#but if there's historical background to my desires i want to be enabled

[officialpenisenvy]

Since it seems down your alley and idk if youve talked about it before to my knowledge im really curious about your thoughts on trans exclusionary radical feminist fixation on pederasty (see: germaine greer’s the boy) + lesbian desire in relation to the like, archetype of the ganymede + the relation between that and sexual objectification of transfems and the utilization of said ganymede archetype in art as a sort of “agencyless transfeminine” 

okay so i want to say first of all that this is just me talking out of my ass and basically reflecting out loud (most of my blog is, but especially right now), so i don't know how coherent this will be, and i apologize preemptively if any wording on this is questionable or offensive, that is never my intent. i haven't looked into or researched this subject, so if you have any recommendations i would love to hear them! ramble answer under the cut

im very familiar with germaine greer's the boy, i have read it (as much as anyone can be said to have read what amounts to a pederasty-themed photo album) and reflected on it for some time: while the purported effort of the book is to "reclaim" pederasty from gay men towards women, i feel like the very desire to enable women to be pederasts is entrenched in greer's radical feminist background. trans-exclusionary radical feminism is built around bioessentialism, the assumption that men are ontologically different from women, and specifically that men are essentially evil, strong and predatory whereas women are essentially good, weak and preyed-upon: the young boy, however, somewhat disrupts this paradigm, being as he has been historically and culturally objectified and preyed upon and victimized in the same way women have. though he will inevitably grow up to become the evil strong man who harms women, therefore, the young boy can still be enjoyed by the woman while he is weak and essentially harmless, a more even relationship than that between a woman and a man that still allows a potentially heterosexual woman to satisfy her desire for a man; i don't need to specify that in real life we know any relationship between an adult and a child cannot be even and is more often than not deeply harmful to the child, and that the vast majority of adults who do sexual harm to children do so not necessarily because of physical attraction but because of attraction to their helplessness.

all this above is my attempt at finding a terf-ist rationale for female pederasty, but it does also somewhat mirror societal attitudes to the young boy, especially in a gay male context — starting from ancient pederasty up to basically the present day, the young boy is consistently the feminine or feminised party, at least in part due to his fragility and weakness in comparison to the (necessarily) stronger adult lover. the young boy, who i will now start calling the ephebe in this more archetypal context, therefore becomes a very powerful cultural figure of androgyny: ganymede's gender is important insofar as zeus chooses to bring him up to olympus and train him up as a cupbearer (a social role unthinkable for a girl), but his vulnerability and sort of waifishness are properties both of the ephebe and the girl/woman, and the same goes for all other popular depictions of ephebes, they are young boys noted for their beauty and androgyny who are functionally interchangeable with girls. as many queer people are, i find androgyny to be very attractive in all its variations and potential combinations, and i think that's why im so drawn to the ephebe as an archetype (needless to say i don't want to fuck actual young boys): the fascination with this concept of a beautiful boy who's devoid of most stereotypical characteristics of masculinity and who's somewhat forcibly put in the social role of a girl is to me a similar drive to the one that makes me attracted to very masculine women, i really enjoy the deliberate blurring of gender lines (and it would be pointless to hide that i also enjoy the element of coercion, though that is a recurring theme in my sexuality which is not limited to the ephebe).

obviously, all this discussion is separate from attraction to actual trans women: my attraction to trans women is motivated by them being women, so my enjoyment of a fem trans woman is paramount to that of a fem cis woman, my enjoyment of a masc trans woman is paramount to that of a masc cis woman (so coming from that place of liking androgyny), and so forth. of course, whether or not one is attracted to trans women is secondary to whether or not they actually treat trans women as women and respect their identity — plenty of people are attracted to trans women and behave like absolute monsters towards them.

like you said, trans women are horribly objectified and sexualised: to my understanding there's two broad categories of sexual objectification trans women face, being forcibly put in a submissive position (so basically recycling the ephebe archetype, especially coming from people who see trans women as particularly feminine boys), and being forcibly put in a dominant/active position (especially from people who see trans women as men and thus inherently sexually domineering, and who potentially fetishize their genitals as well). the forced submission, while obviously horrible and transmisogynistic and often meant as punishment for the transgression of manhood, isn't in practice terribly different from the forced submission cis women tend to experience to a lesser degree, so it can be in some measure rationalized as assimilable to the sexual treatment one would receive if she were as a cis woman (intersectional parenthesis demands i point out that cis and trans black women sexually interacting with non-black men are more likely to be put in a place of forced domination than forced submission). the forced domination, however, is pointedly and manifestly transmisogynistic in a way that specifically portrays the trans woman in question as "really a man" and "really secretly dominant", often with a very phallic emphasis, and this can be an obvious source of discomfort and dysphoria for trans women, some of whom will try to counteract that by making themselves deliberately more submissive and pliable and non-dominant, basically embodying the feminine and ephebic archetype of passive sexuality, or the "agencyless transfeminine" like you said.

i am not sure any of this makes sense, i hope i was able to be at least somewhat coherent for you anon! i would really love any input or criticism my transfem followers might have on this, since im obviously only speaking from what i have seen and am not a trans woman myself but just a tme yapper on the internet — again im very sorry if any of this comes off as offensive or insensitive, please let me know so i can correct myself if needed.

[balkanradfem]

"summerween" it's called hexenacht you historically illiterate dweebs

'historically illiterate dweebs' is too quality of an insult to not publish, also can you share more information on hexenacth? I can tell it's 'night of the witches' in german, but, where I live, halloween is called 'night of the witches' as well! Does germany have an extra summer halloween I didn't know about? Or is this still about gravity falls? Please share the historical lore.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

post here

Ahmed Fouhad Alkhatib (@/afalkhatib)

What being pro-Palestine means to me / my platform: I'm passionately, unequivocally, and without hesitation, a proponent of the Palestinian people's just and urgent aspirations for self-determination, liberation, sovereignty, and safety. I grew up in Gaza, where I experienced Israeli violence and bombardment, including one incident that almost killed me and caused me permanent hearing impairment; my family is still in Gaza and has suffered dozens of deaths during this latest war; my grandparents were expelled from their ancestral homelands in 1948 and fled to the Gaza Strip; and my parents were raised in a refugee camp in Rafah during the 1950s. This background informs and influences me and speaks to why I care about the Palestinian issue and consider myself pro-Palestine. I am motivated by a sincere desire to see my people obtain their legitimate and undeniable rights, which they have not had for decades.

Yet I, and many others, especially those who are silent or are forced to be quiet, struggle with finding a political home in today's pro-Palestine movement. Increasingly, it feels as if pro-Palestine activism is dominated by maximalists (wanting all of historic Palestine and other zero-sum positions and approaches), slogan-driven voices, and narratives. There is a lack of pragmatic and humanistic ability to hold multiple truths at once and to advocate nuanced and color-rich positions and views that are not black-and-white depictions and understandings of the Israel and Palestine conflict.

Here's what, to me, an effective and meaningful pro-Palestine platform entails:

Supporting the right of Palestinians to a sovereign and independent state living in peace side by side with Israel.

Condemning Israeli government actions, policies, priorities, and decisions that kill, harm, undermine, or oppress the Palestinian people.

Criticizing and decrying the conduct of the war in Gaza, the military occupation in the West Bank, and the Israeli government's disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, and the destruction of property and cities.

Rejecting, denouncing, and exposing the theft of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the sprawling settlement enterprise and settler violence.

Supporting highly targeted, specific, and effective sanctions against individuals, groups, and entities that are enabling the unjust and illegal occupation of the West Bank and harming Palestinian civilians.

Denouncing and combating the dehumanization of the Palestinian people or the denial of their existence as people with the right to live on the land they called home for generations.

Acknowledging the tragedy experienced by hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians from 1948 and giving them/their descendants the right to return to the lands of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

Understanding past and contemporary mistakes that have set the Palestinian people back by decades and made them pawns in ideologies and geopolitical programs, agendas, and designs.

Developing a pragmatic and realistic framework for recognizing Israel's existence, right to exist, and the inevitability of its continued existence, all of which should inform how a solution is approached.

Dispensing with delusional and destructive elements of the Palestinian narrative and acknowledging that there will not be a full liberation of all of Palestine, there will not be a right of return to what is now mainland Israel, and that Israel cannot and should not be confronted militarily or through any form of violence.

Promoting a cultural shift away from revolutionary rhetoric, martyrdom, and armed resistance, and instead, rebranding coexistence and peace as a courageous and necessary evolution to preserve Palestinian lives, lands, and heritage and foster a new generation of nation-builders who are focused on doing the most with what the Palestinians currently have and can have in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Denouncing and rejecting antisemitism while also acknowledging that Zionists and Israelis are a diverse group/people and that the Palestinians have to work with all of these segments to have sustainable coexistence and peace.

Understanding how violent/hateful rhetoric, actions, and mistakes are detrimental because they empower right-wing and extremist forces in Israel who are opposed to Palestinian rights and that persistent mistakes and incendiary rhetoric and proclamations erode support for the Palestinian people and cause.

Recognizing Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability when taking actions that have negative consequences and outcomes and acknowledging that, while there's an asymmetry of power dynamics, Palestinian leaders, political groups, and prominent figures should make rational and responsible choices to optimize for better prospects.

Accepting that even with East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, access to holy sites must always be shared and open to all.

Realizing how nefarious regional players like the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies are not sincere or helpful allies to the Palestinian people and have done so much damage to the entire region and the Palestinian cause.

Developing the capacity to hear Jewish perspectives and grievances, historical and contemporary, to understand why pro-Israel supporters believe what they do and why Israel means so much to so many, even if one disagrees with those opinions and views.

Understanding that Hamas recklessly endangered Palestinian lives and placed the people of Gaza in significant harm and that the group relies on Palestinian suffering as part of its strategy to delegitimize Israel globally while perpetuating the conflict without any meaningful resolution.

Registering the dangers of Islamist rhetoric and ideology that seeks to Islamize Palestinian society and to turn the Palestinian national project into a religious one in pursuit of an Islamic state that, by default, will be exclusionary and incapable of accommodating diverse residents in a future Palestinian country.

I am compelled to share the aforementioned because, for far too many people, pro-Palestine activism has been reduced to incendiary language that fails to capture the multiple moving parts of what is needed to advance the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations for freedom and independence. While many students, activists, advocates, academics, and analysts have their hearts in the right place, many cannot present viable and pragmatic ideas that are not mere rhetorical statements and empty slogans.

I know that many strongly disagree with my views and opinions, and that's entirely fine. Still, many more are eager to see a recalibration of pro-Palestine activism to actually help the Palestinians achieve statehood instead of inflaming division and fostering hostility towards supporters of Israel and the Jewish community. Many in Palestine are aware of the need to be pragmatic and don't think that angry protests, BDS, antisemitism, endless academic lectures, social media activism, or "feel good" slogans will actually make a difference.

It's time for a rejuvenated pro-Palestine movement that serves as a big tent to encompass multiple views and opinions and to invite and promote broad alliances, especially with mainstream Jewish and Israeli communities, to work towards a just and sustainable resolution of the conflict once and for all. This is entirely attainable and achievable with humility, civility, patience, compassion and kindness, perseverance and determination, a willingness to accept reasonable compromises and accommodations, and, most importantly, the recognition of both sides' undeniable and mutual humanity.

[sethshead]

"What being pro-Palestine means to me / my platform: I'm passionately, unequivocally, and without hesitation, a proponent of the Palestinian people’s just and urgent aspirations for self-determination, liberation, sovereignty, and safety. I grew up in Gaza, where I experienced Israeli violence and bombardment, including one incident that almost killed me and caused me permanent hearing impairment; my family is still in Gaza and has suffered dozens of deaths during this latest war; my grandparents were expelled from their ancestral homelands in 1948 and fled to the Gaza Strip; and my parents were raised in a refugee camp in Rafah during the 1950s. This background informs and influences me and speaks to why I care about the Palestinian issue and consider myself pro-Palestine. I am motivated by a sincere desire to see my people obtain their legitimate and undeniable rights, which they have not had for decades.

"Yet I, and many others, especially those who are silent or are forced to be quiet, struggle with finding a political home in today’s pro-Palestine movement. Increasingly, it feels as if pro-Palestine activism is dominated by maximalists (wanting all of historic Palestine and other zero-sum positions and approaches), slogan-driven voices, and narratives. There is a lack of pragmatic and humanistic ability to hold multiple truths at once and to advocate nuanced and color-rich positions and views that are not black-and-white depictions and understandings of the Israel and Palestine conflict.

"Here’s what, to me, an effective and meaningful pro-Palestine platform entails:

"1. Supporting the right of Palestinians to a sovereign and independent state living in peace side by side with Israel.

"2. Condemning Israeli government actions, policies, priorities, and decisions that kill, harm, undermine, or oppress the Palestinian people.

"3. Criticizing and decrying the conduct of the war in Gaza, the military occupation in the West Bank, and the Israeli government’s disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, and the destruction of property and cities.

"4. Rejecting, denouncing, and exposing the theft of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the sprawling settlement enterprise and settler violence.

"5. Supporting highly targeted, specific, and effective sanctions against individuals, groups, and entities that are enabling the unjust and illegal occupation of the West Bank and harming Palestinian civilians.

"6. Denouncing and combating the dehumanization of the Palestinian people or the denial of their existence as people with the right to live on the land they called home for generations.

"7. Acknowledging the tragedy experienced by hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians from 1948 and giving them/their descendants the right to return to the lands of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

"8. Understanding past and contemporary mistakes that have set the Palestinian people back by decades and made them pawns in ideologies and geopolitical programs, agendas, and designs.

"9. Developing a pragmatic and realistic framework for recognizing Israel’s existence, right to exist, and the inevitability of its continued existence, all of which should inform how a solution is approached.

"10. Dispensing with delusional and destructive elements of the Palestinian narrative and acknowledging that there will not be a full liberation of all of Palestine, there will not be a right of return to what is now mainland Israel, and that Israel cannot and should not be confronted militarily or through any form of violence.

"11. Promoting a cultural shift away from revolutionary rhetoric, martyrdom, and armed resistance, and instead, rebranding coexistence and peace as a courageous and necessary evolution to preserve Palestinian lives, lands, and heritage and foster a new generation of nation-builders who are focused on doing the most with what the Palestinians currently have and can have in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

"12. Denouncing and rejecting antisemitism while also acknowledging that Zionists and Israelis are a diverse group/people and that the Palestinians have to work with all of these segments to have sustainable coexistence and peace.

"13. Understanding how violent/hateful rhetoric, actions, and mistakes are detrimental because they empower right-wing and extremist forces in Israel who are opposed to Palestinian rights and that persistent mistakes and incendiary rhetoric and proclamations erode support for the Palestinian people and cause.

"14. Recognizing Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability when taking actions that have negative consequences and outcomes and acknowledging that, while there’s an asymmetry of power dynamics, Palestinian leaders, political groups, and prominent figures should make rational and responsible choices to optimize for better prospects.

"15. Accepting that even with East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, access to holy sites must always be shared and open to all.

"16. Realizing how nefarious regional players like the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies are not sincere or helpful allies to the Palestinian people and have done so much damage to the entire region and the Palestinian cause.

