#but the point i wanted to make is like. there is this subset of european people (quite a lot of them)

[zevranunderstander]

number #1 tactic that people use to not sound as racist as they are when they talk to black people: 'uhh so you AMERICANS need to stop pretending everything is about YOU. why should i know this im not from the us :/' (= is talking about like. a phenomenally internationally well-known black artist)

[janecrockeyre]

scum villain is a greek tragedy disguised as a regular tragedy disguised as a comedy disguised as a danmei

this is going to be long, and this is only PART ONE.

a.k.a, Analysing the plot of Scum Villain’s Self Saving System through Aristotle’s Poetics, because I Have Mental Issues

Part One: Introduction and the Tragic Hero

Scum Villain’s Self Saving System is a tragedy disguised as a comedy, unless you’re Shen Yuan, in which case it’s a mixture of a romance and a survival horror. It's a fever dream. It's a horrible, terrible book that made me feel new undiscovered emotions when I finished reading it. 

The thing is... SVSSS shares characteristics with some of the most famous tragedies in the West, such as Oedipus Rex, Medea, Antigone, the Oresteia... if you haven’t read these, I’ll explain everything. But the gist of my argument is this: SVSSS is the perfect tragedy. In triplicate. 

Tragedy as a genre is old as balls and so it has meant slightly different things to different people over the last few thousand years. I'll be focusing on ancient Greek tragedy, which was performed at the yearly Festival of Dionysus in Athens during the 500-350s BC (give or take a hundred years). Aristotle, when writing about this very specific subset of tragedy, had no idea that one day Scum Villain would be written, and then that I would be using his work as a way to look at Shen Qingqiu’s Funky Transmigration Mistake. Anyway!

Greek tragedy greatly influenced European dramatic tradition. I have a lot of opinions about white academics idolising and upholding the classics as the "paragon of culture" but I'll withhold them for now. I have no idea if MXTX has read Greek tragedy or not, so don't take this as me saying they are writing it. 

In my opinion, tragedy is a universal human constant. We are surrounded by pain and hurt and none of it makes any sense, so we seek to process that pain through drama, art, literature, etc. We want to understand why pain happens, and how it happens, and try to make sense of the senseless. The universe is cold and cruel and random. Tragedy eases some of that pain. 

On that note: Just because I am analysing Scum Villain through a Greek lens doesn't mean that it was written that way. I'm pasting an interpretation onto the book when there's probably a very rich and deep history of Chinese tragedy that I just don't know about. If you ever want to talk about that, please, god, hit me up, I would love to learn about it!! 

Anyway, tragedy. MXTX is excellent at it! Mo Dao Zu Shi? Painful dynastic family tragedy. Heaven Official's Blessing? Mostly romance, but she managed to get that pure pain in there, huh? 

But in my opinion, Scum Villain holds the crown for the most tragic of her stories. MDZS was more of a mystery. TGCF was more of a romance. Neither of them shy away from their tragic elements. 

Scum Villain would fit right in between the work of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. How? Let me show you. Join me on my mystery tour into the world of "Aristotle Analyses Danmei..."

Part One: The Tragic Hero

What is a tragic hero? Generally, Greek tragic heroes are united by the same key characteristics. He must be imperfect, having a "fatal flaw" of some kind. He must have something to lose. And he must go from fortune to misfortune thanks to that fatal flaw. 

There are two (technically three) tragic protagonists in SVSSS and all of them are tragic in different but formulaic ways. Each protagonist has their own version of “hamartia” or a “fatal flaw”. 

Actually, hamartia isn’t necessarily a flaw - rather, it is a thing which makes the audience pity and fear for them, a careful imperfection, a point of weakness in the character’s morality or reasoning that allows for bad things to happen to them. For example, in Oedipus Rex, the king Oedipus has a “fatal flaw” of always wanting to find the truth, but this isn’t exactly a flaw, right? Note: this flaw can be completely unwitting, as we see with Shen Yuan. It can also be something that the protagonist is born with, some kind of trait from birth or very young. 

Shen Yuan

Shen Yuan’s “hamartia” is his rigid adherence to fate and his inability to read a situation as anything but how he thinks it ought to be. He believes that Bingmei will grow into Bingge, and it takes several years, two deaths, and some truly traumatising sex to convince him otherwise. 

Shen Jiu

Shen Jiu’s fatal flaw is his cruelty. It is his own sadistic treatment and abuse of Binghe which directly leads to his eventual dismemberment. This is kind of a no-brainer. Of course, it isn't all that simple, and as an audience we pity him for his cruelty as much as we fear it because we know it comes from his own abuse as a child. This just makes him even more tragic. Delicious. 

Luo Binghe

Luo Binghe’s fatal flaw is a complicated mix of things. It is his position as the “protagonist” which compels him to act in certain ways and be forced to suffer. It is his half-demonic heritage, something entirely out of his control, which sets in motion his tragic reversal of fortune when he gets yeeted into the Abyss. He also, much like Shen Yuan, has the propensity to jump to conclusions and somehow make 2 + 2 = 5. 

As well as having their respective “flaws”, all three protagonists match the rough outline of a good tragic hero in another way: they are in a position of great wealth and power. Even when you split the different characters into different “versions”, this still holds true. Yes, Luo Binghe is raised a commoner by a washerwoman foster mother, but his dad is an emperor and he also ends up becoming an emperor himself. 

Yes, Shen Jiu is an ex-slave and a victim of abuse himself, but Shen Qingqiu is a powerful peak lord with an entire mountain’s worth of resources at his back. 

Shen Yuan is a second generation new money rich kid. 

Bingge is a stereotypical protagonist with a golden finger. Bingmei is a treasured and loved disciple with a good reputation and a privileged seat by his shizun’s side. 

In a tragedy, having this kind of good fortune at the beginning of your story is dangerous. Chaucer says that tragedy is (badly translated into modern english) “a certain story / of him that stood in great prosperity / and falls out of high degree / into misery, and ends up wretchedly”. If we follow this line of thinking, a good tragedy is about someone who has a lot to lose, losing everything because of one fatal point of weakness that they fail to address or understand. 

If we look at Shakespeare, this is what makes King Lear such a fantastic tragic protagonist. He is a king in control of most of England, who from his own lack of wisdom and excess of pride, decides to split his kingdom apart to give to his daughters, favouring his murderous, double crossing progeny, and condemning his only actually filial daughter to death. He loses his kingdom, his mind, and his beloved daughter, all because of his own stupidity.

This brings us to:

Part Two: Peripeteia

This reversal of fortunes is called peripeteia. It is the moment where the entire plot shifts, and the hero’s fortunes go from good to bad. Think of it like one of those magic eye puzzles, where you stare at the image until a 3D shark appears, except you realise the shark was always there, you just couldn't ever see it, waiting for you, hungry, deadly, always lurking just behind that delightful pattern of random blue squiggles. 

Each tragic hero has their own moment of peripeteia in SVSSS, sometimes several:

Shen Qingqiu

In the original PIDW, SQQ’s peripeteia presumably occurs when he finds out that Bingge didn’t perish in the Abyss but has actually been training hard to come and pay him back. There’s really not much I’m interested in saying here - as a villain, OG!SQQ is cut and dry, and the audience doesn’t really feel any pity or fear for him. As Shen Yuan often mentions, what the audience feels when they see OG!SQQ is bloodlust and sick satisfaction. There is also the trial at Huan Hua Palace, which I will talk about in Shen Yuan’s section. 

Shen Yuan (SQQ 2.0)

One of SY’s most poggers moment of peripeteia is the glorious, terrifying section between hearing Binghe for the first time after the Abyss moment, and getting shoved into the Water Prison. 

“Behind him, a low and soft voice came: “Shizun?”

Shen Qingqiu’s neck felt stiff as he slowly turned his head. Luo Binghe’s face was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

The scariest thing about it was that the expression on his face was not cold at all. His smile wasn’t sharp like a knife. Rather, it showed a kind of bone-deep gentleness and amiability.”

This is the moment of true horror for Shen Yuan, because he knows what happens next: the plot unfurls before him, inevitable and painful, and he knows that death awaits him at Luo Binghe's hands (lol). Compare it with the bone deep certainty with which he faces his own downfall during the sham of a trial later in the chapter (I’ve bolded the important part):

“In the original work, Qiu Haitang’s appearance signified only one thing: Shen Qingqiu’s complete fall from grace. [...] Shen Qingqiu’s heart streamed with tears. Great Master… I know you’re doing this for my own good, but I’ll actually suffer if she speaks her words clearly. This truly is the saying “not frightened of doing a shameful deed, just afraid the ghost (consequences) will come knocking”!”

After the peripeteia is usually the denouement where the plot wraps up and the threads are all tied together leaving no loose ends, but because this tragedy isn’t Shen Yuan’s but the former Shen Jiu’s, it’s impossible to finish. 

Shen Yuan cannot provide the meaningful answers that the narrative demands because 1) he doesn’t have any memory of doing anything, and 2) he wasn’t the person who did them. Narratively, he cannot follow the same path as the former SQQ because he lacks the same fatal flaw: cruelty. 

This is why Binghe doesn’t kill him - because he loves him, rather than despises him. And this is why Shen Yuan has to sacrifice himself and die for Luo Binghe in order to save him from Xin Mo: because the narrative demands that denouement follows peripeteia, and SQQ’s fate is in the hands of the narrative. 

(Side note: I believe that this literal death also represents the death of OG!SQQ's tragic arc. The body that committed all those crimes must die to satisfy the narrative. SQQ must die, like burning down a forest, so that new growth can sprout from the ashes. After this, Shen Yuan's story has more room to develop instead.)

It must happen to show Bingmei that SQQ loves him too. And this brings us to Bingmei.

Bingmei

Bingmei has two succinct moments of utter downfall. The first is a literal fall - his flaw, his demonic heritage, leads his beloved shizun to throw him down into the Abyss. From his point of view, SQQ is punishing him simply for the status of his birth. He rapidly goes from being loved and cherished unconditionally, to being the victim of an assassination attempt. 

He realises that he is totally unlovable: that for the crimes of his species that he never had a hand in, he must pay the price as well: that his shizun is so righteous that no matter what love there was between them, if SQQ sees a demon, he will kill it. Even if that demon is Bingmei. 

The second moment is when SQQ dies for him. Again, from his point of view, he was chasing after a man who was struggling to see him as a human being. Shen Qingqiu’s death makes Bingmei realise that he has been completely misunderstanding his shizun: that SQQ would literally die for him, the ultimate act of self sacrifice from love: that SQQ loved him despite his demon heritage. 

Much like King Lear holding the corpse of his daughter and wailing in sheer grief and pain because he did this, he caused this, Bingmei gets to hold his shizun's cold body and cry his eyes out and know that it was his fault. (Kind of.)

(Yes, I’m bringing Shakespeare into this, no I am not justifying myself)

Maybe I'm a bit sadistic, but that scene slaps. Let me show you a comparison of scenes so you get the picture. 

Re-enter KING LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms; EDGAR, Captain, and others following

KING LEAR

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:

Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so

That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!

I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why, then she lives.

[...]

 KING LEAR

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

Dies

Versus this scene in SVSSS: 

Luo Binghe turned a deaf ear to everything else, greatly agitated and at a loss of what to do. He was still holding Shen Qingqiu’s body, which was rapidly cooling down. It seemed like he wanted to call for him loudly and forcefully shake him awake, yet he didn’t dare to, as if he was afraid of being scolded. He said slowly, “Shizun?”

