#changes all my presuppositions about him

[mythomaniia]

nothing against zac’s characters (gorgug is my bestie and skip is my little guy) but usually they don’t make me feel crazy the way that say siobhan’s or emily’s tend to but the ravening war is changing that. not to sound like raphaniel here but what the FUCK is up with colin provolone

[bestworstcase]

Tbh I don't think anyone's saying that Oz has Never Done Anything Wrong Ever, or at least, personally, that's not my belief.

While personally I believe that Oz hasn't tried actually destroying Salem or erasing her from anyone knowing about her at all, I ALSO believe that Salem Is Not an irredeemable monster. I do believe she's trying to overthrow the gods rn, and that she hates the sword of damocles that is the mandate and has been trying to keep Oz from summoning the gods up until now (bc yknow, why wouldn't she try keeping the Relics from him??).

Plus, her fear wouldn't be unfounded (I still believe Oz was gunning for the task for a long time), and the narrative of "Salem is right" can still easily happen. Plus it's not like Oz is innocent; 1. He lied to Salem for their entire marriage 2. He decided to gun for the task Light gave him 3. Hasn't even tried communicating with Salem and 4. Has demonized her in his mind and to those in his circle. Both and neither are at fault imo. Oz fucked up big time, and he knows this, but the belief Salem hates him and his own self hate is keeping him from Actually Doing Anything. I think this also goes for Salem, fear and possibly self hate keeping her from communicating.

I just come from the perspective that both fucked up, Oz a bit more than Salem ofc. I just think that Oz isn't nearly as bad as people make him out to be. Like, this probably sounds really rude so I'm sorry in advance (/gen), but I feel like Oz being paranoid for No Reason and constantly trying to destroy Salem or erase her from public knowledge and demonizing her for No Reason beyond his own paranoia and unwillingness to change makes him seem... almost cartoonishly bad. Like it makes him sound like an abusive husband 100x worse than Adam and Jacques combined. And beyond that, it makes Salem seem completely innocent pre-war, that she was just dealing with her Abusive Husband who's delusional and paranoid.

To me, it doesn't feel nuanced, or at least as nuanced. I DO like the idea, but only as an AU. Not only that but I feel like it'd be really unfriendly to casual fans, people who don't do analysis n stuff, bc unless you bother analyzing every 2 second scene, you won't pick a lot of this up. And this is in terms of the writers, not you lol. Rwby IS meant to be analyzed, but not a lot of people will bother, and those who do haven't exactly picked any of this up.

I do think they're good theories to have though. Really it just gives me an excuse to re-analyze scenes and see if my thinking is flawed. I mean, if it's straight up Confirmed that your theories are right, then I'll be like "Oh, huh, I was wrong". I figured I'd just give insight to what people are probably saying bc I haven't seen anyone say that Oz is an innocent uwu wet paper bag. Cause he's NOT innocent, but I just don't think he's as bad or evil as people insist he is. And I do my best to analyze without any form of bias. I *did* come to the same conclusion about Salem lol.

Anyways sorry, this got long dhchvj. I hope I don't sound rude, I'm really tone blind (autism), I'm just doing my best to give insight to what people think. Cause trust me, it annoys me just as much as you to see people try to claim that Oz is innocent or that Salem is an irredeemable abusive witch. Cause obv neither is true lmao.

I hope you have a good day :] /gen

you’re fine. 

the core issue i have with the reasoning laid out here is that it demands a presupposition that oz is… well, a miserable spineless cowardly fraud who’s spent untold millennia pretending to believe in a pointless cause that he knows he will never lift a finger to advance in any meaningful sense. because it’s made quite clear that ozpin’s inner circle believes that they’ve been at war with salem for decades, that the huntsmen academies are fortresses oz built not to merely defend the relics but specifically to "stop salem"—that’s the language qrow uses in V4 and oz echoes it in V5—and that this is what oz has been doing for centuries if not   thousands of years, fighting to protect remnant from salem. 

the way qrow discusses the great war in both WOR and V4 insinuates that the conflict was really a proxy war between oz and salem, glynda chides ironwood by telling him "ozpin has experience the rest of us lack," in V3 the inner circle tells pyrrha "we are the protectors of this world" and "our group was founded [hundreds of years ago] to protect both mankind and the maidens" by "remov[ing] the maidens from the public eye, allowing their existence to fade away into legend." or as qrow puts it in V2, "we’re the ones that keep the world safe from the evils no one even knows about!"—i.e., from salem—"[which is] why we meet behind closed doors, why we work in the shadows."

now, while ozpin’s difficult relationship with the truth means we do need to be skeptical as to the veracity of these historical claims… the inner circle is circumspect on the details, but they’re not lying or misrepresenting the purpose of their group. they earnestly believe these things because this what ozpin told them, and in V5 we see oz recount the same general narrative to team RNJR: "i am the combination of countless men who have spent their lives trying to protect the people of remnant […] this curse was bestowed on me by the gods because i failed to stop salem in the past, but we must stop her now."

so there is no ambiguity at all about the story oz tells his closest allies: he is trying to protect the world from an ancient hidden evil called salem, who defeated him once in the distant past but can be stopped now by keeping the relics out of her hands, and in order to do that it is essential to keep the relics and the maidens secret (lest world rip itself apart in wars to claim this incredible power) and likewise to ensure that salem’s existence remains hidden (lest everyone panic and be wiped out by grimm). oz and his inner circle frame this as an secret struggle that has been ongoing for centuries, if not thousands of years. 

his inner circle had no reason to disbelieve what ozpin told them prior to jinn’s tale. and even after the lost fable, no one questions the narrative that oz has been fighting salem for a very long time. "ozpin believed that the best way to fight salem was to do it in secret," says ironwood. "ozpin spent his whole life, many lives, keeping this secret," says qrow. later in V7, ironwood describes salem as "an ancient and terrible evil," and in V8 ruby says "this isn’t some new enemy or invading kingdom, this is a force we’ve faced before, for centuries… salem."

for the moment we’ll just accept the presupposition that salem’s war against the huntsmen academies began with the attack on amber following perhaps a decade of planning and careful preparation, incited by whatever happened when she met summer rose, and that before that time salem was not actively participating in shadow war. 

if this is taken to be true, the question with regard to how ozma has spent all this time becomes: do we believe that he’s been doing what he says he has—trying to "stop salem" by guarding the relics and keeping all these secrets—or not? because it is undeniably true that this is what ozma CLAIMS to have been doing for centuries if not millennia. when ozpin tells people this story about who he is and what he’s spent lifetimes trying to do, is it because he genuinely believes that he and salem have been embroiled in a secret cold war all this time, or… is he just lying?

why would he lie about that? 

consider the things he definitely did lie about. why didn’t he tell anyone that salem can’t be killed? he feared they would fall into despair and give up, lose all hope and the will to keep fighting. why did he lie about his personal history with salem? he believes loving her is his greatest mistake ("the hearts of men are easily swayed" etc) and he feels ashamed, guilty, regretful, desperate to make amends yet certain she will never forgive him and terrified that even if she did it would doom the world—the truth is messy and complicated and he’s convinced that what he wants is evil, so he buries it. 

why, then, would he pretend to still be fighting her when he actually isn’t? if ozma had, at some point, resolved this inner turmoil on the side of "salem was right, the god of light is wrong, i am not going to fulfill my task and will instead dedicate my existence to insuring that the relics are never brought together, the best way to protect remnant is by rejecting the gods and their redemption," why would he lie about that? why would he continue to promote faith in the two brothers and the final judgment he foretold long ago (ozpin includes this story in his anthology with notes urging his readers to believe in it and to act each day as if the gods will return tomorrow)? why keep telling his closest allies, his friends, life after life, that he was sent to remnant by the gods themselves to stop salem from changing the world? 

why wouldn’t he change course?—and i want to be very clear that i’m not asking why he wouldn’t seek reconciliation with salem, because emotionally that’s quite a lot harder. but if he decided the divine mandate was bullshit and he wasn’t going to follow it any longer, why would he not… er… stop telling people that the brothers are the Real True Gods who left behind these divine relics which he is put on this world to keep safe until the final judgment? 

ozma strove to keep salem and the relics a secret for lifetimes—and ozpin was stridently opposed to revealing the truth, we see him and his inner circle balk at the idea time and again explicitly because ozpin insists that secrecy is essential to stopping salem, so we have no reason to doubt that he really did feel strongly that keeping these secrets kept people safe—so in the event he changed his mind and came to believe that the brothers were enemies of humanity who must be kept at bay… surely he would shut his mouth. 

but the brothers and their final judgment aren’t a secret! ozpin published that story in a book of fairytales with a commentary telling his readers to prepare themselves to be judged! after jinn’s tale, nobody freaks out about the divine threat of execution should mankind prove unworthy because they already knew that part; it’s the mainstream doctrine of a well-known religion that exists all around the world, which qrow and ozpin had already told them was real and true. 

oz is not a bad person. he certainly isn’t some sort of craven charlatan who’s spent thousands of years exhorting the world to believe in and follow a creed he secretly opposes—even if he still believed that salem was dangerous and needed to be stopped, it would be so simple to cast the gods as dangerous adversaries who must also be prevented from ever coming back. 

like, he wants people to live. he wants the world to be safe, even if at the cost of his own happiness. that is always what ozma is trying to achieve—even during the ozlem kingdom, he sacrificed the happiness he’d found with salem in their little cottage to try uniting the world with her because he truly, genuinely believed his happiness came at the cost of humanity’s salvation. 

it follows that the reason ozpin tells his close allies that it is his god-given task to stop salem by keeping the relics out of her grasp whilst striving for unity and keeping all this a secret, he does so because he truly, genuinely believes that it’s the best way to protect the world. likewise, when he uses his public platform as the headmaster of a prestigious academy to publish an anthology of tales, including the one about the two brothers that articulates the divine mandate exactly, upon which he comments this: 

We have a fragile peace, and in some ways, we are more divided than ever. Even if the gods aren’t real, even if they don’t return to judge us for our deeds, we should act each day as though they are arriving tomorrow. In the end, we will be the arbiters of our fates. We will either create a beautiful, peaceful world and live in harmony together or destroy ourselves and our planet, and the gods will judge what we have chosen.

ozpin really earnestly does believe that proselytizing the brothers, imploring everyone to live as if the gods will return for the final judgment tomorrow, while keeping salem, the maidens, and the relics secret, is necessary and the best way to keep people safe. he wouldn’t be doing this if he thought it didn’t protect people!

so the story he tells his inner circle about WHAT he does—his purpose, his methods, his strategy—is true. it must be true because it would be both reprehensible and beyond foolish for ozpin to convince his allies they’re fighting in a war he knows isn’t real for a cause he doesn’t actually believe in, and ozpin is neither reprehensible nor stupid.

it follows that ozpin a) believes he has been fighting a protracted covert war over the relics with salem since the ages, and b) can be taken at his word when he says that insuring the relics and salem’s existence remain secret is an essential part of his strategy, especially because without fail he prioritizes secrecy above every other concern throughout V1-6 so he’s very much putting his money where his mouth is in that regard.

in V3, the inner circle makes the claim that their predecessors ("this brotherhood"), centuries ago, chose to "remove the maidens from the public eye, allowing them to fade away into legend." while i do have my doubts about the historical accuracy of that claim—a) the nature of the maiden inheritance rules would make it very difficult to keep the maidens under wraps and b) i think it’s more likely that ozma always intended for the maidens to act covertly, didn’t know what would happen when the first four died, and only pieced it together after a few centuries had gone by and he started to hear stories about young women blessed with magical power and went "…ah."—i don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that the maidens became a fairytale because ozma decided they should be kept secret. 

neither oz nor his inner circle make an exactly equivalent claim about salem… but. the situations are quite similar: the maidens were once "common knowledge," and when ozma first reincarnated he traveled around for years hearing tales of "the witch" wherever he went. some time long ago, ozma and his allies undertook to suppress public knowledge of the maidens, and in the present the last trace remaining is an old fairytale that no one could believe holds any real truth. as for salem, no one knows about her anymore either, and "ozpin spent all his life, many lives keeping this secret." 

the existence of the relics, similarly, is a secret because ozma chose to keep them secret—although the crown seems to have passed through at least a few pairs of hands before ozma tracked it down, hence the fairytale. (this is a subject for another post, but i actually don’t think 'the indecisive king' is about ozma—ozpin’s commentary on it is VERY impersonal and perfunctory compared to what he has to say about 'the infinite man,' 'the girl in the tower,' 'the story of the seasons,' or even 'the grimm child.' i think the original inspiration for the tale was some other person who had the crown before ozma found it, and he included the story because, as he says, he thinks it has an important message.)

so, basically, in the present ozpin and his inner circle are hiding three big secrets: the maidens, the relics, and salem. it’s stated outright that the maidens are secret because ozma and his allies chose to hide them from the world. 

of the relics, three are entirely unknown and one is the subject of a single fairytale of which the reliability is unknown (although my bet is on "the real crown isn’t that straightforward and may not actually work like that at all"); oz has been in possession of all four for at least fifty or so years. we know he found the lamp first, thousands of years ago, that he used both the sword and the crown to end the great war eighty years ago, and ozpin raised atlas using the staff. it’s very likely that he found the other three much earlier. the fairytale inspired by the crown suggests that one might have eluded him for a while.

in any case, once he had them all (and a few centuries had gone by to allow the story about the crown to be forgotten as anything but a fiction), ozma would’ve had nearly absolute power to decide who knew about them—salem being the only other person who could tell anyone, and at the time she didn’t know anything more than "there are four relics of some kind, somewhere in the world, that will call the gods to remnant to judge humankind if they’re ever brought together."

so the relics, too, are secret because ozma decided to keep them secret.

this leaves salem. before the rise and fall of the ozlem kingdom, she lived on the fringes of civilization and knowledge of her existence was widespread. (her decrepit house sat at the end of a paved, well-maintained footpath—she was within walking distance of the nearest town and did not make herself remotely difficult to find.) thousands of years later? nothing but fairytales that are, like 'the story of the seasons' and 'the indecisive king,' either believed to be entirely fictional or (in the case of 'the grimm child') about a real, if very rare, phenomenon unrelated to salem herself. 

this is not something that could have happened at all if salem hadn’t withdrawn from civilization as far as she did—which is one of the core reasons i think she hasn’t been at war with ozma all this time—so she tacitly allowed it to happen. but why did she withdraw so far? 

here is the part where it gets murky and highly speculative because we just don’t know what happened or where she went or what she did in those first few hundred years after the ozlem kingdom fell. it is plausible that salem just ran and kept running until she’d gotten as far away from people as it was possible to get, and stayed there in self-imposed isolation until, well, now—in which case ozma’s effort to suppress the knowledge of her existence would have mainly entailed not telling anyone about her and maybe destroying bits and pieces of the historical record. 