"17. Developing the capacity to hear Jewish perspectives and grievances, historical and contemporary, to understand why pro-Israel supporters believe what they do and why Israel means so much to so many, even if one disagrees with those opinions and views.

"18. Understanding that Hamas recklessly endangered Palestinian lives and placed the people of Gaza in significant harm and that the group relies on Palestinian suffering as part of its strategy to delegitimize Israel globally while perpetuating the conflict without any meaningful resolution.

"19. Registering the dangers of Islamist rhetoric and ideology that seeks to Islamize Palestinian society and to turn the Palestinian national project into a religious one in pursuit of an Islamic state that, by default, will be exclusionary and incapable of accommodating diverse residents in a future Palestinian country.

"I am compelled to share the aforementioned because, for far too many people, pro-Palestine activism has been reduced to incendiary language that fails to capture the multiple moving parts of what is needed to advance the just and urgent Palestinian aspirations for freedom and independence. While many students, activists, advocates, academics, and analysts have their hearts in the right place, many cannot present viable and pragmatic ideas that are not mere rhetorical statements and empty slogans.

"I know that many strongly disagree with my views and opinions, and that’s entirely fine. Still, many more are eager to see a recalibration of pro-Palestine activism to actually help the Palestinians achieve statehood instead of inflaming division and fostering hostility towards supporters of Israel and the Jewish community. Many in Palestine are aware of the need to be pragmatic and don’t think that angry protests, BDS, antisemitism, endless academic lectures, social media activism, or 'feel good' slogans will actually make a difference.

"It’s time for a rejuvenated pro-Palestine movement that serves as a big tent to encompass multiple views and opinions and to invite and promote broad alliances, especially with mainstream Jewish and Israeli communities, to work towards a just and sustainable resolution of the conflict once and for all. This is entirely attainable and achievable with humility, civility, patience, compassion and kindness, perseverance and determination, a willingness to accept reasonable compromises and accommodations, and, most importantly, the recognition of both sides’ undeniable and mutual humanity."

h/t Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

Mr. Allhatib’s pro-Palestinian activism is my Zionism. Jewish and Palestinian national aspirations are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Neither people can be truly secure in their self determination until both are, until both recognize the fundamental legitimacy of the other and of their need for statehood.

From that mutual understanding can come peace, prosperity, and dignity to all. Is that not a better prospect than what we see at present?

[shihalyfie]

Regarding Konaka’s influence on Tamers (or how much he actually didn’t have)

(Rest assured that if you’ve had a conversation with me recently about this issue, I’m not vaguing you; this conversation has come up a lot in the last few weeks, especially in my private chats, so this is just me deciding that I should write something about this for once since it’s been weighing on my head lately.)

I think, right now, with what happened regarding the DigiFes debacle, a lot of people are having complicated feelings about how to feel about Tamers, and this is completely understandable. I think there are also some things that may be inevitably unavoidable, such as starting to second-guess certain nuances in the series and what they might lead to. All of that is perfectly reasonable, and in the end, it’s going to be up to everyone to decide how they feel.

In light of this, a lot of people have been bringing up the fact that, while Konaka was the head writer, he was by no means the only person working on it. This is very much true, but I’d like to add something else to the equation: this is an issue that goes much deeper than the usual claiming death of the author for the sake of sanity. The full picture is that Konaka has always had much less influence on the series than the fanbase tends to attribute to him. Official statements have been very clear as to not attribute the entire series to him, and, among all the other controversial statements he’s made, Konaka himself has at least been very active about crediting the other staff members as far as their influence on the series! The idea that he was the only person who ever did anything substantial for Tamers is something I’ve been warning against since long before any of this happened (if you want proof, I have a post from April with this sentiment in it), and right now we just happen to be seeing what’s basically the worst possible outcome of the fanbase constantly worshipping him like the only real creative heart behind the series to borderline cult-like levels...when that’s never been true, and has resulted in unfairly taking credit away from people who deserved it.

I’ll go into detail below, and I hope this can help people understand the situation better and sort out how they feel about it.

Note that I make references to his infamous blog in this post, which I’m deliberately refraining from directly linking for obvious reasons, but all of the information is still there, so it should be verifiable if you decide to look for it yourself.

Personally, I’ve always found it really bizarre how there’s been this obsession with portraying Konaka as some kind of auteur whom the entirety of Tamers depended on. I’m not saying this out of spite towards him, because, again, even he himself was very insistent on disclaiming credit for things he wasn’t actually responsible for (he was quite humble in this respect, actually). Not to mention that I think it’s a mistake in general to constantly pin a single person in a multi-person production as the sole heart behind it, and the Digimon fanbase has historically had this strange double standard behind it when it comes to uplifting him as the only heart behind Tamers when nobody says that about any of the head writers for...anything else. (How many times has Nishizono’s name ever popped up when talking about Adventure? People are usually more obsessed with talking about Kakudou or Seki.) Konaka’s work is certainly distinctive, but Tamers had a lot more going on besides just that.

In fact, based on his own statements on the matter and all of the other official information we’ve gotten about Tamers production, while you can’t really quantify such things, it’s generally been estimated that Konaka was responsible for something like only a fourth of the series. Which is an incredibly low amount compared to what the fanbase would have told you before all of this happened, because of this fixation that he must be the genius mastermind behind the whole series. Not only that, this “brilliant auteur” image of him was so inflated that people were attributing way more of 02 to him than he deserved; 02 episode 13 was the only thing he contributed to the series and he was specifically brought on as a “guest writer”, and the overall plot of the episode was determined by the rest of the production staff and not him -- but ask the fanbase and they’ll tell you stories about how he invented some grand planned arc for 02 that got cancelled, or even that Tamers exists because of a “writer revolt” from him and other writers not being allowed to do what they wanted. (You know, as much as I understand 02′s a controversial series, it would be really nice if people didn’t make up completely baseless stories like this just to scapegoat it...)

I honestly cannot emphasize enough how much of the problem we’re in right now has been horribly enabled by the weird pedestal the fanbase has been putting him on. This is to the point where there’s even been a double standard where some of the more unpopular/criticized elements of Tamers must not have been the fault of a brilliant writer like him, and in fact was forced on him by the executives (this excuse had always been brought up anytime someone doesn’t like something about Tamers, just to make sure the image of him as a perfect writer was maintained). Turns out, as per his own admission on the infamous blog, while he wasn’t the one who initially had the idea of putting Ryou in, the part that rubbed the fanbase the wrong way -- that he came in as an accomplished senior who was better than everyone and played up by everyone in the cast -- was unabashedly his idea (he apparently was enamored with the idea of having someone like Tuttle from the movie Brazil). Again, this is a weird scenario where even Konaka himself has been more humble about this issue than the fanbase’s perception of him; he fully admitted whenever he had trouble writing certain parts. For instance, he doesn’t actually like writing about alternate worlds, felt they were out of his comfort zone, and only wrote in the Digital World because the franchise needs one; he’d stated that if he’d had his way, the Digital World arc wouldn’t have come in as early as it did, which might be a pretty shocking statement for a Digimon fan to hear.

If you want even more specifics, here are some extremely major parts of the series that Konaka was not actually the one behind:

The character backgrounds. Konaka stated on his blog that he wasn’t interested in going too much into character backstories because he felt it was too plot-limiting to say that a character is the way they are thanks to something in their past or background (basically, he cares more about plot than character for the most part), and that he’s also not into worldbuilding. Certain things like Ruki going to a girls’ school were supplied by Seki, who infamously loves worldbuilding, family backgrounds, and character settings.

Certain nuances of Ruki’s character, especially the part where she’s pigeonholed into uncomfortable places due to being a girl, were informed by Yoshimura Genki, writer from Adventure and one of the head writers of 02 (who eventually would go on to create an entire career out of feminist cinema).

According to the posts on his blog, Impmon’s character arc didn’t have much input from Konaka himself and was largely written in by Maekawa Atsushi (also a writer from Adventure and one of the head writers of 02).

The whole concept of Yamaki being redeemable in the first place was something Konaka didn’t originally plan for; he’d initially intended to make him a straightforward antagonist, but, of all things, his Christmas song, combined with the input of the other writers (especially Maekawa) humanizing him, led to the development where Yamaki eventually changed sides and became sympathetic. (This makes Konaka’s recent stunt revolving around Yamaki a bit painfully ironic.)

The director, Kaizawa Yukio, was deliberately picked because he didn’t have experience on the prior series, for the sake of changing things up, and he spent Tamers as a period of studying what Digimon should be like. Based on what he’s hinted, it seems Konaka's writing style and choices were able to have as much influence as they did because Kaizawa approved of them -- that is to say, Konaka’s detailed imagery and descriptions were extensive enough that Kaizawa could go “sure, let’s go with that.” But in the end, nothing Konaka did would have gone through unless Kaizawa and Seki (among many others) didn’t also approve of it or provide input. Moreover, Kakudou Hiroyuki (director of Adventure and 02) has also been stated many times to have been a valuable consultant on invoking Digimon so that the new staff could understand what to aim for and how to get the right feel (and also assisted with providing stuff for the mythos, such as the Devas). Nevertheless, Kaizawa also seems to have had his own strong opinions and input on the story; he especially seems to get passionate when it comes to the topic of making the story something the kids watching it could relate to and imagine. (He would eventually go on to direct Frontier and Hunters, along with several episodes of the Adventure: reboot.)

So in other words, looking at this, a lot of these things that people emotionally connected to and loved about Tamers are things that literally were not his personal creation, and were largely contributed by the other writers! Of course, Konaka’s “creator thumbprint” is very obvious -- he was the head writer, after all -- and all of this had to go through his own vetting to make sure he personally liked it as well -- but nevertheless, you can see that this very much was a collaborative effort from head to toe, with him being very open about this fact himself. Insisting on making sure that this fact is well-known isn’t just a coping mechanism to try and remove his presence in the series, but rather a desire to get people to seriously stop giving him credit that really should be going to others (especially since, again, even he himself was very diligent about assigning that credit).

In the end, I’ll leave you with another thing to keep in mind: Konaka doesn’t get paid anymore for Tamers work (unless they make something new like the DigiFes thing), so continuing to buy Tamers merch and supporting the series through fanart and such will probably end up going more towards the Digimon IP as a whole. Basically, if we’re just talking about Tamers specifically, what degree this is going to matter is only really relevant to the content in the original series, which is now twenty years old and remains unchanged. By Konaka’s own admission, he wasn’t into all of these conspiracy theories until 2010 at the earliest, so while it’s understandable to be a bit wary about the themes in Tamers having traces of the base sentiment, the original series itself does not seem to be an outlet for alt-right propaganda, and it’s probably forcing it a bit much to read into it that way. Konaka’s also repeatedly insisted that all of his attempts at a Tamers sequel have been rejected and that he’s been doing increasingly strange swerves to get around members of the original cast not entirely being available, and the Japanese audience has turned out to not be very fond of the contents of the 2018 drama CD and the stage reading for reasons entirely separate from the politics, so it’s also unlikely we’ll be getting a Tamers sequel from him or something in the near future.

So -- at least for the time being -- what’s done with him is done, and the remaining question is how all of us feel about Tamers. I think everyone will have differing feelings on it, and that’s perfectly understandable. Personally, given everything I just said above, I’m going to continue treating it as a series very important to me, and one that many people (including, as it seems, a very different Konaka from twenty years ago) worked on with a lot of effort and love, although you may see me getting a bit more willing to be critical about the series and its themes thanks to my concerns about some of the sentiments in it and what they imply. I also completely understand that there are probably people whose associations are going to be much more hurt and who will have a much harder time seeing the series the same way ever again, and I think that’s reasonable as well. But at the very least, going forward, I hope all of us can understand the depth of this situation, give credit where it’s due, and not force credit where it’s not due.

[architectuul]

Radical Rituals

forty-five degrees is an open collective of architects and designers dedicated to the research and critical making of collective space. They take different forms when engaging in collaborations with other experts, adapting to the project’s scope. In their practice, space-making is about resources, not only material or financial but the intangible resources of human and non-human knowledge.

Talking in the park in front of Tageszeitung in Berlin-Mitte with Alkistis Thomidou and Berta Gutierrez. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

Their work aims at investigating the built environment through research, design and artistic experimentation, across multiple scales and in its social, economical and structural entanglements.They are collecting protocols and collective approaches, exploring alternative living and city making models and new paradigms of urban development to engage with communities and local agents. They strive to create inclusive and accessible spaces through careful use of scale, material and design language with a commitment to rethinking education through academia and practice placing design at the intersection of arts and sciences. Berta Gutierrez and Alkistis Thomidou were talking to Boštjan Bugarič.

***

For this interview we meet in a new park next to Hejduk’s Tower; why did we meet here?  BG: I really appreciate Hejduk's theoretical work and I find it very relevant nowadays since I believe it can give us many leads on how architecture should be taught during the contemporary crisis. 

In 2010 the architecture community gathered to protect the Kreuzberg Tower as new owners began altering the facade. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

Around this park are also other important buildings? AT: On the other side we find a first cooperatively built project for offices, FRIZZ, and on the other there is also the new TAZ building.

This park is divided with paths (lines), how can we create these lines? AT: This area had a very strange atmosphere although it is quite central. I am actually the first time in the park after its renovation. These lines cutting through the space shall be a result of shortcuts where people cross the former park, literally, the footprint.

“Radical Rituals” is an itinerary survey along the 45ºN parallel, on the inventiveness of everyday life, new hybrid vernacular practices and rituals that stimulate and nurture the commons across Europe. | Photo © forty-five degrees

What about your line, the forty-five degree? What is a project about? AT: The name came along with the idea of a research of the 45ºN parallel as many people in our team come from the south of Europe but studied or work and live in the north part of Europe. This line has influenced our way of thinking and although it is a fictional line it burdens Europe and represents a border that people try to cross every day from South  to North. We wanted to investigate what is happening along this line that crosses France, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Romania all the way to the Black Sea. Although it cuts the middle of Europe, cities around it are considered ‘peripheral’. We are researching how the European identity is reflected along this line.

Polarisation between north and south, heterogeneous economic models, diversity of cultural and historic backgrounds. | Photo EW Elsevier Weekblad, Issue 22, 2020

What have you discovered so far? BG: We are currently preparing our first field trip, and we will be in Romania and Serbia by September. Right now this is a very fascinating part of the project as it is like a zoom into the ground. If you go very far away, you see the meridians and parallels as the way of shaping the world, but when you start to get closer, you see countries, borders, cities,  landscapes and people. We would like to zoom in as much as possible, so we can really understand local situated practices that are happening in very specific physical environments.

AT: The project “Radical Rituals” is a survey on very local spatial practices or initiatives that addresses climate challenges, space justice and biodiversity. We want to be surprised by what we learn along the way, what kind of collectivity is created and how local identities can influence space production.

A British writer Shumon Basar references the metallic flowers of Hejduk on the facade as,"grips for angels to hold onto when they climb the sides of the tower” inspired by “Wings of Desire"by Wim Wenders. | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

BG: In this sense it is great that we are in front of Hejduk’s building because he proposes the way in which design comes as a result of small narratives or characters entangled with each other, working with crafts or local materials and contexts. For us the exercise is similar, but instead of working with fiction we work with reality as nowadays reality is complex enough. We don’t have all the answers to these challenging topics, but we believe  that this exercise will give us a sort of light. 