[...]

Luo Binghe involuntarily held Shen Qingqiu closer.

He said in a small voice, “I was wrong, Shizun, I really… know that I was wrong.

“I… I didn’t want to kill you…”

PAIN. SO MUCH BEAUTIFUL PAIN. Yes, I know Shakespeare isn’t Athenian, but he was inspired by the good old stuff and he also knew how to write a perfect tragedy on his own terms. Anyway. I’ll find more Greek examples later.

This post was a bit all over the place, but I hope it has been fun to read. Part Two will be coming At Some Point, Who Knows When. This is a bit messy and unedited, but hey, I’m not getting paid or graded, so you can eat any typos or errors. Unless you’re here to talk to me about Chinese tragedy, in which case, please pull up a seat, let me get you a drink, make yourself at home.

ps: if you want to retweet this, here is the promo tweet!

[eponymous-rose]

A Critical Role Campaign 2 Mechanics Primer

Got a request from a new Critical Role viewer for some clarification re: rules and characters, and dang, yes, there’s so much stuff to deal with as a new viewer at the moment. So here’s an attempt at clarifying some stuff!

How does D&D work?

Fundamentally, one person (the DM) sets the scene and the players riff off that scene by acting out what their characters would do in response. Whenever a player’s actions would lead to an uncertain result, the DM can call for them to roll a die and try to hit a predetermined target number to see if they succeed. The players’ individual characters have abilities that boost certain categories of rolls and penalize others; a very strong character is more likely than a scrawny one to be able to open a jammed door, but they could still have an unlucky roll. It’s the DM’s job to incorporate the sometimes-absurd results of those die rolls into a coherent story.

Combat is the most “gamey” D&D gets, where everyone has a turn set aside to act (with an order determined by the “initiative” roll that starts combat). This is where character classes come in handy: magic-users cast spells, fighters jump in with their weapons of choice, and so forth. Each character has a set of hit points, and once those reach zero, the character is unconscious and possibly dying. But combat ain’t just hack-and-slash: there can be conversation, strategy, manipulation, collaboration, and all sorts of weird subtleties going on. Fundamentally, players’ actions are limited only by their imaginations.

It can be super weird getting into a D&D show even if you have played a bit because everyone plays the game a bit differently. Critical Role’s gameplay leans hard into roleplaying and character beats (there are episodes with basically no dice rolls) but also leans hard enough into the rules that a random bad or good roll can completely derail the story; rolls aren’t fudged or handwaved for the sake of a predetermined narrative, which means nobody playing (including the DM) knows how things are going to end up. This makes for a viewing experience that is a cross between dramedy improv and live sports; the cast plays out long scenes of conversation, but their characters could also permanently die at any time, adding to the high stakes. It’s also totally unedited, which accounts for the absurdly long runtime. 

If any of that isn’t for you, there are a lot of great D&D podcasts out there (often labeled “actual play”) that run the gamut from silly with minimal rules to mechanically involved but edited down. It’s a cool time to get into D&D!

Okay, so how exactly do these characters do their thing?

One of the more confusing aspects for new viewers of the second campaign of Critical Role is that they’re using a fair amount of content that’s not in the baseline ruleset - some character races and classes are coming from expansion content, and some are from Matt Mercer (the DM’s) homebrew. Here’s a quick summary of what each character has going on at the start of the campaign, moving from left to right in the first episode’s seating arrangement.

Fjord (played by Travis Willingham)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Travis is the big guy who looks like he could throw a football real far. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice has a Texas twang.

Fjord is a half-orc warlock. A half-orc typically has green skin and tusks but otherwise looks fairly close to a garden-variety human. Warlocks are magic-users who gained their abilities from a bargain with a mysterious (generally somewhat malevolent) being of great power. Mechanically, they rely a lot on what are called cantrips (spells that can be cast an unlimited number of times a day) since the number of more powerful spells at their disposal is very limited. However, unlike most other casters that have to get a full night’s sleep to regain their stronger spells, warlocks just have to rest for an hour or so and they’re good to go. More specifically, Fjord is a hexblade warlock. Hexblades are warlocks who have a particularly strong bond with their weapon of choice and can summon it from nothing.

Beauregard (played by Marisha Ray)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Marisha is the woman who often perches on her chair like she’s about to take flight. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is a bit gruff with a sarcastic drawl.

Beau is a human monk. Both humans in this campaign use a variant version of human that allows them to pick a feat at the start of the campaign: Beau has some extra expertise in investigative and athletic abilities. Monks are preternaturally powerful martial artists; what some classes do with magic, they do with unarmed combat. Mechanically, they rely on an ability called ki points, which are a stockpile of points that can be used for extra-powerful abilities such as being able to hit extra times on an attack or being able to stun an enemy. More specifically, Beau is a Way of the Cobalt Soul monk, which is a homebrew from Matt and means she’s essentially a warrior-monk-librarian whose key abilities center around rooting out useful information.

Caleb (played by Liam O’Brien)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Liam is the guy who perpetually looks like he’s about to launch into a Shakespearean monologue. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice is soft with a German accent.

Caleb is a human wizard. His variant human feat gives him an eidetic memory and the ability to always know what time it is. Wizards are magic-users who got to where they are with careful study; Caleb has to keep track of his spells by transcribing them into a spellbook. He also has a familiar in the form of the cat Frumpkin, although Frumpkin can also change forms. Mechanically, wizards can pick up spells from a lot of different sources to learn them, but again, the cost in time and materials of transcribing them into a spellbook can be substantial. More specifically, Caleb is a transmutation wizard, which means his wizardry focuses around the act of transforming one thing into another.

Nott (played by Sam Riegel)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Sam is the guy with an alarmingly big smile and a comically oversized flask. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice is high-pitched with varying levels of Cockney accent.

Nott is a goblin rogue. Goblins are small and quick, and may or may not be well-received depending on the location. Rogues are sneaky individuals who do best when striking from the shadows or scouting ahead to investigate potential traps and unlock doors. Mechanically, they get a huge bonus in combat if they attack when unseen or when an opponent is distracted by an ally. They’re also very good at avoiding attacks and at hiding from view. More specifically, Nott is an arcane trickster rogue, which means she also dabbles in magic related to illusions and enchantment.

Jester (played by Laura Bailey)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Laura is the one who may or may not be instigating every round of giggles at accidental innuendo. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is bubbly with an Eastern European accent.

Jester is a tiefling cleric. Tieflings essentially look like brightly-colored humans (Jester has blue skin) with horns and a tail; they’re the result of infernal ancestry and also may or may not be well-received. Clerics are magic-users who derive their power from the blessing of a deity or other extremely powerful entity. Jester’s divine patron is the Traveler, a mysterious trickster with an affinity for phallic graffiti. Mechanically, clerics have a massive stable of spells from which they can choose a subset every morning; their abilities range from healing wounds to causing devastating harm. More specifically, Jester is a trickery domain cleric, which means her spells have a strong focus on illusions and pranks.

Mollymauk (played by Taliesin Jaffe)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Taliesin is the one who looks like he may be some sort of ancient fey creature who’s come to our realm to play D&D. If you’re listening to the podcast, his character voice has an Irish accent of varying intensity.

Molly is a tiefling blood hunter with purple skin. Blood hunters are a custom class Matt created that can use their own blood (in a process called hemocraft) to augment their combat abilities. Mechanically, blood hunters are high-risk high-reward; they can perform devastatingly brutal attacks, but often only at the cost of shedding some of their own blood to do so. More specifically, Molly is an Order of the Ghostslayer blood hunter, which means he’s got an affinity for things relating to the moment of death.

Yasha (played by Ashley Johnson)

If you’re watching the show in video form, Ashley is the one who isn’t around for a little bit (she was splitting her time with a TV show on the opposite coast) and then SHE’S BACK AND I’M STILL SO HAPPY ABOUT THAT. If you’re listening to the podcast, her character voice is soft with a faint Scandinavian accent.

Yasha is an aasimar barbarian. Aasimar are the semi-divine counterpart to tieflings, although Yasha is a fallen aasimar with a fairly different aesthetic. Barbarians use their rage to enhance their already fierce battle prowess. Mechanically, barbarians in a rage take less damage and deal more damage, and also embrace a high-risk high-reward playstyle as tanks in the middle of the fray. More specifically, Yasha is a Path of the Zealot barbarian, which means her battle rages are fueled by the influence of a divine being.

Interested in watching from the start of campaign 2? The show has a YouTube channel with each episode posted in its entirety, and all episodes are also available in podcast form (they did jump channels partway through, but you can usually find a playlist that has them all). If you want to delve into campaign 1, I highly recommend it, but be aware that they’re still figuring out tech stuff and you’re also jumping in partway through the game they started years earlier at home. Campaign 2 starts 20 years after campaign 1 on a different continent of the same world, and is intended to be an appropriate jumping-on point for new viewers.

Interested in catching up faster so you can watch live with friends? Search Critical Recap for a series of recap videos on YouTube, which then becomes a series of written summaries on the CritRole website after episode 88. There are also great summaries on the Wiki, and many people have put together catch-up guides for new viewers. 

There’s A LOT of content out there. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for skimming the early stuff if you want to get in on the new episodes sooner. <3

Episodes air at 7 PM Pacific every Thursday on Critical Role’s Twitch and YouTube channels; the VOD goes up for free on YouTube the Monday after. In the last few months, the cast has been distanced at the studio (all on separate cameras) and episodes have been pre-recorded several weeks in advance; normally, the show is streamed live and everyone is around the same table.

Hope that helps! If you have any questions, let me know. This is a fun show to get into, and a great all-consuming massive body of entertainment if you have the time for it.

[st-just]

Hey, Cuba-anon again with a slightly different question. Less about Cuba, more about foreign policy and ethics in general. I am interested to know what you think about Nationalism and it’s place in the modern world. How should one view their relationship to their country versus their relationship to the global community?

To give my point of view, I think I am a pragmatic nationalist? I am not gung-ho about America because “it is the best nation ever and the president is never wrong, uwu”, but rather because I live here, my parents and grandparents live here, and if something in the world negatively impacts America it will by extension negatively impact me. I don’t think other countries are beneath me or anything, but I also know that the feeling is not always reciprocal. So, to me, putting the well being of Americans first and everything else second is similar to putting on your air mask first before helping others in the event of a plane crash.

Either way, would love to hear your point of view and see how others tackle the question.

(sorry for the delay in response, got halfway through writing this then saved it to drafts and completely blanked on it)

But okay, interesting question, and worth breaking down.

So, you know how through the '90s and early 2000's there was this just utterly overpowering narrative where the last chapter of every history textbook ended with a chapter about how national borders were less and less important and how through the magic of The Internet young people were more connected and cosmopolitan than ever, with the strong implication that the weight of history was pulling us inevitably towards a post-national utopia of frictionless exchange and understanding. Call it the Star Trek ideal.

Hasn't exactly worked out, of course. And to a large degree was bullshit even at the time (or the optimism of academics expecting all of humanity to think like they do, being charitable). But in my heart of hearts, that's still how I think things should work.

But okay, to get a bit less abstract, a bunch of barely connected thoughts-

- Nation-states (and states generally) are, at best, convenient administrative divisions of humanity. They have no value outside the services they provide to their residents, and certainly no rights or moral worth outside that. America doesn't deserve your loyalty or life anymore than the state of Ohio or city of Baltimore do (replace with wherever you live.)