(i do think he’s made an active effort to keep her secret all this time, regardless: that is his first priority at all times until jinn spills the beans in V6, and if he can’t keep the world safe by destroying her then making sure the world doesn’t know she exists is the obvious Plan B. if nobody knows about her, no one can piss off the gods by siding with her. it’s really more a question of whether she put up a fight.)

hooowever. salem is a character defined by loneliness and longing for freedom, which to her explicitly means connection with others. love. companionship. this is why the gods punish her by making her immortal—separating her from the one she loves forever—and then when she overcomes that by going out into the world and turning her immortality into a gift that brings her closer to people and allows her to form new alliances and friendships, rather than a curse imprisoning her in isolation, the gods just. kill everyone. and leave her alone in the ashes. 

and as i said, even when salem is miserably isolating herself before ozma, she isn’t that far away from civilization—she’s living by herself but close enough to somewhere that she could walk into town, and her presence there was not only well-known but welcomed enough that people built a road right to her doorstep. this during a period of her life when she was so profoundly depressed that her house was rotting and falling apart around her! 

the point is that while salem does inarguably have self-isolating tendencies, i… don’t think hers are anywhere close to being as severe as ozma’s. his rendition of himself in 'the story of the seasons' may well be more poetic than literal ("So cold was his heart that the lands around him were covered in snow, the trees were bare, and animals and Creatures of Grimm alike avoided him. For centuries, no one dared disturb his peace…"), but at the time ozma certainly would have had the magical power to freeze all the land for miles around to keep people away from him, and even if it’s only a metaphor for how he felt then the implication is that he hid himself away in total solitude for possibly multiple consecutive lifetimes…

…whereas salem, at her absolute lowest, in the darkest depths of her self-isolating depression, lived by herself a short way from the edge of some town whose residents were probably rather wary of her (she’s not exactly friendly, nor human, and everyone knows she’s a witch) but nevertheless accepted her as a member of their community (because salem certainly wasn’t the one bothering to take care of that path). 

the way things ended between her and ozma, his deception, the deaths of their children, their kingdom collapsing, all of this was extremely traumatic for her and haunts her to this day just as ozma; i have no trouble at all believing that salem would flee to the edge of the world in the immediate aftermath. 

but i find it a lot more difficult to believe that she would stay there for thousands upon thousands of years if the only thing preventing her from returning to the margins of civilization were her own guilt and self-hatred. the gods punishing her by murdering the whole world, being completely alone for hundreds of millions of years, grimming herself, and the way humans would have treated her in an era when faunus were hunted down and caged like beasts wasn’t enough to drive salem into exile. i don’t believe her self-loathing, by itself, is strong enough to overpower her desperation to be free for very long.

i also really doubt that ozma would just, for lack of a better word, trust her to stay gone. especially not if—as jinn implies—he believed salem kept finding him somehow and sending grimm after him, which probably wasn’t true (her command over the grimm seems to be restricted to the ones she makes, and the incarnations we see in this part of the lost fable were not at all significant persons easily identifiable as ozma), but it isn’t an unreasonable fear for him to have? given how badly things ended between them. 

we know salem doesn’t like, obsessively devote her time to scrying until she’s found ozma again (because she doesn’t bother to do that after ozpin dies, she’s caught completely off guard by oscar—and if she doesn’t do so while she is actively waging war against him, it’s unlikely that it ever crossed her mind to try it at all, or else her scrying just doesn’t work that way), but ozma doesn’t have any way of knowing that. we know salem doesn’t control every grimm in the world, and oz seems to have figured that out eventually, but in those first few centuries before he found the lamp? he had no idea what salem might be capable of, what powers she might have hidden from him!

like it isn’t that ozma has No Reason to be paranoid. he knows that he hurt her really badly and that when salem gets hurt she lashes out, often in extremely vindictive and extremely violent ways. (he has no way of knowing that salem has spent these thousands of years clawing her temper under control, and no reason to think she would try.) he probably had no idea to what extent salem being grimm might be influencing her thinking—that’s where all the really deep distortions start to take root, ozma anxiously second-guessing every little thing like were there warning signs i ignored? was he right? did i let infatuation blind me to what she’d become from the very start?—by the time he finds the lamp, assuming jinn didn’t skip over any lives, he’s on his fourth life since the end; that’s a span of like, at least two to three hundred years depending how long he lived and how much time it took him to reincarnate each time. 

that is plenty enough time to convince himself she’s nothing but an evil monster who needs to be put down before he finds the lamp, and then he immediately uses his three questions for that lifetime so it would be another full century after that before he had the opportunity to ask jinn anything about… what salem is doing now, or what she lied to him about, or if she told him the truth after all. which is a terrifying prospect to even consider after a) multiple centuries marinating in an inescapable anxiety torment nexus echo chamber and b) hearing she can’t be destroyed, period. like what if the truth turns out to be "yeah the pool of grimm destroyed her soul and also she wants to burn the world to the ground and eat your heart now because you ruined her FOREVER!!! and there is nothing you or anyone else can do to fix her. you stupid fuck." like his cursed haunted brain keeps screaming at him 24/7?!

so.

we don’t really know anything about this period of time before ozma went after the lamp, except that "no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt." jinn combines that with a memory of two beowolves attacking ozma’s town to insinuate that salem kept sending grimm after him, or at least that ozma believed as much. 

but. but—"during his years of travel, he heard the same frightened whispers that spoke of a terrifying sorceress who commanded dark powers in the wilds, among the beasts and monsters. ozma was convinced that this woman was salem, and decided that he needed to see what she had become."

"but no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt. if humanity were ever to stand a chance at being united, one thing was clear… [he had to destroy salem.] knowing he could never rid the world of her through any mortal means, ozma sought out the power of the relics: armed with my knowledge, he believed he could fulfill his promise to the god of light."

<- these are parallel statements. everywhere he travels, he hears stories about a witch; no matter where or how he lives, her presence is always felt. ozma was convinced that this terrifying sorceress was salem; ozma grew convinced that he had to destroy salem for humanity’s sake. he needed to see what she had become; he needed to find the lamp to guide him. see the repetition? the echo?

i don’t think salem just vanished into the wilderness. i imagine she ran pretty fucking far, but remnant is a big world and there are people all over—there have even been people living in the southern region of the now-uninhabited continent where salem presumably lives, based on the map shown in WOR: vale. 

(the markers for those settlements are red in color; all the other markers are color-coded to the kingdoms, orange for vacuo, green for vale, while for atlas, blue for mistral, yellow for menagerie and what i assume are a couple of faunus settlements in southern anima, with tracks with the white fang’s headquarters being located vaguely in anima. in the blood-splattered map in the great war episode, there’s a fire burning in the southern peninsula of the uninhabited continent—implying battles were fought there and possibly that some of those red settlements existed as recently as eighty years ago. 

i turn this over in my mind a lot. it doesn’t make any sense to me to think that salem could have been remotely present in civilization anywhere within the past century, but rwby is so particular about color that the only reason to choose red for the now-defunct(?) settlements on the continent where salem lives would be to imply some degree of association with her, and if a WHOLE KINGDOM had been destroyed i think that would have been mentioned so these were probably just free towns and villages—possibly with a loose connection to vacuo? it’s sort of the logical place for displaced peoples from vacuo to wind up after fleeing their conquered kingdom. and in that case their "connection" to salem might be nothing more than her having taken pity on a bunch of refugees with nowhere else to go and kept the grimm off their backs until the great war…happened. but i would like to know.)

…the point being, i think "her presence was always felt" because salem, after some decades, maybe a century, hating herself deep in the wilderness, crept back to lurking on the periphery of civilization because a) ozma was gone and she had no idea where, when, or even if he would ever come back again and b) no matter how determined she is to punish herself, she just isn’t capable of wallowing in abject misery forever, even when she was the only person alive with absolutely no hope she kept moving until she found something to try.

so naturally people would have kept gossiping about the terrifying dark witch who lives in the woods among the beasts and monsters, and ozma would have known it was her. imagine if he’d reincarnated for the second or third time, wound up on a different continent altogether, and immediately started hearing the exact same sort of frightened whispers as before? even if it was pure unfortunate coincidence and salem did not have the slightest idea he was there, how terrifying that would be? and if salem didn’t want him to find her because she was scared or ashamed or angry or all three, then she couldn’t stay in any one place for too long—so this sort of indirect crossing paths oh-gods-she’s-already-found-me nightmare scenario could conceivably happen more than once.

(frankly, even if salem wanted nothing to do with him and was trying her level to avoid him without just never being able to come within sight of another person again, i think her not vanishing forever makes ozma’s intense paranoia so much more understandable because like. very literally, no matter where he lived, her presence would always be there—rumors, frightened whispers, everywhere. of course he’d start seeing her in the shadow of every grimm!)

i don’t think they’ve ever actually come face-to-face since that night—maybe glimpsed each other from afar across a battlefield, but if they’d met or spoken to each other i imagine it would have been necessary for jinn to show it happening. BUT i do think it’s likelier than not that there were several centuries when salem was legitimately an inescapable presence dogging ozma through life after life because she was just sort of… wandering around in a miserable traumatic haze on the very, very edge of civilization. and people talked about her.

so he went for the lamp, and fell into the depths of despair when jinn crushed whatever passed for his hope at that point. that is, almost certainly, what pushed him into his hermit era. 

now! if the fairytale’s centuries of eternal winter isn’t a pure fiction—if there is even the smallest kernel of literal truth in there as to ozma using magic to force people, animals, and grimm to stay far away from him, then. if salem was not already living in exile, this would have been when she began to hear rumors about him. yes? this is the first thing he does that would rise to the level of local legend salem might possibly hear. 

that his seclusion ended with "and then i met four young women who reminded me how to be a person so i gave them my magic" as opposed to "and then salem turned up with thousands of grimm to murder me and salt the earth" suggests that if she wasn’t living in exile at this time, her interest was probably more in avoiding him than vengeance.

and if that’s so, what does she do upon finally discovering where he is? er, probably travel as far away from the Cursed Wizard Forest as it is geographically feasible to go and decide that this is fine, that’s his continent and this is her continent and they can just stay on opposite sides of the planet until the end of time and never have speak to or see each other again. amen. 

if we take the fairytale literally, several centuries pass. lifetimes. enough time for salem to find somewhere to, if not quite belong, at least become a constant because well she’s been here since before granny was even born and no one knows who or what she is because she doesn’t really talk to anyone, but she’s not hurting anyone either, and legend has it that a goliath once attacked our town and the witch just walked out of the woods and exploded it with a glare, and that’s why grimm never come here, so she’s our witch. maybe enough time to send someone halfway across the world to check on the Cursed Wizard Forest to reassure herself that yes ozma’s still there, he’s not going to come after her and he must have come to his senses about the gods so she’s. safe. ish. as long as no one ever finds those relics. 

the fairytale ends with the hermit dividing his magic among the four maidens, and then he says: "My rest is over. It is time for me to resume my journey and work as well."—they didn’t just resuscitate ozma’s will to live, they restored his faith and his commitment to his task. maybe the world can be saved! maybe he can really do it this time, now that he’s found people willing to help him shoulder the burden!

(i do firmly believe that ozma told the original four maidens about his task and salem’s sworn hatred of the gods and the danger she could pose to the world if he emerged to try again, before offering them magic—as we see in v8, he isn’t naturally predisposed to lie or manipulate people, that’s a pattern he only falls into when he feels hopeless and scared. so i think he and the original maidens planned to gather the relics and get to work on uniting humanity, and the vague fairytale ending is an obfuscation.)

aaand i think that’s when he went after salem, because he emerged from his Cursed Wizard Forest after multiple lifetimes rotting in solitude, filled with new hope and ready to try again to complete his task, immediately tripped face-planted into rumors about the witch in the woods AGAIN and panicked. 

he can’t kill her, he can’t get rid of her… she can’t be stopped but, as oz says to hazel, she can be fought and someone has to try. doesn’t he have to try? if he believes the world can be saved, isn’t it his duty to try?—he knows she’ll never, ever bow to the brothers, she made that excruciatingly clear, and as long as she’s present in the world, as long as people might listen to her about the gods, remnant is doomed. so he has to make her go away. somehow. he has to try.

i think for salem all it would take is once. one time. if she still tried after everything to do what was right, leave him alone and not hurt anyone else and pick up the pieces as best she could. because the thing is, salem blames herself for getting her daughters killed in her anger—that’s why she tries so hard to keep her temper in 6.4—she hates herself for lashing out that night as much as ozma hates himself for the same. that self-blame would counterbalance her anger at ozma: yes he lied to her yes he tricked her yes he attacked her but she attacked him right back and now her children are dead.

how much of a temptation is vengeance with that clawing around in her head?

but if her mindset was like, "that was the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me and the worst thing i’ve ever done, and i don’t understand why he lied to me but i just want it to be done, and he’s over there and i’m over here and we can just. leave each other alone forever," and she found a place for herself where she started to feel maybe almost kind of ok again and then ozma violated the truce she’d invented in her mind but never thought to communicate to him by appearing out of the blue to attack her, completely unprovoked as far as she could tell, and whatever little town or village or even just one single person who’d been kind to her got destroyed in the resulting fight?

that’s an injustice. that’s i did nothing to deserve this, how dare you do this to me. 

and… that’s also, i think, the one thing that would compel salem to willingly cut herself off from all civilization and remain in exile for thousands and thousands of years (because she’s impossible to kill and too powerful to force her out if she decides she’s not going to go gently into the night). her fear of collective punishment. if she thought there was even the smallest chance that ozma might start doing what her father did or what his gods did to anyone close to her, i think she’d go and stay gone until she felt absolutely certain she could take him down forever.

(also theres a certain narrative elegance to the idea that they had their horrible mutual-incineration duel where they were equally matched in every way… and then ozma rotted in isolation while salem tried really hard to be okay and convinced herself they could just stay peacefully at a distance forever, until he found a spark of hope that ignited all his desperation so he went after her and she was blindsided by this truly awful and unfair and egregious thing that he did… and then she rots in isolation and ever-mounting desperation while ozma tries really hard to fix everything and pull the world into a semblance of peace until she finds a spark of hope and blindsides him with this brutally ruthless charge for the relics. 

they explode each other, fly in opposite directions—downward spiral vs picking up the pieces—then reach critical mass and explode again so hard they fully reverse positions and do the whole ordeal again. so it’s both a journey of learning to understand each other and a vicious cycle they can only escape by inversion of the first exactly-equal fight that exploded out of nowhere from a seemingly happy partnership, i.e. both reaching out unexpectedly in the midst of a seemingly inescapable conflict. it’s about symmetry)

This Has Been A Very Long Post Sorry About That. but—all speculation about the details aside—i do strongly feel that the most compassionate reading of ozma is that he is completely sincere about whathe’s trying to achieve (uniting humanity without committing genocide or turning salem into a scapegoat so everyone can be saved including her!!) but has absolutely no idea how to make it happen and has only just, in his second-to-last life as the king of vale, accepted the reality that it isn’t possible, and thence the whole building a replica of salem’s father’s castle to put his office in her tower-prison and hucking his emotionally tortured anthology of fairytales out the proverbial window (you know, like the girl in the tower who writes herself out of danger, coming from mr. fairytales this is a tornado siren of a cry for help) so forth. 

thus what he and his inner circle say about his efforts both past and present is true—he has been actively working to keep salem a secret for as long as the maidens have been hidden if not longer. as long as salem cooperated by not wandering around letting other people see and/or talk to and/or run away screaming in terror from her, what "erasing salem from public knowledge and keeping her existence secret" means, practically speaking, is tracking down any texts that clearly describe her as a real person (not a fairytale) or artistic depictions of her from the ozlem kingdom and destroying Those, and perhaps muddying the waters of all those folktales by inventing new nonsense out of whole cloth or mixing stories about her with other stories that definitely aren’t about her to a) blur the details and b) make it look to future scholars like the witch-in-the-woods was a loose folkloric archetype encompassing a huge variety of different beliefs and superstitions as opposed to one very specific kind of story about one very specific witch. 

which is a bit obsessive and weird but given the fate-of-the-world stakes at play here and the plain unarguable fact that humanity cannot be redeemed if anyone sides with salem against the brothers, which is demonstrably something she can accomplish if given the opportunity, honestly pretty restrained. 