AT: Through this research we want to see what stories point to possible futures and possible present-s as people develop tools and knowledge that is embedded in the context of the local space. We worked on this concept at the Architecture Triennial in Oslo, where we created a digital Atlas that connects OAT’s archive and discourse with the transformations that take place on the city’s ground through local initiatives. We encountered initiatives that manage to achieve systemic changes and give multiple answers to the big challenges we are facing. In a way, proving that the environment is a primal source of our knowledge.

Oslo In Action(s) is a research project uncovering city-makers who stimulate and nurture the commons beyond the boundaries of professional practice.

The Digital Atlas was commissioned by the Oslo Architecture Triennial for their 20th jubilee “Conversations about the city". | Photo © forty-five degrees

Your practice was as well put on the list of the Future Architecture Platform? How do you see yourself in the FAP? AT: It was an  important experience to have this opportunity of working with people and institutions. We met extremely generous and inspiring people in Ljubljana and then in Oslo. Then, we got the digital research fellowship at Architectuul which enables us to meet and connect with other projects and not just sit in our office and work on the research but expand our network and bring different perspectives together. We are very grateful that the Future Architecture Platform gave space for this project.

Initiatives in Oslo (up) and Urtegata Sykkellevert space for multimedia production and Tøyen Taxi. | Photo © forty-five degrees

Just finished curating a panel on Kvadrato, how did you choose panels and why you wanted to present them? AT: The panel was called ‘Communication for Commonalities’, where we invited diverse initiatives that work collectively and with several communities. Their work spans from creating digital platforms that communicate collective intelligence on a global scale, to very local projects that engage directly with a variety of actors on the ground.

With Akerselva Trebåtforening, we paddled on a 100-year-old wooden boat on an underground river running into the fjord (up); Losæter is the city farm of Oslo. | Photo © forty-five degrees

BG: It was a great example for us to address our questions and concerns and discuss them in the context of communication of architecture. As we know, communication in architecture is about media and its symbolic representation. Nevertheless, for us communication is related with the ground, physical context, methodologies and the communication channels that people use to promulgate the project with peers or bigger networks.

The Fjord floating saunas - Oslo Badstuforening. | Photo © forty-five degrees

The legendary GSF Skatepark. | Photo © forty-five degrees

The Oslo fjordhage, a floating classroom dome. | Photo © forty-five degrees

How you integrate the theoretical methods in the learning process? BG: In my personal research I try to answer the question of how do we promote other ways of learning coming from non-disciplinary practices since academia became such a rigid space with a very outdated curriculum. With non-disciplinary practices beyond academia we can really find many inputs on this crossing.

Berta Gutierrez and Alkistis Thomidou | Photo © Boštjan Bugarič

AT: We are currently collaborating with two other international practices on an Erasmus+ Youth in Action project on how to learn together. During the next two years we will develop formats of different ways of learning and engaging youth to  physical interaction with various spaces in the city, public, private or common areas. We see the engagement of young adults in space-making processes as a project of emancipation and investment in the future.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

A History Of God – The 4,000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” — Karen Armstrong on Powells.com

book by Karen Armstrong (2004)

The idea of a single divine being – God, Yahweh, Allah – has existed for over 4,000 years. But the history of God is also the history of human struggle. While Judaism, Islam and Christianity proclaim the goodness of God, organised religion has too often been the catalyst for violence and ineradicable prejudice. In this fascinating, extensive and original account of the evolution of belief, Karen Armstrong examines Western society’s unerring fidelity to this idea of One God and the many conflicting convictions it engenders. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact – or fiction – of our lives.

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Review: Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time – the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated, altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to its followers’ practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates. Armstrong also shows us how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have overlapped and influenced one another, gently challenging the secularist history of each of these religions. – Gail Hudson

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The Introduction to A History of God:

As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God. There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them. I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory. I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good or beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed. James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I listened to my share of hell-fire sermons. In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively. God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images. When I was about eight years old, I had to memorise this catechism answer to the question, ‘What is God?’: ‘God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections.’ Not surprisingly, it meant little to me and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect.

As I grew up, I realised that there was more to religion than fear. I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot and some of the simpler writings of the mystics. I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality. To do this I entered a religious order and, as a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith. I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God but he remained a stern taskmaster, who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalisingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about ‘God’, seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate – and highly contradictory – doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life and once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programmes about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings were justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.

Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in the kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces but these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seems always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God – not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that ‘he’ would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other Rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality ‘out there’; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary rational process. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world.

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement: ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement it only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of ‘God’: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. The same is true of atheism. The statement ‘I do not believe in God’ has always meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed ‘atheists’ over the years have always been denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the ‘God’ who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called ‘atheists’ by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a God’ which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

Despite its other-worldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We hall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed – sometimes for something radically different. This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but could only be provisional. They were man-made – they could be nothing else – and quite separate from the indescribable Reality they symbolised. Some developed quite audacious ways of emphasising this essential distinction. One medieval mystic went so far as to say that this ultimate Reality – mistakenly called ‘God’ – was not even mentioned in the Bible. Throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world. Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of life. Not everybody would regard it as divine: Buddhists, as we shall see, would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source; they see them as natural to humanity. All the major religions, however, would agree that it is impossible to describe this transcendence in normal conceptual language. Monotheists have called this transcendence ‘God’ but they have hedged this around with important provisos. Jews, for example, are forbidden to pronounce the sacred Name of God and Muslims must not attempt to depict the divine in visual imagery. The discipline is a reminder that the reality that we call ‘God’ exceeds all human expression.

This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception. Scientific notions work like that but the ideas of art and religion do not. Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine. Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies. Each expression of these universal themes is slightly different, however, showing the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human imagination as it struggles to express its sense of ‘God’.

Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine per cent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which ‘God’ of the many on offer do they subscribe to?

Theology often comes across as dull and abstract but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonising struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountain tops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies, is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbours, these often crept back into the faith at a later date. Mystics have seen God incarnated a woman, for example. Others reverently speak of God’s sexuality and have introduced a female element into the divine.

This brings me to a difficult point. Because this God began as a specifically male deity, monotheists have usually referred to it as ‘he’. In recent years, feminists have understandably objected to this. Since I shall be recording the thoughts and insights of people who called God ‘he’, I have used the conventional masculine terminology, except when ‘it’ has been more appropriate. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God – al-Dhat – is feminine.

All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who – in some sense – speaks. His Word is crucial in all three faiths. The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decide whether the word ‘God’ has any meaning for us today.

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Biography Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs –including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation – and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

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From Publishers Weekly This searching, profound comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs.., argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge, condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent “a retreat from God.” She views as inevitable a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves, and welcomes the grouping of believers toward a notion of God that “works for us in the empirical age.”

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My wish: The Charter for Compassion – Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong TED Talk given in 2008

What God is, or isn’t, will continue to morph indefinitely unless…

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Richard Barlow:

‘The whole thing about the messiah is a human construct’

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

How “God’s Day” was established on January 1, 1968

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Divine Principle – Parallels of History

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“… Many Koreans therefore have difficulty understanding and accepting religions that have only one god and emphasize an uncertain and unknowable afterlife rather than the here and now. In the Korean context of things, such religions are anti-life and do not really make sense…”  LINK

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

[fursasaida]

Do you have any advice for someone who loves learning and reading about all kinds of stuff but isn't academically trained to understand lots of things? Tbh, I'm curious about everything but I feel stupid when I read things I don't understand right away. It's like I lack critical thinking which makes me endlessly sad because that's something I'd like to develop but idk how. It feels like I passively absorb info, and even the things I understand, I tend to forget or don't know how to articulate :(

I think it would help if I had a concrete example or some more details about what exactly you’re struggling with, but I can offer some general thoughts. (I’m procrastinating on some research by answering this, so it got long. If anything needs clarifying, feel free to come back and let me know.)

“I feel stupid when I read things I don’t understand right away.”

I think it’s very important to understand that being smart or being stupid are phrases so broad they barely mean anything. Understanding a text right away means you have certain skills and knowledge that enable you to do that. It says nothing about your potential to develop those skills and that knowledge base.  I am very good at understanding texts, which means people say that I am “smart” because that skill is valued in a particular way. If you asked me to plow a field I would suddenly be “too stupid” to do it, because I do not have the skills and knowledge. But I could learn them!

And for that matter, even if you never become someone who “gets” texts right away, so what? A lot of people could stand to slow down, if you ask me.

This brings me directly to:

“It’s like I lack critical thinking”

That feeling of running into a wall is actually one of the best tools you could have for thinking critically. Many, many, many people who easily understand academic/analytical writing fail to question what they read, precisely because they can just sort of gulp it down. If you are getting snagged on what someone is saying, it’s not because you are incapable of grasping the Expert Truth they are conveying; it’s because on some level you disagree, or don’t share the worldview that underlies their thinking. (Or also, and this option is not always given enough credence, because they’re a bad writer. [Coughs in Donna Haraway’s direction])

This is true even, or especially, if what’s snagging you is that you don’t understand what they’re saying. This is because in their writing they have assumed their readers share a lot of contextual knowledge and assumptions. That’s not bad in itself; if everybody stopped to fully explain every single term, connection, and assertion in everything they wrote, shit would be impossible. But I want to emphasize that if you happen to fall outside the bounds of those assumptions, it not only does not mean you are stupid, it means you are especially well equipped to question and criticize them--so long as you do the work to understand them, in good faith.

(I add that last corollary because there is a problem where people don’t bother to understand where things are coming from before attacking them, and that’s not useful to anyone. But clearly you are not one of these people. I’d like to encourage you to consider these “I don’t get it” moments not as reasons to give up but as a genuinely good starting point for developing the critical skills you so badly want to have.)

An author makes a statement. The statement doesn’t make sense to you. Why not? Are there words you don’t know? Look them up. Look up their etymology, or examples of their being used in sentences, if you need more than the definition is giving you. Is it the content of the statement itself? Then clearly the author and you are coming at whatever the subject is with different background information and assumptions. (This is still true if it’s a subject you know nothing about! That’s a prime example of coming at it with different assumptions. The author assumes a lot of things about the world that you don’t, because you haven’t learned them.) The important question is not What’s wrong with me that I don’t share this author’s assumptions? Rather, the question is Can I figure out what is behind this author’s statement? And once you arrive at some idea about the answer to that, the task is not necessarily to bring yourself into agreement with it, but to decide whether you think it makes sense or not.

This is where an example would be helpful, because “figure out what the underlying assumptions are” is very vague and I’m sure you’re sitting here like, “Oh, sure, just like that.” So, to start with: The things that pull you up short are the things you should ask questions about. What is it in my understanding of the world that makes this statement not make sense? (One way to look at this is: is there a different but related statement that does make sense to me? What’s different between the two, and why does it make such a difference to me?) What would I have to believe, or assume, for the statement to make sense to me? Why did this person mention this example and not those, and can I interpret this choice as something that makes sense to me? Or as a clue that reveals something about where this text is coming from?

And to be clear, when I say “underlying assumptions,” I don’t mean that this only/always means sussing out bias or prejudice in the usual way those words are used. I also mean the things that author learned in their field before writing the text, which you have not. Like, a lot of what I write now depends on the assumption that there is a difference between “absolute space” and “place.” You might have to read up on that a bit to know what I’m saying at a given moment because you aren’t specialized in what I’m specialized in. You might then decide you think this distinction is bollocks! Reading up on it isn’t necessarily just to get you to agree with me. It’s to get you to where you can make an informed decision about agreeing or not.

Often the biggest assumptions lie in the simplest statements. I’m reading about the Cold War a lot right now. If someone says, for example, “The Cold War was the dominant structure of international politics between 1945 and 1989,” this seems very obvious and straightforward. It’s a basic statement of what most people mean when they refer to “the Cold War” at all. It’s “a historical fact,” a piece of information for those interested in history to “absorb.” But there are a lot of questions worth asking about this! Are we sure there was only one, singular (“the”) Cold War? Was it really “the dominant structure” for everyone, everywhere, that whole time? What is a “structure” and what makes one “dominant”? Are we completely sure about those start and end dates, and do they apply everywhere?

Now one can imagine that if I were to ask all these questions of someone who referred to the Cold War this way in a dinner conversation or something, I might appear very ignorant--or “stupid.” But being critical means not accepting things at face value. I may know perfectly well exactly what this person is referring to, but if I want to question the assumptions built into that reference, I have to ask about things that are “obvious” or “well known.”

The good news is that when you’re reading a text, you don’t have to worry about other people at the table judging you. It sounds like right now you are doing that to yourself, and I would very much like to encourage you not to. Having “dumb” questions is being critical. The only difference between “I don’t understand this sentence about the Cold War” and “I have a critique of this sentence about the Cold War” is that in the first case, I have questions about the sentence; in the second case, I have developed answers to my own questions about the sentence. But both of them involve looking at the sentence and saying “this doesn’t add up to me.”

Criticism is a process. Developing expertise does mean getting to a point that you don’t need to do extensive research every time you read or criticize something, but there will always be new things you don’t understand and have to put in the work to be able to critique. The vast majority of ~inspiration~ among academics, if you read/listen to them talking about their research projects, comes out of bumping up against something they don’t understand and just not being satisfied until they could account for it. That could be anything from the way the word “democracy” was used in the Iran-Contra hearings to the everyday social fact that women are routinely expected to have longer hair than men in much of the United States.

So. You are actually in a great place to get better at this, because everybody who is seriously and honestly trying to be critical has to start from making the obvious not-obvious--from not understanding something.

That brings me to the last thing I want to address:

“It feels like I passively absorb info, and even the things I understand, I tend to forget or don't know how to articulate.”

Criticism, or just--learning--isn’t just a process; as what I was saying about academics above already suggests, it’s a project. This is not only true of academics. Plenty of people who aren’t academics do research or study things on their own just because they’re interested. But the kernel of that interest is a desire to understand something, whether it’s for a practical purpose or not. Maybe you’re teaching yourself to sew and having a lot of trouble with a particular stitch, and you want to figure out if that stitch is standard because it’s actually the most functional or if there’s some other reason, which would mean you could use something different. Or maybe you just really want to know what’s up with sea turtles. Either way, there is something you want.

I think if you identify specific questions about or interests in the world and pursue those, you will have an easier time building these skills and retaining information. (This doesn’t mean you have to give up your general curiosity! Just that at any given time, you are focusing on a few specific things.) Information sticks with us because it’s useful somehow. If your goal isn’t just “know things” but “figure out this thing, specifically” then information about that thing has an actual use for you. So think about something that you’ve had a lot of trouble understanding and that you want to understand--not because you feel like you’re supposed to, or because you feel ashamed that you don’t, but because you want answers to your questions. Your project is now satisfying that curiosity.

I find the more I think about a question I have, the more I start to see information that’s applicable to it popping out of the world all around me, everywhere, even when I’m not actively “working on it.” And I remember those things because they are not just “information.” They are of significance to something I am trying to do, which is answer the question. And that question is not assigned to me by anyone else, not even the author of a text I don’t understand. I can only assign it to myself (I have to want to understand that text!).