-If you accept the basic idea of humans having equal moral worth (or anywhere close to it), then the entire idea that someone's entire life should be defined by what side of an imaginary line on a map they were born on seems obviously absurd as soon as you start thinking about it?

-Nations - in terms of borders, whose included, what characteristics are 'national', etc - are also both contingent and a great extent artificial, defined by state and cultural elites via a standardized language, a mythologized national history, patriotic holidays, nationalizing and creating traditions and rituals, national education and entertainment, etc, etc. There's nothing primordial or inherent there.

-Unfortunately, people really, really like having teams to identify with, and like excluding people from those teams and/or treating them like shit for not belonging to them even more. (People talk a lot about x or y horrible thing being fundamental to human nature, but I really think this is one of the places where human nature really lets us down.)

-Nationalism is an extremely easy and powerful way of dividing the world between us and them, and across the world there has been massive success using it as a locus for identity formation and to organize populations around basically every sort of project imaginable, from funding public education and welfare to genocide.

-Nationalism is, as mentioned, inherently exclusive - and no matter what it's proponents say, in practice there's always someone within the borders of the nation who doesn't quite fit (in the European context, Romani and Jewish people are the most obvious examples). Cases where the nationalist imagination doesn't perfectly overlap with state borders, or with the identity of some subset of the 'national' population also tends to go, uh, badly.

-However, within the national population, appeals to national solidarity or theoretically shared ideals can often be (to a limited degree) useful in transcending or working to ameliorate regional, ethnic, class, etc divides.

-While it's true that large chunks of the American (Canadian, British, French, Japanese, etc) populace benefit quite a bit from their position in the current international system, it's almost universally the case that what foreign policy elites consider 'the national interest' extends far, far, far beyond anything that provides concrete benefits to the average citizen - I'll just gesture vaguely towards Afghanistan, here. Or World War 1 - and quite a lot of death and misery is inflicted for the sake of a narrow slice of the elite's material interests and entirely meaningless concerns around national glory and prestige.

-To be frank, in specifically America's case, putting the interests of co-nationals first and everyone else second is less putting your own air mask on first and more launching a life boat at half capacity to make sure you have leg room.

-But, again, the fruits of pursuing the national interest really, really aren't evenly spread. Does the US government's tireless and vicious championing of stringent IP laws, regardless of how many needless deaths result from the constraints on the drug supply they create, really do much for the average American?

-Which, to go back to the air mask analogy, brings up the awkward point that very often it's not so much putting your own mask on first as tearing the masks off people around you so you have extras, just in case. How much less is the life of someone on the wrong side of the border worth? Half as much? A tenth? A thousandth? The pursuit of America's national security and national interests has a death toll well into the millions.

-Honestly, even if you don't care at all about foreigners, in terms of domestic policy it's just a useful heuristic to instinctively distrust anyone who relies too much on nationalist rhetoric to justify themselves. I mean, the music's almost always bad and anyone who actually gets invested in the symbolism of their flag is reliably a complete killjoy, but even beyond that - they're just very reliably the worst people. This is admittedly unkind and not always true. But, well, see that quote about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel, which applies wonderfully to both people and organizations. If someone's trying to sell something by wrapping it in the flag, that usually means they don't want you looking too closely.

-Viewing the world through a nationalist framework and caring about zero-sum issues of national prestige also make it incredibly hard to coordinate around issues that don't care about national borders, or are going to disproportionately hurt people without rich and powerful nation-states defending their interests. Like, I don't know, global pandemics. Or climate change.

-Anyway, in conclusion, borders bad, nationalism bad, and also any officially codified 'Patriotic' culture is instantly cringe. Hopefully some of this makes sense.

[nevermindirah]

Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

[teenyfish]

Marine Biology Story of the Day # 12: True Crime Edition

I was reminded of this experience by @cantankerouscanuck so thank them for triggering this memory.  Today I’m going to tell you the story of how I was involved in an eel poaching ring sting operation.

Yeah, you heard me.

Right after I had gotten my masters, I was working as a fisheries tech for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS).  One of our surveys involved sampling baby eels, or glass eels, as they swam up our local rivers—this was done in order to determine how many babies were recruiting to the American eel population.

(me as a young, naive, fisheries technician) 

Eels are catadromous, which means they start their life out in salt water, and then move to freshwater for most of their life, then return to the sea to spawn. Eels start their life out in the Sargasso sea, in which they are thin, clear leptocephali.  Then they become thicker but still clear, as glass eels, and they swim inshore and up in freshwater streams and rivers.  There, they transform into fully pigmented elvers, which slowly grow into adult “yellow” eels.  Once they become reproductively viable, they are called “silver” eels, and it’s this point that they swim back out to the Sargasso sea to reproduce.  We have never seen them in the Sargasso sea, and have never seen two reproduce, but we know it happens, because baby glass eels come into coastal areas every year from March through June. This is when we would catch them at VIMS.

(Above: eel life cycle, Below left: glass eel, Below right: elver) 

So how do you catch an eel?  Well, you build an eel trap.  Basically what eels are looking for when they swim up river is flowing water and climbable walls, which is what we provide with the trap.  Basically, one section of the trap is a box, of which the inside is covered in a textured plastic material that is easy for them to climb.  Once they reach the top of the box, the flow of water running into the box pushes and sucks them into a long tube that runs down to a bucket.  The bucket has a few screened holes, which allow the water to pass through while maintaining some level of water in the bucket, but the eels cannot climb up the bucket and back through the tube.  Thus they are trapped until we come and check on them.

(A VIMS eel trap) 

These traps are usually placed at dams, culverts, or waterfalls, places where unnatural barriers would make it harder for eels to climb, and therefore, they would be more attracted to our traps. Eels can climb these barriers somewhat, unlike salmon and trout, but they are always looking for the path of least resistance. Because of this, all of our trap sites were at completely gorgeous spots in rural Virginia.

We would check on these sites every 2-3 days, count them, and take a small subset back to the lab for measurements and to observe pigmentation to determine which stage the glass eels were during the transition to elvers.

(Left: an eel pigmentation chart.  The darker they are, the closer they are to changing into an elver.  You can see the pigmentation differences between the lighter red circled eel, and the darker blue circled eel) 

Now, how did I get involved in a sting operation?  Well let me explain.  So eels are poached from the U.S. for the Asian market, both in adult and in glass eel form.  You can make $2,000 for a pound of glass eels on the black market.  It’s lucrative.  The reason why our eels are being targeted now is because Asian and European eels are both endangered, because they have also been fished to the brink of extinction. So now poachers are going after our eels, and there are a lot of Americans who will provide for that market.  

(a mass of glass eels--just to get an idea of how many of these guys you can catch in an average east coast creek) 

Fishing for glass eels is SUPER illegal in every east coast state except Maine. So, poachers build poaching rings in all other states.  They will build their own traps or steal from research study traps like ours, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service wanted to bring one big ring down.  So they contacted us, because we had poaches steal our catch or steal our traps in the past—and an agent came and began working with us.  He provided us camera traps for all of our eel trap sites, so we could detect where poachers were going, and our USF&W agent would go out in the dark of night and wait at these sights, pretending to be a poacher, until he gained their trust.  My boss would sometimes get calls at 3 in the morning from the agent asking him questions about eels, so he would know enough about the fish to pass as a poacher. Eventually, he followed the ring up to Maine, where he got the license plates and identities of all of the ring participants, including the leader.  And then the USF&W took their asses to court.  I think the ring leader is facing up to 10 years in jail. You can read an article about it here.

(OPERATION BROKEN GLASS BIIIIITTCCCHHH)

I never ran into any of the poachers, but there were definitely days when I saw that the trap had been messed with or our catch had been stolen.  I also answered some questions for our agent when he called during work hours, and to be honest, I’m glad I didn’t get the 3 am calls.  

All and all though, it was one of my favorite projects to work on, because it took me to some very unique and beautiful terrestrial sites that I never would have gotten to go to if I hadn’t worked on this project.  And, I got to interact with some natural “poachers” as well. Occasionally, we would find northern water snakes in our traps—it was always a bit of a challenge getting them out.  We would also occasionally find baby painted turtles trying to make their way into bigger ponds—and it was always fun releasing them up on the other side of the waterfall.  Unless it’s a sea turtle, it’s pretty rare that I get to interact with reptiles, so that was always an interesting surprise.  

(little baby turt and a northern water snake) 

I know this was super short today, but as always, PLEASE do not hesitate to ask any questions you have about the research or experience.  

[alexeiadrae]

Thoughts on Evil

I finished watching Evil. For reference, I am an atheist and was raised in a secular household and I am a skeptic who loves folklore and scary stories and who also loves debunking paranormal claims. My husband is Catholic and believes in demonic possession and the end of days stuff, and somehow we work, just like Kristen and David somehow work. I am also a counselor so I am familiar with the mental health aspects that Kristen deals with, and since she was the skeptic and the atheist related to her on those levels, as well as balancing motherhood with a professional career even though I have a private practice and do not testify in court, and my husband is not an adventurer in any sense of the word and has been in the trenches with me for years.

That said, I wasn’t sure if I would finish it. One thing I have noticed about atheists who were raised in secular homes is that we tend to not find the demonic possession end of day stuff scary, and if anything we find it overacted to the point of ludicrousness if it isn’t boring as hell (can’t speak for all of us, but the overwhelming majority that I have talked to about it feel that way). My parents were both raised Methodist and found The Exorcist scary even though they had been atheists for years, so I think if you are raised Christian it is still scary even if you leave the faith, but if you are never raised to believe in it then it’s silly. Both my sister and I found it silly, even though other people our age who were Christian thought it was terrifying. And it extends to other movies and shows that feature demon possession and end of day stuff. While I love horror, it’s not a subset of horror that works for me.

So I don’t know if people raised in other belief systems like Islam or Buddhism find it scary (but would be interested in finding out!), but lifelong atheists tend not to. So for those reasons I wasn’t sure if I would finish it, and for the first few episodes I still wasn’t sure because, bluntly, the demon possession stuff just has me rolling my eyes with how over the top it is if I wasn’t laughing at how preposterous it was. So those elements definitely dragged it down for me. Yet there were elements that I really appreciated, and it did have one episode that terrified and disturbed me. So I finished it. Do I want to watch the second season? Not sure. Spoilery thoughts below.

-I did appreciate how at the beginning it illustrated how someone like Kristen would have a massive amounts of student loan debt and would be working her ass off to pay it. They sort of drifted from this. But at the beginning there was the sense of how it is hard juggling career and kids and paying the bills.

-While I did like some of the psychological aspects, there was some stuff that fell victim to me knowing the ins and outs of Kristen’s profession. Most counselors and psychologists, or the good ones at least, do see a therapist of their own to work on their own issues, get what they need to off their chest and ensure that they are in a good emotional state to practice, so I am glad that they showed Kristen going to therapy and working on her issues. That said, if someone stole a therapist’s client files, that would be a BFD, for both the practitioner and the thief. A practitioner could lose their license if they were shown to be negligent in handling the files. They could have also filed a lawsuit against Leland for stealing the files. And if I was a practitioner, I would want to know how the files were stolen. 