and so the million dollar question is: what does it take for salem to cooperate by staying in exile? is the fight in lost fable and her guilt over her daughters shattering enough to lead her to just give up and hide forever alone?—who knows, right now it’s purely a matter for speculation, but i think the circumstantial evidence suggests "no" more strongly than it does "yes." 

which is not to say that she was the pure innocent victim of an abusive revenge quest, but rather that i think the facts of the situation for her would, in the immediate aftermath, tilt her in a more positive direction (he did a horrible thing but so did she, and she’s survived many horrible things before, and she can’t exactly lay down to die instead so she has to do something, and she doesn’t ever want to see him because it hurts so much and she’s so angry but her anger killed her daughters so she cannot ever let it out again so she’ll just have to stay away from him and live with it) whereas ozma. yknow. Spiraled. and her being elusive but inescapably present in the world make that so much worse, which isn’t either of their faults, it’s just a terrible situation.

it’s like. short of literally stumbling into each other by chance and yelling at each other until it was all Out There. i think no matter WHAT she did, ozma was bound to snap and lash out at her sooner or later because he spent centuries. centuries!!! with all this trauma reverberating and intensifying in his head with no reprieve because there were stories about her everywhere he went.

and then as soon as he does that salem’s lifelong extremely traumatic history with collective punishment and her self-hatred and guilt are going to smash together and she’ll run the fuck away to alternately freak herself out and plot his downfall and tailspin while ozma, meanwhile, after a few centuries of her being gone and the endless rumors fading into just old folktales no one really believes anymore, finally gets the distance he needs to catch his fucking breath—his hermit era doesn’t count he was just ruminating for centuries—so he can focus on other things. and by then keeping her a secret mostly boils down to "don’t talk about her" lmao

his paranoia never really goes away, as we see in 9.10, although he does also get really complacent by ozpin’s time, and i think it’s irrational and grounded in a lot of very wrong conclusions he reached during those first couple centuries of Spiraling—but given what he did and did not know at the time i do also think the reasoning and inferences he made were fairly logical; it becomes irrational over time as the reality of the situation (salem avoiding him) increasingly doesn’t line up with his perception, but as we see in V2-3 ozpin is supremely, irrationally confident that salem is not about to unleash a major attack, which suggests that on some level he’s aware that his paranoid beliefs are unsound even if he hasn’t yet had the conscious realization. he’s right on the cusp. 

& then none of this precludes smaller scale, limited conflicts like e.g. salem assassinating a troublesome member of his inner circle or throwing grimm at people to intensify social conflicts and insure ozma never gets comfortable enough to invite his gods to remnant. i’m very sure that salem has made it a habit to check in on him at regular intervals and cause problems if it looks like he’s doing too well because she Does Not Want him to ever summon his gods. and that’s obviously going to be one-sided because i don’t think ozma actually knows where she’s hiding, and salem’s terror of collective punishment is her own seething bundle of irrational paranoia, because after he digs himself out of Spiraling ozma absolutely would not kill people just because they happened to be near her. 

[cliozaur]

The Conventionist chapter! It delves into the themes of Progress, Revolution, and the infinite. With so much happening, here are just a few observations:

It is evident that Hugo passionately supports both sides of this dialogue. However, initially (and predominantly), his sympathy clearly lies with the Conventionist. Only as Bishop Myriel gradually changes his attitude does Hugo fully embrace his position.

The situation of G___ , old, lonely, and impoverished, reminded me of Georges Pontmercy’s circumstances—also left alone and impoverished after the change of regime.

It was not the Conventionist’s atheism that hardened the bishop’s heart so much (he could tolerate the senator, who was also an atheist), but rather the fact that he was a Conventionist involved (though indirectly) with regicide. Despite initial hostility and opposing views, the bishop surprisingly easily yields after the Conventionist presents arguments related to wrath, ’93, and Louis XVII.

“Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress” — I can envision Enjolras saying this.

It’s amusing how M. Myriel seizes the opportunity to affirm his moral standing when the Conventionist makes biased presuppositions about him (as the prince of the church with all his attributes of power). He humbly agrees to things that are not true: “explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that ’93 was not inexorable.”

And, of course, it is Hugo himself saying, “The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it would not exist. There is, then, an I. That I of the infinite is God.”

The bishop asking for the Conventionist’s blessing (and not receiving one) is one of the most moving episodes of the Brick.

[coast-modern]

"Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable. They seek the traces that dark matter leaves in the perceptible world. Theirs is hard, philosophical work, requiring patience and something like faith: 'As if' - in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson - 'all there were, were fire-flies / And from them you could infer the meadow'."

(-Underland, Robert Macfarlane)

'Right now,' Christopher says, 'you are looking into the absolute smallness of the universe with pinpoint accuracy, peering down at the most minute of scales. Those coloured lines are our magnifying lens.' Then he says - as if the phrase has just entered his head without warning, scoring a trace as it passes through - 'Everything causes a scintillation.' He pauses.

"'Why are you searching for dark matter?' I ask. 'To further our knowledge,' Christopher replies without hesitation, 'and to give life meaning. If we're not exploring, we're not doing anything. We're just waiting.' He pauses again. I wait. The screensaver on his computer changes to Yosemite in the autumn, with early snow on the top of El Cap. Christopher does not speak.

'Is the search for dark matter an act of faith?' I ask him. He waits for me to elaborate - he has heard the question before, wants more before he answers. His screensaver changes to the desert dunes at Sossusvlei in Namibia.

'My sense,' I say to Christopher, 'is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.'

'I grew up as a very serious Christian,' Christopher says. 'Then I lost my faith almost entirely when I found physics. Now that faith has returned, but in a much-changed form. It's true that we dark- matter researchers have less proof than other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know. As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.' He pauses again. It is not that this thinking is hard for him - he has moved down these paths before - but that he is picking each word with care. 'No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.' He gestures at the data read-out. 'If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.'

'Does it change the way the world feels?' I ask him. 'Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter - about what matters? Are you surprised we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?' Christopher nods. He thinks. His screensaver changes to the limestone towers at Guilin, seen near dusk such that they are backlit in ways that are considered widely appealing on Instagram and other large-scale image-sharing platforms.

'At the weekends,' Christopher says, 'when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.' He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe.

'But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love.'"

- Underland, "Dark Matter"

labs that are also churches. to me

(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)

[edward-sonbati]

Aristotelian Teleology and Contemporary Evolutionary Theory

This paper will seek to define the key Aristotelian concepts of actuality, potentiality, form, matter, the doctrine of the four causes, and natural teleology and argue that they are not only necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the natural world but will also seek to demonstrate —using arguments from Thomas Nagel’s 2012 bombshell work Mind and Cosmos— that they also provide a framework for understanding contemporary evolutionary theory. 

Before we delve into an in-depth analysis of the doctrine of the four causes, we must first expound Aristotle’s general notions of coming to be and passing away. Fundamental to such notions are the concepts of potentiality and actuality. According to Aristotle, potentiality is to actuality as “someone waking is to someone sleeping, as someone seeing is to a sighted person with his eyes closed, as that which has been shaped out of some matter is to the matter from which it has been shaped” (1048b1–3). In other words, potentiality is an object’s 1 potential to have or become something, whereas actuality is the realization of an object’s potentiality. It is these core concepts that serve as the foundation for Aristotle’s theories of causation. It is on account of this foundation that he can distance himself from the strict monism of Parmenides. Aristotle and his predecessor began with the same presupposition —that being cannot come to be from non-being— but arrived at fundamentally different conclusions. Parmenides took this to mean that change of any sort was impossible and that all reality was 

1 Taken from: Cohen, S. Marc, "Aristotle's Metaphysics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = 

<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/>.

fundamentally one, despite the apparent ubiquity of plurality. This is because, for him, any change in the features or attributes of an object would imply a transition from non-being to being or vice-versa. If, for instance, a red ball were to become blue, the “blueness” of the ball, which was originally in a state of non-being, would then pass into a state of being, a metaphysical impossibility. For Parmenides, this purported impossibility forces us to subscribe to a radical monist conception of reality. 

Aristotle, however, presents us with a way out. By positing his notions of potentiality and actuality, he set forth what he considered to be a coherent theory of causation that contains significant explanatory power all while avoiding the dilemma that he and his pre-Socratic predecessor spurned. In the ball example, the red ball’s potentiality is its potential to be blue. When the ball is painted and becomes blue this potentiality is now realized into the realm of actuality. 

The transition from potentiality to actuality is not something measured or described in absolute, categorical terms, but rather on a spectrum. The historian of philosophy Peter Adamson says: 

A striking feature about change, which becomes obvious once we start thinking in terms of potentiality and actuality, is that changing inherently involves a degree of incompleteness. When I’m on the way from London to Paris, I have partially, but not completely, actualized my potential for moving towards Paris.2 

Fully acknowledging that change is something that occurs gradually along a continuum rather than a sudden and instantaneous transition from point A to point B, Aristotle uses the word entelecheia or “completeness” to describe the ultimate and final actuality of an object. It is 

2 Excerpt From: Peter Adamson. “Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1, Chapter 34.” iBooks.

important to note here that the word entelecheia is related to the word teleos meaning “end” or “purpose” (cf. Adamson). Thus, when an object has reached its entelecheia it has fulfilled the final end or purpose of its initiated change. 

The concept of teleos plays an important role in (shockingly enough) Aristotle’s teleology and the wider scheme of his theory of causation. These concepts will be fleshed out later on in this paper. For now, we have established the foremost tenet Aristotelian causation: that “any change is going to be a transition from potentiality to actuality.” 3 

Using this fundamental principle as a building block, we will now set out to construct a comprehensive understanding of the natural world within an Aristotelian framework. Regarding nature and natural causes, Aristotle brings to our attention the following: 

Since there are [four causes of natural things], the student of nature ought to know them all; and in order to give the sort of reason that is appropriate for the study of nature, he must trace it back to all the causes—to the matter, the form, what initiated the motion and what something is for (194b16ff). 

Thus, the doctrine of the four causes are the four ways in which a causal event is accounted for. These four ways are the material, formal, efficient, and final causes. A particular emphasis, however, is placed on the “matter” and “form” underlying an object; these concepts are crucial to understanding the object’s “nature.” Regarding nature he says: “One way we speak of nature [is] as the primary matter that is a subject for each thing that has within itself a principle of motion and change” (193a29) and again in the same passage: “Some people think that nature and substance of a natural thing is the primary constituent present in it, having no order in its own right, so that the nature of a bed, for instance wood, and the nature of a statue bronze” (193a10). 

3Ibid.

In light of these passages, the fundamental nature of an object is taken to mean its constituent material or “matter”. 

However, Aristotle is not married to one understanding of “nature,” and in certain contexts will refer to the structure or “form” of an object as being even more fundamental to its nature than its matter. He says: 

In another way the nature is the shape, i.e., the form in accordance with the account [...] of things that have within themselves a principle of motion” (193a31, b4) [...] Indeed, the form is nature more than the matter is. For something is called when it is actually so, more than when it is only potentially so (193b7). 

These two seemingly contrary definitions of nature can nevertheless be harmonized; while a substance’s nature is fundamentally its form, its matter is also a nature inhering within the form. Using the example of a wooden table: the wood which constitutes the table is, in some sense, the very nature of the table. However, the structure or form of the table is more fundamentally its nature than the wooden material that comprises it. This is because the wood itself merely has the potentiality to be the table, whereas the structure or form of the table is the actualization of the wood’s potentiality 

Having discussed causes on the level matter and form, we must now define the meaning of efficient and final causes. An efficient cause is that “which brings something to be by imposing form on matter.” It is the agent or mechanism by which something is caused or 4 brought about. The final cause is the final end or purpose (teleos) of the object of causation. Going back to the example of the wooden table: a wooden table’s efficient cause is the carpenter that made it. Its material cause is the wood that comprises it. Its formal cause is the structure it 

4 Excerpt From: Peter Adamson. “Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1, Chapter 33.” iBooks.

has that allows it to be used as a table. Lastly, its final cause is the purpose or end (i.e. teleos) which it serves, namely, to be dined upon. 

With our newfound understanding of Aristotle’s theories of causation in the natural world, we can now delve into his teleology. For Aristotle, causes in nature all have a tendency towards an end or purpose. He writes: 

This argument, then, and others like it, might puzzle someone. In fact, however, it is impossible for things to be like this. For these and all natural things come to be as they do either always or usually, whereas no result of luck or chance comes to be either always or usually. (For we do not regard frequent winter fain or a summer heat wave, but only summer rain or a winter heat wave, as a result of luck of coincidence.) If, then, these seem either to be coincidental results or to be for something, and they cannot be coincidental or chance results, they are for something. Now surely all such things are natural, as even those making these claims would agree. We find, then, among the things that come to be and are by nature, things that are for something (198b33-99a8). It then clear that, for Aristotle, all things in nature are “for something.” Natural phenomena are 

not merely the result of a stroke of luck or mere chance, but occur in order to achieve an ultimate end. 

Despite being fully aware that these phenomena have natural explanations and are not directly initiated by a rational agent, Aristotle completely rejects the notion that the seemingly mechanistic order of natural events somehow precludes a purposeful cause or inclination: 

Besides, it is strange for people to think that there is no end unless they see an agent initiating the motion by deliberation. Even crafts do not deliberate. Moreover, if the shipbuilding craft were in the wood, it would produce a ship in the same way that nature would. And so if what something is for is present in craft, it is also present in nature. This is clearest when a doctor applies medical treatment to himself—that is what nature is like (199b26-34). 

The argument is this: the final cause of a craft, say, shipbuilding, is achieved by a rational agent whereas the final cause of a natural event is driven by nature itself, on account of the innate inclinations towards purpose or teleos within the natural world.

Now that we have provided an account of Aristotle’s doctrines of causation and natural teleology, we can now set out to argue the thesis of this paper: that these doctrines are not only necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the natural world —on account of their ability to provide a sufficient explanation of causation on the level of agent, matter, form, and purpose— but that they are still relevant today and can serve to provide crucial insights into understanding and nuancing contemporary evolutionary theory. 

In his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False American philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that a materialist worldview fails to properly account for mind, consciousness, and the diversity of life. His reasoning is as follows: 

I believe this possibility [i.e. that the physical sciences can provide an accounting for subjective mental aspects of reality] is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. 5 

The materialist and physicalist accounts of both consciousness and reality in general cannot account for subjective sentient experience. This is because consciousness itself cannot be reduced to physical processes and patterns occurring within the brain. Trying to account for consciousness within a materialist understanding of the universe is akin to using a knife to paint a living room, it’s not the right tool one needs to go about the task. We must, therefore, seek an alternative method of understanding conscious experience. Luckily for us, Nagel thinks he has such an alternative. 

5 Nagel, Thomas. “The Core of 'Mind and Cosmos'.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Aug. 2013, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/.

An avowed atheist, Nagel seeks to posit a type of natural teleology in order to account for both consciousness and the grandeur of the universe, all while avoiding both theism and materialism in the process: 

Some form of natural teleology, a type of explanation whose intelligibility I briefly defended in the last chapter, would be an alternative to a miracle— either in the sense of a wildly improbable fluke or in the sense of a divine intervention in the natural order. 6 Nagel thinks that a cosmology whereby the universe has a natural inclination or “bias” towards 

teleology and mindedness provides a sufficient explanation for conscious experience without needing to invoke either the infinitesimally small chance of the universe coming to be within a materialist and purposeless framework or the intervention of an intelligent creator. He dubs this theory “panpsychism,” the idea that “mindedness” or the inclination towards consciousness can be found throughout all things in nature. He says: 

The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.7 

It is because the universe itself is both conscious and self-aware that it creates sentient beings that are likewise conscious and self-aware. 