And you can support this with the way you read! Reading is interactive (yes, even when it’s just you and a page and you’re not making any noise). The more you approach it that way, the more you will retain of what you read--even if you end up disagreeing with it--because you are not trying to be a container for information to fill, which is absolutely bound to leak. Instead you are looking for things that are useful to you, which may or may not be findable in the text you are currently reading. You are not a receiver. You are a spelunker.

So what does it mean to read interactively? It can mean almost anything. For people like me, it often means a lot of making notes, annotations, and so on (the physical act of annotating a text does a lot to help me retain things, for example). I have files upon files of notes and quotes and outlines from different research projects. I write out paragraphs of musings to try to articulate how my questions are shifting as I learn, or what exactly the thing I’m struggling with is. (You mentioned struggling to articulate; writing things out for yourself is one way to practice at this. So is bouncing things off a friend, which I also do a lot.) But it doesn’t have to look like this.

If you are pursuing an interest, then ultimately what you’re doing ought to be pleasurable. (I don’t mean that it should make you jump for joy every second, but the feeling of making progress toward a goal, even if a particular step is unpleasant, is still pleasurable.) If “taking notes” for you looks like drawing, then great. I once outlined a paper by drawing it as a floor plan for a two-story house. I make research playlists that I consider to be functionally identical to syllabi. I have tagged collections on this tumblr that represent some of my thinking through one set of questions or another. What I’m trying to get at is that in working to answer your own questions, you are not just abstractly trying to “understand” something, which miraculously happens or doesn’t depending on whether your mind is ~good enough~ to receive the Content. You are interacting with statements, pieces of information, images, texts, etc., which you are collecting and arranging and rearranging in order to try to reach a place where you’re satisfied. All of that is part of the process of “understanding,” and if you’re genuinely interested in that process, then the work involved shouldn’t feel like homework. So the literal things you do as part of it don��t have to be similar to schoolwork, if those kinds of things are boring or painful or just unhelpful to you. Do whatever! You’re in charge!

So, to summarize all of this: I think the first thing you need to do is think of yourself not as ignorant, stupid, or uneducated, but as someone who is actively wanting and trying to engage and learn about the world. This is admirable! This is exciting! Thus your goal is not to “absorb” information to make up some deficit, or to become some other, “smarter” person who would understand things the first time you look at them. Your goal is simply to answer your own questions about the world. From that point of view, not-understanding is not a problem. It’s necessary. It’s where the questions come from. If you have to answer a lot of sub-questions along the way--if it takes you weeks to really get what a single essay is saying--this does not say anything bad about you. It just means you’re doing the damn thing. But in order to succeed at it, you do need to have some motivation; it needs to mean something to you. (One of the biggest tricks the devil ever pulled was the idea that inquiry could ever possibly be impersonal.) And whatever that personal meaning is is good enough, I promise.

[lostinthewinterwood]

AU Exchange 2020

Hey friend!

Looks like this letter’ll be going out on time, for once in my life.  This one’s very long; there’ll be a list of fandoms after the general info so you can hop around and not get bogged down in the details that don’t matter for what you’re going to be writing.

Treats in any medium are welcome, my other exchange letters are here, and at the bottom there’ll be tags for each fandom I’ve requested, if you want to see whether I’ve requested them before and what I’ve said about them.  Good luck, have fun, and thanks for writing for me!

 General DNW non/dub-con; non-canonical major character death; heavy angst; hurt no comfort; graphic depictions of deliberate and methodical self-harm*; graphic depictions of suicide; smut; gore; grimdark; complete downer endings; character bashing; incest; cringe comedy; a/b/o; mpreg; graphic eye trauma; graphic and/or permanent hand trauma; issuefic; unrequested identity headcanons; a focus on unrequested romantic relationships**. *I don’t include things like, say, punching a wall in a fit of emotion under this. however, something like cutting would not be appreciated. **canonical levels of canonical ships are perfectly fine; background non-canon ships that I haven’t dnw’d are okay too (unless otherwise specified—see below for fandom-specific notes).

  General Likes

– I really like plotty fics

– Secret identity and disguise shenanigans, the more layers to them and more absurdity the better.

– Crossdressing for whatever reason and gender disguises, also for whatever reason.

– A focus on family and/or friendship, especially characters realizing they’re not nearly as alone as they think they are, and just generally characters who like each other and enjoy spending time together

– Found family; families of choice

– Character studies

– Worldbuilding

- explorations of how whatever AU you pick to write affects the characters and/or plot, and the ways in which it doesn’t

  Other General Notes:

If there’s an AU I’d especially like to see on its own, without any other AU in combination with it, I’ll mention it—outside of that, feel free to combine the AUs as you see fit.

All the times that the Dragon Rider au is one I asked for, I’ve framed it in my prompts as a sports story thing—while that would definitely be great, don’t feel pressured to make it be like that; it’s just where my prompting muse is at right now, so if you want to take it in another direction go right ahead.

  Fandoms in Order of Appearance:

Hanging Out with a Gamer Girl

Harry Potter

Mother of Learning (x2)

Day Break Illusion (x2)

  Hanging Out with a Gamer Girl (Manga)  

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Terazaki Kaoru (HOwaGG)

·        Ousaka Nanami (HOwaGG)

·        Group: Terazaki Kaoru & Ousaka Shouko (HOwaGG)

·        Group: Terazaki Kaoru & Ousaka Nanami (HOwaGG)

 Fandom-specific dnw: sexualization of Kaoru’s crossdressing, romance between Kaoru and Nanami beyond light shiptease à la canon (unless the AU chosen is a romantic fairytale, in which case go right ahead), full justification of Kaoru’s fears re: Nanami’s dad, heavy gender dysphoria.

 Overall I love these kids and their friendship, and I also love how much Shouko feels like a mom to Kaoru even though he isn’t hers, even though he’s keeping secrets from her—he doesn’t seem to have that much parental support overall.

Whatever AU you pick, I’d appreciate that being preserved.

  ·        ALL: Character was Stolen by Fairies as a Baby

·        All: East of the Sun and West of the Moon Fusion

·        All: Fairytale Fusion

·        ALL: Fantasy/Magic Royalty and Palace Intrigue AU

·        ALL: Magic is a part of everyday life

·        ALL: Magical Girl Fusion

·        ALL: Magical Realism

·        ALL: Regency-Inspired Fantasy AU

 For this set of tags, I’d love to see something that fuses the AU elements to canon, or replaces canon elements with them—maybe instead of gamers, the kids are magical girls!  Or maybe there’s just magical elements wound seamlessly into their lives, or they instead live in a fairytale world, or…

Basically, this is my more generic magic!au set.

  ·        ALL: Characters met as children

·        ALL: Deaf Canon Characters

·        ALL: Disabled Canon Characters

·        ALL: Mute Canon Characters

·        HOwaGG: trans girl Terazaki Kaoru

 These are the generally mundane AUs—if one or both of the kids is disabled in some way, how does that affect them?  If they’ve known each other longer than they have in canon, or used to know each other—how does that affect them?  If Kaoru is a trans girl, is that something that she knows before their canon meeting, and maybe that’s a point at which she’s already begun transitioning?  Or does the crossdressing give her a revelation?

  ·        ALL: Daemon AU

·        ALL: Daemons in Canon Divergent AU

 I like daemon!aus a lot, though I’m not very good at writing them myself—if this world has daemons, what are the kids’?  Are they fully settled yet, or not quite?  Most people have daemons opposite to their sex—is it obvious that Kaoru’s daemon is female, and if so, does that pique Shouko’s interest?  Does his daemon get him recognized by people who know Kaoru-the-boy even when he’s out looking like a girl?

  ·        ALL: Dragon Rider AU

·        All: Figure skating AU

 Sports aus!  One mundane, one distinctly less so… what’s it like, if they’re dragon riders? Is it a whole other world, or just our world +dragons?  If it’s figure skating, what kind of skating do they do?  Singles?  Pairs? Ice dance?  Are they just casual about it or competitive?

  ·        ALL: Platonic Soulmate AU

·        ALL: Soulmates - Soulmate Mark Appears At First Touch

·        ALL: Soulmates Share Scars

 These are probably my three favorite kinds of soulmate AUs—run with them!  Tell me about the kids and their dynamic and the world they inhabit, with soulmates thrown into the mix!

     Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling   

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Percy Weasley (HP - JKR)

 Fandom-specific dnw: non-canon ships.

 I’ve phrased this so broadly because it’s generally better safe than sorry on these things—essentially what I especially don’t want is non-canon ships between people on opposite sides of the war, e.g. drarry, harry/Voldemort, etc. If you want to toss in background, idk, Pansy/Daphne or something, or relationships between various Ministry people, that I don’t mind.

 ·        ALL: Underground Resistance

·        HP: Percy Weasley is a spy for the Order of the Phoenix during the war

·        ALL: Character Is a Secretly a Spy for the Other Side

 There’s really one thing I want here—spy!Percy!  He spends so much of the war in the Ministry, surrounded by Death Eaters and their accomplices and enablers, to all appearances the black sheep of the Weasley family and not much of a threat.  Now, this could be genuine… but it could also be him playing them; I want to see a world where he, at some point—maybe after he chooses to stay with the ministry instead of his family, maybe before—decides to be a spy for the Order et al.

What are the risks?  What can he accomplish?  Can he help people beyond simply passing out information, perhaps with seemingly-inconsequential little acts?

     Mother of Learning - nobody103   

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Kirielle Kazinski (Mother of Learning)

 request-specific dnw: physical parental abuse within the Kazinski family, significant exaggeration of canonical emotional neglect/abuse/general family dysfunction, romantic and/or sexual Zach/Zorian.

 ·        All: Character has a secret identity

·        All: Identity Porn

·        ALL: Possessed by time travelling future self

·        MoL: Kirielle as a Branded One

 I’m fascinated by the idea of Kirielle somehow getting wrapped up in the time loop—what��s it like to live years and years of your life while your body stays nine?  What does she do, what does she learn?  Are Zach and Zorian still Branded Ones, or is she taking one or both of their places?

If you go with this, I’d rather not have her gate!soul erased—either let her escape, or don’t go far enough to need to address it, please.

The identity bits here are mostly leaning on the idea that, with her only being nine, Kiri would need some kind of identity obfuscation to do half of what Zach and Zorian do in canon, so…

  ·        ALL: Daemon AU

·        ALL: Daemons in Canon Divergent AU

 Nothing particularly profound here—but! Daemons! How does this affect things? Is Kiri happier with someone to talk to who isn’t her siblings or parents or village children that her parents mightn’t approve of?  I’d imagine her daemon hasn’t settled yet—what forms does it like?

  ·        All: Changeling AU

·        ALL: Fairy Tale AU

·        All: Fairytale Fusion

·        All: Historical Fantasy AU

·        ALL: Magical Realism

·        ALL: Nature Magic

 The setting and/or mood change AUs—give me Kirielle-the-faerie child, or Kiri in a fairytale, or shift the setting more historical and into our world, or change the nature of the magic—the canonical magic system is fairly hard as magic systems go, which works well for the story as it is, but I also really like softer magics.  What about a world where there’s simply small everyday magics present, or where Kiri has an affinity for green growing things quite beyond the natural?

  ·        ALL: Deaf Canon Characters

 How does Kiri’s life change, if she’s born deaf or becomes deaf?  How does her role as Cikan Kazinski’s only daughter change?  Does Eldemar have a Deaf community?

This could play into her desire to go to Cyoria, too—I wouldn’t expect Cirin to have much in the way of resources or community, but maybe Cyoria does; maybe that’s why she wants so badly to go.

  ·        ALL: Finding Peace/An End to the War

·        ALL: Legal Drama

·        ALL: Magical environment/species conservation scientist au

·        ALL: Magical horticulturists

 This set is more likely future!fic than anything else—Kirielle’s growing up into a country on the brink of war; what’s she going to do when she gets older?  Maybe she’ll be involved in that, or with the law—or maybe she goes to school and learns to be a mage, and then goes on to a career as a conservationist or horticulturist.

    Mother of Learning - nobody103   

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Zorian Kazinski (Mother of Learning)

·        Zach Noveda (Mother of Learning)

 request-specific dnw: physical parental abuse within the Kazinski family, significant exaggeration of canonical emotional neglect/abuse/general family dysfunction, romantic and/or sexual Zach/Zorian (unless in a romantic fairytale au).

 ·        All: Changeling AU

·        All: Fairytale Fusion

·        ALL: Fantasy/Magic Royalty and Palace Intrigue AU

·        ALL: High Fantasy AU

·        All: Historical Fantasy AU

·        ALL: Magical Realism

·        ALL: Nature Magic

 Again, setting and/or mood changes—turn one or both of these two into a changeling child, or push them into a different setting, or change their world to feel a little more magical than it does in canon.

  ·        All: Character has a secret identity

·        ALL: Deaf Canon Characters

·        ALL: Legal Drama

·        ALL: Magical environment/species conservation scientist au

·        ALL: Magical horticulturists

·        ALL: Role Swap AU

 This set is a combination of probably-post-canon things and things that could slide into the canon timeline—what if one or both of them went to more effort to construct a second identity, either in the loop or out of it, for anyone’s benefit?  What if one or both of them was deaf—if you go here, it’d be interesting if you combined it with deaf!Kirielle too.  A role swap—what if Zorian got there earlier and the angels didn’t think him unworthy, and Zach wound up his tagalong instead?

And the other three are basically what-ifs for the post-canon world—there’s Zach’s court case to be dealt with, and these two are both skilled enough to do basically whatever they want to, if it’s to do with magic.  Why not become a conservationist or horticulturist?

  ·        ALL: Daemons in Canon Divergent AU

·        All: Figure skating AU

·        ALL: Regency AU

·        All: Robin Hood Fusion

·        ALL: Spies & Secret Agents

·        ALL: University AU

 This is a whole grab bag of different AUs—they’re all fairly self-explanatory I think, though I will say that you shouldn’t feel pressured to keep the overtly mundane-seeming AUs mundane, if you don’t want too—I’d like the mundane versions of course!  But there’s plenty of interesting things you could explore with, e.g., magic!figure skating, so.  Go wild.

  ·        All: Tam Lin Fusion

 In a weird way, MoL already has its characters in the roles they need to be in for a Tam Lin fusion, though the structure is of course very different–what is Zach if not a sacrifice against Panaxeth’s release? What is Zorian if not the one who fights nigh-impossible odds to save him from that fate?  I’d love to see a fic that goes into this.

    幻影ヲ駆ケル太陽 il sole penetra le illusioni | Day Break Illusion   

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Tsukuyomi Luna (Day Break Illusion)

·        Taiyou Akari (Day Break Illusion)

·        Shirokane Ginka (Day Break Illusion)

·        Hoshikawa Seira (Day Break Illusion)

·        Group: Tsukuyomi Luna & Tsukuyomi Serena (Day Break Illusion)

·        Group: Hoshikawa Seira & Shirokane Ginka & Taiyou Akari & Tsukuyomi Luna

 fandom-specific dnw: heavy gender dysphoria.

 ·        All: a character is transgender (binary)

·        ALL: Alternate First Meetings

·        All: Character has a secret identity

·        ALL: Deaf Canon Characters

·        ALL: Disabled Canon Characters

·        ALL: Street Rats

 This is basically the AUs of mundane level things; the broad strokes of canon are perfectly compliant with any of these, or at least they could be. What changes, if you go for any of the AUs listed above? What stays the same?