-Which is one of the weak points of the show. Why did Kristen feel like she had to take on Leland and LeRoux on her own? She hardly exhausted her options. She didn’t even tell her mother that Leland had threatened to kill her daughters, much less document the threat and work to get a restraining order against him (yes, I know, those don’t always work well but they give her a legal recourse). Ditto with LeRoux. One of my specialties is domestic violence and harassment so I am very familiar with the steps you would take to document all of that and get help before abandoning the idea, but Kristen didn’t try any of those. And while domestic violence and the like doesn’t appear to be her specialty it pops up frequently enough that it would be alarming if she didn’t know that. It took away a bit from me. Also, if someone had threatened my children, I would tell my children. Yes, I get you wouldn’t want your kids to be anxious, but in a case like that they would need to know. I would tell my husband. I would tell the police. In fact, as a mandatory reporter, Kristen would be legally obligated to call the police if someone made threats on someone else’s life, especially a child’s life. It blew my mind that she just kept it to herself. Especially as Leland did it in a public courthouse surrounded by people. I would find someone to corroborate.

Now a problem in these cases is someone making threats to harm or kill someone, being reported, and then denying it to the police and leaving them unable to do much. They could have written that in, but they didn’t, and it did not reflect well on Kristen IMO.

-Another counselor nitpick, a good counselor/psychologist would not start out by challenging a client’s beliefs but take time exploring them and mapping out how they think. This is two fold, helping the client to trust the counselor and feel validated by them while it helps the psychologist understand how they see the world and build a map of their thoughts process and belief system and give them clues to how to utilize it to help them get better. Basically if someone came into my office and said they were possessed by a demon I would go with it even though I don’t believe them because understanding how they think is more important than challenging everything right off the bat. 

-There were a few episodes that were very effective. The Halloween episode with the masked girl was chilling. The episode that really did it for me was when David was in the hospital and subjected to the whims of a sadistic, racist nurse. And what is interesting is what made is so chilling is that none of it was supernatural. But that thought of being held captive, drugged to the point of being unable to advocate for yourself and ask for help and at the mercy of someone who wants to hurt you was terrifying (and not to mention hard to watch). I also have a history of sleep paralysis, and the thing that would terrify me most when I was paralyzed was the thought that someone was in the room or outside my home wanting to hurt me and I couldn’t defend myself or even call 911. So David being medically paralyzed captured that feeling. I also hate IVs, absolutely hate them and have this fear that they will tear my veins out, so there were several scenes I could not watch. Finally, this happens. There have been nurses who have tormented and killed patients and they got away with it for years because they were able to cover it up. And my husband, who is mixed Pacific Islander, Asian and European but appears a racially ambiguous brown, is nervous about hospitals for that same reasons and because of mistreatment his father received when he was treated for lung cancer (they broke a mercury thermometer in his lungs) that likely contributed to his death. So that episode chilled me to the core for a number of reasons.

-That said, Kristen’s sleep paralysis stuff was not an accurate depiction of how it works at all. You can’t even talk when you have sleep paralysis. I was usually laughing at the scenes with George. George. I mean, how the fuck can you take a demon named George seriously? I laughed my head off when he said his name was George and wondered if I was suddenly watching a comedy. If I had sleep paralysis and a demon came in and said his name was George I would laugh myself out of it. 

-The episode with the boy who tried to drown his baby sister in the pool brought back memories of working in a children’s mental hospital. I saw something similar with a kid who was even younger. And that kid suffered abuse so horrific that it gave me and one of the other therapists working with them nightmares, and with the knowledge that we don’t have good treatment options for someone who exhibits the symptoms that kid did it was a horrible case. If I wake up one morning and see on the news that they were arrested for a string of murders or killing their kids I will not be surprised. You don’t need possession to explain this stuff. The truth, that someone would be so sadistically abusive to their own child, and that despite all of the red flags that this child’s parents were allowed to raise and abuse them for as long as they did and to the extent that they did, is far more terrifying. I guess that’s another reason I don’t like the demonic possession stuff. It gives abusers a way out. 

-So there were things I liked about it, and there were things I hated about it. I think I’ll see what the plot synopsis and reviews of the second season are like before committing.

[modernabstractart3-blog]

Summary Art Painting Studios -- From Primitive Caves for you to Modern Lofts

Contemporary Painting Have anyone ever attempted to remember typically the first time when you actually discovered for yourself looking at a good abstract art work or a great abstract artwork? Do a person remember the ideas or even feelings you had by what you were looking with?

Contemporary Painting

This article is a mirrored image of some of the own personal along with opinion-based viewpoints and facts while an artist about summary art with certain personal references to facts that tend to be throughout agreement with precisely what I believe myself personally seeing that to the nature, delivery, expansion and the progression of the cut fine art outside the boundaries from the esoteric terms of often the art instituto.

To get a basic and requisite look at the topic, we should initial comprehend what the word fuzy indicates before we might tackle the actual understanding associated with "abstract art" on its own; in addition to we learn that subjective in this sense as well as as some sort of verb implies to extract or perhaps eliminate and surprisingly as being an form word means not easy to be aware of; abstruse. And as a new transitive verb it signifies to take apart, get rid of. It's origin is actually via Latin abstrahere 'draw away' or 'draw by. '

Thus, we can determine that abstract, is normally considered a form regarding art that does not necessarily depict any situation that resembled the particular objective or stuff globe; instead it showed brand-new creations that very subjectively were expressions of typically the inside substance and often the spirit in the artist and also often through a deep spontaneity that brings away the internal world of the actual artist.

Therefore abstract artwork, being the merchandise of this kind of very natural, unconstrained along with unpremeditated impulse within the lack of any external obama's stimulus, is intrinsic and is one of the very basic nature in addition to the comprise of the particular artist, as the real influence behind his designs.

As I evolved via my representational art as well as became far more acquainted using the history of skill, I learned that summary art work had its root beginnings inside the very early daybreak involving human history whenever man did start to draw upon the walls connected with their cave. These earlier cut arts, abstract images and also abstract paintings : often embellished with natural and organic fabric dyes - often attempted to help get the essential mother nature and the good quality associated with the objects rather when compared with the genuine appearance regarding them.

As the fine art historians and art pros formulated their opinions along with ideas into prints, considerably more esoteric terms spun over subject under " nonobjective art, " " nonrepresentational art, " and inch nonfigurative art. " With regards to aesthetics, since non-e on the principles of creating artwork are actually precisely formulated, that particular subset of humanities offers its pundits galore having many schools involving divergent opinions and feelings, exactly where esoteric lectures in addition to viewpoints are listened to along with open jaws in pays of cause, personal words and phrases suffers within the cloud connected with confusion.

Decades long ahead of the birth associated with fuzy expressionism in America, remarkably figurative arts had endured in the East, that is from the Islamic culture, everywhere calligraphy also as the nonfigurative skill is educated as a subject matter establishing sometimes as early because with primary schools, since excellent emphasis is located upon typically the pupils' purchasing and creating skills within calligraphy, for the reason that art regarding handwriting.

From the Western tradition, abstract patterns are identified in many forms. Nevertheless abstract arts are distinctly distinguished in composition application form in relation to pretty art as well as fine art work, where in subjective fine art, the results of development, are spontaneous snapshots with the artist's thoughts, emotions, and also the introspection by which this individual results in his work involving summary art.

Abstract Expressionism, we all know that it today, had been born in the us in often the mid 20th hundred years pursuing a massive exodus from the European avant- garde musicians to New York Town, making the area the actual center of the artwork planet; a title which had been held by Paris, france. Typically the contemporary American performers were being immensely influenced by simply the arrival of this particular new talent that will produced forth the very pleasant freedom of personal phrase throughout the vehicle of improvisation inside absence of typically the boundaries along with limitations connected with conventional types.

The introduction of summary expressionism throughout New York is the start of a new tranquil artistic revolution by which often the particular artist began to be able to rebel overloaded against typically the status quo. He started out the latest era where he or she could readily create to the future along with transform the existing scene for any better tomorrow.

Some involving the innovators in fuzy expressionism, for instance Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem fuente Kooning, grew to become synonymous together with New York Institution along with action painting while they enjoyed a significant role concerning how became deservedly known because avant-garde; a new region of independence for the actual artist to create in addition to construct with an ritual in which surmounted any sensible and also objective realm regarding purpose.

On the a lot more textural area, Jackson Pollock began to re-arrange the easel and coated since he pleased, conveying themselves by pouring the particular coloring from within unto typically the canvas, as he believed. Pollock, as one regarding the most mavericks involving the era, used likewise his body as a good device to paint together with, while he moved speedily all-around his large canvases on to the ground, spattering interlacing habits regarding paint, like a great emotional ride up and down, drawing often the viewer into their rhythmic movement of motions, apparently in to an infinitude, infiniteness of place.

In wonderful contrast to help Pollock, Barnett Newman's color-field paintings, are generally open career fields of substantial empty spots for the audience in order to step into all of them and also imagine what they would like to place in them.

At this point, in the interest of simplicity, we could possibly categorize fine art into just representational artwork and summary art. Representational art becoming what we instantaneously acknowledge in association to be able to recognizable objects, vs. cut art work that requires our considered to perceive the composition on the art and the contrast of each of our observation using the conclusions looking for built in the past, inside order to get to the actual immediate instance, where we live. Thus, in our declaration regarding abstract art, the particular profile or the deficiency of any psychological answers, brought about as the actual response to understanding the subjective art, elevates the problem of, what on earth is truly a abstract fine art and any time does it become productive.

Let's take a imagine that many of us are looking at the representational art, a landscape where it depicts any mossy wooded area cloaked in a low hole which has a cascading shallow steady flow working through it. Many of us can all trust exactly what we are looking in, appreciate the high quality associated with its beauty, and a few regarding us become awestricken through its magic, and possibly check out the mist in often the air and aroma the particular moss. We want to appear at it as some sort of pleasant encounter. We impression that it is restful, because it has typically the tendency to generate us really feel good. It helps all of us - even if the idea is for the brief time - ignore our issues, and converts our trouble into a brand new degree of calm, to the actual point which we could always be there, in our creativity. We walk away via the painting like a pro and seem at other artwork in which does not produce the particular same feelings and thoughts, and most of us turn and look from it again and yet again, wanting to have an overabundance of regarding the same pleasant knowledge. Delight is what all of us are experiencing.

This can be the mental reaction we sense in the direction of this very representational fine art that we fully know. The idea communicated to people a clear message within the particular boundaries connected with its techie expertise, through which it ended up being created. The complex competence wasn't the initial aesthetic attraction, however. It seemed to be typically the message that the item communicated for you to us how it looks, that fascinated us. The actual virtuosity with which it had been created becomes 2nd to help the significance of often the meaning and the good quality of the delivery. Though the message doesn't always have in order to have the same this means for every single viewer, it is usually the combination of each, the message and often the specialized expertise that gives about a comprehending that reasons the viewer as a better alternative sentimentally.

From sketching as well as chiselling with sharp rocks about the walls of their cave, to the beauty involving today's technology, male has journeyed through a incredible evolution within the artistry among many other mechanics of life. From whoever has accepted the boundaries with their culture and environmental variables, have remained true and also faithful to what that they were accepted and likely to create available as numerous representational and radical disciplines. But the more bright, who had an consciousness of higher sort of living and true probable, wished to move beyond numerous with no tolerance intended for reductions and entrapment. That they started to be the visionaries who have fled from and sought liberty regarding expression elsewhere, exactly where the achievement of which freedom was probable.

Some sort of great number of American artists along with teachers this sort of as Joseph Albers in addition to Hans Hofmann transferred in order to America in core the twentieth century and made New york city the new Art Facility of driving by leaving London right behind. They brought using them that all freedom involving spontaneity to make paintings that will became whatever you know right now as summary expressionism. While unique because our little finger prints, each appearance, evolved into a new aesthetic personal unsecured to reckon with.