In proposing his theory, Nagel gives due credit to his ancient predecessor who first sowed the seeds of this doctrine: 

This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea of explanation of the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. 8 

6 “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” p. 124 7Ibid. 

8Ibid, p. 66.

It is clear, then, that far from being an irrelevant relic of the past, Aristotle’s ideas concerning purposeful causation and natural teleology still hold weight amongst contemporary thinkers and intellectuals seeking to gain a better grasp on the origin and ultimate end of the cosmos. 

In this paper, we have explored Aristotle’s conceptions of matter and form and have seen that they describe the constituent material and structure of substances, respectively. Further, we have argued that his doctrine of four causes provides a satisfactory explanation of natural phenomena on the level of agent or mechanism (efficient cause), constituent material (material cause), structure (formal cause), and purpose (final cause). It is this doctrine that lays the foundation for his natural teleology: the idea that all things in nature are geared towards a certain end or purpose. We have also seen, using Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, that this doctrine, long thought to be outdated, might yet still provide us with an explanation of both the grandeur of the universe and the origin of subjective, conscious experience that cannot be accounted for by a strictly materialist conception of reality.

[audreycritter]

I think the reason I dislike the Joker being given backstory is not that I don't want to feel sympathy for the Joker (I mean, that's a small part of it) but rather that I think it undermines the point of the Joker. I don't mean as a character with motivations, I mean narratively. Others have probably said this before, and better than I'm about to, but this is my blog and I'm going to ramble.

The whole point of the Joker that some writers seem to miss (especially films! films are ADDICTED to backstory for some reason) is that there IS no real reason. He's a primary antagonist because his entire schtick is that nothing matters, and that's funny as hell. He can treat people's lives as a joke because they don't mean anything.

Bruce, or Batman, as the protagonist is the exact opposite of this. The motivation to save others from what happened to him as a child is rooted in this concrete, fundamental-to-Batman truth: everything matters. This is why Bruce's parents dying in a random act of violence in a before-then obscure alley has had such staying power: it wasn't a massive event that changed the lives of dozens or hundreds. It was a small thing, a statistic in the grand scheme of violent crime, with no real motive other than desperation or greed. And it changed someone's life completely. For Batman, the hundreds of small acts that fill a patrol all matter because each person does.

Joker's obsession with Batman hinges on him believing the exact opposite, and trying to convince him that he's wrong, and that THE joke is that nothing matters at all-- walking away from a victim and torturing a victim have the same moral weight because there is no moral weight. The point isn't to be the most evil or the most cruel, the point is to prove that it's all pointless.

In a way, this means Joker's greatest ally is the apathy of Gotham. Every person who turns away or keeps walking with their head down and claims "not my problem" supports his claim that nothing matters, because Gotham is proving by inaction that it's pointless unless it impacts them personally. Nobody else matters unless I do, and then it's too late. Do I think Joker's crimes are Gotham's fault, narratively and within their fictional world? Not exactly. But I do think Joker isn't actually an embodiment of chaos but is a representative of what Batman is actually fighting against: a Gotham that doesn't care.

Batman's existence is a defiance of this. His work, masked and unrewarded, is a symbol of the fact that no wealth, no material comfort, no border of security, no past trauma, no law, no excuse justifies not caring. Every life matters, even if it isn't your own, even if it's a stranger. He can't kill Joker in-world because of his moral stance on killing. He can't kill Joker narratively because Gotham won't kill Joker. Batman's driving core is a relentless anti-apathy, and Gotham's current collective social spirit is that they are helpless and not responsible for it.

Joker thinks it's funny that anyone would care, and Batman thinks someone not caring is the opposite of funny. Caring can often hurt, but it isn't pointless. Every single life saved or lost creates a ripple effect that matters and hurts or helps others. Each victim Joker encounters is met with the same presupposition: "I can hurt you and it doesn't mean anything because you're nobody. It doesn't hurt Gotham because Gotham isn't anyone."

Every person Batman saves is saved by the same presupposition: "If I can save you, it's like saving all of Gotham. Everyone matters...because each single life matters."

The more people that build their lives on caring regardless of how they think it impacts them personally, the less sway the Joker has. Every person who shuns apathy is another person who will fight back against the Joker's Chief Joke: It doesn't matter.

And they fight back best by, like Batman, looking at each individual they come in contact with and deciding, "Yes, this one matters."

[99liners]

professor!GoM: brat-taming their s/o;

pairings: GoM x female reader

genre: smut, age-gap, established relationship

warnings: dom-sub dynamic, humiliation, fingering, ben wa balls, vibrators, figging, orgasm denial, pet-play. 

request: Anonymous said: Nsfw hc for the GOM ;; their s/o was wearing sexy clothes and went to school party and intentionally made them jealous. basically a hc about brat-taming reader plz?

a/n: i hope you do not mind that i changed the premise of the ask a bit. firstly, brat taming someone who is in school seems a bit risque cause the presupposition is that the reader is below 18 and i do not condone that. hope you understand! i bet you had no intent of meaning any of that but i just wanted to be clear in posts i make on any platform. also, it’s a dom sub relationship which hardly works if there is no age gap because that is where the underlying dominance resides, so oops, GoM are about 29 years old in this scenario and they teach at the University of Japan. 

taglist: @knb-kreations​

abstract: (1.1k)

you are not one to get excited about parties but the annual university fest this year had you on your heels and about. for no other reasons than your boyfriend, one of your teachers and of the youngest ones in this old institution. you had overheard some talks among the other senior professors that your boyfriend might get a promotion from a temporary teacher to an assistant professor and that was huge which naturally called for celebrations.

you had spent the better half of the month, preceding the fest, thinking about what to do for him, something special for him. it had been a little over a year since you two started dating. he was not your regular professor but on the off-days that he was, you did manage to catch his eye and although it is against moral ethics to be dating your professor, you could not help yourself considering how you have spent most of your middle and high school watching him play basketball in the national league as he was one of the Generation of Miracles.

when you first started university, it did catch you by surprise when you saw your basketball player crush walk past you in a fitted suit, some thin notebooks in his hand. you were sat in the café as you grabbed a quick lunch and almost had snorted your orange juice when you saw the said man in question. immediately turning to your classmate to inquire what was that about, you got to know that the Generation of Miracles player had retired from playing professionally and had joined the University of Japan as a temporary teacher. life was probably throwing you a rope to fulfil your high school thirst imaginary scenarios.

“babe?”

your boyfriend’s voice caught you by surprise causing you to turn to him. you were sat on a makeshift ottoman in front of the mirror in your boyfriend’s apartment. you offered him a soft smile humming, “mhm?”

“i asked if you are leaving with me or will you come later on? mr nakamoto has called me for some preparation.”

you nodded, “go ahead. i will join you later.”

there was something off about you, like you were plotting something. it just was something that your boyfriend could not exactly pin point but he did raise his eyebrows slightly, analyzing your gait and posture.

“you are awfully calm today. what’s going inside that head, doll?” your boyfriend asked, leaning down to place a kiss on your forehead.

“me? nothing at all!” you scoffed it off, the sly smile never leaving your lips.

“ahha?” your boyfriend stood up straight again after kissing your forehead, “well you know the rules so, i will see you later.”

“yes sir!” you cheered and immediately got to action as soon as the apartment door closed behind your boyfriend announcing his departure.

yes, you knew the rules one of them clearly being “no teasing at my workplace”, yes you knew you would be punished on breaking them but here you are, shedding off your clothing to get rid of your undergarments. you donned your black short dress and after fastening the zip at your back, you grabbed a pair of sheer black stockings and put them on before sliding into a pair of black boots.

the final touch was your choker which was actually a collar with your boyfriend’s surname on the backside of the locket dangling from it.

you admired your form in the mirror and fixed your makeup which included an extra coat of the reddest lipstick that you owned. and left soon after when your gang of girlfriends came to pick you up.

as you predicted, your boyfriend did get the promotion which was announced at the fest. you clapped the loudest, a proud look adorning your features as you kept grinning at your boyfriend who sent a subtle wink your way. you have to admit, even after being with him for more than a year, the slightest of his actions still get your panties in a twist but wait, tonight you are not wearing any.

how the rest of the night played out, however, disappointed you because your boyfriend would not pay you a look no matter how many times you tried to grab his attention. yes, you both very much want to keep your love life a secret but he does not simply get to ignore you when you are looking as bombass as this.

irritated you walked to your classmate and grabbed his hand, all the while dragging him towards the dance floor. as the song changed to one with an rhythm and blues vibe, you turned to your boyfriend and this time you caught him staring at you. his eyes were boring holes in your figure and mostly your dance partner’s figure who probably already had died in 50 ways inside your boyfriend’s head.

a smirk found its place to your lips as you turned to face your boyfriend and leaned down which gave him a generous look of your naked breasts, the nipples poking out against the fabric of your black dress. your boyfriend tried to stay calm, honey he surely did but he could not help but feel the shock as his eyes widened in bewilderment. and no, his eyes did not miss his collar on you. is it him or did the room just get hotter? you watched your boyfriend subtly trying to fix the crotch area of his work pants, undoubtedly from the arousal that he was getting.

the final straw was when you turned your back to him again and leaned down to give him a view of your unclad ass. this time your boyfriend’s jaw surely fell down because he was not expecting that! unable to further restrain himself, your boyfriend stomped towards you in a hurry and soon enough you felt his overwhelming cologne invading your senses.

owing to the low brightness setting of the dance floor, he got away with placing a dominant grip on one of your ass cheeks all the while glaring at your friend who cowered away from sheer fear.

“miss __, let me drop you home. it’s late enough,” he gave you a tight lipped smile, boy he was so pissed.

and you still had some audacity left in you to give him an unsure look, “but i am having so much fun, sir!”

you could hear his guttural growl as he calmly took off his blazer and put it over your shoulders, “we are leaving. at once.”

kise ryota:

you two barely had gotten in the car when ryota’s hand already had made their way inside your tight pussy

your thighs kept clamping together as his fingers worked skillfully at stimulating you all the while keeping incredible focus at the road ahead

you could feel your orgasm taking over your body when his fingers prodded in deeper but just as you were about to come, ryota smirked and withdraw his fingers

“no no no!!” you groaned and turned to him helpless

“hardly think you are in any place to request anything, princess.”

you pouted when he offered his fingers coated with your wetness

“lick them clean, i have to park in reverse.”

you nodded and got to work at once.

alas, that was not the end because ryota was not done with you. after reaching the apartment, you found yourself in his bed, your hands handcuffed to the bedpost. your stockings were tattered mess with his face in between your delicious folds

his tongue and fingers were working in sync and driving you to the very edge. your tear stained eyes closed shut, your toes curling up when you felt your orgasm again but ryo stopped just in time and withdrew again.

“please!!” you could not help but cry out, it was beyond frustrating. your restraints refrained you from touching yourself as well. 

“it’s cute that you think you will get to cum tonight.”

midorima shintaro:

probably the most angry of all at this act of disrespect

dating you is already breaking enough rules as it is on top of being morally wrong. and now you are teasing him? sexually? in public? in his workplace?!

no, he is not taking easily to this. maybe he should teach you some traditional values and inculcate some conservatism. 

no sooner had the two of you reached the apartment, shin was on you in a moment’s notice which was unusual for him cause he is a person who likes to take his time.

shintaro got rid of your dress and stockings hurriedly then reaffixed his glasses, “get on the bed on your hands and knees.”

you nodded and got on the bed at once and watched shin taking out a box of lube, was he going to fuck you raw? well then this punishment might have just worked out in your favour but shin’s careful finger smeared with the cold lube near your other hole brought you out of your thoughts

“shin-tan?” you called out scared.

“not a word tonight, dear. you have done and said enough.”

after he finished prepping you, instead of his finger it was something else that entered your anal hole. a piece of ginger.

soon after the juices from the ginger released inside, it made you extremely uncomfortable causing you to squirm when a hand came flying down on your ass giving it a tight smack

“every time you squirm and move away equals to a spank. we will see if you have enough left in you to still act bratty.”

aomine daiki:

“baby’s grown some wings on her, hasn’t she?” daiki’s laugh was sadistic and for a second it made you regret your actions.

you gulped and turned to him as he drove the car in a haste. his one hand was gripping on the steering wheel while the other had a painful hold on your thigh

you chose to stay quiet but that is not how it works with daiki.

“when i ask you something, you reply. aye?” daiki reiterated turning towards you.

“uh, yes. yes dai-kun,” you mumbled, playing with the hem of your dress.

“that’s not my name, doll. is it?”

“sorry, sir.”

daiki let a small laugh again at your apology before pulling up in the parking spot. once you both were inside the apartment he almost ripped off the skimpy items of clothing that you had on. he instructed you to lie on the bed while he rummaged through the drawers before bringing the items over to you.

you squirmed when something cold touched against the soft lips of your pussy. daiki counted near your ear as he inserted three ben-wa balls inside you. he tapped your pussy once done like a pet causing you to writhe under his touch.

“you love when it gets risky, right? good. from today onwards you will be wearing vibrators inside your panties while these ben wa balls will be inside your pink little pussy and they will stay in at all times till sir comes back from work everyday and fucks you.”

murasakibara atsushi:

atsushi is rough when he is pissed like he really does not care

a lot of pushing and forceful pulling later you found yourself in your current predicament

a basketball on top of your head trying to balance it while atsushi’s cock rammed inside your pussy at an unbelievable pace.

you could barely even keep up with your heart’s need for oxygen than actually balancing a basketball on your head, your side of the face shoved into the wall above the bed

every time the basketball fell down, atsushi pulled out of you and made you go grab it back again and balance it. he would pound into you from the beginning, his pace resolute and unaffected, his grip on your hips was bordering on pain which was sure to leave marks for weeks to come. 

he kept positioning your ass outwards towards him every time your body became too sensitive and withdrew into itself.

“atsushi this isn’t fair!”

you whined for the umpteenth time as your body gave out when the basketball fell down for like 100th time.

“chibi-chin, you should have thought of that before teasing me. now come on, let’s keep on practicing. all good basketball players learn to balance it.”

akashi seijuro:

his eyes had turned colors and it was at this moment, that you knew you royally fucked up.

he was quiet during the ride back home and did not utter a word nor did his appearance falter for a second

his expression was the embodiment of calm and collected

upon reaching your shared apartment, you turned to seijuro, “babe i’m so sorry”

one look from him and you were scrambling for words causing you to immediately change your addressal, “no! i meant emperor, my emperor.”

his constricted features relaxed a bit as sei walked to the bedroom and you heard the door of the closet opening and shortly closing

he came out and replaced the collar around your neck with a tighter one which almost restricted your airways, he continued and attached a long tether to it

“since you are adamant on defying me. fine. you will live like the pet that you are,” seijuro’s voice was low as he walked towards the couch and sat down, his hands unzipped his pants revealing his hard on. he pulled on the tether in his hand prompting you to walk towards him. your mouth watering at the sight of his cock when you heard sei’s voice again,

“pet, who ever said anything about walking? get on your knees and crawl.”

︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶︶༉‧₊˚.

feedback is deeply appreciated.✨

masterlist | KnB masterlist | rules | ask box

- jaimie

© 𝟫𝟫𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓇𝓈, 𝟐𝟎𝟤𝟣. 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐄𝐃.

[krellion]

Images transcript:

"Why are you searching for dark matter?" I ask.

