, and why debt needs to be taxed as a form of economic pollution. Banks need far more capital, real estate lending must be restricted, and we need to tackle inequality and mitigate the relentless rise of real estate prices. Turner also debunks the big myth about fiat money—the erroneous notion that printing money will lead to harmful inflation. To escape the mess created by past policy errors, we sometimes need to monetize government debt and finance fiscal deficits with central-bank money.

#to read #credit #finance #economy #economic history #financial crisis

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ourheartscondemnus · 7 years ago

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Hi Ninji, I kinda just thought of how Adam and Eve have practical, simple modern clothing in plain colors, whereas Eva has vintage/retro type of attire, with patterns. They blend in as she stands out, careless of being seeing, confident in her immortality and kinda ignorant, whereas they are more careful of their privacy and general safety. I like how their mentalities clash in every way, even just in attire, and if you have a few thoughts on this it's always nice to read what you think !

Sorry, I got to this late, I had some errands to do today!

First I want to point out this great article: Q&A: Costume Designer Bina Daigeler on Only Lovers Left AliveVampire Costumes, Dressing Tilda, & More

It has a lot of interesting facts from the costume designer himself and it’s a great read. Th first part of this article has some great information on the characters clothing and I think it is important to observe each one:

The film’s central characters, all vampires, have been there and done that — and their clothes, which have been cobbled together over centuries — reflect it. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) swoons around his home in Detroit in half-unbuttoned dark shirts and bare feet, slim jeans, and lanky black hair; he’s as unconcerned with the outside world as he is with updating his wardrobe.

Half a world away, Swinton’s Eve stalks the streets of Tangier in white leather and a shockingly white mane, which is given extra volume with yak hair. At home, her casualwear consists of embroidered Chinese pajamas and a decadent yellow-and-black robe handmade by costume designer Bina Daigeler, who previously worked with both Swinton and Jarmusch on The Limits of Control. Eve delights in life, books, and technology; naturally, she’s got a gleaming-white iPhone that she uses to FaceTime with Adam. Together, they sip blood from elegant little glasses and lounge in centuries-old robes.

Ava, Eva’s troublesome little sister (played by Mia Wasikowska), is the most colorful of them all. A night owl who prefers clubs to cafés, Ava wears girly, vintage-style dresses, patterned tights, and silver Mary Janes to flounce around Adam’s house and cause chaos wherever she goes.

The fourth vampire in their pack, the “real” Christopher Marlowe (Josh Hurt), appears a little disheveled at first glance. But a closer look reveals his three-piece suits are made from exquisite and very old fabrics, gathered over the centuries since the writer’s mysterious “death” in 1593.

There’s also a part that mentions the gloves which is also important.

I know that there are references to the age of their clothes themselves. How did that affect what kind of textiles you used for the designs?

I like to use for them this very basic, natural leather — all of them, there’s something with leather they are wearing, and that they protect themselves also with the gloves. [The leather] is somehow a little bit like a second skin. The only one who is different — because she is lost — is the character [played by] Mia [Wasikowska].

So focusing on Ava now-

Ava is the youngest of the group, and she is a very unique personality in the film. She’s bouncy, ready to party at all times, bratty, stubborn, childish, and depending on how you see her-annoying as hell at times. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a fun character, but the way she easily manipulates and plays Eve, and Eve allows it, while Adam just stares like ‘Fucking really?’ is upsetting to me because Eve is so good natured and Ava loves taking advantage of that to get her way. She knows she can’t with Adam, so she likes to annoy him, piss him off, destroy his life.

Remember, this is the second time she’s done something horrible to him, and considering she’s less than 400 years old, How do we know that? When asked, John Hurt said Marlowe is YOUNGER than Adam- Adam is 500-600 depending on the interview, article, etc that you read. Tom always said 500 so I go with that. Eve is 3000 according to Tilda, and John said that Marlowe was 300-450 years old and was uncertain how he turned. I never finished it, but here is some interview notes I took from various interviews- this was only HALF of them. And everyone agrees, including Jarmusch, that Ava is the youngest. So she’s likely only close to 100-200. We know that because she hurt Adam 87 years prior to the film- it was made in 2012/2013 so that means the incident that he’s still upset over took place in 1925/1926 or so.