Nonetheless the basic roots associated with the move from representational art to be able to abstract art work and expressionistic paintings possessed begun to build in typically the later part of often the nineteenth century in the actual form of impressionist along with neo-impressionists when art acquired begun to change their confront, while still holding onto a fantastic degree of similarity to what the idea intended to be; and by simply the time post-impressionism experienced arrived on the landscape, the field involving fine art had already been subject to some sort of noticeable change and effectively on its way to a major alteration.

Before to the arrival connected with this brand-new transformation, and also certainly prior to post-impressionism, the particular artist had been primarily interested in the organic representation of the landscape, rather then attempting to tap straight into the interesting depth of the own emotions by using his / her canvas, and get connected to typically the psyche of their market.

Nothing is more highly effective along with significant than the particular birth plus the power involving a new idea. Practically nothing can or is competent connected with stopping an concept. Once a notion is considered, it should not be stopped, diminished or utilized; because a good idea has no muscle size or form to sit on a physical space and turn subjected to the enemy pushes, and become insecure. A new thought, after conceived, takes on a lifetime of its own, by currently being nurtured from the powerful lofts of creative imagination and brought forward inside arms involving those who take hold of this.

Hans Huffman who else started to be recognized as the papa from the abstract expressionism possesses this particular to say: "An idea can simply be appeared with the help connected with the medium of phrase, typically the inherent qualities regarding which needs to be surely inquired about and comprehended in obtain to become the transporter associated with an idea. " Typically the idea of self-determinism, in order to permit oneself the control of freedom of reflection is a luxury which is not available for purchase, nevertheless to attain; a school innately available to any few, but obtainable through the masses. For a few that arrives quickly, along with the sleep come to be able to embrace it by way of hard knocks.

The evolution associated with art work from representational for you to fuzy expressionism required an enormous levels of liberalism and endorsement by those whose support and economic support had been instrumental in the tactical a higher level the abstract expressionist artists.

In an article, very unveiling of their philosophy connected with art, Johannes Itten states: "If brand new ideas are in order to think any artistic kinds, the actual physical, sensual, perceptive in addition to spiritual forces have to almost all be equally available as well as act in concert. very well Absolutely speaking, Itten claims what can be done to create the good artistic phrase within terms of the means necessary to broadcast a idea, which is a thing thought, felt or imagined from the mind, into the particular canvas being a successful function of art, which could be inquired about and realized by the person.

This kind of above criteria specified by simply Itten in the beginning 20th century was any major philosophical bite in which essential lots of gnawing and food digestion before making acceptance as well as support; and so the abstract musicians experienced to endure a quite lovely plight in generating and also preserving their income.

Prior to arrival of the actual European founders and their very own fortitude, in taking all their very precious reward involving abstract paintings, representational performers had no concept while to what freedom connected with imaginative expression really supposed to start the doorway into a new world of practicing art, that opened a new entrance in addition to an extension associated with their inner self applied.

Encountered with the sever visitors of the traditionalists who have refused change, the summary designers began to communicate their heart, on their very own new canvases, making use of their individual newly created regulations. Throughout the world of artwork, where skill is dealt as a extravagance and also not a necessity along with influenced by the discretionary dollars of any few, the entrance on the abstract art throughout general since particular cut expressionism endangered the axles on which typically the art work market was pivoted.

Transform became inevitable, as well as people who prefer the old ways broke rank along with futurists at the expense with the modern art; but often the subjective expressionists became busily linked to experimenting and looking for ways the several physical organizations and designed new instruments by which they are able to implement paint to their canvases.

Suddenly the conventional signifies by the fact that artist possessed painted became an constantly changing process of query, generation, experimentation, and more projects; each time giving birth and labor to a brand-new strategy. The canvases, chemicals as well as the studio tools lengthy far beyond the restrictions of the artist's business and also into the region of attachement and discovered objects.

Jackson Pollock ended up being the quintessential action electrician, who struggled badly using acceptance, began to utilize the body as the painting musical instrument around his / her vast canvases laid out and about on the floor along with danced with his information, drippings as well as spattering associated with paint; this individual developed and also mastered the method of action artwork and liked some regarding the sprouts of any fun new fame and good fortune ahead of he fell unwilling recipient on the demons of the traditions at the vine ripened age of 49. They left a great musical legacy behind, which continued in order to inspire many abstract music artists through the variety connected with great canvases which they left behind.

And this Pollock have said in aspect regarding his paintings: "It's most a big sport of structure, some along with a brush, a number of together with a shovel, some opt for a pen. The method regarding painting like a pro is the all-natural growth outside of need. My spouse and i want to express this feelings rather than show you these people. It doesn't subject how the paint is actually put on, as extended as something is explained. On the floor My partner and i am more content. We feel nearer, more an integral part of the painting, since this kind of technique I can wander around it, job through the four sides along with literally be in typically the art work. The modern performer is cooperating with space in addition to time and articulating their feelings rather than showing. When I'm painting, I am not aware of precisely what Now i'm doing. It's merely after the get acquainted interval that we see what We've been concerning. The artwork has a lifestyle involving its own. Every fine painter paints what they are. "

Another great designer as well as contemporary painter coming from the fuzy expressionists class is Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg created influences with identified objects about the streets associated with New York Area and also defied every feasible traditionalist's rule as this individual grown through his occupation, which often became quite deservedly fulfilling, earning him excellent, prestige and financial good results within the past few generations. He after moved for you to, Florida to receive away from Brand-new York City, where he or she continue to create his or her art work on the peaceful and rich shores regarding Captiva Tropical island.

One involving the most inspiring approaches connected with Rauschenberg worth recollecting, will be his concept associated with leaving plenty of to probability for the cause regarding discovery, where the musician enjoys the serendipity involving unexpected happenstance.

The a pair of most important style of subjective expressionism, were being the motion painters having use connected with textures, spattering along with drippings of paint during, gesturing the mood on the artisan, and the color-field artists who expressed their process the unified fields regarding color and shapes, although other painters made employ of both equally styles inside their work.

[tlbodine]

Writing Disabled Characters

Okay. So. I am unwisely wading into this because I’ve seen way too much about this on my dash this week, and I feel like there are some really good points being made but also a lot of people getting angry and talking past each other. 

In case you’ve missed the debate up to this point, it goes something like this: 

Person A: I wish there were more representation of disability in fiction. 

Person B: It just isn’t realistic, though. How is a disabled person going to do all of the cool stuff a story character is supposed to do? 

Person A: Actually it isn’t that hard. You can do this and this and this. Also what about This Piece of Popular Media Already Featuring a Disabled Protagonist? 

Person B: But that media doesn’t count because that person Isn’t Really Disabled and also wtf why do I have to write disabled characters into everything? Why does every story suddenly have to have all this representation shoe-horned in there?! WHY CAN’T I JUST TELL A STORY?!?!?! 

Person A: *now visibly angry* Just admit you’re being ableist. 

Person B: You’re not even answering my question so obviously you’re just being a jerk right now and hiding behind labels 

*cat-fight snarling and cartoon dust cloud ensues* 

Okay y’all. We’re done. We’re finished. All of you go to your corners and calm the fuck down. 

Let’s take a deep goddamn breath and talk about disability* in fiction. Buckle in, because this is a long one. 

*(Note: I think all of this also probably applies, in one way or another, to any other type of representation, be it racial or sexual or whatever, but right this second I’m gonna be focusing on disability because I want a can of worms not a dumptruck of worms) 

Nobody is saying that your story has to have a disabled character in it (and if someone actually is saying that, they’re being kind of a dick). 

There is no Representation Police that will show up at your doorstep and pound on your door and confiscate your laptop if you are not hitting the appropriate quota of disabled characters in your fiction. If you don’t want to tell a story with a disabled character in it, that is your prerogative, and literally no one is going to hold a gun to your head and force you to do it. 

However, you gotta accept some responsibility that you are choosing not to write a disabled character. Because there is nothing stopping you from including one, aside from your own decision not to do so. 

And maybe you should take a step back and ask yourself why you are making the decision not to write a disabled character. 

Do you think it would just be physically impossible for a person with a disability to do all of the things you need your character to do? You might be right! On the other hand, someone with no legs reached the summit of Mt. Everest, an athlete with a wooden leg won 6 Olympic medals in 1904, and a man with cerebral palsy traveled across 20 European countries in a motorized wheelchair. 

Just for starters. 

No, not all disabled people are going to be capable of amazing feats of whatever, and no, disabled people don’t exist to provide inspiration porn etc. etc., there’s stuff to unpack here, but my point is that physical disability does not immediately preclude a character from being able to do cool and heroic shit. So if that’s your justification for not writing a disabled character into your story, maybe you just need to do a bit more research because you don’t realize what’s actually possible. 

Have you never seen a disabled character in media and you’re afraid it would be too fucking weird or niche or only appeal to the SJW-type subset and not have mass commercial appeal? 

You know what? I actually sympathize. I totally get that concern. You don’t want to look like you’re pandering. You’re just here to tell a good story, you don’t want to have to shoe-horn in a character just because somebody told you that not putting them in was ableist. 

But like. There are already highly successful, commercial, mainstream pieces of media with disabled characters in them. 

Professor X. Bucky Barnes. Edward Elric. Matt Murdock. Bran Stark. Gregory House. Toothless (and Hiccup by the end). Just to name a couple off the top of my head. 

And you know, their representation isn’t always perfect and ideal (it always bothered me that Daredevil’s blindness is often conveniently ignored for example) but it’s already there. In wildly successful pieces of media. The presence of a disabled character does not automatically make your story less commercially viable. 

Would making your character disabled mess up the story you’re trying to tell in some way? 

Be honest with yourself. Would it really? Why? 

Maybe you’re absolutely right! Maybe you’re trying to tell a story about a very specific thing, and introducing extra variables into it would detract from that story. And you know what? That’s totally fine. It is absolutely fine to write your story however the fuck you want to write it. 

But if you don’t want to write it because: 

It seems unrealistic

It seems too logistically difficult

“People like that wouldn’t exist in this setting” 

It literally never occurred to you and now you’re embarrassed and defensive about it

You are vaguely viscerally uncomfortable at the idea for a reason you can’t explain

Then, well. Maybe you have some internalized ableism and you need to tend to that. Or maybe you just haven’t thought past the surface, and you should take some time to figure out why you forgot that disabled people exist. Or maybe you’re being intellectually lazy. And maybe all of those reasons are why disabled people are angry at you, and maybe taking a second to (shudder) check your privilege and see where they’re coming from is more important than rushing to defend your own wounded ego. 

Because, I feel like I need to reiterate: Nobody is forcing you to write stories in any particular way - which means that everything in your story is part of your own conscious or unconscious decision-making, and you need to own that and accept responsibility for it one way or another. 

And you know what? 

You in the back! You over there with your disabled characters! You, who is at this very moment inching your mouse cursor over the reblog button with the intention of smugly pointing out that your book is full of disabled characters, and you always care about representation. Good for you! Also, I do not care. Until you also tell me what the book is about, and why this character is interesting, and your writing is solid -- I do not give even the single tiniest of fucks. 

Because writing diverse media isn’t enough to make it good. 

Diversity is not a sole goddamn selling point for a story. 

And if the only thing you can tell me about your story is how much representation is in it, I have no way of knowing whether or not it’s any good or whether I’ll enjoy it, so you don’t get to claim any kudos points. 

You gotta ask yourself the same question as hypothetical Mr. “That’s Just Not Realistic” McGee over there: 

Am I writing this just to get brownie points with someone? 