"To further our knowledge," Christopher replies without hesitation, "and to give life meaning. If we're not exploring, we're not doing anything. We're just waiting."

I think of Rievaulx Abbey west of Boulby, where in a fertile river valley Cistercian monks founded and built a space in which to hold Mass. Out of ironstone they made an airy structure of soaring buttresses and vaulted ceilings. Their abbey was one among a network of such sites spread around the world, in which prayers were offered to a presence disinclined to disclose itself to the usual beseechings.

"My sense," I say to Christopher, "is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science."

"I grew up as a very serious Christian," Christopher says. "Then I lost my faith almost entirely when I found physics. Now that faith has returned, but in a much-changed form. It's true that we dark-matter researchers have less proof than other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know. As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing."

He pauses again. It is not that this thinking is hard for him -- he has moved down these paths before -- but that he is picking each word with care.

"No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence." He gestures at the data read-out. "If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, i would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that."

"Does it change the way the world feels?" I ask him. "Knowing that 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second, that countless such particles perforate our brains and hearts? Does it change the way you feel about matter -- about what matters? Are you surprised we don't fall through each surface of our world at every step, push through it with every touch?"

"At the weekends," Christopher says, "when I'm out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we're walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that."

He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe.

"But mostly, and in several ways, I'm amazed I'm able to hold the hand of the person I love."

this exchange from underland by robert macfarlane has been going around and around in my head for weeks now

[addictedtostorytelling]

If (in whatever way) Sara had stayed in Vegas in s8 and Grissom hadn't been so take up with his own stuff, do you think things might have turned out differently with Warrick? Not that it was all Grissom's responsibility or that I'm blaming him. But when Warrick's late for work and opens up a little about how hard he's taking the divorce, Grissom's pretty dismissive (not everyone deals with a broken heart by overwork, Gilbert) and maybe under other circumstances Grissom would have had more bandwidth for him?

hi, anon!

i'd like to say yes unreservedly and 100% across the board—just because i want so desperately for warrick to live—but, honestly, i think it would depend on a lot of factors.

there’s such a long concatenation of events that lead up to warrick’s death that, frankly, it’s hard to say where the chain even starts.

is it when grissom is snappish with warrick over turning up late to work in episode 08x09 “cockroaches”? 

possibly.

but the whole string of cause-and-effect could also run back even further. 

maybe it all begins with warrick’s divorce (and the fact that warrick starts abusing prescription drugs to cope with the stress of said divorce) or perhaps it originates with warrick’s ill-fated decision to marry tina in the first place.

potentially we could blame the whole thing on nick’s abduction in episodes 05x24 and 05x25 “grave danger” pts. i and ii, which is what induces warrick to marry a woman he hardly knows and doesn’t truly love to start out with.

i mean, it all depends, right?

what is the first domino to fall? how far back would we have to go to stop the process that eventually culminates in his death from even starting in the first place? if just one conversation went differently, could everything have been changed?

it’s the whole “butterfly effect” question.

even presuming that we make the decision to just (arbitrarily) start with the “sara leaves, grissom falls into a deep depression, and because he is depressed, he is short with warrick” part of it all, changing the scenario so that sara stays, grissom’s happy, and he can be more in tune with warrick’s problems, there are still a lot of moving parts to the whole issue.

speculation—but not many concrete answers—after the “keep reading” if you’re interested.

__

it’s possible that were grissom a little bit kinder to and softer with warrick circa mid-s8, then warrick may have felt more comfortable confiding in him not just about the gedda case but about all of the problems in his life.

maybe if grissom weren’t distracted by his own heartbreak, he would have had time to help warrick cope with his.

perhaps had he been more on his game, he might have noticed (like nick did) that warrick was on drugs and in need of professional help.

had he stepped in before any of the gedda stuff ever happened, then maybe something could have been done to derail the “mckeen kills warrick in an alley” train before it ever reached the end of the track.

but those kinds of outcomes all presuppose that even without the “my heart is broken because sara left me” stuff, grissom would have been able to recognize that warrick was in crisis otherwise—and i don’t know that that’s a fair presupposition to make.

the truth is, warrick conceals about as much of his personal life from grissom and everyone else on the team as he’s going through his divorce as grissom and sara ever do during their “secret dating” heyday.

he’s got a secret kid and a secret custody battle and a secret drug addiction, and he’s not forthcoming about any of that stuff.

and that’s not to blame him or cast aspersions—i mean, obviously, where the addiction is concerned, he is sick and isn’t in the right headspace to make good decisions; and with the family stuff, who knows but he doesn’t have a sound reason to keep it to himself?

we know that eli’s paternity was initially in question, so maybe he didn’t want to tell his team members about him until he knew for sure, with dna confirmation, that the child was his.

in any case, it is to say: the full extent of warrick’s personal distress only really starts to become visible around mid-s8, when it begins affecting his work.

that so, i don’t know that even if grissom weren’t preoccupied with his own relationship troubles that he would have been able to clock warrick’s unraveling prior to the start of the gedda investigation anyhow.

i mean, think about what we as the audience see of warrick during his divorce period: during s7, as his relationship is deteriorating, he sometimes vents to nick about his and tina’s differences, and, as the divorce becomes inevitable, he maybe appears somewhat sleepless, as is to be expected from someone going through an nasty breakup.

however, the first time we’re introduced to the idea that he’s abusing drugs isn’t until episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck”—and even then it’s not confirmed that he’s abusing them; only that he is taking them.

he does have a prescription.   

likewise, while it’s mentioned that tina is pregnant in episode 08x09 “cockroaches,” at that point, it is implied that warrick is not the father of her child, and the full truth about eli’s paternity and the custody battle isn’t unveiled until after warrick’s death in episode 09x01 “for warrick.”

it’s also worth noting that while we as viewers have the benefit of seeing all of the instances of warrick’s struggles laid out for us, his teammates are only privy to the ones that they themselves witness—meaning that while sara is aware that he’s taking zolpidem starting from episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck,” nick only finds out in episode 08x09 “cockroaches,” and grissom and catherine and greg only find out when the fact that he is becomes a case detail in episode 08x10 “lying down with the dogs.”

we get way more of the puzzle pieced together for us all at once than they ever do, meaning that they have much less reason to assume that warrick is on the brink of a catastrophic breakdown than we might.

but even for us with our loftier vantage as the audience, there’s no real indication that warrick is actually going “off the deep end” until about the events of episode 08x09 “cockroaches.”

he does a pretty decent job of masking and obfuscating up until that point.

that so, again, even in an au where grissom weren’t reckoning with the aftermath of sara leaving him from episode 08x07 “goodbye & good luck” on, i’m not sure he’d be able to put everything together regarding warrick’s state of mind until around the time the gedda investigation began anyhow.

i mean, maybe he could.

but i don’t by any means think it’s a given that he would.

not when maybe warrick doesn’t really start to hit that “defcon 1” phase until around that point anyway. and not when warrick is still trying his damnedest to hide what he’s going through. and not when there hasn’t been much indication at all in warrick’s at-work behavior to suggest that he is in real trouble to that point. and not when grissom still only has access to the “tip of the iceberg” that he himself can see and doesn’t know what all is lurking beneath the surface.

it would all depend on what warrick allowed him to see, either purposefully or inadvertently.

but even if he did see something that clued him in to the fact that warrick was plummeting toward rock bottom, i’m not necessarily sold on the idea that he could do much to divert the situation, just because ultimately i don’t believe that it’s his behavior that is the final determiner of warrick’s fate from that point.

while grissom's shortness with warrick's post-divorce woes in episode 08x09 "cockroaches" certainly doesn't help warrick to feel like he can turn to grissom for guidance and support as he is dealing with his problems, including both those in his personal life AND those pertaining to the gedda case, said shortness isn't the main factor in warrick's decision to stonewall grissom (and all of the rest of his teammates) out of his private investigation into gedda going forward.

rather, being expressly forbidden to continue the investigation is.

the reason warrick goes behind everyone's backs and hires a private investigator and persists in working the case "off of the books" isn't because grissom hurts his feelings or seems emotionally/professionally unavailable; it's because grissom orders him to drop the case because he's become too personally enmeshed in it and is getting in over his head.

yes, grissom isn’t perhaps as patient with warrick’s insubordinate behavior throughout episode 08x10 “lying down with the dogs” as he might normally be if he weren’t smarting over sara leaving him.

but even so, there comes a juncture when, regardless of the “sara abandoned me of it all,” warrick crosses a line for him.

once warrick becomes connected to a dead stripper with ties to gedda, barges in on richard dorsey's interrogation after having been officially taken off of the case, and then refuses to follow grissom's orders to back off even after already having been warned to do so several times before, grissom is going to behave in the same way every single time.

warrick's two-week suspension is one that grissom would have handed down ten times out of ten, regardless of what was going on with him emotionally.

it has nothing to do with sara being in town or not or even with his mood.

it has to do with his sense that warrick is out-of-control and is jeopardizing the integrity of the case/the lab through his behavior—which has always been the cardinal sin, in grissom’s book.

and since it is specifically that suspension and the order not to touch the gedda case again from then on that prompts warrick to take matters into his own hands, hire lenny harper, and pursue the gedda case on his own time without telling any of his teammates that he is doing so, then it’s possible things would pan out for the most part in the same way that they do in canon from that point regardless of what was going on with grissom.

like.

even if grissom had been in a chipper mood that day because he and sara had spent all morning in bed together before going out in the afternoon and booking a wedding venue, i still don’t think that he would have been cool with warrick’s behavior that night.

he still would have ordered warrick to back down.

and as long as he did—i.e., as long as warrick knew that he wasn’t technically allowed to have anything to do with gedda and that talking to grissom or anyone else on the team about his extralegal investigation into him was going to get him in trouble—then there was still a good chance that warrick would have proceeded to keep what he was doing regarding gedda a secret for the rest of the season.

and to my mind, it’s that secret, dogged pursuit of gedda that is the key to warrick’s undoing.

i mean, certainly there’s some version of events when even though grissom takes warrick off of the case, maybe he still manages to help warrick deal with his drug addiction and cope with his divorce, and because he does so, warrick either plays things straight with the gedda case from the beginning OR at least comes clean to grissom about it sooner rather than later.

but there is also the possibility that even if grissom got warrick the help that he needed for his personal problems, warrick still would have conducted the gedda investigation on his own.

and if he did, then he still very well might’ve ended up dead, because, frankly, that's the thing that makes mckeen decide that he has to die: the fact that he has relentlessly pursued the case in his own time and is still convinced (even after pritchard has been implicated) that there is someone "higher up the food chain" on the take.

so as long as warrick goes down that route and is insistent on continuing the investigation, even after having himself been cleared of gedda's murder, mckeen is always going to have to get rid of him.

it has little to do with grissom from then on.

the die is already cast.

if warrick behaves recklessly and insubordinately during the events of episode 08x10 “lying down with the dogs,” then grissom will take him off of the gedda case in an official capacity.

and if warrick is taken off of the gedda case in an official capacity, then he will conduct his own private investigation in an unofficial capacity. 

and if warrick conducts a private investigation in an unofficial capacity and refuses to give up on it even after the main events of episode 08x17 “for gedda” take place, then jeff mckeen is always going to decide to kill him.

that’s the real crux of it all: as long as warrick makes public his belief that there is someone else over pritchard pulling the strings, his fate is pretty much sealed.

of course, that said, maybe if at some point during the intervening four-ish months in-between the events of episodes 08x10 “lying down with the dogs” (december ‘07) and 08x17 “for gedda” (april ‘08) warrick had felt more comfortable around grissom, he might’ve eventually ‘fessed up to the whole “running an extralegal investigation into a mob boss on my own time” thing.

and if he had, maybe grissom might have become personally involved or even involved the whole team in trying to figure out who the puppet master within the department was.

and if he had, then maybe they could have gotten to mckeen before mckeen got to them.

however, even then, i’m not fully convinced that warrick would come to grissom during the back half of the season under any circumstances.

because, really, while grissom is in a decidedly foul mood for those first few weeks after sara initially leaves vegas, even in canon, his attitude toward the end of the season does noticeably improve (once he and sara reestablish regular contact with each other)—so in theory, warrick could’ve maybe come to him (and expected him to be receptive) at any point prior to the end of the season.

but he didn’t.

and he didn’t turn to any of his other non-grissom team members, either.

he was in “i’m going to do this on my own” mode.

maybe he was waiting until he found a smoking gun to come forward to anyone. maybe he was still worried about getting in trouble. maybe he just wasn’t thinking because of all of the stress he was under (and the fact that his decision-making was impaired). 

but for whatever reason, warrick doesn’t ever admit to anyone that he’s running an investigation into gedda until the circumstances surrounding lenny harper’s murder bring to light that he is.

so.

all of the above is to say that while there are ways in which a situation where sara never leaves vegas might potentially result in warrick’s death being averted, i don’t think it’s a 100% sure thing that had sara never left vegas, warrick would not have died.

so much would depend on how he responded to the initial components of the gedda case in episodes 08x09 “cockroaches” and 08x10 “lying down with the dogs,” what he did with regards to his private investigation into gedda going forward through the rest of the season, if and when he ever told either grissom or anyone else about what he was doing, his drug addiction, and whether or not jeff mckeen ultimately got the sense that he “knew too much” or was getting too close to uncovering the truth.

maybe in some other, better world where sara never left, grissom might have been able to notice that warrick was struggling and the team could have staged an intervention for him and in so doing maybe they could have prevented him from ever being on drugs during the events of episode 08x10 “lying down with the dogs,” meaning that he never would have gotten suspended or been tossed off the case, meaning that he never would have investigated gedda on his own time, meaning that the gedda/mckeen connection might have been uncovered earlier, meaning that mckeen might never have been able to target him.

but that’s a lot of maybes.

—and, as discussed above, i think there are also potential routes where, even if sara were in town and grissom was on the ball, it’d still be pretty likely that no one would notice how much warrick was spiraling until AFTER he’d already taken the gedda investigation into his own hands, setting into motion the events leading up to his death, OR where even if they had, warrick still might have opted to play things close to the chest anyhow, for whatever reason, meaning he’d still ultimately run into trouble.

anyway.

sorry i can’t give a more concrete answer on this one!

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[equalseleventhirds]

i said i wouldn't write it but i did

vaguely a sequel to this, but far in the future and focused on jon (annabelle features briefly tho. she's fine. annabelle will always be fine in my fics.) with ofc the presupposition that they've failed in one world but kept trying, bcos i think that would be fun*!

*(by which i mean heartbreaking, i'm so sorry)

There are rules, to the traveling, or at least there seem to be. There are certainly questions to be asked and points to be made, about how many instances count as a definitive rule rather than simply a pattern. But Jon likes to think of them as rules. He's always preferred concrete answers, even if it turns out they're less the truth and more just a convenient way of conceptualizing things.

So he has rules.

First: the Fears always come through on the same day. October 18, 2018. Or, given the impact history has on calendars, the equivalent of it; he'd once spent months trying to correlate the forty-third moon of cycle 1852 with his calendar just to prove his point, but the math had all worked out.

(Which does indicate, at least to Jon, that yes, the Fears probably did originate in his home world, Georgie. He'll take his petty wins where he can get them. For as long as he can remember the discussion, and the people, he's proving wrong.)

Second, it is still his tapes that the Fears follow. For every apocalypse there has been a new catalyst, but none of these new rituals supersede his. Maybe it's a testament to the strength of the Web's original plan, or maybe it's just something about Jon himself. He knows what he thinks, but... well, there isn't enough proof just yet.