So looking at her age, it makes sense that she is the way she is. Part of the film’s story is Adam’s turning point on humanity. He’s basically turned his back on it at the end of the film, returned to his vampire roots, etc. after Ian -his last connection a)betrayed his trust and b)was murdered by Ava-the reckless and blood thirsty child of the group. Seriously, in vampire terms, she’s probably still a baby which is possibly why Eve gives in to her manipulations.

SO ON CLOTHING-The style of clothing isn’t modern, and yet it’s not ancient pieces thrown together across time. It’s recent enough that it still looks stylish, and still gives her a unique image compared to-well EVERYONE in the film. Even the background people at the club didn’t pop out. You had a few hipsters, a few basic outfits, but nothing POPS. And the one outfit that does pop had a cut scene- The girl from The White Hills outfit. (There was a deleted scene where they pass by and she sees that they have no reflections you can see it here ) BTW her name is Ego Sensation. Just fyi.

SO anywho- Ava’s clothing is meant to have more personality, to stand out, because of the concept that she is ‘lost’ her being lost is entirely up for debate on the meaning, but I take it as because of her age, she’s still not ready to let go of the lifestyle she’s become accustomed to, to party and explore the world, to live among the living instead of hiding away.

Another great thing about her is with Adam and Eve-their clothes can be completely androgynous. One of Tilda’s great qualities is she’s built where she can dress as either sex and it WORKS. If Eve and Adam traded outfits, other than awkward sizing it would make no difference in making them both look a certain gender. (Also-headcanon that Eve is genderfluid). Meanwhile, Ava is girly from head to toe. Even her gloves are supposed to look more ‘girly’ than the others. It’s one of the things that makes her character so adorable to look at.

Going back and looking at her age- Ava has no reason to fear people. She didn’t live in a time when vampires were hunted, most likely. I want to believe she was likely still a ‘newborn’ when she first pissed Adam off, but only Jim Jarmusch could tell -and I have no way to ask him or even Mia. Sad. If I could be connected to them to know more I totally would. (I STILL want a book on how all of them were turned/met one another etc. because I NEED IT and tbh I don’t like most of the fanfic for the movie :x ) - Let’s assume she was turned around 1900 (Edith Cushing is that you?) - By then everyone pretty much stopped believing vampires existed. You had books like Carmilla( (1872) and Dracula ( 1897) and in 1922 the movie Nosferatu. By then, it is safe to say Vampires were more myth and legend than a real fear. Going from there, who really believed in any kind of supernatural being existing anymore? And the few things people may have believed, aliens and ghosts, are all just superstitious to those who don’t believe.

Ava literally was not raised as a vampire in a time where she needed to fear people, unlike Adam and Eve. She just doesn’t have a reason to hide- and if she drains people, it can easily be a murder covered as being someone who is severely mentally ill and thought they were a vampire. But the killer would never be found- unless there was some tie to her or others around her. That’s why Adam and Eve skipped town, Adam broke his rule of not being seen with Ian because Ava wanted to go out-meaning they were the first who’d be mentioned as suspects in his disappearance.

Adam and Eve meanwhile have lived through a hell of a lot of shit where innocent people were MURDERED for any traits that tied them to witchcraft, being some supernatural creature like a vampire and have seen some shit. People would put stakes through the dead to keep them from rising, they’d bust their jaws, they even made cages over graves to keep the dead underground. There is a real fear of being found out embedded in them, and as Marlowe said, it would cause chaos-and likely lead to their deaths, if they were to tell the world they existed. Eve plays with the idea, but she’s a smart one, she wouldn’t do it knowing it could mean they’d be killed for it. If not used as lab rats.

Each of their clothing has its own type of personality, Eve’s is very reminiscent of the places she’s been and the cultures she explores, Adams clothing, according to that one pamphlet thing (I can never remember where it is or how to find it)

and Kit’s is your basic nice suit match but with pieces that are about 400 years old. (I want to know the secret of their clothing staying perfectly intact.)