Am I writing this to target a specific niche (ie, a disability-focused magazine)? 

Am I writing this to feel morally superior? 

Am I writing this because I’m disabled and I want to tell a story about someone like me? 

Am I writing this because I want to understand disability better? 

Am I writing this because I want to explore some or another topic or theme or trope and it seemed interesting? 

Am I writing this because it would work with my setting so why the hell not? 

I don’t care what the answer is, but you should. Art demands intellectual honesty. Know your motives and fucking own them. If you’re writing something in a particular way so that it will get reblogged by a particular person? Just admit that. If you’re writing something in a particular way because it’s your experience and you want to write a goddamn story about it? Say that! 

But don’t let yourself get caught in the trap of believing you’re morally superior to somebody else because you’re Doing This One Thing Right, okay? 

Do I have any advice on writing disabled characters? 

Damn right I do. I mean. You know me. I’ve got advice about fuckin’ everything. 

But that’ll have to wait for a future post, because this one’s gone on way too damn long already. 

[unit8ddafilipadamski]

Secondary Research

https://www.theartsshelf.com/2014/03/25/elder-scrolls-online-new-concept-art-and-previously-unseen-artwork-released/

The art above inspires me to create a concept art fantasy village, because it’s very creative idea and it can be very colourful or dark depending on the ideas taken whilst creating something like this.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/384283780695660319/?autologin=true

The art above give me idea of creating a future fantasy city, it is very creative idea as multiple thoughts are emanating through, of what could be done, a dystopian or utopian world, depending on what colours and style of city wanting to re-create,  and what story wish to add, make it humans only or add perhaps alien’s or elve’s, possibilities are endless.

https://questgamingnetwork.com/classic-elder-scrolls-73-summerset-isles/1s65s/

Art above shows a elvish fantasy town, that creates idea of wanting to make your own version of it as add some vibrance, life, story and ambience, to the concept art of wanted to make, vibrant colours are going through the head and how I could make a land showing life form. 

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwallpaper-gallery.net%2Fimages%2Fconcept-art-wallpapers%2Fconcept-art-wallpapers-2.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwallpaper-gallery.net%2Fgallery%2Fconcept-art-wallpapers.html&docid=cslsqU8KS9UbvM&tbnid=ym9rqaxZb8NjXM%3A&vet=1&w=992&h=496&bih=969&biw=1920&ved=2ahUKEwiIwczhwp_hAhXbQRUIHaZZBG84ZBAzKA4wDnoECAEQDw&iact=c&ictx=1#h=496&imgdii=ym9rqaxZb8NjXM:&vet=1&w=992

Image above inspire me to re-create a statue inside a village or city, landscape, or some structure for the concept art.

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FDrk-UjBWwAAEIun.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Ftesonline%2Fstatus%2F1060949139113066496&docid=fMMygZE7ULqOwM&tbnid=AOLb6E246M9_fM%3A&vet=10ahUKEwihg-Spvp_hAhUDxxoKHfeiAtEQMwicASgmMCY..i&w=1200&h=675&bih=969&biw=1920&q=eso%20concept%20art&ved=0ahUKEwihg-Spvp_hAhUDxxoKHfeiAtEQMwicASgmMCY&iact=mrc&uact=8

Above art, inspires me to what armour could be made if the concept art would be decided to make a character for a game, the armour looks Japanese style but fantasy which I do like.

It also gives thought to what weaponry could be used by the character and what style they can be made in.

Colour scheme looks fabulous with the dark red, silver and black, giving a scary look to the warrior’s.

https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Vvardenfell_Flora_and_Fauna

The art above give me idea, what can be done or made for a mood board of the foliage that may appear in my own landscape, whilst giving me some more ideas of what colour schemes’ can be used.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mrra

Top three images and one below arts are made by artist Jeremy Fenske who is a freelancer, concept artists and art director at singularity 6, They inspire to create some ancient American civilisation style concept art with the fantasy twist to the art work.

The amount of detail in these arts show many different combinations of digital art and how colours’ can me mixed together to create a astonishing art piece.

https://wilvarin1980.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/eso-concept-art/

The cross hatching path is very interesting because, it adds depth and a form of perspective and it does not make the image look orthographic, it also adds form and a story in the image, which is highly looked up on it makes it interesting, which I would like to add something this sort as well in my final major project.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/56464093/ENVIRONMENT-CONCEPT-ART-ENVIRONMENT-DESIGN

Art above interests me in a way that there are just simple colours and shapes splashed together to create a wonderful image, it gives idea and inspiration to make something similar and get very creative.

source: unknown

Image above features basic shapes, with a wonderful entrance to some sort of a city/temple in Middle East or North Africa give idea to of different architectural locations depending where and with what story I could make my own concept art.

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GCEB_enGB819GB819&biw=1920&bih=969&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=pu-ZXNGEM7GAur4PivGXmAw&q=eso+concept+art&oq=eso+concept+art&gs_l=img.3..0j0i7i30l4j0i30.68114.68757..69218...0.0..0.63.240.4......1....1..gws-wiz-img.AcU1XbMx6hI#imgrc=Ce6krICdpymL9M:

The image above, is most favourable for landscape wished to create, simple shapes, few colours, shows distance, nice simple but detailed, concept art.

Very inspirational to do a landscape in the same style.

https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/media

Link above features all the media work from the elder scrolls team and Zenimax studio and Bethesda, as well as other studios working under them, it shows great amount of concept arts for landscape, characters, Screenshots, Music, and Animations’ video that inspires me from various artists.

Artist: Jeremy Fenske

http://conceptartworld.com/artists/jeremy-fenske/

https://www.artstation.com/jandrew/profile

Links above contains lots’ of art and work made by a freelance, concept artist, art director of singularity 6, who lives in Los Angeles, California, USA.

His artwork inspires me to be able to do good looking art like him. Which is why I will do concept art to get better at it because practice makes a master.

Equipment:

Sketchbook: to be able to plan out and practice some art.

Computer: to be able to work on a device.

Graphic tablet: to actually draw things on the computer.

Internet: to be able to post my work and the process of my work into blogs.

Pencil: to draw ideas and quick sketches in the sketchbook.

Camera/Phone: to be able to take images from my work in the sketchbook and take primary images of landscapes for primary research and primary references’. 

Game art design and its role:

Game art design is a subset of game development. It is the process of creating the artistic aspects for video games. Video game art design begins in the pre-production phase of creating a video game. The video game artists are visual artists involved from the conception of the game and they make rough sketches of the characters, setting, objects. The starting concept design can also be created by the game designer before the game is moved into actualisation. Sometimes the concept designer’s are called “programmer art”. After the rough sketches are completed and the game is ready to be moved forward those artists or more artists are brought in to bring these sketches to life through graphic design.

The art design of a game can involve anywhere from two or more. The larger the gaming company is the more people there are likely to design game. Small  companies tend to not have as many artists meaning that their artists must be skilled in several types of art, whereas the larger the company, although an artist can be skilled in several types of development, the roles each artist plays becomes more specialised.

Concept art is a form of illustration used to convey an idea for use in films, video games, animation, comic books, or other media before it is put into the final product. Concept art usually refers to world-building artwork used to inspire the development of media products, and is not the same as visual development art or concept design, though all three are often confused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_art some information above are taken from the listed website.

Above image taken from https://depositphotos.com/9004018/stock-photo-karlstejn-castle-in-czech-republic.html Karlstejn castle, Czech Republic.

The castle interests me with it’s colors, it blends in nicely with dark and light colours, it gives me ideas’ on which color pallet I may decide with what to go for in the final design, the brick and stone fits well with the location of the castle to make it blend in well with the surrounding environment.

Image above taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuschwanstein_Castle_LOC_print.jpg Neuschwenstein Castle, Germany.

Castle is very interesting because, it is located in a mountain region which would make the concept art feel more alive to the story of a MMO RPG game, it also interests me because it appears to be a challenging adventure for the character and the stone of the castle is just incredible almost as if it part of the mountain which is very interesting and makes me do something similar, Would like to take that bit from the design into my concept art.

Above Image from http://canidrinkthewater.blogspot.com/2014/06/malbork-castle-and-teutonic-knights.html Malbrok Castle, Poland.

Castle above inspires me from the outside walls that I like, because it is not common to see roofed walls in western European which perhaps may add some uniqueness to the world I am creating.

Above image from https://www.viator.com/sv-SE/tours/Paris/3-Day-Mont-Saint-Michel-and-Loire-Valley-CastlesTour-from-Paris/d479-2050ML3 Saint Michel Castle, France.

The castle inspires me on what style of architecture I would like to use in my concept art design, such as Gothic, this will make the theme of fantasy fit well.

Above image https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Himeji Himeji castle, Japan.

The roof of Asian structures are very interesting it would help me create a more fantasy theme of the final art itself using the form of Asian/oriental mix of roofs using the European structures itself.

Above image https://www.123rf.com/photo_13746664_bizarre-rocks-in-sahara-desert-tadrart-algeria.html?fromid=djA3U3dLWTROMklPMDF5RHlzYkFDUT09 Austria, Lake Halstatt.

Image above is very interesting, because the rocks formation seems uncommon with its pointing out of the ground, which I would like to add something like this in the concept art.

Above image https://www.123rf.com/photo_13746664_bizarre-rocks-in-sahara-desert-tadrart-algeria.html?fromid=djA3U3dLWTROMklPMDF5RHlzYkFDUT09 England, Lands end.

Image above inspires me by its depth and field of view of how distant things appear, because it is simple yet complex with the perspective and shades of colours.

Above image http://medomed.org/2016/inventory-and-convention-of-the-cultural-landscapes-of-the-mediterranean-and-middle-east/ Jordan.

Image above is a idea of how I would like to use the colours and shades if I would decide I would like to make my concept art in more of a desert hot location.

Above image https://www.123rf.com/photo_13746664_bizarre-rocks-in-sahara-desert-tadrart-algeria.html?fromid=djA3U3dLWTROMklPMDF5RHlzYkFDUT09 Tardrat, Algeria.

Image above is giving ideas on how the stone looks in the alternative atmosphere/environment looks like so I would have a better understanding of structures to make them fit in a specific location.

Image above taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra Alhambra Castle, Grenada, Spain

Castle above is located in a warm area meaning the stone is different, which will help me decide on colours if I would have a idea to create a concept art in the sort of hot area of the world.

[tevotbegotnaught]

“The conductor…in the power he has over others…it is in his interest as a human being, as well as that of his musical achievements, to resist the temptation to misuse it. Tyranny can never bring to fruition artistic-or for that matter human- gifts; subordination under a despot does not make for joy in one’s music-making. Intimidation deprives the musician of the full enjoyment of his talent and proficiency. Yet I should certainly not want to impugn the employment of earnest severity or even the occasional borrowing of the Bolt of Zeus; the latter if the hand knows how to wield it, can in exceptional situations bring surprisingly good results. Severity is a legitimate even indispensable means of dealing with people...”

Bruno Walter

In my Summer of 42 (years), I was a college freshman…again. With neither Mexican weed nor dormitory hijinks to distract me, I worked through the full Brooklyn College Core Curriculum and a handful of music courses. My degree plan also required an ensemble each semester. When the Assistant Dean interviewed me, he looked over my CV and immediately suggested their Jazz Band. After hearing them, I chose a contemporary music ensemble founded by a composition professor. Fall semester, she was on sabbatical and a trumpet prof, Juilliard guy and veteran freelancer, ran the class. To begin, he sat everyone in a circle and asked us to play “Happy Birthday" in hocket. Most of the class was unsure of the melody and some also thought it a stupid idea. With our nonstandard instrumentation, we massacred Second Viennese School composers for the rest of the term.