  ·        All: Changeling AU

·        ALL: Character was Stolen by Fairies as a Baby

·        ALL: Daemon AU

·        All: Fairytale Fusion

·        ALL: Fantasy/Magic Royalty and Palace Intrigue AU

·        ALL: Magical Realism

·        ALL: Regency-Inspired Fantasy AU

·        All: with the right postage you can send letters anywhere anywhen

 Different flavors of fantasy—for the changelings, is the character we know from canon the stolen child, or their faerie replacement?  Are their daemons affected by them fighting the daemonia; what happens to a daemon when the human is consumed by a daemonia?  How do their powers and battles work in a world that’s more overtly magical? For the last—who/where/when would they send letters to?  Would Akari send one back in time to Fuyuna, Luna to her sister, Seira to her friend? Forward to their future selves? How does this affect the timeline; do you have to be careful, lest you irrevocably change things, or are future-letters already set and immutable?  Is this common or rare—what’s the price to send a letter through time?

  ·        ALL: Character Journeys To The Underworld to Rescue Their Dead Friend

·        All: Journey to the Underworld to Resurrect Loved One

 Who are they rescuing?  How are they going about the rescue?  Are they bringing back Fuyuna?  Seira’s friend?  Luna’s sister, if it turns out she’s dead not just vanished some other way?  Ginka herself, if we suppose that she died in the annihilation rather than going to battle elsewhere?

If a Daemonia’s victim is resurrected, does everyone remember them again? Either way, what are the consequences of bringing back a person who’d been erased?

  ·        ALL: Dragon Rider AU

·        ALL: Fencing AU

·        All: Figure skating AU

 Sports aus!  Two mundane, one not.  I’d love to see the kids in some kind of competitive something—are they teammates? Competitors? Is Sefiro Fiore a sports organization in this world, or are they both athletes and tarot users?

  ·        DBI: Daemonia hosts aren't erased from the timeline when killed

 So, one of the generally convenient things in this world—even if it’s not a particularly nice thing—is that none of the characters ever have to deal with the fallout of the deaths they cause; the daemonia’s victims are erased.  Ret-gone, if you will.  But what if they weren’t?  What would the effect of that be; how would that change things?

    幻影ヲ駆ケル太陽 il sole penetra le illusioni | Day Break Illusion   

·        Fanfiction (Medium)

·        Group: Hanayume & Lymro & Mama Nagataki & Taiyou Akari (Day Break Illusion)

·        Group: Hanayume & Lymro & Mama Nagataki (Day Break Illusion)

 fandom-specific dnw: heavy gender dysphoria.

 ·        All: a character is transgender (binary)

·        ALL: Deaf Canon Characters

·        ALL: Disabled Canon Characters

·        ALL: Found Family

 So, again, this is the more mundane aus—add these in!! tell me how they affect things, or how they don’t affect them!

Found family is… kinda canon? But there isn’t really much focus on that aspect in canon so I’d love some more here.

  ·        All: Changeling AU

·        ALL: Character was Stolen by Fairies as a Baby

·        All: Fairytale Fusion

·        ALL: Fantasy/Magic Royalty and Palace Intrigue AU

·        All: Historical Fantasy AU

·        ALL: Magic is a part of everyday life

·        ALL: Magical Realism

·        ALL: Regency AU (no homophobia)

·        ALL: Regency-Inspired Fantasy AU

·        All: with the right postage you can send letters anywhere anywhen

 And these are the magic and/or setting AUs!  How do these elements change their lives; what stays the same regardless?

See my previous set of Day Break Illusion requests for my thoughts on the letters tag.

  ·        ALL: Daemon AU

·        ALL: Daemons in Canon Divergent AU

 Just—daemons!  What are theirs?  For Hanayume—what gender is her daemon?  I’m sorry I’m running out of things to say at this point…

  ·        ALL: Dragon Rider AU

·        ALL: Fencing AU

·        All: Figure skating AU

 So, in canon, Hanayume, Lymro, and Mama Nagataki are kind of Akari’s fortune-teller aunts/mentors; if we change it so that Akari’s thing is fencing or figure skating or dragon-riding, why not bring her aunts along for the ride as her mentors in that sport, or, if we’re not including Akari—competitors themselves, perhaps, or maybe generally teachers?

   If you made it all the way down here—first of all, wow, this letter was way too long so good on you for making it—second of all—thank you again for writing for me!! Good luck!!

[mediaeval-muse]

Video Game Review: Assassin’s Creed Revelations (Ubisoft, 2011)

Genres: action-adventure, third person, open world

Premise: Ezio Auditore travels to Constantinople to unlock the secret of Altaïr's vault in Masyaf, battling Templars who also want the vault’s contents. In the present day, Desmond Miles is trapped in the Animus and must find a "synch nexus", a key memory that links him with Altaïr and Ezio, to reintegrate his splintered subconscious and awaken from his coma.

Platform Played On: PC (Windows)

Rating: 3/5 stars

***Full review under the cut.***

I am evaluating this game based on four key aspects: story, characters, gameplay, and visuals. I will not be evaluating the multiplayer mode because I don’t like playing video games with other people.

Content Warnings: violence, blood

Story: The main premise of Revelations’ story is that, following the end of Brotherhood, Desmond has fallen into a coma. The stress of being controlled by Juno has splintered his subconscious, so in an effort to save his life, Rebecca Crane and a mysterious figure have placed him back in the Animus. In order to repair his mind and escape, Desmond must “play out” the remainder of Ezio’s memories, so he follows his ancestor as he travels to Masyaf in search of Altaïr's vault, which requires five “keys” to open. These keys have been hidden around Constantinople, and Ezio must race against the Templars during the political conflict between Şehzade Ahmet and Selim I.

Desmond’s plot follows a somewhat natural progression. Though I missed his interactions with the Assassin team, it makes sense that his next big adventure would involve being trapped in the Animus and learning more from Subject 16. I liked that gameplay in Ezio’s world unlocked some puzzles in Desmond’s world (even though he’s trapped in the Animus, he inhabits a little island where he can be himself) and that these puzzles told us more about Desmond’s past. I did not think, however, that Desmond’s past was related in a compelling way. Most of it is told to us through Desmond monologuing as the player completes puzzles that are somewhat reminiscent of Portal. I thought Desmond’s past could have been done better, perhaps by having flashback scenes like how Altair’s past is related.

Ezio’s plot felt like it was lacking, and I think the reason is that the past 3 games have focused on finding and controlling the Apple/Piece of Eden, whereas this game is about opening a vault/library.  Ezio’s story also lacks a strong antagonist to tie things together; instead of battling the Borgias, Ezio is competing with general “Templars,” and even though there are some prominent Templar figures, none of them had “stage presence” like Cesare Borgia did. Though I liked the political backdrop, I think Ezio himself was ill-suited for it. It sort of feels like the creators wanted to extend Ezio’s story rather than start something new with a protagonist who was more connected to the setting, and though recovering Altair’s library is a fun goal, I think the story should have revolved around someone who grew up in the region.

I did like that we got to delve a little deeper into Altair’s past and learn more about him. Unless you play the portable Assassin’s Creed games, you don’t get to learn much about what happened to Altair in ACII and Brotherhood, so it was nice to see some exploration of his life in a game that was centered on uncovering his work.

Characters: Ezio, our protagonist and player-controlled character, is a little older in this game, and while he’s still likable, he’s much more serious and down-to-business. I’m a bit torn as to whether his demeanor fits the setting of the game - on the one hand, I loved that the European character wasn’t presented as someone who comes to the Middle East and takes charge. Ezio definitely has much to learn, and his skills are seen as having value without being superior. On the other, I do wish the protagonist had been someone who lived in the area - I got the feeling that Ezio was made the protagonist because of his popularity rather than his suitability for the setting, and while I appreciate that Revelations closed out his arc, I don’t really think it was needed.

The major supporting character in this game is Yusuf Tazim, leader of the Turkish Assassin Order. He shows Ezio around and provides much-needed instructions and lore, and he’s incredibly charismatic and personable. Ezio also encounters historical figures such as Manuel Palaiologos and the future Suleiman the Magnificent, which were fun treats for history enthusiasts, but not extremely commanding personalities. Instead of courtesans appearing throughout the city, there are Romani people seen hanging about, and though I liked that they were included and talked about their oppression, I do think their visual design and function during gameplay were somewhat stereotypical.

Ezio furthermore gets a real love interest in this game in the form of Sofia Sartor, an Italian traveler and book collector who helps him locate the keys. I thought the interactions with her were sweet, but she was a kind of damsel in distress and she didn’t have much personality other than liking books for a large part of the game.

Desmond, for his part, doesn’t get a lot to do, despite this game being about reconstructing his psyche and digging into his past. I liked that we learned more about him, but I do wish the stakes of being trapped in the Animus were higher.

Gameplay: Revelations uses almost all of the same mechanics as Brotherhood. There are armor and weapon upgrades, treasure stashes, upgrades to the city of Constantinople (which stimulates the economy and earns the player more money), etc. Art merchants are replaced with book merchants, so instead of buying paintings, players can purchase codices, but functionally, they were the same. Similarly, instead of freeing areas from Borgia influence, players liberate “Templar dens” and turn them into “Assassin dens,” and while they’re thematically different from the Borgia towers, they’re functionally the same. Players complete assassination missions in which you kill the captain of the guard responsible for overseeing the Templar den, but instead of blowing it up, you trick your enemy by signaling Templar retreat, allowing the Assassins to move in and take over the area. You can also recruit assassins and make use of thieves, mercenaries, and courtesans much the same way as in Brotherhood, though courtesans are replaced by Romani people. There was a moment in Sequence 2 when Ezio had to defend the Assassin safehouse from a Templar attack, and gameplay involved placing barricades, commanders, archers, riflemen, and cannon fire. while balancing morale and damage. I kind of liked the strategy involved and it could have been an interesting mechanic for the rest of the Templar dens/Assassin safehouses, but alas, this moment only occurred the one time unless you’re not paying attention to your infamy meter (which was easy to take care of).

The major weapon upgrade in this game is the introduction of the hook blade and various types of bombs. Bombs ranged from simple noisemakers, to stink bombs, mild explosives, smoke screens, and other useful ranged attacks, while the hook blade enabled faster climbing as well as traveling along zip lines. These weapons were fun, but because so much of the other gameplay was the same as in Brotherhood, they felt like cosmetic patches to an otherwise repetitive gameplay experience.

Visuals: As always, I adored the look of the historical setting. The artists and developers beautifully rendered Constantinople, and I loved seeing more rich colors and details on the buildings and clothing of NPCs than when playing as Altair in the first Assassin’s Creed. I also really loved the look of Ezio’s armor, which forwent the classic white and red palette and opted for a more somber grey. The grey blended with the surroundings a bit better, in my opinion.

What really threw me off was that the facial models for some of the returning characters were altered. Both Ezio’s and Desmond’s face shapes are a little different from how they appear in Brotherhood, and though I do not doubt the change was in service to testing out advancements in graphics, I couldn’t quite shake the uncanny valley vibe.

Animations were up and down; upon starting this game, I encountered a horrible glitch that made the screen flicker and movement impossible, but luckily, I was able to fix it easily using instructions from other players who had the bug. There were some really satisfying combat animations, including finishing moves that upped the level of Ezio’s epic skills, but sometimes they lagged or a bug would make them not connect to an opponent. While not the end of the world, it was noticeable and sometimes took me out of the immersion experience.

Final Verdict: Despite repeating much of the gameplay from Brotherhood and unnecessarily extending Ezio’s story, Revelations presents a beautiful atmosphere and fun adventure to unlock some much-desired background to Altair’s narrative.

[kendrickcissell-blog]

The 25 Best Information On Merge, Year By Year

From the album Effluxion, out February 22, 2019 on Merge Data. Click on "Add File" button to import the MP3 files which you like to merge into one. Or select all the MP3 information or the folder the place the MP3 audio are located after which instantly drag and drop them to the primary window of the MP3 combiner. In the Merge From field, click on the binoculars to seek for the report to take away. Very often, you find yourself desirous to merge two audio clips, two MP3 information, or two favourite songs. Merge the text from each record's Background area. The person interface for grouping tracks together prior to the final merge might be confusing initially, and tricky even after you master it. That is solely a problem in the event you're being anal retentive (like me) about having your chapter marks at actual chapter boundaries within the book.

Is the quickest and biggest option to convert audio to video on-line. Nonetheless, it is not really easy to pick the proper time to put the merged clip as a result of the software program program would not assist to enter the time manually. Select Edit > Be a part of > Areas per Tracks (or use the Merge Areas per Tracks key command). For audio and video recordsdata, we advise usingmp3 andmp4 info, as these are acceptable with the Media Participant. You can also can split, crop, rotate and flip the videos. This app enables you to merge videos as properly. In case you're questioning in regards to the range, YouCut additionally works in milliseconds. 2. Choose the MP3 file you wish to merge in the primary interface and you may change the order to determine which MP3 music will be performed first and then the following. After setting, test "Merge into one file" choice on the bottom. It even can merge video files like MP4, AVI, MOV, WMV, MPG, VOB, MKV, FLV, WebM, MXF, AVCHD, MTS, and and so on. Combine, merge and Be a part of MP3 recordsdata into one large file. Click on OKAY. Your merged clip will now appear within the Project panel. The online audio cutter and merger supports numerous audio file codecs including MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, OGG, AU, Merge MP3s FLAC, AIFF, M4A, OPUS, RA or http://www.mergemp3.com/ MKA. And it's capable of cutting and becoming a member of MP3, WAV, OGG, AAC, M4A file, with the maximum file dimension of 200MB. It's a free software which may merge MP3 information. It may possibly merge from 2 to 9999 MP3 files into one MP3 file to let you be capable to handle your seperated MP3 musical information higher. After I open my apps, I need to click "Run As Administrator", and the few occasions I forgot to do this and simply opened the app and tried merging the recordsdata, NOTHING occurred - no merger passed off. Other than merging, Free Merge MP3 moreover works as an audio converter which allows you trade between virtually all audio codecs in batches.MP3 Joiner Mac or MP3 Merger Mac Lion is an easy-to-use softwares to merge, combine, be a part of MP3 tracks. Only should verify Merge into one file" with mouse, you'll be able to merge multiple MP3 clips collectively right into a singe MP3 audio file with excessive audio high quality. You can configure a website online-huge setting to tell Configuration Supervisor 2007 whether or not to mechanically create new knowledge when it detects duplicate hardware IDs, or to permit you to resolve when to merge mp3s, block, or create new shopper data.update PS. So far, mp3splt works for mp3 and ogg files. I have no success yet for m4a recordsdata. Merge MP3 does what it claims completely and effectively. However, because of the its limitations, it won't be for everybody. 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The applying solely helps MP3 files and the lack of features lets this application down. If you'll want to work with MP3s and no other codecs, and wish only fundamental performance, Free MP3 Cutter Joiner will probably be ok for your needs.When it's advisable create a special lyric for as ringtone or be a part of MP3 data totally free, you might want a MP3 joiner to combine them collectively. There are tens of millions of MP3 combiner functions world vast. A number of the packages are larger than to merge MP3, WAV, WMV and different audio codecs as a single audio monitor. With the intention to choose up the desired program, the article listed the very best 10 free MP3 Mergers it is best to know. Merely select the required program according to your requirements. In case you could have any question associated to merging MP3 info, chances are you'll be at liberty to let me know in the feedback.In August 2010, Merge Data released Arcade Fireplace's The Suburbs to important acclaim, previous the band's headlining look at Lollapalooza The album went straight to number one on the US and UK charts. Famed director and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam additionally directed a reside on-line broadcast of the band's live performance from the historic Madison Square Backyard in New York following the album's launch, which was streamed dwell by an estimated 1.eight million distinctive viewers. The Suburbs gained the Grammy for Album of the Yr on the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards on February 13, 2011.X2X Free Video Audio Merger is free to obtain and no subscription is required. Audacity is one free program that allows you to cut up mp3s. It is comparatively simple to use when you get a cling of the interface. By utilizing the Merge Data activity, you can merge already matched information, and also choose to manually merge records. In TIBCO MDM, match and merge of information is performed as two separate actions. You can find matching records by utilizing the patterns search. After the matches are found, the output of match activity is perhaps merged.