But even with all this, Ava’s stands out the most because she doesn’t see any fear or need to fear being out in the open unlike the others. If you look at it in her pov, it makes perfect sense to not have to hide, and lets be honest- the fact that Adam and Eve dress the way they do actually does make them stand out a bit in a crowd because NO ONE dressed like that now-or hardly anyone does anyways.

Ava’s clothing and their significance is one of my favorite things about the film tbh. And, like you said, she is careless, overconfident, and slightly ignorant. But on another hand, isn’t it smarter to try and blend in with a crowd instead of standing out? I can’t quite remember, but I think 2012/2013 was the area when vintage was suddenly EVERYWHERE and everyone wanted to be vintage-so who stood out more, Adam and Eve, or Ava?

For some other links you may enjoy:

A wordpress users views and analysis of Ava’s costumes: https://superqueen.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/may-i-avas-wrist-length-gloves-in-jim-jarmushs-only-lovers-left-alive/

An interview with Jim Jarmusch: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/04/jim-jarmusch-only-lovers-left-alive-interview

#asks #alaysis #i forgot my own tags x-x #Anonymous #long post

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ntrending · 5 years ago

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Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/can-ai-destroy-humanity-popular-science/

Can AI destroy humanity?| Popular Science

“It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line. Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens. Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization. Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press. Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer. In less than thirty years, it will end.”

Jaan Tallinn stumbled across these words in 2007, in an online essay called “Staring into the Singularity.” The “it” is human civilization. Humanity would cease to exist, predicted the essay’s author, with the emergence of superintelligence, or AI that surpasses the human intellect in a broad array of areas.

Tallinn, an Estonia-born computer programmer, has a background in physics and a propensity to approach life like one big programming problem. In 2003, he had co-founded Skype, developing the backend for the app. He cashed in his shares after eBay bought it two years later, and now he was casting about for something to do. “Staring into the Singularity” mashed up computer code, quantum physics, and Calvin and Hobbes quotes. He was hooked.

Tallinn soon discovered that the essay’s author, self-taught theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, had written more than 1,000 articles and blog posts, many of them devoted to superintelligence. Tallinn wrote a program to scrape Yudkowsky’s writings from the internet, order them chronologically, and format them for his iPhone. Then he spent the better part of a year reading them.

The term “artificial intelligence,” or the simulation of intelligence in computers or machines, was coined back in 1956, only a decade after the creation of the first electronic digital computers. Hope for the field was initially high, but by the 1970s, when early predictions did not pan out, an “AI winter” set in. When Tallinn found Yudkowsky’s essays, AI was undergoing a renaissance. Scientists were developing AIs that excelled in specific areas, such as winning at chess, cleaning the kitchen floor, and recognizing human speech. (In 2007, the resounding win at Jeopardy! of IBM’s Watson was still four years away, while the triumph at Go of DeepMind’s AlphaGo was eight years off.) Such “narrow” AIs, as they’re called, have superhuman capabilities, but only in their specific areas of dominance. A chess-playing AI can’t clean the floor or take you from point A to point B. But super-intelligent AI, Tallinn came to believe, will combine a wide range of skills in one entity. More darkly, it also might use data generated by smartphone-toting humans to excel at social manipulation.

Reading Yudkowsky’s articles, Tallinn became convinced that superintelligence could lead to an explosion or “breakout” of AI that could threaten human existence—that ultrasmart AIs will take our place on the evolutionary ladder and dominate us the way we now dominate apes. Or, worse yet, exterminate us.

After finishing the last of the essays, Tallinn shot off an email to Yudkowsky—all lowercase, as is his style. “i’m jaan, one of the founding engineers of skype,” he wrote. Eventually he got to the point: “i do agree that…preparing for the event of general AI surpassing human intelligence is one of the top tasks for humanity.” He wanted to help. When he flew to the Bay Area for other meetings soon after, he met Yudkowsky at a Panera Bread in Millbrae, California, near where he lives. Their get-together stretched to four hours. “He actually, genuinely understood the underlying concepts and the details,” Yudkowsky recalls. “This is very rare.” Afterward, Tallinn wrote a check for $5,000 to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the nonprofit where Yudkowsky was a research fellow. (The organization changed its name to Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, in 2013.) Tallinn has since given it more than $600,000.