Spring term, the founder returned. She was just over five feet tall, brown-skinned, with narrow shoulders and mineshaft dark eyes. When she listened, her head nodded while bottomless eyes fixed on you. Raised in a distressed country, her life moved from prodigy to conservatory-trained professional with impeccable musicianship: piano, score reading, solfege, conducting, improvising, composing. Then, she came to the US, with zero money and English and rebuilt her career from scratch. At BC, she conducted the orchestra until politics pushed her out. Now, she gave composition lessons and led this ensemble.

Our roster still read as spare parts: three singers, three pianists, two flutes, violin, saxophone, clarinet, guitar; some highly skilled, others not. For most, English was a second or even third language. Our professor's first assignment: list your colleagues’ instruments, find pieces for a subset of our forces, select only pieces written after 1960, bring scores/parts for audition.

The following week, we presented our finds. First, someone showed her a John Cage duet. As she turned pages, Maestra’s face went blank .

“Why did you get this?”

A mumbled answer.

Maestra closed the score. “You got eet because eet looks easy. Didn't you? First of all, it’s a short duet. Three, maybe four minutes of music. Nothing to do on a real pro-GRAM. Not serious. Not serious at all.”

More mumbling.

“Get something else. Thank you.”

She jabbed the score into their hands, then addressed the class.

“Nothing about John Cage. John is extraordinary. When you choose music, don’t just take a name you theenk you know. Read the score. You are musicians …supposed to be….”

Next, one of the singers produced a folio. Its font, ornate and oversized. I winced. Maestra saw it was a Puccini aria with piano accompaniment and recoiled.

“After nineteen-sixty? Thees? You are kidding me!”

Again, she faced us.

“Thees is NOT opera work-SHOP. I know some of you did not make it there. I'm very sorry about that. Please find some other music to sing. There are so many good theengs. I hope you will find out. Music does not end with Verdi, Puccini.”

So it went. Gratefully, she anticipated our poor choices and suggested some pieces.

Meastra spoke Spanish to some students, aware of the terrain they navigated and supportive. Jorge, a Mexican pianist, was one of her projects. He was a skilled player, an enthusiastic and warm colleague. His giggle often broke up the class. In our third meeting, we rolled the piano front, Jorge sat on the bench. While he longed for mama's home cooking, he wasn’t missing any meals in Brooklyn. His midsection expanded well beyond his tight-waisted pants, straining shirt buttons. Maestra questioned him on preparation: “you’re playing the second movement, what about the third?”

Unaffected by the prodding, he began to play. A minute in, she said, “stop”.

He continued, eyes closed.

She shouted, “Stop! I’m telling you, STOP"

He looked over.

“JORGE….WHAT…ARE…YOU….DOING?”

It wasn’t meant as a question. Jorge smiled and gently shook his head.

“Why are you smiling? Look at you!”

Her voice leveled.

“This is not ready. It’s better, but it's not ready.”

She shifted.

“I am very worried about you. Look..at…your…STOMACH. You need to take better care of yourself. You know, pianists perform in pro-FILE. Theenk what you show to the audience.”

Jorge wasn't smiling. He put his hand on his belly.

“Everyone should con-see-der an exer-CISE pro-GRAM. I am forty years, Dio mio! Almost FEEFTY years older than some of you. Take care of yourselves.”

She dismissed him with a sweeping gesture.

“Ok, who is next? Anna, where is the list? Geeve it to me!”

Her assistant, a brilliant, tiny, Yankee grad student, always cleaned up.

Maestra partnered Jorge with another pianist for a Gyorgy Ligeti duo. Its ingenious architecture, a complex cycle revealed one beat at a time. In Yogi Berra's construction, half the score was ninety-nine percent rests. The players needed infallible inner time. While they played, Maestra leaned over the piano, right hand supporting her, left turning pages. She nodded her head slightly in tempo. The pianist's hits charged toward and away from each other like Pacman's gobbling goblins.

“You are late!” she slammed her left hand down. They went back. Another hammer blow. Back again. The piece never made it to the program.

At the end of the initial class, she approached me about Milhaud's “Le Creation du Monde", a chamber work for winds, including alto saxophone. We didn’t have the other winds, of course, but a young woodwind quintet, in residence for the year, would help out.

“Le Creation" story moves from brooding chorale to a raggy bolero where the winds pass around jumpy tunes, then strut them all, polyphonically, in a joyous finale.

At the first of four rehearsals, we were less than half personnel. Maestra had been enthusiastic about the quintet, encouraging us to meet, hear and study with them. But they were collaborating with major artists and appearing all over the world. Their residency, now in name only. No one in the group even bothered to return her emails. Our conductor was livid. (Later, the assistant assured us that Maestra never returned emails, either.) In rehearsal, the music just marked time. In long stretches with no tune and no landmarks, I fell into a hole and missed my entrance.

“What are you DOING! Counting! Count-ting! I can’t do everytheeng for you.”

Concert day was the first we all sat down to play. In the midst of my disciplined colleagues, I was a bellowing hippo. During the chorale, my slow descending notes were either out-of-tune, out-of-time, the wrong dynamic, or all three.

The baton came down hard “NO..NO..NO. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

“How can you be late. It's jazz. Jazz! You play jazz? Right? You know who is John Col-TRANE? Play it like Col-TRANE! Why should I have to tell YOU this. Come on!”

I wore other hats that night: soprano, clarinet. Still, my mind remained fogged through the Milhaud finale.

The quintet players all demolished their solos. With a huge smile, Maestra gave each well-deserved bows. When they were done, she flashed her eyes at me, scowling. Then, jerked both her hands upwards, like she was flipping a pool toy. I stood up and stared straight down.

Next semester, a composition student brought a score. It was mostly squiggles and arrows, notation designed to move the music forward without defining functional harmony or conventional melody. She conducted a circle for each “bar”. We could gauge the length of each gesture and respond in time. Simultaneously, she sang the gestures using their pitched start/end points, conducted, turned pages and offered substantive commentary. If one of us was even a second late, her glance immolated them.

I became friends with some of her students. Waiting outside her office, they often heard shouting. When the door opened, students walked out in tears. Some planned to work closely with Maestra toward their Master's or DMA. Those plans would change...

An alumni couple created an endowed chair for Maestra, protecting her from political games. To celebrate, students accompanied her to the donors’ Connecticut home for a musicale. We loaded two vans with the usual music school suspects: waifish Asian virtuoso string players, an Eastern European sturm und drang pianist, a diffident “difficult” composer, and bit players like me.

Both donors were in their eighties and fabulously rich, earnest, lefty intellectuals. The wife wore a gas mask-like apparatus, its hoses attached to a whirring box on her back. I strained to understand her speech, but her eyes shone with love and curiosity. The couple warmly welcomed us to a large room packed with guests.

I was part of a quartet: oboe, flute, clarinet and piano, playing a student work. The composer, a young Dominican guy, rising star in the program. A Caribbean undergraduate writing skilled takes on contemporary European music. His piece used the difference-tone clusters of Gyorgy Ligeti: loud, high notes, staggered and longheld, producing acoustic anomalies: window-fan undertones and piercing oscillations. Bathing in timbral waves and madly counting beats, I couldn’t find the piano part, though we made it to the end without requiring oxygen or a conductor. The composer took a awkward bow and disappeared.

With Maestra as Maitre’d we served up a baroque cello sonata, Beethoven piano music and some Sondheim. Then, our little foursome loudly dropped a turd on the buffet table.

The donor husband was one of those ruddy-faced white guys who wear baggy corduroys and turtle necks over their barrel physiques. He sought me out, towering above me as I packed up my clarinet.

“What did he mean with that piece?"

“Sir, I…I wouldn’t want to represent the composer, he never said anything about..”

“Now, you must know something.”

He was an important man accustomed to getting answers, fast and in full.

“I know my part and how it fits with the others. The woodwinds are playing difference tones, Stravinsky used...”

“Why didn’t HE explain that to us? We go to concerts all the time. Conductors explain new music. They give examples, give context. You can’t just write something like that and expect people to automatically understand it.”

Gulp....“Of course.”

“It’s his responsibility to help the audience understand the music”

I looked over. By the buffet, the composer was holding a plate, one of the string players laughing next to him. Mrs Donor approached me, extending her hand. The box on her back hissed and clicked. Above the mask, searching eyes, below, a voice from a radio in another room. Was she talking about the quartet? It was too uncomfortable. I interrupted.

“Thank you so much for your hospitality and the opportunity to play for you. You and your husband are so generous.”

She squeezed my hand and leaned in, radio transmission drowning in static. Her husband came to her side.

“My wife is saying we've been to many, many concerts of new music. Starting way back, with Lenny Bernstein. He taught us there’s always something to learn. He introduced us to many extraordinary artists”

He put his hand lightly on her back. Over her shoulder, Maestra was listening to a guest, head level with their sternum, eyes searchlights in reverse. The radio faded and its whirring submerged in the din.

We got back very late. Our vans parked by the gatehouse and turnstile on the east side of campus. A few yellow lights glowed in the music building. Maestra thanked us. We said goodnight.

Drifting on an acoustic sea, our ancestors explored sound, harnessing the waves. Between foaming peaks and psychic undertow, they found power. From our African beginnings, to the stars, every lineage counted on those who navigated, who mastered instruments, who carried in them songs and stories. They became the music, while it lasted.

[kendrixtermina]

If I weren’t drunk and in self-doubt mode, I’d probably say that he’s an idiot who jumps to conclusions no matter WHAT his nationality is. 

But there were all those times where he insinuated that I couldn’t understand or properly be on his side either because I was a girl or because I was European

Now I could ovsly find me an European girl, but if she’s a lesbian, couldn’t she think that I can’t understand her because I’m bisexual and as such perhaps more immersed in mainstream- or nerd culture (I wouldn’t say that it’s inherently sexist but there exist clear subsets who are)? 

Can ANY two people truly understand or support each other? That IS a legit open philo9sophical question and any answer that glosses over that because it’s comfortable or feelgoodsy won’t bring me any satisfaction

ARGH. This is all because my stupid ex called me unfeminine for not wearing tons of makeup and jewelry. For all that he was into atheism and technology, he did use ‘nerd’ as a negative quite a few times. If an European guy had ever said that I “must not have a proper female brain” because I’m bi, I’d have told him to fuck off and left, or maybe that’s just what I like to believe.  But you don’t want to be the smartass who thinks they’re superior and know all better, or the touchy non-objective person who makes everything about them those are the literal worst kinds of people

I started with the assumption that he probably knows more than me but at which point am I going to be forced to admit he’s an idiot?

He told me he wants an intellectual girlfriend, but he just liked the sound of someone agreeing with him. Did he use my commitment to objectivity to be mean at me with no repercussions, or did I just troll myself because I’m not half as intellectual as I try so hard to be and doomed to live a boring little life while he snorts cocaine off some hooker’s ass in a mansion in canada

I just want someone who wants all of me. Or at least LIKES me damnit. 

Is that so selfish and emotional, that I want my boyfriend (or future partner (m/f/x) ) to actually LIKE me and treat me like he does? 