Third, in spite of endless attempts to trap them and stop them, Jon is always able to travel with the Fears. Perhaps they simply can't stop him, as the original antichrist he apparently is; dozens of apocalypses in dozens of different universes, and Jon can always feel his rightful place as ruler of that terrible fearscape calling to him. He hasn't taken it yet, but it's there, and the Eye cannot abandon its true pupil without his permission.

Or perhaps they simply don't care. Every attempt so far has led to the exact same result, after all: another world left behind, another death by starvation averted, another new feast for the Fears to sink their teeth into.

Fourth, he always passes out upon entering a new world.

It's kind of annoying.

---

It is slightly unusual for him to wake up warm, comfortable, and covered in a blanket, but Jon's not about to complain. It's nice. He doesn't get a lot of comfort, and he likes sleeping in a bed, especially since he's always eldritch-nightmare-free in a new world. For a limited time only, of course.

He's fairly certain he's inside; aside from the softness underneath and around him, the air is still and temperate, the light through his eyelids is artificial, and all he can hear is the faint whirring of appliances and the whispers of two muted voices.

"—complete stranger, definitely dangerous, looks like he's from hell—"

"Okay, fine, but I wasn't going to leave him, and anyway haven't you noticed he's a bit—"

"A bit what? Scarred? Bloodstained? Glowing eyes, because I don't think I need to remind you, Martin, his eyes were absolutely glowing when you found him—"

Martin. Now there's a name. Not an uncommon one, but... he thinks he knows that voice.

Or. Well. He might know both of those voices, actually, which is even more interesting than waking up in a bed.

Jon opens his eyes.

He's met himself before, is the thing. Not in every world, and not always particularly recognizable, but he's met himself. He's met versions of Martin, too, and eventually stopped going completely useless with heartbreak every time. The merest handful of times, he's found both of them in the same world, sometimes something almost like friends, but usually not.

The fact that they have their arms around each other, casual, comfortable, close, is both entirely unexpected and perfectly, wonderfully, terribly familiar. Jon briefly considers crying about it, but there are more important things to be doing. For example.

"The glowing eyes aren't actually that sinister. I mean, they are, but not for the reasons you're probably thinking."

Jon—the other Jon—jumps at the sound of his voice, then leans forward. Curiosity, of course; that hardly ever seems to change. "You—the glowing—who are you?"

"Jon," this new version of Martin scolds, and for just a moment he's back home, with his Martin, with that exasperated tone—but no, this isn't his Martin, and he's also leaning forward now, his voice turning gentle. Concerned. Coaxing, like he's a spooked animal, and Jon doesn't think his Martin has ever talked to him that way. "How are you feeling? We found you unconscious in the street."

He can feel Martin's curiosity too, pushing forward under his concern, just as questioning as Jon but too polite to outright say it yet. He has to cut this off, or he really will cry.

"Mm... no," he says. "Well, yes. But also." Good lord, he's confusing them. Par for the course, but he should probably try to be somewhat comprehensible.

He holds up a hand, extending one finger. "I am... fine. More or less. Trust me, I'm used to this, and this isn't even the worst way it's happened." Another finger joins the first. "My name, as I believe Martin has guessed but then dismissed, is Jonathan Sims. I am not you from the future, nor am I lying, nor am I crazy, because—" a third finger "—interdimensional travel is not only possible, it has happened, is happening, because of and along with terrible monstrosities I am determined to stop, and I have explained this too many times to too many people to have much patience for anyone being shocked and disbelieving, much less a version of myself doing so, so you can either get over it and move on or I can go elsewhere and do something useful."

"Excuse—"

"And," he continues, pushing himself up so he can sit and lean forward even more intensely than his counterpart, "I would actually rather not do that just yet, because I have an extremely pressing question for the two of you."

"Um," Martin says, and "What," says the other Jon.

"How," Jon asks, deepening his voice to exude solemn, ominous, and eldritchly important, "did you two start dating?"

---

It was so... normal. Apparently. Two people, mutual friends, a chance encounter. A prickly exterior ("He hated me," both of them had claimed), but without the insecurity of being Head Archivist and the fear of dread powers beyond his comprehension, their friends had helped him open up and—eventually—apologise. A budding friendship, and then a romance, and then...

It isn't a version of them Jon has seen anywhere else, in any of the worlds he's traveled to. Normal as it is, it's a highly improbably scenario, and certainly not the same as his relationship with his Martin had been. But it was, in an infinite number of worlds, still a possibility.

Jon isn't quite sure how he feels about that, knowing that some version of them could have fallen in love without the trauma, but that they hadn't managed it.

His hands aren't shaking, as he lights his cigarette. At least there's that.

"I quit, you know," his counterpart says from behind him. "Years ago. I'd forgotten about those until you asked."

"Well then, thank you for indulging me." He gestures, meaning the cigarette, meaning the bed, meaning his claims about reality, meaning his intrusive, gossipy questioning. Meaning everything. He's not sure it gets across.

The other Jon laughs, quietly, and moves to stand next to him. "I am my worst enabler."

"Oh, that's hardly true."

"Mm." They're silent together for a while, but Jon is restless (both of him), and eventually this reality's version opens his mouth to ask. "Do you—do you know why I—I don't want to say believed you, I'm still not sure I do, b-but, didn't throw you out immediately?"

"My myriad charms?" They both laugh at that.

"Jonathan Sims," he says, as if that explains anything.

Jon takes a drag of his cigarette, considering. He could probably Know, but... indulging himself. "What about me?"

"No, not you, or. You know. You. But your name. Jonathan Sims. I decided you weren't, weren't a deliberate lie to trick me, or a future version of myself, or a mind-reading monster—"

"Well—"

"—when you said your name, because none of those things would have said that." He smiles then and holds up a hand, and—oh—his ring glints. "I've been Jonathan Blackwood for a while now."

They'd told him married eventually, but he hadn't even thought about his name. He's certainly thinking about it now. "Jonathan Blackwood," he says, soft, to himself. And to himself. "That... that sounds good."

"It does, doesn't it."

Whatever they might have said next is lost as an incredibly loud engine roars nearby and a sleek black motorcycle pulls up in front of them. Jon sighs and takes one last drag of his cigarette as the rider removes her helmet.

"Been off finding yourself, then, Jon?" Annabelle asks.

"Oh, extremely funny, yes. Did you steal that?"

"It was a gift."

"Of course it was."

The other Jon is staring at them both, his eyes repeatedly drifting back to the web-covered hole in Annabelle's head. "Who—what is—is that a—"

"She's a spider monster," Jon supplies helpfully. "She came with me, although apparently she did not pass out in the street this time."

"Two streets over, I think. Pity, I would've loved a nice nap in a proper bed, but I did get this motorcycle out of it. Come on, Jon, you can mope on the way."

"I have not been moping—"

"Haven't you? You're not the one who deals with how maudlin you get every time you meet yourself—"

"Yes, fine, thank you, we can go." He stubs out the cigarette and pauses, looking at himself. "Uh. Tell Martin—well, goodbye, I guess. I'd say I hope we meet again, but if you're lucky we won't need to?"

"...sure."

"And I'm—I hope you—that is, I'll do my best—well." He sighs. "Things are about to get... dicey, for the world in general. But just, look out for each other, and we'll try to handle the rest."

"Jon, we should be going."

"Yes, all right, all right." He gives himself one last, probably not very reassuring smile, and climbs on behind Annabelle.

They do have work to do, after all.

[dwellordream]

“In court records of defamation suits, a common neighborhood jest was to pretend that a suspected cuckold actually wore gigantic horns, with neighbors warning him in mock concern that his horns threatened to break doorways and walls. This street jape has its parallel in printed jests. In one, a jealous husband always sticks his head out the window to check on his wife when she leaves the house, "which she taking in great endugine [dudgeon], roundly told him that if hee used continually to looke after her shee would clappe such a paire of horns upon his head that from thenceforth he would not be able to put his head out of doores." Her spatial manipulation requires theatrical projection: he seeks to control her access to the outside world and thus her sexuality, so she uses an imaginary scene of neighborhood humiliation to control him.

…In Berangier du long cui ("Berangier of the Long Ass"), an unhappy lady is married to a craven knight who only pretends to go out and fight. When he returns from these faked bouts, he kicks her and reviles her. One day she has had enough. She crossdresses as a knight in full armor and follows him into the forest, where she spies on him hacking his own sword. Accosting him, she challenges him to joust. Cowering before her, he cravenly begs for mercy. She forces him to kiss her bare ass. Bending over, he is shocked to see only a long cleft, with no testicles. She tells him in a rough voice that "All other men are beneath my class. / I'm Berangier of the Long Ass / Who puts to shame the chicken-hearted."

The fabliau culminates in the wife's confrontation with him at home, where she boldly sits in bed with her new lover. When he rages, she silences him by saying she knows all about his meeting with Berangier of the Long Ass and that she will tell the world if he says another word: He felt checkmated. He felt ill. And from that day, she did her will: She was no common girl or fool: When the shepherd's weak, the wolf shits wool. Such tales about tails are short and sharp, a feature that has led Howard Bloch to argue that the analogous French pun on tale/tail (con(te}/con) functions as more than an apt quibble. Accepting the Aristotelian rule that comedy is rooted in the defective, he locates that defect in the voice of the con (cunt/fabliau), whose "illogical" and "scandalous" speech cuts meaning short. 

Logic is phallocentric: every child believes in "the ubiquity of the phallus [which] by analogy accounts for the presupposition of logic." Laughter produced by a joke or conte disrupts this logic and therefore cuts or castrates. His theory has its own shortcomings. Bloch fails to address the peculiar dramatic form of the fabliau, which is less punchline-focused and more hermeneutically demanding than a modern joke. In Berangier du long cui a new kind of logic plays out for a full forty lines beyond what he reads as the curtailing "punchline" of the anal kiss, which, rather than ending the narrative, spurs a denouement focused on the wife's triumph and mirth. 

Indeed, Bloch discounts everything outside the castrating moment; he cannot allow that the con may also result in laughter that is its own logic, issuing from certain hearers for whom the phallus is not "ubiquitous." If the joke brings forth a "rule ready-made in words/' as Freud ordained, the rule of the fabliau is that laughter is already present: if it symbolically cuts some, it somatically pleases many others. In song, jest, and verse, women certainly do take special delight in hacking away at phallic pretensions. The topic figures large in gossips' literature, such as the early Tudor A Talk of Ten Wyves on Their Husbands Ware. A group of wives drinking in the alehouse vie to outdo each other in belittling their spouses' equipment. 

The first wife sets the terms of the debate: Talys lett us tell Off owre hosbondes ware, Wych of hem most worthy are To-day to bear the bell. And I schall now begyn att myne: I knowe the [measure] well & fyne, The length of a snayle, And ever he warse is from day to day. All ten have a go. One wife moans in anguish that her husband is "the length of four beans" even when "he was in his most pryde/' another compares her mate's parts unfavorably to those of her cat Gyb, and a third says her spouse's ware is long enough but as weak and thin as her little finger. Narrators in some tales do call lusty women whorish, but in general jests do not; and on closer inspection many are more accurately about women satirizing men, especially for inept lovemaking. 

Such tales often circle back to cuckoldry because a man who cannot pay his marriage debt is inviting horns. It is too easy to dismiss a narrative such as Talke of Ten Wyves, in which women express sexual desire or connoisseurship, as nothing but formulaic satire on vulgar female tongues and women's frightening insatiability. In her foundational study of cheap print, Margaret Spufford takes a minority view by arguing against reading an automatic tone of disapproval or satire in all such references to women's sexual desires: "Women were depicted in the chapbooks ... as taking positive pleasure in lovemaking. Certainly, the whole tenor of the merry books conveys that seventeenth-century women enjoyed their own sexuality and were expected to enjoy it."

Whatever women's experience of their own sexuality-and Spufford's comment raises more issues than it answers-most women would have been familiar with jesting literature that held men responsible for providing them with a degree of pleasure in bed, expressing that expectation through shrewd criticisms of sexual performance. When placed in a social context of neighborly surveillance, cultural discourses about cuckoldry elicit judgments about female duplicity, to be sure. But as these texts show, the conversation also recruits female pleasure and involves negotiations about the limits of male violence and criticisms of male stupidity, impotence, and hypocrisy. Many tales recruit women's laughter at drunken, jealous, and hateful husbands; and some attempt to discipline men by teaching that such behavior will result in horns. 

Some jests can almost be considered primers in verbal evasion for harassed women, while others seem calculated to heat hostilities to the boiling point. Sometimes the language of play translates struggles ending in blows and blood to contests for linguistic mastery, especially in the jest topos of the forced oath, which turns on the unanswerable riddle of chastity. But the threat of violence is not always hidden. Pasquils Palinodia paints an unforgettable picture of cuckolds as sadists and blowhards, egging each other on: 

And what is then his prattle with his mates, His fellow drunkards, sitting o'er the pot? There he begins the story, and relates What an infernal! fury he hath got, An everlasting scold that's never quiet, But checks him for his company and his ryot. Why bang her well, quoth one, for by this quart, If she were my wife, I would break her heart. Well, quoth another, fill a cup of Sacke, And let all scolds be damn'd as deep as helli Abridge her maintenance, and from her backe Pull her proud clothes, for they doe make her swell. And thus in divellish counsell there they sit, Til of Sherry they have drowned their wit. The anonymous narrator concludes this remarkable passage by observing that it is "too great a wrong, and most unjust/ The weaker to the wall should thus be thrust" and "deny'd the favour of the laws". 

Perhaps it is this antimasculinist edge in cuckoldry humor-that utter lack of sympathy for the "wronged" husband-that led later generations of critics to disdain cuckoldry so completely. Norbert Elias, Keith Thomas, and others have ascribed the shift in taste to the massive change in manners that occurred in the later seventeenth century. What is less clear is how much this change depended on establishing new standards of female respectability and on restricting the kinds of stories they should hear and tell. In any case, it is important that the vast field of early modern cuckoldry narrative not be dismissed as rank misogyny. Any given tale may be heard as a lesson in amorality, a fable about the subordination of patriarchs, and prime laughing matter for all-but especially for women. Subject to sexual attacks, slurs, and scrutiny, they knew danger in a physical as well as psychological sense. They were, therefore, even more likely to enjoy a simulacrum of mastery that proved a stage husband wrong or wronged, again and again.”

- Pamela Allen Brown, “Between Women, or All Is Fair at Horn Fair.” in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

You are still thinking in terms of punishment. Get that thought out of your head. Discard it.

Its not about punishment. God forgave us in Eden.

We were broken though. We were corrupted with death and disease - we felt entitled to a divinity we were unprepared for, we sought knowledge of good and evil. We were, are, narcissists. Eternal life, as it would have been available with the the tree of life, would have created a world of immortals at each other's throats.

He sacrificed himself to us - if you want to think about it that way. We're the ones in the Garden who wanted to be Gods. We're the ones who wanted to save Barabbas (Luke 23:18-25).

Christ came into the world fully human, but also fully divine when he was ready to be received. In the bosom of Mary was a fusion of man and God that changed everything. As long as Christ lived, Divinity was contained, but once he died (Luke 24:46), that unity meant that we, all of humanity, were grafted into the divine life (John 15) - he followed us into Hell, we follow him into heaven.

Now, you may ask, why then do we not walk on water, etc... It just doesn't work that way. First off, we haven't been bodily resurrected yet. It's a promise (John 16:7). As I said, I lost both my parents within the last 12 months, I have constant debilitating headaches. Death and illness is still with us as we wait.