The encounter with Yudkowsky brought Tallinn purpose, sending him on a mission to save us from our own creations. As he connected on the issue with other theorists and computer scientists, he embarked on a life of travel, giving talks around the world on the threat posed by superintelligence. Mostly, though, he began funding research into methods that might give humanity a way out: so-called friendly AI. That doesn’t mean a machine or agent is particularly skilled at chatting about the weather, or that it remembers the names of your kids—though super-intelligent AI might be able to do both of those things. It doesn’t mean it is motivated by altruism or love. A common fallacy is assuming that AI has human urges and values. “Friendly” means something much more fundamental: that the machines of tomorrow will not wipe us out in their quest to attain their goals.

Nine years after his meeting with Yudkowsky, Tallinn joins me for a meal in the dining hall of Cambridge University’s Jesus College. The churchlike space is bedecked with stained-glass windows, gold molding, and oil paintings of men in wigs. Tallinn sits at a heavy mahogany table, wearing the casual garb of Silicon Valley: black jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers. A vaulted timber ceiling extends high above his shock of gray-blond hair.

At 46, Tallinn is in some ways your textbook tech entrepreneur. He thinks that thanks to advances in science (and provided AI doesn’t destroy us), he will live for “many, many years.” His concern about superintelligence is common among his cohort. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s foundation has given $1.6 million to MIRI, and in 2015, Tesla founder Elon Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, a technology safety organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tallinn’s entrance to this rarefied world came behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, when a classmate’s father with a government job gave a few bright kids access to mainframe computers. After Estonia became independent, he founded a video-game company. Today, Tallinn still lives in its capital city—which by a quirk of etymology is also called Tallinn—with his wife and the youngest of his six kids. When he wants to meet with researchers, he often just flies them to the Baltic region.

His giving strategy is methodical, like almost everything else he does. He spreads his money among 11 organizations, each working on different approaches to AI safety, in the hope that one might stick. In 2012, he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) with an initial outlay of close to $200,000.

Existential risks—or X-risks, as Tallinn calls them—are threats to humanity’s survival. In addition to AI, the 20-odd researchers at CSER study climate change, nuclear war, and bioweapons. But to Tallinn, the other disciplines mostly help legitimize the threat of runaway artificial intelligence. “Those are really just gateway drugs,” he tells me. Concern about more widely accepted threats, such as climate change, might draw people in. The horror of super-intelligent machines taking over the world, he hopes, will convince them to stay. He is here now for a conference because he wants the academic community to take AI safety seriously.

Our dining companions are a random assortment of conference-goers, including a woman from Hong Kong who studies robotics and a British man who graduated from Cambridge in the 1960s. The older man asks everybody at the table where they attended university. (Tallinn’s answer, Estonia’s University of Tartu, does not impress him.) He then tries to steer the conversation toward the news. Tallinn looks at him blankly. “I am not interested in near-term risks,” he says.

Tallinn changes the topic to the threat of superintelligence. When not talking to other programmers, he defaults to metaphors, and he runs through his suite of them now: Advanced AI can dispose of us as swiftly as humans chop down trees. Superintelligence is to us what we are to gorillas. Inscribed in Latin above his head is a line from Psalm 133: “How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.” But unity is far from what Tallinn has in mind in a future containing a rogue superintelligence.

An AI would need a body to take over, the older man says. Without some kind of physical casing, how could it possibly gain physical control? Tallinn has another metaphor ready: “Put me in a basement with an internet connection, and I could do a lot of damage,” he says. Then he takes a bite of risotto.

Whether a Roomba or one of its world-dominating descendants, an AI is driven by outcomes. Programmers assign these goals, along with a series of rules on how to pursue them. Advanced AI wouldn’t necessarily need to be given the goal of world domination in order to achieve it—it could just be accidental. And the history of computer programming is rife with small errors that sparked catastrophes. In 2010, for example, a trader working for the mutual-fund company Waddell & Reed sold thousands of futures contracts. The firm’s software left out a key variable from the algorithm that helped execute the trade. The result was the trillion-dollar U.S. “flash crash.”