It’s not impossible! For years I looked at everything he did like it was the most awesome and interesting ever, like he was my salvation. And he couldn’t even be arsed not to mock me to my face. That’s what finally killed those feelings dead after all the times I should have left but didn’t, all the times I assumed that I was upset only because of my own touchyness and shortcomings and would never have thought of doubting him, all the times I wanted to bad to make myself worthy of him and accommodate him just like I would want to be accomodated

He kept MOCKING ME right to my FACE. 

Im just rambling at this point because I want this shit out of my system to I can continue about my day.  

I can’t believe I let him call me a fucking polar bear in bed. I’m a Gothic Lady you motherfucker. A Baroque Venus! 

i just want to have real love in my life before i die. For three years I wouldn’t shut about how perfect he was. I feel so humiliated. 

[nevermindirah]

...You really think that an 18th-cen european Jew grew up w/ white privilege? Or even had access to white privilege anywhere in the world prior to the last 30 years? Or even has it in every country the Guard visits now? Whiteness as a construct is diametrically opposed to The Jew (bc Other). He'd have more access to whiteness than Nile or Joe today in the US but equal to Joe any time prior to about 1980 when Whites weaponized Jews in the "war in drugs." He'd be as Other as Joe even today places.

So I'm guessing this person sent me this because of either my Jewish Booker headcanons post or this contribution of mine to Nile Freeman Marine Discourse.

The tone of this ask feels heated, like this person is upset, like something I posted touched a really sore spot for them. I definitely didn't say that Jewish Booker would've grown up with white privilege, because as far as I know racial politics didn't work that way in pre-Revolutionary France. But I don't think this person is upset about claims I didn't make.

Naming the whiteness of Jews who are white might feel like an erasure of the seriousness of antisemitism. Naming the whiteness of white Jews might feel like gaslighting, like an implication that "Jews have white privilege so antisemitism can't be that bad."

I want to be super clear: White Jews' whiteness doesn't make antisemitism any less dangerous or any less important to fight.

One of the things that makes antisemitism so insidious is it makes itself look like it's not really that big a deal. Antisemitism is cyclical - for a few decades or centuries, Jews are accepted and welcomed members of the larger societies we live in, and then the cycle turns over and our non-Jewish neighbors are expelling or killing us again. Those periods when everything seems fine are a kind of gaslighting, where we're told we're being paranoid for pointing out antisemitic things that are bubbling underground and setting the stage for the next round of undeniable, catastrophic antisemitic acts like expulsion or genocide. Because of these experiences, many Jews are very understandably sensitive to anything that might even hint at maybe downplaying antisemitism. This isn’t us being unreasonably hypersensitive — getting called hypersensitive is part of the harm antisemitism causes us — it’s a painful but sometimes all-too-painfully necessary adaptive response, to be on the lookout for danger.

But part of being on the lookout for danger is then deciding whether something that looked at first glance to be dangerous is in fact dangerous or not.

In the US the founding purpose of whiteness was to draw a bright line between fully human people and purportedly subhuman people who first-class (white) people could kill or enslave with impunity. A European-descended Jew in the United States in the 18th century WOULD have had white privilege. To my knowledge there's never been a legal racial category specifically for Jews in any US jurisdiction, and European-descended Jews, including Sephardim who came to the Americas during the colonial era to escape the Iberian expulsions, typically were legally white. European-descended Jews had the legal right to own slaves, for example, and some did.

This is not to say that all non-Jewish white people in the US accepted white Jews as equal in whiteness, because that was definitely not the case. Who counts as white, whether whiteness is guaranteed by birth or contingent on behavior, and what power and access whiteness confers all vary a lot within the US by era and region of the country. Institutional antisemitism like job discrimination and university quotas, relational antisemitism like getting side-eye from a non-Jewish white person for using the whites-only water fountain - I could give all kinds of examples of legal and cultural whiteness not protecting white Jews from antisemitism, examples of Jews not having full access to whiteness because of antisemitism.

Antisemitism isn't a subset of racism like antiblackness is. Antisemitism is its own thing, a system of oppression that targets Jews for being Jews. We have to fight them both. Naming the whiteness of Jews who are white in a particular time and place is just being honest about the holistic reality of intersecting systems of oppression.

All that said, in some other countries/places, Jews are considered a racial category, and some people in those cultural contexts might consider antisemitism to be a subset of racism alongside antiblackness. I don't have experience in those cultural contexts. When I'm writing about Jewish Booker and whiteness, I'm thinking specifically about his relationship with Nile, who would absolutely see him as white.

Racism is a construct, and it's constructed to serve a purpose. The purposes racism is constructed to serve vary across time and geography, and immortality opens up some really interesting angles for exploring that. I would LOVE to read meta or fic about Andy and Quynh and Joe and Nicky’s experience of being the same people, with the same bodies and cultural origins, but getting assigned different racialized labels as racism evolves over 1,000 years.

[ignaciowordlow-blog]

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[rametarin]

Hey, folks that follow my tumblr.

Remember when I talked about jokey-jokers and sardonic 90s faced funnymen from my childhood, and how they weirdly turned out to be stealth tankies and Marxists? Like, all the time?

Yeah I’m just pointing that out because, y’know, genocide denialists exist waving leftist flags that don’t have swastikas on them, too. And they try so very hard to omit communism from any conversation about genocide to the point where they try to reshuffle an entire conversation happening in real time so attention goes to be  about Nazi genocide, and then morph the conversation into nothing BUT Nazi genocides, or aikido flip and accuse the other person of stanning for the Nazis by, “not wanting to talk about genocides anymore for some reason. :^)”

The biggest difference between those stupid disaffected apes among us white people that get insecure and upset and go join a hate group/pride gang out of paranoia about brown people, and the actual leftist skinheads that claim Nazis are their greatest enemy, is there are more educated and cold blooded manipulators that know how to disguise their beliefs among the Marxists. A Nazi will tell you he’s a Nazi, or at best will be something like a, “law and order” conservative, whom shapes social policy that just so happens to disproportionately punish black people disproportionately harder than white peers and contemporaries.

A Fabian socialist or a Marxist will feign being Le Educated Purely Logical Thinker, argue with you about subjectives too niche and in the sauce to easily check if they’re wrong or not, make their own publication companies filled with scholars that will smooth over evidence SPECIFICALLY to make tenured, degree granting professors supporting their revisionism, and then publicly browbeat you with their published “findings” as written truth to prove the Soviets either weren’t real Marxist-socialist shits, or the genocides weren’t real because they never happened or weren’t real because of bogus technicalities.

It’s easier to deal with a Nazi. But remember that a Soviet Republican and a Marxist Revoluitionary are just two sides of the same coin as the Nazis. The only difference is Nazis believe in the socialist revolution only for one PARTICULAR subset of germanic community of the indo-European family/phenotypes, and the other believes it should be a monoculture that aggressively replaces ideology and dogmatic principle with even SCIENCE AND FACTS, by claiming something can only be science and fact if it meets the scrutiny of what their social values say reality is.

They are very, very difficult to spot because they study intensely what culture is, what arguing is, how to convincingly lie and smooth over the truth in disingenuous and deceitful ways. They operate with more conspiracy for simple cultural and institutional victories where they can be the arbiters or writers of policy in everything from daycares to childrens media to public schools to the DMV to worming their way to tenured positions of university and the private sector by legally browbeating it with threats of turning social change against them unless they make room and comply in the Human Resources department.

Nazis as an ideology are retarded by the fact that there are a very limited number of unmixed white people in the world, and a very, VERY tiny number of those whites want anything to do with any self-proclaimed community that espouses white supremacism of any stripe. And of those, most of them are not intelligent. And the ones that are, you won’t see them writing children’s books, or cartoons, or videogames, or novels, that openly proclaim white people to be some sort of supreme human specimen. But you will see Rebecca Sugar’s Marxist/Anticapitalist learnings and Intersectional Feminism (which is anti-capitalist) on primetime cable and satellite networks.

People like our pal brendanicus, by contrast, when they don’t have a publicly viewable bank of social media messages to snitch on themselves with, get to pretend they never said these damning things ever. People like brendanicus in the past would have said this evil shit, but nobody ever known, even as he argued and filibusted and dragged a discussion in bad faith just to torpedo it and keep people from having it about how shit the Soviets and pre-Soviet communist revolutionaries were in Europe, Asia and Africa. But privately, they’d be thinking and saying shit like this to their friends.

But having no proof, before now, no one could ever prove it. Even if they could imagine people like brendanicus saying this shit.

I fear the Nazis less because they’re easy to see coming. A Marxist will whoop up a term in academia like, “stochastic terrorism”, demand everybody claim it’s a real thing, perform and pretend until praxis and generous ownership of the staff of a mainstream dictionary prints it as a real thing, apply it to a benign and innocuous statement someone made to ‘prove’ through a lens that they meant [X], and then completely abandon the validity of the term when it starts getting used to read the motives and retroactively conclude intentions of THEIR guys. There are no Nazis in American or European academia, just dried up, whiny, graying fossils grumbling while they kick cans around and whining about “reverse discrimination.” Working for places like the Heritage Foundation and etc.

These ones are cultural guerillas and they view every discussion or argument they can have as a microcosmic war against another person. And they delight in “educating” you, to control what you think and delete opposing documents and invalidate competition. They’ll pretend to be liberal and wear liberalism as a disguise, but when the mask slips, they’ll sneer and scream about them with the vitriol of any right-wing unironic believer of Alex Jones or watcher of the Trinity Broadcasting Company screams about “the gay agenda” and “X-current politician is bad anti-christ man.”

i hope people realise this person:

posted also this post:

[obscureoldguy]

There’s Bears; Ya Know...

There’s an old, morbid joke which underscores the viciousness of bears. To paraphrase: “You and a friend are being chased by a bear. How fast do you have to run to survive?”

The answer? “Faster than your friend.”

When it comes to unintended interactions with wild animals, survival is job one — or, at least, that’s the point the joke tries to make. Even impractical “solutions” borne out of superstition are in play. Which is why we have bears in the first place.

Or, more accurately, why we have “bears” — as in, the word, not the animal.

According to the Etymology Online, the word “bear” is derived from the Proto-Germanic term “beron,” meaning “the brown one.” It’s not all that uncommon for words to be derived from descriptive terms; the initial names of things have to come from somewhere, after all. But “bear” is somewhat special because, apparently, “beron” wasn’t the animal’s first name. Rather, according to author Ralph Keyes, in the book “Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms,” the term “beron” (and ultimately, “bear”), is a euphemism for the animal’s original name. Keyes expanded on his findings in an interview with TIME magazine:

Our ancient ancestors were so worried about bears, they didn’t even want to name them because they feared [the bears] might overhear and come after them. So they came up with this word — this is up in Northern Europe — bruin, meaning “the brown one” as a euphemism, and then bruin segued into bear. We know the euphemism, but we don’t know what word it replaced, so bear is the oldest-known euphemism.

Basically, the true name for bears was given the “Voldemort” treatment — saying it was taboo.

Keyes’ note that “we don’t know what word it replaced” is likely a slight exaggeration on the author’s part (or perhaps an over-reliance on technicalities). Proto-Germanic languages were a subset of Indo-European ones, used mostly by Northern Europeans, and the specific term that those peoples used for bears is likely lost to time. But other Indo-European languages used some variety of the term “htrkos,” a reference to the Arctic.

Nevertheless, the “htrkos” root is also one no longer in use, and for the same reason — cultures across Europe feared that using the animal’s “real” name would summon it, Beetlejuice-style. And to avoid having to run faster than their friends, the people of that era used a replacement term instead, one which remains today.

From “Now I Know” dan@nowiknow.com