[vivienwise]

Impressions in the Land | Part 2

Last semester I looked at a lineage of women using their bodies in the land. I compared the way these women use their bodies, how their backgrounds and methodologies change the work, and how viewers can relate to them. How does blending in to one’s environment speak to the way we negotiate our identities in and through space? What is the relation between self and environment? How do technological extensions of the self enable and disable relationships with the environment? In this post I will trace my trajectory from studying these artists to my own experimentation with digital technology in an effort to answer these questions.

Ana Mendieta

By looking back to ancient and aboriginal cultures, Ana Mendieta embraced a worldview that placed humanity not above, separate from, or in control of nature, but as a part of it. Mendieta’s exploration related directly to her own experience and to her overriding desire to ground herself in place, time, and history. 

As she says, “I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. I believe this to be a direct result of my having been torn away from my homeland during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of my having been cast out of the womb. My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that tie me to the universe.”

When Mendieta began her Silueta Series in the 1970s, she was one of many beginning to work in the emerging genres of land art, body art, and performance art. She combined the three in what she called earth-body sculptures. Her purpose and interest were rooted in nature’s symbolic meaning; Mendieta wanted to fuse with the land, not aggressively scar it. Mendieta often used her naked body to explore and connect with the Earth. She carved and shaped her own figure into the earth to leave haunting traces of her body made from grass, sand, dirt, flowers, tree branches, gunpowder and fire.

Rebecca Belmore

An interdisciplinary indigenous Canadian artist, Rebecca Belmore’s work focuses on issues of place and identity in the context of Indigenous people. Belmore’s work reminds us that the notion of intertwining self and world pre-dates the modern ecology movement. This idea has been central to Indigenous approaches to land for thousands of years.

In the early 90s, Belmore created Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, a project in which she travelled across the country with an intricately crafted, giant megaphone and invited Indigenous participants to use the megaphone to speak to the land and acknowledge their relationship to it.

The megaphone operated as a performance, a sculptural object, and a functional tool, “reaffirming the historical stewardship of the land and underlining the power and importance of voice”. There is a reciprocity of self and site that honors rather than collapses cultural difference. In the case of this project, the intertwining of self and world has been done acoustically. Viewers are invited to listen to the land while also recalling that the land is an audience, one that is listening.

In my own work, I am thinking about care and how it connects my body to the land. I am being cared for by the land, how can I reciprocate that? The idea behind this project came from asking myself how I find “topographical intimacy: (a term coined by Lucy Lippard*). What does it mean to find intimacy within a landscape? How can I connect to the land? The mountains are a place with which I feel connected, grounded. This led me to considering a sort of self portrait within the land, an intimate embedding of myself within a topography. What would it be like if I could lie down amongst these bodies of land, like lying in tall grass but at a different and impossible scale? Is the topography of my body that different from the topography of these mountain bodies?

Experimentation

After spending the fall semester of my externship working on one large project in response to that research, I decided to spend the spring in a far more experimental stage, trying to learn and play on a few different tools in the DSC. I want to see what digital tools can be useful to me and dip my toes into a few more things!

Maybe one of my favorite digital tools to use is the Structure 3D Scanner. I scanned myself and a friend, as well as some interesting landscapes in Utah.

I then used those 3D scans to do some more experimentation on the 3D printers – printing with resin for the first time as well as ceramic on the Form2.

The DSC recently got a small CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router which I have been excited to try out. The best way I can describe its function is a drill bit attached to a computer. As a fiber artist, my inclination is to work with soft things. I wanted to see if I could cut models out of a soft foam to create some cushion/pillow/forms. My first problem was that the CNC does not cut soft things. But! If you freeze foam in water, it is then a solid. So now I am working on cutting some mountains out of soft foam.

At this point I’m interested to see what the larger role of digital technology will have in my work and how it intersects with the traditional craft processes I’m more accustomed to using. The artists I’ve been looking at are directly engaging with the land and here I am sitting in the basement of a university library in the middle of a city.

I am hoping that using technology will help me to get at this compulsion to connect my body to the land, to satisfy the urge to leave a trace of myself in the landscape. While I live in Philadelphia, there is something that makes the mountains more accessible via digital tools. I can access these spaces that would otherwise be challenging for me to get at, and explore my interaction with these land bodies at a scale this not possible in the real world.

 *Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press, 1997.

[pope-francis-quotes]

30th March >> (@Zenitenglish) #PopeFrancis #Pope Francis #PopeinMorocco’s Address to Moroccan Authorities, Diplomatic Corps ‘Courage to encounter one another, extend a hand of friendship is a pathway of peace & harmony, whereas extremism & hatred cause division & destruction’ #PapeAuMaroc #PopeFrancisinMorocco

Pope Francis’ Address to Moroccan Authorities, Diplomatic Corps

‘…The courage to encounter one another and extend a hand of friendship is a pathway of peace and harmony for humanity, whereas extremism and hatred cause division and destruction…’

Below is the Vatican provided text of Pope Francis’ address to Moroccan authorities and the diplomatic corps this morning in Rabat:

***

Your Majesty,

Your Royal Highnesses,

Distinguished Authorities of the Kingdom of Morocco,

Members of the Diplomatic Corps,

Dear Friends,

As-Salam Alaikum!

I am pleased to set foot in this country so filled with natural beauty, while at the same time preserving the traces of ancient civilizations and bearing witness to a long and fascinating history. Before all else, I would like to express my deep gratitude to His Majesty King Mohammed VI for his kind invitation, for the warm welcome which he has given me in the name of the entire Moroccan people, and, in particular, for his gracious introduction.

This visit is for me an occasion of joy and gratitude, for it allows me to see at first hand the richness of your land, your people and your traditions. I am also grateful that my visit offers a significant opportunity for advancing interreligious dialogue and mutual understanding among the followers of our two religions, as we commemorate – at a distance of eight centuries – the historic meeting between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. That prophetic event shows that the courage to encounter one another and extend a hand of friendship is a pathway of peace and harmony for humanity, whereas extremism and hatred cause division and destruction. It is my hope that our mutual esteem, respect and cooperation will help strengthen the bonds of sincere friendship, and enable our communities to prepare a better future for coming generations.

In this land, a natural bridge between Africa and Europe, I would like to affirm once more our need for cooperation in giving new impetus to the building of a world of greater solidarity, marked by honest, courageous and indispensable efforts to promote a dialogue respectful of the richness and distinctiveness of each people and every individual. All of us are called to rise to this challenge, especially at the present time, when our differences and our lack of reciprocal knowledge risk being exploited as a cause for conflict and division.

If we wish, then, to share in the building a society that is open, fraternal and respectful of differences, it is vital to foster the culture of dialogue and adhere to it unfailingly, to adopt mutual cooperation as our code of conduct and reciprocal understanding as our method and standard (cf. Document on Human Fraternity, Abu Dhabi, 4 February 2019). We are called to pursue this path tirelessly, in the effort to help each other overcome tensions and misunderstandings, clichés and stereotypes that generate fear and opposition. In this way, we will encourage the growth of a fruitful and respectful spirit of cooperation. It is likewise essential that fanaticism and extremism be countered by solidarity on the part of all believers, grounded in the lofty shared values that inspire our actions. For this reason, I am happy that I will shortly visit the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams, Morchidines and Morchidates. Established by Your Majesty, the Institute seeks to provide effective and sound training to combat all forms of extremism, which so often lead to violence and terrorism, and which, in any event, constitute an offense against religion and against God himself. We know how important it is to provide a suitable preparation for future religious leaders, if we wish to awaken a genuinely religious spirit in the heart of future generations.

Authentic dialogue, then, makes us appreciate more fully the importance of religion for building bridges between people and successfully meeting the challenges that I mentioned above. While respecting our differences, faith in God leads us to acknowledge the eminent dignity of each human being, as well as his or her inalienable rights. We believe that God created human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and he calls them to live as brothers and sisters and to spread the values of goodness, love and peace. That is why freedom of conscience and religious freedom – which is not limited to freedom of worship alone, but allows all to live in accordance with their religious convictions – are inseparably linked to human dignity. In this regard, there is a constant need to progress beyond mere tolerance to respect and esteem for others. This entails encountering and accepting others in their distinctive religious beliefs and enriching one another through our diversity, in a relationship marked by good will and by the pursuit of ways we can work together. Understood in this way, creating bridges between people – from the point of view of interreligious dialogue – calls for a spirit of mutual regard, friendship and indeed fraternity.

The International Conference on the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries, held in Marrakech in January 2016, addressed this issue, and I am pleased to note that it condemned, in effect, any exploitation of religion as a means of discriminating against or attacking others. It also stressed the need to move beyond the concept of religious minority in favour of that of citizenship and the recognition of the value of the person, which must have a central place in every legal system.

I also see as a prophetic sign the creation in 2012 of the Al Mowafaqa Ecumenical Institute in Rabat. The Institute, an initiative of Catholics and other Christian denominations in Morocco, seeks to help promote ecumenism, as well as dialogue with culture and with Islam. This praiseworthy undertaking manifests the concern and the desire of the Christians living in this country to build bridges as a means of expressing and serving human fraternity.

All these are ways to halt the misuse of religion to incite hatred, violence, extremism and blind fanaticism, and the invocation of the name of God to justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression (Document on Human Fraternity, Abu Dhabi, 4 February 2019).

The genuine dialogue we want to encourage also leads to a consideration of the world in which we live, our common home. The International Conference on Climate Change, COP 22, also held here in Morocco, once more demonstrated that many nations are conscious of the need to protect this planet where God has placed us to live and to contribute to a true ecological conversion for the sake of integral human development. I express my appreciation for the progress being made in this area and I am gratified by the growth of authentic solidarity between nations and peoples in the effort to find just and lasting solutions to the scourges that threaten our common home and the very survival of the human family. Only together, in patient, judicious, candid and sincere dialogue, can we hope to devise adequate solutions for reversing the trend of global warming and to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty (cf. Laudato Si’, 175).

Similarly, today’s grave migration crisis represents an urgent summons for concrete actions aimed at eliminating the causes that force many people to leave country and family behind, often only to find themselves marginalized and rejected. Last December, once more here in Morocco, the Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration adopted a document intended to serve as a point of reference for the entire international community. At the same time, much still remains to be done, especially in passing from the commitments undertaken there, at least in principle, to concrete actions, and, more particularly, to a change of attitude towards migrants, one that sees them as persons, not numbers, and acknowledges their rights and dignity in daily life and in political decisions. You are aware of my great concern for the frequently grim fate of such people, who for the most part would not have left their countries were they not forced to do so. I trust that Morocco, which hosted that Conference with great openness and exceptional hospitality, will continue to be an example of humanity for migrants and refugees within the international community, so that here, as elsewhere, they can find generous welcome and protection, a better life and a dignified integration into society. When conditions permit, they can then decide to return home in conditions of safety and respect for their dignity and rights. The issue of migration will never be resolved by raising barriers, fomenting fear of others or denying assistance to those who legitimately aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. We know too that the consolidation of true peace comes through the pursuit of social justice, which is indispensable for correcting the economic imbalances and political unrest that have always had a major role in generating conflicts and threatening the whole of humanity.

Your Majesty, distinguished Authorities, dear friends! Christians are deeply appreciative of the place accorded them in Moroccan society. They wish to do their part in building a fraternal and prosperous nation, out of concern for the common good of its people. In this regard, I think of the significant work of the Catholic Church in Morocco in providing social services and in the field of education, thanks to its schools, which are open to students of every confession, religion and background. In thanking God for all that has been accomplished, allow me to encourage Catholics and all Christians to be servants, promoters and defenders of human fraternity here in Morocco.

Your Majesty, distinguished Authorities, dear friends! I thank you and all the Moroccan people once more for your warm welcome and your kind attention. Shukran bi-saf! May the Almighty, Gracious and Merciful, protect you and bless Morocco! Thank you.

[Vatican-provided text of Pope’s prepared speech]

© Libreria Editrice Vaticana

30th MARCH 2019 16:40PAPAL TRIPS

[johnboothus]

VinePair Podcast: Inside Costières de Nîmes One of the Rhône Valleys Most Exciting Appellations

This week on a bonus episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” hosts Adam Teeter and Zach Geballe are joined by winemakers Michel Gassier from Château de Nages and Franck-Lin Dalle from Château de Campuget. The four discuss Costières de Nîmes, an ancient wine region located in the southernmost part of the Rhône Valley. Listeners will learn about the region’s vast history and unique geography, and how the wines produced there are affected by both.

Costières de Nîmes is the only southern Rhône appellation where Syrah is the dominant red varietal. And though there are myriad wines produced in Costières de Nîmes, rosé reigns king. Dalle and Gassier explain how rosés from Costières de Nîmes are different from those coming out of Provence, as well as why the region has embraced Mediterranean culture.

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Adam Teeter: From Brooklyn, N.Y., I’m Adam Teeter.

Zach Geballe: And in Seattle, Wash., I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is a bonus “VinePair Podcast.” You are getting a double dose this week. Congratulations, you lucky ducks.

Z: Two episodes, same great price.

A: It’s amazing, right? It’s not a “Next Round.” It’s a real podcast. We are talking about a cool wine region we’re excited about. Before we jump into that, what’s going on man?

Z: Oh, man. I have been so excited about being able to sit outside and drink because we’ve had some pretty good weather in Seattle. I feel like I spent all of 2020 after March and because of the weather in Seattle, indoors. Now, I can just stand in my yard and drink a beer. It shouldn’t be this big, exciting moment for me. I took my son to the park and he met some friends who have a son of a similar age. So did we take our kids on the tennis court so they could ride their scooters and we could drink beers? We absolutely did.

A: Amazing.

Z: That is what has been going on with us. How about you?