The researchers Tallinn funds believe that if the reward structure of a superhuman AI is not properly programmed, even benign objectives could have insidious ends. One well-known example, laid out by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence, is a fictional agent directed to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI might decide that the atoms in human bodies would be put to better use as raw material for them.

Tallinn’s views have their share of detractors, even among the community of people concerned with AI safety. Some object that it is too early to worry about restricting super-intelligent AI when we don’t yet understand it. Others say that focusing on rogue technological actors diverts attention from the most urgent problems facing the field, like the fact that the majority of algorithms are designed by white men, or based on data biased toward them. “We’re in danger of building a world that we don’t want to live in if we don’t address those challenges in the near term,” says Terah Lyons, executive director of the Partnership on AI, a multistakeholder organization focused on AI safety and other issues. (Several of the institutes Tallinn backs are members.) But, she adds, some of the near-term challenges facing researchers—such as weeding out algorithmic bias—are precursors to ones that humanity might see with super-intelligent AI.

Tallinn isn’t so convinced. He counters that super-intelligent AI brings unique threats. Ultimately, he hopes that the AI community might follow the lead of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1940s. In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists banded together to try to limit further nuclear testing. “The Manhattan Project scientists could have said, ‘Look, we are doing innovation here, and innovation is always good, so let’s just plunge ahead,’” he tells me. “But they were more responsible than that.”

Tallinn warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, he explains, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he says, “waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind 5-year-olds.” That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

Yudkowsky, the theorist, found evidence this might be true when, starting in 2002, he conducted chat sessions in which he played the role of an AI enclosed in a box, while a rotation of other people played the gatekeeper tasked with keeping the AI in. Three out of five times, Yudkowsky—a mere mortal—says he convinced the gatekeeper to release him. His experiments have not discouraged researchers from trying to design a better box, however.

The researchers that Tallinn funds are pursuing a broad variety of strategies, from the practical to the seemingly far-fetched. Some theorize about boxing AI, either physically, by building an actual structure to contain it, or by programming in limits to what it can do. Others are trying to teach AI to adhere to human values. A few are working on a last-ditch off switch. One researcher who is delving into all three is mathematician and philosopher Stuart Armstrong at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which Tallinn calls “the most interesting place in the universe.” (Tallinn has given FHI more than $310,000.) Armstrong is one of the few researchers in the world who focuses full time on AI safety.

I meet him for coffee one afternoon in a cafe in Oxford. He wears a rugby shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and has the look of someone who spends his life behind a screen, with a pale face framed by a mess of sandy hair. He peppers his explanations with a disorienting mixture of popular-culture references and math. When I ask him what it might look like to succeed at AI safety, he says: “Have you seen The Lego Movie? Everything is awesome.”

One strain of Armstrong’s research looks at a specific approach to boxing called an “oracle” AI. In a 2012 paper with Nick Bostrom, who co-founded FHI, he proposed not only walling off superintelligence in a holding tank—a physical structure—but also restricting it to answering questions, like a really smart Ouija board. Even with these boundaries, an AI would have immense power to reshape the fate of humanity by subtly manipulating its interrogators. To reduce the possibility of this happening, Armstrong has proposed time limits on conversations, or banning questions that might upend the current world order. He also has suggested giving the oracle proxy measures of human survival, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the number of people crossing the street in Tokyo, and telling it to keep these steady.

Ultimately, Armstrong believes, it could be necessary to create, as he calls it in one paper, a “big red off button”: either a physical switch, or a mechanism programmed into an AI to automatically turn itself off in the event of a breakout. But designing such a switch is far from easy. It’s not just that an advanced AI interested in self-preservation could prevent the button from being pressed. It also could become curious about why humans devised the button, activate it to see what happens, and render itself useless. In 2013, a programmer named Tom Murphy VII designed an AI that could teach itself to play Nintendo Entertainment System games. Determined not to lose at Tetris, the AI simply pressed pause—and kept the game frozen. “Truly, the only winning move is not to play,” Murphy observed wryly, in a paper on his creation.