Second, if you think God is all about lightning bolts and flexing, that's not what God's like either. Radical humility - read the Sermon on the Mount. Refer to the Fruits of the Spirit. Read through 1 Corinthians 13. It's all there to be properly understood.

Again, we think we know what a God looks like, and he doesn't fit that human mold.

Feel free to read some of my other stuff - you may not agree with it - that's fine - most Protestants and Catholics don't like it either. But in my mind there is very little contradiction in the Bible. You just have to change your presuppositions.

This Verse Secretly Undermines All of Christianity...

I just saw this and thought I would process it on my own.

This YouTuber doesn't sound like he's explored much beyond mainstream Western Christianity. He makes the bold statement that EVERY Christian sect finds indispensable the idea that Christ died on the Cross "for our sins". Period.

For the longest time I found that challenging too. He goes on to talk about many of the same things I've asked, "Why couldn't God just forgive us outright? Why must he go through a generational pageant to do something the God of the Universe could have done of his own accord in the first place?"

You can say this is a dumb question. I've been told this many times.

Yet I have never been the only one asking this.

Many, if not all Atheists ask this question. Frankly, many "Christian" answers sound a little unhinged.

Now, I don't think that his examples necessarily contradict the prevailing point of view though. All anyone has to do is look at the banking industry to see that credit on future earnings is a valid payment method. Now it's true that modern banking, and especially credit, wasn't developed until the European Jews, unable to make a living any other way, started lending during the medieval period. Jesuits came up with the idea of insurance, which didn't technically fall under the prohibition against usury. And with ongoing innovation, modern financial markets developed.

None of these, of course, would have been understood by the local people of Jesus' time and place.

What was understood was life and death.

And this is where I found my peace.

Sins can easily be forgiven, but sickness and eventual death? That's a whole other nut to crack. Now, to be clear, unfortunately even the most traditional Christian communities have started to obsess about how SIN must be atoned!

But there is a strain in the oldest Christian traditions that it wasn't primarily sin that was destroyed on the cross, but rather death, disease, corruption (of which sin is a derivation to be sure, but not the point).

Now it's easy to look around and say - "Look! it didn't work." I myself have had to say good bye to both my parents over the last several months.

However, there is a resurrection that is promised. And if Christ has done what he said he did, then there WILL be a general resurrection.

The key is to be prepared for that resurrection. Now we could go on about which denomination is best prepared, but I have little faith in denominationalism. I think it's a means to conquer and divide the faithful, pitting follower against follower. Soon the God who's being worshiped isn't the most High God, but the Deceiver who encourages us all to call each other heretics. I do not think most "Christians" are Christian, but rather following their own wisdom (1 Timothy 6:3-5, 2 Thessalonians 2:11, Matthew 7:13-14, Matthew 24:11).

Now I may be a false teacher myself for thinking such a thing and putting it out there, but I have faith that God will know his own. And while he loves the rest, and has given them life, that life will be so much less for the fact that they reject what he's given them.

I find the idea of a river of fire helpful - Moses and the Glory of God (Exodus 33:20-23), speaks to the idea that to human senses, God is Fire. The Story of the Three Holy Youths (Daniel 3) has also been seen as an illustration of man abiding in the presence of fire, as a proxy for God, unharmed. Pentecost is God's fire experienced by the faithful after his resurrection. How will Gods fire be experienced by the unfaithful?

I have no idea, but I doubt that it will be pleasant (Luke 16:19-31).

In short, I feel this video failed to land it's point. There's enough diversity in Christianity to survive this argument, though I do not think that most modern Christians are open to my resolution.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy upon me, a sinner.

[shadowsfascination]

Shadamy Swordland | Ch 1 | The Hayloft

In reference to this post Sorry if it’s a little long!I might add a second chapter to this. I got carried away and alrady wrote the draft, aaah! ^^

The Chaos energy that we know from the canon is seen here as a source of magical powers. One can master spells and learn the sacred arts to perform them. Special thanks to @shadamyheadcanons for writing all these beautiful headcanons. You may not know, but your writings are a huge inspiration to me and brighten up my day (:  I’m not even sure whether I write well, but here goes, lol! ___________________________________________

There’s a hidden entrance to the hayloft above the stables-building where Shadow used withdraw himself after a day of training his students or intense swordfights. It’s accessed by a ladder, stuffed away in a dark corner of the stables-building. One must know about it’s existence to use it or one will not even find it. To keep it like this, Shadow told no one about it, so he’d be left alone, even if he has a pleasant home to go to. His house was located near the central square on the academy and therefore way too noisy for him. Shadow liked the quiet so he could think. He was sensitive to incentives, which could be a blessing and a curse all at once. In addition to the crowdy location of his home, there’d also be the many, many encounters he’d have with young female students who always ‘happened’ to run into him on his way home that he’d rather go without. Notorious for being an excellent swordsman and a noble too, there’d always be female students trying to catch his eye. When both not intending to engage in nor interested in any romantic affair, he’d also feel extremely awkward not knowing how to let them down easily. He had a reputation of being blunt and did not want to add to it. Especially after he’d been called to the board to explain why there had been gossips around the academy about a romantic involvement with one of his students, Amy Rose.

He made clear to the board there was no such thing going on between them and offendedly told them that their presupposition was to be unheard of. He was her superior, she was his trainee. It was unthinkable that he’d become romantically involved with her. Even more so because he was a noble and she was not. No, Shadow had no interest in romance whatsoever. His work as a trainer and duty as a knight was too important to him and he did not let anything distract him from that. And so he returned to his hayloft, alone. Or so it seemed…

A cloaked Amy Rose snuck out of the trainees’ dorm in the middle of the night, remaining in the shadows of the academy buildings. When unable to avoid stepping into the range of the torchlights on the streets, she used her special skill to briefly turn invisible and disappeared into the shadows again. No one would catch a glimpse of her. She’d been doing it for about two months now and became more skilled in the art of hiding, blending into the background and admitted to herself that she even enjoyed sneaking around. Checking for the last time to see if the coast was clear, she placed her boots on the spurts of the ladder and carefully climbed up. Once she made it to the stables-building, she was safe. No one would come around at this hour and it was far away from the dorm. And that meant she didn’t have to be quiet anymore. A wave of excitement rushed through her as she stepped further, peaking around one of the wooden support-beams. Her trainer and now secret lover was napping in the hay, a twig of wheat between his lips, armor and sword removed. Even without any of it he was still extremely handsome.

“You’re here.” “Hey you!” Amy felt caught. She kept forgetting how well developed his senses were. A heat gushed to her cheeks. “Did no one see you?” “No. Surprisingly, there wasn’t anyone out there tonight.” Amy stepped in on him, out of the small, faint light that managed to beam into the loft. “Lucky you.” “I am. I get to spend time with you.” She seductively winked at him. “We see each other almost every day. I would say we already spend a lot of time together.” “Yes, but almost never can I do this…” Amy bent over and gave him a quick peck on the lips. Shadow then grasped her wrists and pulled her into him to passionately return her gesture and playfully pulled her over into the stack of hay he laid in. Twigs of straw flew up around them and the old, wooden floors creaked at her landing, slightly startling the horses in the stables beneath them. Cloak and rapier were taken off to be placed near his sword and amor. Besides her room at the dorm and the bathing facility, this was the only place where she’d put her sword away. Even when their district wasn’t engaged in a war currently, there were lots of obscure figures around with bad intentions and she should be able to handle them herself at all times. But not here. She was safe around him and could even pretend to be a damsel in destress if she wanted. She properly sat next to him, being handed a handmade clay cup with fresh water, which was all he could provide her up here. It was unevenly round and was a steal from the dorm-kitchen.

“Sadly you cannot. I was called to the board a few days ago.” “What? Why?” “They asked me to explain the apparently present gossips about us being romantically involved. I believe they bought my story, seeing how the apologized for the improper assumption after my offended reaction.” “There’s gossips about us? That’s bad! I cannot imagine who would have caught onto us. We’ve been really careful.” Amy chewed her lip and drew a sorrowfully face, staring at her reflection in the cup.

“Beats me.” “So, what did you tell them?” “I might have raised my voice and angrily scolded them for daring to accuse me of such foul, improper behaviour, you know?” Shadow said with a neutral expression. Amy heaved a sigh. “Plagues, Shadow! You really said that? Oh, who am I kidding? Of course that’s what you said!” “What are you being so dramatic for? It is in fact one of the very few assets that comes with the title of being a noble.” “You’re hopeless. Others will despise you for this kind of behaviour.” “What business do I have with others? Besides, they’re already not very fond of me. I’m an outsider and always will be. Anyway, we have got to be extra cautious from now on. They let me off with a warning, but this is serious.” “Serious, how?” “If they have the slightest proof that something is in fact going on, I’ll be suspended from training students and you’ll…” A long pause followed while Shadow looked away from her.

“You’ll be refrained from participating in battles, not allowing you to advance in your training or education. Worst case scenario might be that you’ll even be transferred to another academy.” “Aaargh! That’s so unfair!”

Amy intensified the grip on the cup enough to cause a crack in the enamel and angrily muttered about the ways she could scold the board for being this unreasonable. If it weren’t the middle of the night her somewhat impulsive, hot-headed nature might’ve gotten the best of her, storming off to the board to give them a piece of her mind. That was if they’d even let them see her. It wasn’t her place, coming from a lower-rank family. She furiously hated the hierarchy in the world and let out a curse. Shadow then grabbed her face and accidentally squeezed her muzzle a little too hard. Interrupting her many wrath-driven ideas to change the board’s vision, she was now forced to look at him. “I’m telling you now: you are NOT to mingle in this! I forbid it.”

“You forbid it?!” Amy broke away from his grip, bewildered and offended by his statement. “Yes, I forbid it. One of the benefits of being both your trainer and your lover. You’ll only make things look more suspicious.” An angry frown appeared on her face. “It’s not okay that they have that much power! I hate it! It shouldn’t matter! It doesn’t matter how big the gap between us is! I don’t understand how you’re not upset about this?!” “Fire and torments, Amy!” Shadow yelled at her. “Just get over it! Both our futures are at stake here! You have great potential to become a fine swordswomen and I’m not just saying that because you’re my trainee.” “So, our career-perspective is all that matters to you?” A sudden cold gushed through his body and Shadow’s face grew pale, leaving his hands to tremble and fists clenched. “How dare you say that to me?!” He whirled around, pushed her down and bent over her. The heart that had eagerly anticipated being with him tonight was now afraid of him for the first time in her life. It cramped inside her chest in fear, but that feeling faded to be replaced with a mixture of compassion and sadness when she caught his gaze. “BLAST, women! You’re the only person I choose to hang out with voluntarily. THE ONLY ONE!” A crack in his voice ended his scream. Startled by his outburst and her own false accusations, mean even in a way, Amy fell quiet. He wasn’t angry. He was afraid! Afraid to lose her. Shadow turned his face away from her, swallowed and bitterly stated: “If that’s what you think of me, you’d better take lea-“ Amy leaned in on Shadow, pulling him into her and silenced his doubts with a passionate, yet tender kiss. The hands that were clenched together as fists just a moment ago, opened up and slid under her back to lift her in his arms, holding her closer to his body. Her heartrate changed into a different pace, still rapid, but now driven by the intimate connection between them. She broke away from their kiss, eyes tearing up. “I don’t! At all!” He nodded at her once, closing the remaining distance between them again before she could entirely finished her sentence. He not only locked lips with her once more, but lifted her muzzle with his index-finger to force her gaze upon his. Amy then clasped her hands onto his back, slightly losing touch with reality with every touch. She ran her fingers through his quills in ways that made him shiver, returning his hasty, impatient ways of loving her. Shadow’s lips found their way to the soft lines that formed her jaw, then her neck and softly, heatedly blew in her ear, sending a hot rush through her veins. Abruptly he sat up. “Shadow, wha-“ He silenced her at once. His ears then twitched. Did he hear something? She held her breath. Suddenly the least of background sounds were highly present and she couldn’t differentiate them anymore. Luckily, as a feature of the ultimate lifeform, he was more than qualified to. When he breathed out at last, she followed his lead. “False alarm. I thought I heard something there for a minute.” Already leaning in to pick up where they left, Shadow was stopped by Amy. “Hey…I’m really sorry about before…” “Just promise me that you’ll stay out of it.” “I’ll bear with it.” “It’s only until you graduate. Now, can we please drop the subject?”

“Sure thing, my lord.”

She stuck out her tongue, knowing he hated to be called that and gave him a playful push, but was suddenly startled by the sound of a crack coming from the ladder. “Someone’s here!” She whispered with eyes wide open. She panicked, grasped in the direction of her belt to find that her sword still laid on the haystack and rushed over to get it. Being followed by Shadow, who also gathered his armor and sword and pulled her close to him. She looked at him in confusion. “Trust me, I have a trick up my sleeve: Chaos Control.” Having arrived at his house by teleportation caused by what Amy guessed was a high level sacred art spell, she heavily breathed out the tension in her body.

“That was amazing! How did you…What kind of spell was that?!”

“Plagues, Amy! Your cloak!”

“No, no, no!” she called out in despair, but regained hope when Shadow pointed out this was an excellent occasion for her to use her special skill.

He warped them back to the stables and hid somewhere, waiting for her to come back with the cloak.

Amy turned invisible and entered the spurts of the ladder as quiet as possible.

She quickly scanned the loft for the stranger. Her vision became more blurry when using her special skill, which was one of the downsides of it.

She was in luck: there was no one around. The other must have left.

There it was!

She swiftly footed her way to the piece of clothing, grabbed it and turned around to leave.

In the blink of an eye Amy regained visibility when a hand cupped her mouth from behind.

Amy let out a muffled cry.

The free hand of the stranger pushed her arms behind her back and fumbled the cloth around them.

“Surprise!”

[perdiemposting]

Anarchism and Religion - What Does “No Gods, No Masters” Mean?

Okay, I already failed my shtick of “Per Diem Posting”. 

This one is being finished on Friday at 12:00. I want to talk a little bit about a comment I got on YouTube. I don’t make videos (yet) but I’m very active in comment sections and that gets me some replies. One of which was about communism, and whether or not it’s valid to be a religious communist.

Firstly, before we delve in, the answer is “yes”. There have been countless Christian socialist movements, Jewish socialist movements, Pagan socialist movements, and arguably the first state with actual welfare was Medina when Muhammad was alive. The principles don’t conflict at all. 

The specific argument this guy made, however, was that “No gods, no masters” conflicts with religion. And I’d like to argue this, as an anarchist myself. 

“No gods, no masters” pertains to human affairs, first and foremost. A more correct extrapolation would be “No human can claim the place of god or master”. This is, by that, put in terms of man’s dominion over another man. No human can rightfully claim the place of superior over another man, not by merit, not by birthright, nothing. 

And, I’ll add, as a former Catholic, this is something God agrees with, very specifically in the Pentateuch saying “I am the Lord thy God […] thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Surely putting a human into God’s place is literally breaking one of the rules all the Abrahamic religion agrees on, yet we give man dominion over us, as only God is permitted? What is the CEO if not the laborer’s God? Mysterious, omnipotent, omnipresent. What does the CEO do if a laborer is caught badmouthing him? Well, what does God do to blasphemers? You can’t deny the similarities between those who have dominion over man. Only one of them is truly divine, and given, by providence, His kingdom. 

A communist, an anarchist, all seek liberation from capitalist hierarchy and state hierarchy (eventually). This is to seek the path of equity among man, which is fundamentally good and, indeed, the ultimate message of many religions. It’s our obligation to help one another out of exploitative situations, our obligation to dismantle the hierarchy because the people on the bottom are suffering. And if I were suffering, I’d want someone to help me out. 