A: I’ve been doing a lot of outdoor dining, which is a lot of fun. It’s been getting really nice, so I respect what you’re doing. Besides that, I’m getting excited about late-spring and early summer entertaining, and changing the moods in terms of the drinks we’re surveying. My favorite cocktail of the year last year was the Daiquiri. I think it might be again this year because it is such a great drink. Also, I am getting excited about, obviously, rosé. It’s the best, but we’ll talk about that a little bit in a second, but I guess that’s a good segue, right? I butcher French names all the time, so can you introduce the wine region we’re talking about?

Z: I’m going to do my best. I think I’m slightly more proficient, but our guests can gladly correct pronunciation. We are talking about Costières de Nîmes, and we’ll let our guests know a little bit more where exactly in the Rhône we are. It’s one of these great regions of the broader Rhône Valley. I think, of late, we’ve seen more exciting wines come out of interesting expressions of terroir. Also, there is this broader realization that’s gone on throughout the region and I hope our guests can shed some light on these great appellations. American consumers may not be as familiar with this region because it hasn’t been as present on labels or they haven’t had the same presence in the past, but now it’s really exciting. It’s super cool to talk to two folks from Costières de Nîmes, joining us late at night for them, which we also appreciate making it doable for all of us here around the globe. Michel Gassier from Château de Nages and Franck-Lin Dalle from Château de Campuget. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining us.

Michel Gassier: Thank you for having us.

Franck-Lin Dalle: Bonjour, our pleasure.

Z: Let’s start with each of you giving an explanation about your winery projects and tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in Costières de Nîmes and a little bit of background.

M: Do you want to start, Franck-Lin?

F: Go ahead, Michel. You are older than me

A: That’s how we’re starting, wow.

Z: That’s why I let you talk first on the podcast.

M: You mentioned locating the appellation on the map, and we’re in the Rhône Valley. We are the very south of the Rhône Valley where the Rhône actually dumps into the Mediterranean. It overlooks the Rhône delta or region known as Camargue, which is a marshy area. The type of terroir is the rolled pebbles that Châteauneuf-du-Pape has so well exemplified. Everyone that loves Rhône wines is familiar with those big, round rocks. That’s the soil that we have. In terms of my family estate and vineyard, I am the fourth generation of my family. Even though I’m old, I’m already the fourth generation. We’ve been around for a while and we’re managing different vineyards in different locations throughout the Costières de Nîmes area. We actually have two main estates and labeled Château de Nages for one and Domaine Gassier for the other.

F: I’m the third generation of this family estate. Campuget is an old estate where we know there has been a vineyard since 1753. We will talk later about history here, but there is a long history between wine and the estate. We produced in Costières de Nîmes from the very beginning. And hopefully, there will be the fourth generation soon.

Z: Oh, exciting.

M: Oh, so you’re not that young.

F: Come on, please.

A: Hilarious. All right, so set the stage for us. Obviously, we know we’re in the Rhône, but can you paint a picture of what it looks like? If we were to be standing in the region, what would we be experiencing and what style of wines would we be getting?

F: What I’m going to do is like a blind tasting which I think is the best way to let you enjoy this area.

A: I love this.

F: You are truly in what I call a magic triangle. You have the town of Nîmes, the town of Avignon, and the town of Arles. Three gorgeous cities that we have around us, and Costières de Nîmes are really in the middle of the three. From there, you can enjoy the, of course, the Rhône Valley. You can enjoy the beauty of the Palais des Papes. You can discover some fantastic places like Pont-de-Crau. You also have the magnificent Colosseum in Nîmes. When you are in the middle of this magic triangle, you are, in fact, deep within our history, specifically from Roman history. You have to come here because you can enjoy this magic triangle.

M: There is a lot of diversity. We are about 35 minutes from the beach, about an hour from the mountains. As Franck-Lin said, there are a lot of historical monuments from Roman times, and a lot of great restaurants as well. Our area has a lot of Michelin star restaurants, but also a lot of bistros where for very little money you can have a great meal. The quality of life here is excellent.

F: Yeah, I would also add that you have the Mediterranean culture here, and it is revealed in the food and in the countryside, of course, in the wine. That’s truly the key of this place.

Z: I want to talk about culture and food in a minute. One thing that I’ve read about Costières de Nîmes is that despite what you know, on a very surface level, you would think, “Oh, it’s the southernmost appellation in the Rhône, it must be hot.” It’s the proximity to the Mediterranean that actually makes it relatively cool. Is that right? If so, for both of you, how does that affect the wines you make? How does that shape the wines?

M: Yeah, it’s absolutely true. The Mediterranean is a large body of water that has a fairly constant temperature. When the temperature rises in the middle of summer, it provides a cool, refreshing impact on the land that’s close by. We have what we call thermal winds. In the afternoon, during the summer when the sea is cooler than the land, colder air blows from the sea onto the land. That air, because it comes from sitting above a body of water, brings moisture so the air is not quite as hot, but also not quite as dry. It helps the vines survive those tough conditions. As a result, the fruit stays a little fresher. The grapes retain their acidity a little better. It enables us if we desire to make wines with more freshness, tension, or dynamic to make them further inland in the Rhône Valley. That’s a great feature that we can play with when we pick our style.

A: What is the style of the wines we can find in the region? If someone were to find wines with the appellation’s name on them, what should they expect?

F: That is a good question. First of all, on the appellation, we produce some reds, whites, and rosés. White is a tiny part of the total production. When people buy a bottle from Costières de Nîmes, freshness is important. People can expect some wine with fruits, with freshness, and also with elegance. Since the wine is not too concentrated, they keep elegance, and they have rounded tannins. This is clearly what people can expect when they buy a bottle of fresh wine with elegance. Those are two words that are important for me when I talk about wines from this appellation.

M: If I may add, the benefit of the microclimate that we have and the depth of soil that we have because that accumulation of pebbles and clay is usually anywhere between 30 and 50 feet. There’s no barrier for roots to go deep. We are the only southern Rhône appellation where Syrah is the dominant red varietal in terms of acreage. Most of the reds from Costières are blends of Syrah, Grenache, with some Mourvèdre and Carignan in it. Unlike Côtes du Rhône which is predominantly Grenache with a little bit of Syrah. We’re predominantly Syrah with Grenache, so it gives more black fruit character. Syrah, because of the microclimate, is not that baked, heavy, thick Syrah. It’s a more lifted, more violet profile and sometimes it can really border on northern Rhône style. Even though whites are about 9 percent of the production in the appellation, they are very interesting. Again, because of the microclimate and its production that is actually growing quite a bit, we rely on the classic varietals Chenin Blanc, Roussanne, Marsanne, Claret, a little bit of Viognier. They make for really interesting wines as well.

Z: I’m curious, you mentioned this idea of the Syrah-dominant wines. Are there producers — yourselves or others — who are making varietal Syrah or co-fermenting it with a little bit of white wine as you might see in the northern Rhône more traditionally? Or are producers who lean heavily on Syrah blending with other red varieties?

M: It’s a good question. As you know, appellations are very keen on rules for what and what is allowed and not allowed. We are not allowed to blend white grapes in our reds in Costières de Nîmes. We can do it for rosés, but we can’t do it for reds. Even though it’s a great idea, if you step outside of the appellation and, for instance, you try to ferment Syrah with Viognier, the results are great. But it’s not part of the appellation.

Z: As Adam mentioned, it’s rosé season. What is a rosé from Costières de Nîmes typically like? What varieties would you typically see used to produce the rosé wines?

F: Rosé wines from the appellation will be what a rosé must be. It will be a wine with a lot of freshness. You will never see a heavy and difficult rosé from this appellation. We truly have some fresh rosé, and I think every single producer from the appellation is really focused on that. We have the climate to do that. We are lucky to have these climates to make some very fresh rosé. If we talk about rosé, of course, we will talk about colors. You will see different colors, but most of the rosés made in the appellation are usually quite pale. Not as pale as other appellations like Provence sometimes, but quite pale. On top of that, you have a few producers trying to expand, research, and improve the quality of some wines. As you just mentioned the co-fermenting process, you have some Syrah and Viognier, Syrah and Vermentino, or red Grenache and white Grenache. The rosé is very creative and still full of freshness. I’m very sorry to insist on that, but I think the true quality of the rosés from the appellation is that they are fresh. They won’t be heavy on your palate

M: I’m sure the first question that comes to most consumers’ minds is how do they compare to Provence rosé? We make our rosés with pretty much the same varietals as Provence. Our climate is pretty similar, and what’s different is our terroir. I concur with Franck-Lin about aromatics and freshness. I’d say in general they have a little more mouthfeel perhaps than Provence. I don’t know whether it’s the rocks that we grow our vineyards on, but they might be a little more body, more mouth-filling than the Provence, which is not for all of them, but for the most part, looking for leaner styles.

A: One thing I know I want to talk about a little bit is the history of the region. Obviously, it’s a very, very old wine-producing region. As I was doing some reading on my own, I think there are some histories that say it’s a region that’s producing wine that the Greeks were drinking. How far back can you trace the history of the region? How has the region evolved since that time to where we are now? I think a lot of people don’t think about that. Wine regions, especially in the New World, have only been around for 50, 60, 70 years, but this region can go all the way back. I’m really curious as to the picture you can paint for listeners of what that history has done. How it has influenced the region and its winemaking?

M: First of all, thank you for that question. Because as we are one of the newer appellations on the Rhône Valley, people automatically assume that we’re new to the wine trade or to making wine. But in fact, when the Romans conquered this part of France in 150 B.C., the local populations were already making wine because they were taught by the Greeks. Wine production around Nîmes started in about 600 B.C. The region had a lot of fame, and there are documents that show that wines from Nîmes were exported to Italy and Greece during the popes of Avignon. In the 1300s, they were served at the pope’s palaces. I think where the region fell off the map is after the phylloxera crisis about 100 years ago when all the French and European vineyards were uprooted and replanted. I don’t think the region took more of the qualitative turn, but more of the quantitative turn. I think that’s when we lost a step in terms of the quality and the reputation that we had in the past. Now, new generations are coming back. The youth has made wine throughout the planet. They have ambition. The potential has always been here, but the new generations are unleashing it. That’s what’s really exciting about what’s going on in our appellation. We’re seeing the quality meter rise so quickly. It’s a very exciting time to be part of that.

F: Michel, that was perfect. We came from 600 B.C. to today, so that was perfect.

Z: I want to talk a little bit about food. This is true all over France, but I think you see it especially in the Rhône and in areas closer to the Mediterranean, which is the unique cuisine that is French but also has some similarities with Mediterranean cuisine. For the two of you, when you’re thinking about your wines, what are some of the classic dishes from the region that you think your wines pair well with? Also, outside of the paradigm of the classic southern French cuisine, other foods that people could enjoy these wines with.

F: Luckily in this area, we have a very diverse agriculture, so it gives us a chance to taste and discover a lot of different things. It can be, of course, from the sea. We are very close to the Mediterranean, so we can enjoy some gorgeous fishes. We also have a lot of lamb and sheep. We have this grilled lamb. Nîmes used to be a big place of lamb production in the past, but less today. Still, we have a few flocks, and it gives us fantastic meat. Of course, we have a lot of vegetables like you have all over the Mediterranean gastronomy. Again, the agriculture here is very diverse. You can have some gorgeous tomatoes, basil, garlic. A lot of beautiful Mediterranean classic food can be made here. We have this chance to match our wines with very classic Mediterranean food.

M: Just to perhaps change a little bit what was said about it being French cuisine with Mediterranean influence. No, it’s Mediterranean cuisine. We are by the Mediterranean. Our culture is Mediterranean. When I see your classic Julia Child French cuisine, I don’t see anything that I’ve ever grown up with because of the classic butter, cream, and everything, you’ll never see it here. Our fat of choice is olive oil, and the vegetables we grow are Mediterranean vegetables. I’d say our cuisine would have a lot to do with Spanish or southern Italian because northern Italian is also cream and butter. It’s tomato-based, it’s olive oil-based, and it’s garlic-based. It’s a lot of herbs. As I said, the meat of choice is lamb rather than beef, for instance. Lots of seafood. Naturally, the wines go well with that. They could be very versatile, too.

F: I think when we talk about gastronomy in our area, and when you say Costières de Nîmes, you have the word Costières, which is even difficult to pronounce for the French. The gastronomy here is like denim. We all have denim, we all enjoy denim. We like it because it’s simple, but we like it because it can be very elegant. It can be casual, and it can be for everyday. Mediterranean food is clearly the food that you enjoy easily every day, and it brings you a lot of pleasure. For me, this is a small shortcut, but this is the way I would describe it. You can enjoy your denim, and you can drink your denim, and you can eat your denim.

Z: There you go. I never thought about the all-denim diet there, but that’s a good one. I like that.

F: You can never forget that denim has been created in the town of Nîmes. That’s why it’s named denim.

Z: I have forgotten that I knew that. I should have sort of led with that. One last question for the two of you before we wrap things up here. We talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but one of the compelling things about the region, in addition to the quality of the wine, is the relative accessibility as far as price point. What should a consumer expect to pay for wines from the Costières? I’ve certainly tasted plenty of the wines, including your wines, and found them to be quite comparable to many other appellations within the Rhône. Where do these wines sit price-wise?

M: I’d say if you look at the range of prices, you’ll find most of the Costières de Nîmes will be between a little above $10 to $25 a bottle. Of course, you have the outliers that will be a little higher or you might get some cheaper price at Costco or a similar store. More or less, the consumer will find a price range between $12 to $25 of Costières de Nîmes on the U.S. market.

A: Very cool. Michel and Franck-Lin, I want to thank you both so much for taking the time to come on and tell Zach and I a little bit more about the region and to explain it to the listeners. It’s been a really fascinating conversation. I can’t wait to get to drink more of these wines. I want to thank you for sending me some of your wines. They were very delicious.

M: Thank you.

A: I hope that everyone goes out and tries to find these wines as well, because they are really special. It’s super cool to be drinking wines from a region that’s been making wine for centuries. You can’t find that every day, and it makes these wines really special, so thank you both so much.

F: Thank you very much.

M: Thank you for having us.

A: Zach, as always, see you next week, man.

Z: Sounds great.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and in Seattle, Wash., by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible, and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tasting director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who is instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again.

Ed note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: Inside Costières de Nîmes, One of the Rhône Valley’s Most Exciting Appellations appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/costieres-de-nimes-podcast/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/vinepair-podcast-inside-costieres-de-nimes-one-of-the-rhone-valleys-most-exciting-appellations

[wineanddinosaur]

VinePair Podcast: Inside Costières de Nîmes, One of the Rhône Valley’s Most Exciting Appellations

This week on a bonus episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” hosts Adam Teeter and Zach Geballe are joined by winemakers Michel Gassier from Château de Nages and Franck-Lin Dalle from Château de Campuget. The four discuss Costières de Nîmes, an ancient wine region located in the southernmost part of the Rhône Valley. Listeners will learn about the region’s vast history and unique geography, and how the wines produced there are affected by both.

Costières de Nîmes is the only southern Rhône appellation where Syrah is the dominant red varietal. And though there are myriad wines produced in Costières de Nîmes, rosé reigns king. Dalle and Gassier explain how rosés from Costières de Nîmes are different from those coming out of Provence, as well as why the region has embraced Mediterranean culture.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

Adam Teeter: From Brooklyn, N.Y., I’m Adam Teeter.

Zach Geballe: And in Seattle, Wash., I’m Zach Geballe.