For the strategy to succeed, an AI has to be uninterested in the button, or, as Tallinn puts it, “it has to assign equal value to the world where it’s not existing and the world where it’s existing.” But even if researchers can achieve that, there are other challenges. What if the AI has copied itself several thousand times across the internet?

The approach that most excites researchers is finding a way to make AI adhere to human values—not by programming them in, but by teaching AIs to learn them. In a world dominated by partisan politics, people often dwell on the ways in which our principles differ. But, Tallinn notes, humans have a lot in common: “Almost everyone values their right leg. We just don’t think about it.” The hope is that an AI might be taught to discern such immutable rules.

In the process, an AI would need to learn and appreciate humans’ less-than-logical side: that we often say one thing and mean another, that some of our preferences conflict with others, and that people are less reliable when drunk. But the data trails we all leave in apps and social media might provide a guide. Despite the challenges, Tallinn believes, we must try because the stakes are so high. “We have to think a few steps ahead,” he says. “Creating an AI that doesn’t share our interests would be a horrible mistake.”

On Tallinn’s last night in Cambridge, I join him and two researchers for dinner at a British steakhouse. A waiter seats our group in a white-washed cellar with a cave-like atmosphere. He hands us a one-page menu that offers three different kinds of mash. A couple sits down at the table next to us, and then a few minutes later asks to move elsewhere. “It’s too claustrophobic,” the woman complains. I think of Tallinn’s comment about the damage he could wreak if locked in a basement with nothing but an internet connection. Here we are, in the box. As if on cue, the men contemplate ways to get out.

Tallinn’s guests include former genomics researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, who is CSER’s executive director, and Matthijs Maas, an AI policy researcher at the University of Copenhagen. They joke about an idea for a nerdy action flick titled Superintelligence vs. Blockchain!, and discuss an online game called Universal Paperclips, which riffs on the scenario in Bostrom’s book. The exercise involves repeatedly clicking your mouse to make paper clips. It’s not exactly flashy, but it does give a sense for why a machine might look for more-expedient ways to produce office supplies.

Eventually, talk shifts toward bigger questions, as it often does when Tallinn is present. The ultimate goal of AI-safety research is to create machines that are, as Cambridge philosopher and CSER co-founder Huw Price once put it, “ethically as well as cognitively superhuman.” Others have raised the question: If we don’t want AI to dominate us, do we want to dominate it? In other words, does AI have rights? Tallinn says this is needless anthropomorphizing. It assumes that intelligence equals consciousness—a misconception that annoys many AI researchers. Earlier in the day, CSER researcher Jose Hernandez-Orallo joked that when speaking with AI researchers, consciousness is “the C-word.” (“And ‘free will’ is the F-word,” he added.)

RELATED: What it’s really like working as a safety driver in a self-driving car

In the cellar now, Tallinn says that consciousness is beside the point: “Take the example of a thermostat. No one would say it is conscious. But it’s really inconvenient to face up against that agent if you’re in a room that is set to negative 30 degrees.”

Ó hÉigeartaigh chimes in. “It would be nice to worry about consciousness,” he says, “but we won’t have the luxury to worry about consciousness if we haven’t first solved the technical safety challenges.”

People get overly preoccupied with what super-intelligent AI is, Tallinn says. What form will it take? Should we worry about a single AI taking over, or an army of them? “From our perspective, the important thing is what AI does,” he stresses. And that, he believes, may still be up to humans—for now.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

Written By Mara Hvistendahl

#Science

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ofstormsandwolves · 7 years ago

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Ok, so there's been a bit of discussion (mostly on @skyler10fic 's blog) about how time in Pete's World moves compared to in the original world, so I'm gonna try and explain my ideas on it. I had always understood it that time moves at the same speed (or near enough) as the original universe, but that due to different things happening, they're ahead of the original world in terms of certain things like technology, and that is what was meant in terms of 'time moving faster' there.

The way I see it, at some point, Pete's World is given the opportunity to progress faster in terms of technology, design, possibly infrastructure and a few other things. The reason I see it this way, is because of Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel; at some point when Pete's World and the original world separated to become parallel, they made leaps and bounds in various areas that, in original world 2007 wouldn't have been possible.

The most obvious of these things are the Cybus earpieces- while they were designed to resemble the bluetooth devices used at the time, the fact that it's established they can 'download' information right into people's brains suggests that they're more technologically advanced than Rose's original world. Then there's the Cyberman concept and design; again, clearly cybernetics are much further along in Pete's World than they were in original-world 2007. And according to the storyline, Lumic doesn't have a dream where he is presented the concept of Cybermen, he isn't working with other Cybermen (like the ATMOS storyline in series 4 where Sontarans supply the technology), which means that it was current human technology that built them, and a 21st century human who came up with the concept.

There is also the fact that Torchwood, in 2010 (Doomsday) is publicly known, and that the only reason the public opposed them was because they wanted to destroy the Cybus factories. That means that they weren't surprised by Torchwood's technology, or what they stood for, and so clearly they are used to, what would be in Rose and Jackie's original world, accelerated technology. My point is, I get the impression that they possibly have some sort of acceleration in their technological advances- time is moving faster for them in terms of certain types of technology. Possibly the fact they utilise zeppelins could be why other areas of technology are so advanced; perhaps instead of building new aeroplanes and helicopters and things, they were focusing on cybernetics and technologies like smartphones and such.

The other reason I always thought that they were advanced in certain areas but that Pete's World still essentially ran at the same speed as the original world (in terms of, day length, month length, year length etc.) is because I always felt the reason Mickey was there for three years was because travelling the Void is so difficult. It took the Cybermen three years to cross the Void, which the Doctor said could be due to the sheer number of them, but they arrived in 2007 London in the original world, most likely by sheer chance. Then, when Mickey and Pete and Jackie went back, their hoppers were most likely limited to a short period of time they could jump between: aka they would return to Pete's World shortly after leaving in 2010. Most likely, when Rose dimension jumped she was limited to the same parameters; obviously she couldn't go back in her own timeline, but the hoppers probably also could only move between 2012 (2013?) Pete's World and 2009 original world, which they'd have worked out because they knew there was a three year time difference.

In Journey's End, when the Doctor asks Rose about the stars going out, he says to her "your world's ahead of this one, you've seen the future", which to me only confirms that Rose was living in 2010-2012/2013 (although if the original world is only in 2009, it would suggest that Rose had only been trapped for two years- 2010-2012) and that they're ahead by a few years but not necessarily going through time faster than the original world. Essentially, they're going at the same speed but Pete's World is already ahead because of the Cybermen crossing the Void.

(Also fun fact, I've worked out that if Pete's World is three years ahead of the original world, then in series 4, they would be in about 2012 (as original world is 2009), meaning Rose was trapped for only about two years. And Tony Tyler is going to nursery but he's most likely only about a year old (some nurseries in the U.K. take kids from birth, and most take them from six months old, only you have to pay, so it's perfectly feasible that Pete and Jackie send toddler Tony to nursery, and now I have a bizarre idea that Jackie works for Torchwood and that's why Tony's at nursery so young (and also how Jackie got the bloody big gun in Journey's End).)

Basically, at some point Pete's World Britain lost its monarch (or maybe never had one), and at some point they chose to use zeppelins rather than planes, and Torchwood was established despite the Doctor and Rose not being part of events, and I think it's all these things combined that led to Pete's World moving forward at a faster rate in terms of some technologies, attitudes, lifestyles etc. But I don't think that Pete's World would be able to, say, orbit the sun faster, or have shorter days, or shorter years or whatever because otherwise it probably wouldn't be a parallel Earth, because it wouldn't be parallel it would be different. I'd also be questioning whether Pete's World humans would be parallel humans should the rotation of the Earth/ length of days/months/years etc. be changed, or whether they'd have evolved, which is another reason why I have always taken it to mean that time passes quicker in terms of developing technologies and moving forward with things like that, which in turn affects attitude.

#skyler10fic #(because i feel you'll wanna read this)#meta #doctor who #Pete's World

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