A: And this is a bonus “VinePair Podcast.” You are getting a double dose this week. Congratulations, you lucky ducks.

Z: Two episodes, same great price.

A: It’s amazing, right? It’s not a “Next Round.” It’s a real podcast. We are talking about a cool wine region we’re excited about. Before we jump into that, what’s going on man?

Z: Oh, man. I have been so excited about being able to sit outside and drink because we’ve had some pretty good weather in Seattle. I feel like I spent all of 2020 after March and because of the weather in Seattle, indoors. Now, I can just stand in my yard and drink a beer. It shouldn’t be this big, exciting moment for me. I took my son to the park and he met some friends who have a son of a similar age. So did we take our kids on the tennis court so they could ride their scooters and we could drink beers? We absolutely did.

A: Amazing.

Z: That is what has been going on with us. How about you?

A: I’ve been doing a lot of outdoor dining, which is a lot of fun. It’s been getting really nice, so I respect what you’re doing. Besides that, I’m getting excited about late-spring and early summer entertaining, and changing the moods in terms of the drinks we’re surveying. My favorite cocktail of the year last year was the Daiquiri. I think it might be again this year because it is such a great drink. Also, I am getting excited about, obviously, rosé. It’s the best, but we’ll talk about that a little bit in a second, but I guess that’s a good segue, right? I butcher French names all the time, so can you introduce the wine region we’re talking about?

Z: I’m going to do my best. I think I’m slightly more proficient, but our guests can gladly correct pronunciation. We are talking about Costières de Nîmes, and we’ll let our guests know a little bit more where exactly in the Rhône we are. It’s one of these great regions of the broader Rhône Valley. I think, of late, we’ve seen more exciting wines come out of interesting expressions of terroir. Also, there is this broader realization that’s gone on throughout the region and I hope our guests can shed some light on these great appellations. American consumers may not be as familiar with this region because it hasn’t been as present on labels or they haven’t had the same presence in the past, but now it’s really exciting. It’s super cool to talk to two folks from Costières de Nîmes, joining us late at night for them, which we also appreciate making it doable for all of us here around the globe. Michel Gassier from Château de Nages and Franck-Lin Dalle from Château de Campuget. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining us.

Michel Gassier: Thank you for having us.

Franck-Lin Dalle: Bonjour, our pleasure.

Z: Let’s start with each of you giving an explanation about your winery projects and tell us a little bit about what you’re doing in Costières de Nîmes and a little bit of background.

M: Do you want to start, Franck-Lin?

F: Go ahead, Michel. You are older than me

A: That’s how we’re starting, wow.

Z: That’s why I let you talk first on the podcast.

M: You mentioned locating the appellation on the map, and we’re in the Rhône Valley. We are the very south of the Rhône Valley where the Rhône actually dumps into the Mediterranean. It overlooks the Rhône delta or region known as Camargue, which is a marshy area. The type of terroir is the rolled pebbles that Châteauneuf-du-Pape has so well exemplified. Everyone that loves Rhône wines is familiar with those big, round rocks. That’s the soil that we have. In terms of my family estate and vineyard, I am the fourth generation of my family. Even though I’m old, I’m already the fourth generation. We’ve been around for a while and we’re managing different vineyards in different locations throughout the Costières de Nîmes area. We actually have two main estates and labeled Château de Nages for one and Domaine Gassier for the other.

F: I’m the third generation of this family estate. Campuget is an old estate where we know there has been a vineyard since 1753. We will talk later about history here, but there is a long history between wine and the estate. We produced in Costières de Nîmes from the very beginning. And hopefully, there will be the fourth generation soon.

Z: Oh, exciting.

M: Oh, so you’re not that young.

F: Come on, please.

A: Hilarious. All right, so set the stage for us. Obviously, we know we’re in the Rhône, but can you paint a picture of what it looks like? If we were to be standing in the region, what would we be experiencing and what style of wines would we be getting?

F: What I’m going to do is like a blind tasting which I think is the best way to let you enjoy this area.

A: I love this.

F: You are truly in what I call a magic triangle. You have the town of Nîmes, the town of Avignon, and the town of Arles. Three gorgeous cities that we have around us, and Costières de Nîmes are really in the middle of the three. From there, you can enjoy the, of course, the Rhône Valley. You can enjoy the beauty of the Palais des Papes. You can discover some fantastic places like Pont-de-Crau. You also have the magnificent Colosseum in Nîmes. When you are in the middle of this magic triangle, you are, in fact, deep within our history, specifically from Roman history. You have to come here because you can enjoy this magic triangle.

M: There is a lot of diversity. We are about 35 minutes from the beach, about an hour from the mountains. As Franck-Lin said, there are a lot of historical monuments from Roman times, and a lot of great restaurants as well. Our area has a lot of Michelin star restaurants, but also a lot of bistros where for very little money you can have a great meal. The quality of life here is excellent.

F: Yeah, I would also add that you have the Mediterranean culture here, and it is revealed in the food and in the countryside, of course, in the wine. That’s truly the key of this place.

Z: I want to talk about culture and food in a minute. One thing that I’ve read about Costières de Nîmes is that despite what you know, on a very surface level, you would think, “Oh, it’s the southernmost appellation in the Rhône, it must be hot.” It’s the proximity to the Mediterranean that actually makes it relatively cool. Is that right? If so, for both of you, how does that affect the wines you make? How does that shape the wines?

M: Yeah, it’s absolutely true. The Mediterranean is a large body of water that has a fairly constant temperature. When the temperature rises in the middle of summer, it provides a cool, refreshing impact on the land that’s close by. We have what we call thermal winds. In the afternoon, during the summer when the sea is cooler than the land, colder air blows from the sea onto the land. That air, because it comes from sitting above a body of water, brings moisture so the air is not quite as hot, but also not quite as dry. It helps the vines survive those tough conditions. As a result, the fruit stays a little fresher. The grapes retain their acidity a little better. It enables us if we desire to make wines with more freshness, tension, or dynamic to make them further inland in the Rhône Valley. That’s a great feature that we can play with when we pick our style.

A: What is the style of the wines we can find in the region? If someone were to find wines with the appellation’s name on them, what should they expect?

F: That is a good question. First of all, on the appellation, we produce some reds, whites, and rosés. White is a tiny part of the total production. When people buy a bottle from Costières de Nîmes, freshness is important. People can expect some wine with fruits, with freshness, and also with elegance. Since the wine is not too concentrated, they keep elegance, and they have rounded tannins. This is clearly what people can expect when they buy a bottle of fresh wine with elegance. Those are two words that are important for me when I talk about wines from this appellation.

M: If I may add, the benefit of the microclimate that we have and the depth of soil that we have because that accumulation of pebbles and clay is usually anywhere between 30 and 50 feet. There’s no barrier for roots to go deep. We are the only southern Rhône appellation where Syrah is the dominant red varietal in terms of acreage. Most of the reds from Costières are blends of Syrah, Grenache, with some Mourvèdre and Carignan in it. Unlike Côtes du Rhône which is predominantly Grenache with a little bit of Syrah. We’re predominantly Syrah with Grenache, so it gives more black fruit character. Syrah, because of the microclimate, is not that baked, heavy, thick Syrah. It’s a more lifted, more violet profile and sometimes it can really border on northern Rhône style. Even though whites are about 9 percent of the production in the appellation, they are very interesting. Again, because of the microclimate and its production that is actually growing quite a bit, we rely on the classic varietals Chenin Blanc, Roussanne, Marsanne, Claret, a little bit of Viognier. They make for really interesting wines as well.

Z: I’m curious, you mentioned this idea of the Syrah-dominant wines. Are there producers — yourselves or others — who are making varietal Syrah or co-fermenting it with a little bit of white wine as you might see in the northern Rhône more traditionally? Or are producers who lean heavily on Syrah blending with other red varieties?

M: It’s a good question. As you know, appellations are very keen on rules for what and what is allowed and not allowed. We are not allowed to blend white grapes in our reds in Costières de Nîmes. We can do it for rosés, but we can’t do it for reds. Even though it’s a great idea, if you step outside of the appellation and, for instance, you try to ferment Syrah with Viognier, the results are great. But it’s not part of the appellation.

Z: As Adam mentioned, it’s rosé season. What is a rosé from Costières de Nîmes typically like? What varieties would you typically see used to produce the rosé wines?

F: Rosé wines from the appellation will be what a rosé must be. It will be a wine with a lot of freshness. You will never see a heavy and difficult rosé from this appellation. We truly have some fresh rosé, and I think every single producer from the appellation is really focused on that. We have the climate to do that. We are lucky to have these climates to make some very fresh rosé. If we talk about rosé, of course, we will talk about colors. You will see different colors, but most of the rosés made in the appellation are usually quite pale. Not as pale as other appellations like Provence sometimes, but quite pale. On top of that, you have a few producers trying to expand, research, and improve the quality of some wines. As you just mentioned the co-fermenting process, you have some Syrah and Viognier, Syrah and Vermentino, or red Grenache and white Grenache. The rosé is very creative and still full of freshness. I’m very sorry to insist on that, but I think the true quality of the rosés from the appellation is that they are fresh. They won’t be heavy on your palate

M: I’m sure the first question that comes to most consumers’ minds is how do they compare to Provence rosé? We make our rosés with pretty much the same varietals as Provence. Our climate is pretty similar, and what’s different is our terroir. I concur with Franck-Lin about aromatics and freshness. I’d say in general they have a little more mouthfeel perhaps than Provence. I don’t know whether it’s the rocks that we grow our vineyards on, but they might be a little more body, more mouth-filling than the Provence, which is not for all of them, but for the most part, looking for leaner styles.

A: One thing I know I want to talk about a little bit is the history of the region. Obviously, it’s a very, very old wine-producing region. As I was doing some reading on my own, I think there are some histories that say it’s a region that’s producing wine that the Greeks were drinking. How far back can you trace the history of the region? How has the region evolved since that time to where we are now? I think a lot of people don’t think about that. Wine regions, especially in the New World, have only been around for 50, 60, 70 years, but this region can go all the way back. I’m really curious as to the picture you can paint for listeners of what that history has done. How it has influenced the region and its winemaking?

M: First of all, thank you for that question. Because as we are one of the newer appellations on the Rhône Valley, people automatically assume that we’re new to the wine trade or to making wine. But in fact, when the Romans conquered this part of France in 150 B.C., the local populations were already making wine because they were taught by the Greeks. Wine production around Nîmes started in about 600 B.C. The region had a lot of fame, and there are documents that show that wines from Nîmes were exported to Italy and Greece during the popes of Avignon. In the 1300s, they were served at the pope’s palaces. I think where the region fell off the map is after the phylloxera crisis about 100 years ago when all the French and European vineyards were uprooted and replanted. I don’t think the region took more of the qualitative turn, but more of the quantitative turn. I think that’s when we lost a step in terms of the quality and the reputation that we had in the past. Now, new generations are coming back. The youth has made wine throughout the planet. They have ambition. The potential has always been here, but the new generations are unleashing it. That’s what’s really exciting about what’s going on in our appellation. We’re seeing the quality meter rise so quickly. It’s a very exciting time to be part of that.

F: Michel, that was perfect. We came from 600 B.C. to today, so that was perfect.

Z: I want to talk a little bit about food. This is true all over France, but I think you see it especially in the Rhône and in areas closer to the Mediterranean, which is the unique cuisine that is French but also has some similarities with Mediterranean cuisine. For the two of you, when you’re thinking about your wines, what are some of the classic dishes from the region that you think your wines pair well with? Also, outside of the paradigm of the classic southern French cuisine, other foods that people could enjoy these wines with.

F: Luckily in this area, we have a very diverse agriculture, so it gives us a chance to taste and discover a lot of different things. It can be, of course, from the sea. We are very close to the Mediterranean, so we can enjoy some gorgeous fishes. We also have a lot of lamb and sheep. We have this grilled lamb. Nîmes used to be a big place of lamb production in the past, but less today. Still, we have a few flocks, and it gives us fantastic meat. Of course, we have a lot of vegetables like you have all over the Mediterranean gastronomy. Again, the agriculture here is very diverse. You can have some gorgeous tomatoes, basil, garlic. A lot of beautiful Mediterranean classic food can be made here. We have this chance to match our wines with very classic Mediterranean food.

M: Just to perhaps change a little bit what was said about it being French cuisine with Mediterranean influence. No, it’s Mediterranean cuisine. We are by the Mediterranean. Our culture is Mediterranean. When I see your classic Julia Child French cuisine, I don’t see anything that I’ve ever grown up with because of the classic butter, cream, and everything, you’ll never see it here. Our fat of choice is olive oil, and the vegetables we grow are Mediterranean vegetables. I’d say our cuisine would have a lot to do with Spanish or southern Italian because northern Italian is also cream and butter. It’s tomato-based, it’s olive oil-based, and it’s garlic-based. It’s a lot of herbs. As I said, the meat of choice is lamb rather than beef, for instance. Lots of seafood. Naturally, the wines go well with that. They could be very versatile, too.

F: I think when we talk about gastronomy in our area, and when you say Costières de Nîmes, you have the word Costières, which is even difficult to pronounce for the French. The gastronomy here is like denim. We all have denim, we all enjoy denim. We like it because it’s simple, but we like it because it can be very elegant. It can be casual, and it can be for everyday. Mediterranean food is clearly the food that you enjoy easily every day, and it brings you a lot of pleasure. For me, this is a small shortcut, but this is the way I would describe it. You can enjoy your denim, and you can drink your denim, and you can eat your denim.

Z: There you go. I never thought about the all-denim diet there, but that’s a good one. I like that.

F: You can never forget that denim has been created in the town of Nîmes. That’s why it’s named denim.

Z: I have forgotten that I knew that. I should have sort of led with that. One last question for the two of you before we wrap things up here. We talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but one of the compelling things about the region, in addition to the quality of the wine, is the relative accessibility as far as price point. What should a consumer expect to pay for wines from the Costières? I’ve certainly tasted plenty of the wines, including your wines, and found them to be quite comparable to many other appellations within the Rhône. Where do these wines sit price-wise?

M: I’d say if you look at the range of prices, you’ll find most of the Costières de Nîmes will be between a little above $10 to $25 a bottle. Of course, you have the outliers that will be a little higher or you might get some cheaper price at Costco or a similar store. More or less, the consumer will find a price range between $12 to $25 of Costières de Nîmes on the U.S. market.

A: Very cool. Michel and Franck-Lin, I want to thank you both so much for taking the time to come on and tell Zach and I a little bit more about the region and to explain it to the listeners. It’s been a really fascinating conversation. I can’t wait to get to drink more of these wines. I want to thank you for sending me some of your wines. They were very delicious.

M: Thank you.

A: I hope that everyone goes out and tries to find these wines as well, because they are really special. It’s super cool to be drinking wines from a region that’s been making wine for centuries. You can’t find that every day, and it makes these wines really special, so thank you both so much.

F: Thank you very much.

M: Thank you for having us.

A: Zach, as always, see you next week, man.

Z: Sounds great.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and in Seattle, Wash., by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible, and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tasting director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who is instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you again.

Ed note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: Inside Costières de Nîmes, One of the Rhône Valley’s Most Exciting Appellations appeared first on VinePair.

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