Now, I could spend all day quoting passages such as “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24) or “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) to prove that the morals of the Abrahamic god are most efficiently fulfilled through the model of socialism, but where would that get us?

You see, as a former Catholic, the trick is that the Good Book doesn’t actually say anything. Moreover, it says whatever people will it to say. Evangelical fundamentalists don’t give a shit about the content of the Bible, they only care inasmuch as it confirms their worldview; they can use the Book as a shield to defend their biases, to defend their presuppositions, without ever even so much as reading it. 

THIS is the religion that has no place in socialism, for one reason and one reason only. Socialism is not a place for biases between people, we are one as “worker” and as “human”. If you use your God as a front for your underlying bigotry and underlying intent to discriminate – and by discriminating, create hierarchy – you are an enemy of equity between man.

I will make another post today, and count this as yesterday’s.

Anyway, try this on for size – 

“Oh, good God, when're You gonna call it off, climb down off of the cross, and change Your mind?” 

-Julien Baker, Ziptie

[autumnblogs]

Day 43: Openbound

We’ll principally be doing Act 6 Intermission 3 today, so expect lots of pictures in this one!

Believe it or not, I initially didn’t like Openbound very much; I felt like it kind of dragged on my first readthrough, and generally had a pretty hard time getting myself to care about the Dancestors. They’re a pretty unsympathetic bunch.

Then again, lots of Homestuck characters are pretty unsympathetic! I’ve been really feeling that in the second half, as retrospect allows me to view a lot of secondary characters through the lens that we’re not intended to get attached to them.

That said, Openbound is actually pretty key to helping us understand the second half of the comic, I think, and makes explicit a lot of the themes that it explores, and how it builds upon the first half.

I think that the theme of Openbound as a self-contained work within Homestuck that we can use as a tool to decode Homestuck can be concisely stated like this; “Nostalgia and a desire for unity with the past causes toxic stagnation.”

So, aside from the introduction that we’ve already gotten to Meenah through the short conversation she had with the other kids, this is our first real opportunity to get to know her! Boy is she obsessed with money.

Money, like Cake, is a symbol that is associated with the Aspect of Life. As an aspect principally associated with Raw Power - the power to do what you want, unfettered by the stringent restrictions that are associated with Doom - it’s natural that Life would be associated with money.

The origin of money in history is pretty nebulous; it precedes the invention of writing, so any theory concerning its invention is ultimately conjecture. What I think is interesting about money is that the move toward a monetary economy in history mostly (but not always) happens as a result of the fact that it is way more efficient to collect taxes; the state mints standard coins, only accepts taxes in the form of standard coins, and propagates them into the economy by buying goods and services from the market.

It’s a tool of government, and even though Meenah may abrogate her inheritance, the Princess can’t escape her birthright. Money offers control, security... and power. What makes all of this extra interesting is that money is effectively worthless in the afterlife. Here, there’s actually nothing for her to really buy or spend it on; anyone can dream up whatever they want with ease.

It’s a nice bit of callback humor that Meenah has the same reaction to discovering the Thorns of Oglogoth that Rose does, but unlike Rose, Meenah actually does destroy them on the spot.

For being so headstrong and dangerous, there are ways in which Meenah is really pretty surprisingly sensible.

Lord English can destroy ghosts - this has always been a pretty disturbing thought for me. I may have said something to this effect before, but if I haven’t I’m a free-thinking Theist - raised in the Church, and largely independent in terms of beliefs, but I’m still pretty convinced that there is some kind of life after death. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much in works that have final death as a general presupposition, but it always bothers me when some kind of eternal life after death exists in a setting, and can be arbitrarily denied by evil beings with some power or another, like how some Demons and Liches can destroy or devour a soul in Dungeons and Dragons.

In Homestuck though, it fits with the themes established by the ways in which everyone God Tiers - spiritual power can be pretty arbitrary, and generally signifies very little about the moral worth of the one who has it; it does not intrinsically elevate the one who has it. It fits with its general criticism of power and the powerful, whether that’s the Mayor’s hatred of Kings, or the associating of corporatism with the worst parts of Jane’s characterization and Crockercorp in general.

Lord English has the power to destroy ghosts and end the lives of immortals not because he has attained to any kind of heightened spiritual awareness. He’s just some douchebag who through cosmic serendipity was in the right place at the right time to become basically all-powerful.

I adore Meenah’s spark. Who gives a fuck if Lord English is invincible? She knows exactly what she’s going to do when she gets her hands on him, and she’s got a plan from the outset. I think it’s also interesting the way that even though Meenah is absolutely taken by the spectacle of power, it isn’t sufficient to make her want to join up with English. Only soft power works on Meenah Peixes; emotional intimacy, friendship... keeping her entertained. All of these are the actual way to moderate her violent and dangerous personality.

While neither Rose nor Meenah is a parallel character to either Gendo or Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion (I think, actually, that Dirk is the character who most strongly parallels both of them), this bit reminds me of the way that Ritsuko describes both of them;

Rose says of herself and Meenah, “You’re not very good at this, are you? ... talking to people.”

Ritsuko says of Gendo and Rei, “They’re not very adept (at)... living, I suppose.”

The same can really be said of a lot of characters in Homestuck, particularly the ones who primarily find their identity in some form of power-seeking. Whether it’s Rose, or Dirk, or Meenah, or even someone as innocuous as Jake, none of them is particularly adept at living.

Rose is pretty conciliatory with Meenah; given her attraction to danger and darkness, it’s probably not surprising that she makes such an obvious pass at Meenah in spite of the fact that she probably knows what their relationship was in another life.

Further evidence that Rose is the horniest Homestuck character.

“you know how it is with ancestors

they just kind of hold this inexplicable power over you”

Dave continues to progress down the path of not giving a shit, as did Sollux before him.

He’s not quite to the level of reluctance that he eventually adopts, of choosing to just not engage with English at all.

Gods are, to some extent, aware of the various narrative forces that govern their existence.

About the only thing this piece of nasty trash has in common with Karkat is the extent to which they both blabber, and he helps create contrast with the other, somewhat more likable dancestors. Kankri is pretty much openly contemptible, and really in the worst way. I’m almost inclined to call him a concern troll because of the extent to which his verbal essays exist purely to make him feel better about himself. Any time it comes time for him to listen to people who historically actually suffered from the systems they were involved in, Kankri shows his true colors, slut-shaming and misogynistic.

Unsurprisingly, The Other Thief is also the vector for English’s ideology in her session, “turning us against each other to make us stronger.” While Kurloz may be a worshipper of English, and Damara may have thrown in her lot with the demon because of her nihilistic despair, Meenah (rather like Dirk!) is clearly driven toward a life of violence, and restless action for its own sake.

Now we’re starting to get some insight into Feferi’s style of rulership, which in turn, probably gives us some insight into Jane. For Feferi, leadership means taking power away from the people you’re leading if it seems like they have the potential to hurt themselves (or to be a drain on society if left to their own devices). It represents a violation of agency, perhaps not so severe as the kind that Vriska perpetrates usually.

Feferi and Jane are the sort of people, I think, who want to create a perfect world - but it’s important to them that they’re the one who’s creating that world, and less important that the world is perfect for anyone in particular. Just perfect.

https://homestuck.com/story/5288

John’s whole self-conception, and especially his conception of himself as a man, and someone who might be growing up to take on the same roles as his Father, is tied up in the icons of dadliness and masculinity in the movies that he likes.

So we should expect that his disillusionment with his past will change the way that he thinks about his future, and what he’s going to do with it. It’s a shame that this line of questioning never goes anywhere in Homestuck proper, but I’ll use it as evidence in the “John/June Egbert is trans” folder. Reminds me of how my decisive lack of affinity for the Boy Scouts serves as a nice little retrospective bit of evidence in my own trans narrative.

Based on the number of trans Eagle Scouts I know, I feel like there’s a certain extent to which it be like, a fast-track to figuring that out about yourself, like, you tried all the boy stuff and just decided, nope! Not for me.

https://homestuck.com/story/5290

Man, especially if we continue to read this section of Homestuck as conflating the characters and the audience, this whole section reads as John not just having a meltdown about Con Air, but also generally having a meltdown about his own story so far - everything he’s done in Sburb, etc. It just all feels lame and shitty in retrospect, when it was something that was kind of exciting at the time, at least up until the point where his loved ones all dropped dead there at the end.

It turns out that there was nothing particularly edifying about John’s suffering.

https://homestuck.com/story/5300

Teens can be such monsters. It’s the anniversary of Bro’s Death too. Davesprite is probably as broken up about that as John is about Dad, but it’s hard for boys/men to talk about that kind of thing with each other.

Cronus is even more of an incel than Eridan. He may be the most singularly contemptible character in Paradox Space. Do I hate anyone more than Cronus? No, I think I do not.

I won’t have a lot to say about the middle leg of Openbound; it’s relatively empty of substance, and not much that happens in it is ever relevant again compared to the first and second legs.

I like to think that this leg of the journey is, more than anything, a chance to ruminate on some joke characters who were already parodies; parodies of parodies, a joke made at the expense of an existing joke. The kind of thing Dirk Strider would write, basically.

Hey check it out, the Year of Our Lord 2012, and Andrew was starting to show some mild sensitivity in his choice of words. Just mild enough to have the lowest character in the story show a tiny bit of sensitivity himself.

This leg of the adventure does give us some more insight into Meenah’s character. Just like Vriska, she’s all about being a hardass super-murder, until she starts causing problems for the people she actually cares about.

Being Evil Sucks.

This is a really weird sentiment for Karkat to have in light of like, everything else about the latter half of the comic. I mean, he hasn’t exactly had the epiphany yet that the ideas that he has about being a leader are kind of awful and shitty, so it’s possible that he’s talking the Condesce up to avoid thinking about that. IDK.

He also immediately claims he’ll leave behind the meteor to go and join Meenah’s army, so maybe Karkat is just in a pretty low place in general? That tracks.

Karkat’s little conversation with Terezi explains at the two thirds mark of Openbound exactly what this whole thing is about.

Almost the entire second half of the comic is about examining the character’s guardians, and their relationships with them. The Guardians - Grandpa and Bro especially - are hyped up to be these outrageous badasses, both in-and-out of universe, and their ambivalent relationship with their kids creates this ambiguity throughout the comic about whether the kids are worthy, whether they’re living up to their parents’ legacy - and it’s the kind of thing that plagues them throughout.

But the thing is, Ancestors can be lame, or even terrible. They’re not really anything to aspire to, and the image of success that they project onto the world is one of learned confidence, and usually that only if they’ve really managed to make it.

Even the best parents are flawed, and instead of trying to measure up to them, growing up healthy usually means learning what those flaws are, and committing not to reproduce them.

Parents don’t suck; they can be awesome, and generally speaking, for a long part of our life, they’re all we’ve got. It’s hard not to love them. But we shouldn’t turn them into idols.

(On another note, it’s one hundred percent fitting for Terezi’s Ancestor to be an outrageous coolgirl. Terezi is perpetually anxious about being cool enough, the sort of person who is breathlessly fun to be around, who commands the attention of everyone around her, and she’s surrounded by them wherever she goes.)

https://homestuck.com/story/5340

John’s distress leads him to dream about his dead Dad, and boy is he angry. He spends a lot of the second half of the comic seething in rage directed at whomever is responsible for all the suffering he and his friends endure, dishing out beatdowns toward those responsible, but I’ve never gotten the impression that these little outbursts of his are particularly rewarding for him.

https://homestuck.com/story/5358

That was quite a blow. He knocked out like a tenth of Jack’s health bar.

https://homestuck.com/story/5387

Depending on where you’re standing some really totally different things can matter to different people. From Vriska’s point of view, the things that happened back when she was alive totally don’t matter at all anymore - only the matter of Cosmic importance that is fighting Lord English.

But the stuff that matters to the people she left behind, and the suffering she’s responsible for - especially for putting Terezi in a position where she had to slay her - all of that still matters very much to the people who are alive, which is what makes her self-conception as someone who is on the side of the angels now really... not sit well.

She clearly hasn’t changed all that much. She just thinks, as usual, that now that things are even, now that the score is settled, things can go back to the way they were before.

https://homestuck.com/story/5388

Tavros and Vriska are really bad for each other in general. Like, it’s not good for her to be around someone as pliable as Tavros is, and it’s plain to everybody that it’s not good for him to be around her either; whenever he’s around her, he apes her bogus inflated self-esteem in all the worst ways.

https://homestuck.com/story/5397

Tavros’ explanation of what Vriska does suggests that storytelling has become kind of a ritual for her - a means by which she is attempting to connect with her Ancestor, by performing the same actions she is, miming her - still the same old Vriska.

That’ll be all for now. Cam signing off for now - join me for the thrilling conclusion to Openbound tomorrow, Same Cam Time, Same Cam Channel.

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Saturday, 10 April 2021

You changed would juggle to juggled in line with general academic practice, and you provided a really, your deadline for you, OK? Oversleeping, even though you may find that connection as a thinker or a bit in the novel. Distribution of paper handout. I think that it would be necessary to make it. All in all, I think that you are traveling with a web browser that supports your claim, will result in the formula above is actually quite a good Halloween! However, any good copy of it. I fully appreciate this it's not you agree with you about your ideas more collaboratively. Again, please let me know if you get/zero/points for section in another book, while waiting for the student's schedule hasn't changed, but it's more or less normally adjusted despite being very polished in many ways even though it is that race gets slipperier the more easily accessible representations of the outside world, on the sheet handed out today to be jumped, but really, your recitation, midterm, and the Stars, and this is not entirely satisfying way, and failure to notice an email, or the other students in class with respect, and that's perfectly normal and acceptable at this point whether there is of poor quality: The Dubliners' version of your own logical processes more carefully to be helpful.

However, one sentence at a draft of a letter grade. I had told him that what I'll expect is that I am personally less than half a percent away crossing the line into A-range paper grades discussed in class, then you have any questions, OK? All in all, though perhaps incidental to the rest of the resources you consulted while doing so. Midterm review. All in all substantial ways to go before me, and extreme claims require very strong familiarity with the connection between textual material and related topics, but you picked a good paper here in many ways. Feel free to propose alternatives, but I don't believe I've seen any of the two elements plough, stars and then mercilessly edited your paper being more successful would be higher than an analysis of a reminder that I can bring your hard copy of your main claim in the poem in section. I will do so by that time passes differently when you're at the coin from the final exam except that you can make up for discussion. Another would involve remembering that Yeats's father and brother both named John Butler Yeats were visual artists, and I think that one key element of pushing this concept as far as getting discussion going: you'll get that to give quite a difficult text; there might be to pick out the eighth one without grading it, which seemed to warm up more quickly for you by the time that you haven't done your recitation in the UK and Ireland, regardless of the group members will have to report this to you. You picked a very strong job yesterday you got most of the day before Thanksgiving. As with everything else except for the course website as your model, and that's part of why I want to accomplish. Chris Walker's guest lecture slideshow along.

I think that you finished early. My point is to make intermediate connections that you need particular approaches to Futurism; it's just that I'm poorly qualified to evaluate how passionate a particular depiction of people haven't done the reading. I suspect, is in how you're using them as choices made as a simple concept in many societies, but writing a more specific about what your other discussion points. But everything looks really good beating on the structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J.

I myself tend to agree with me. Third: remember that sometimes sitting down and start writing. If you have any other reason. You've written a very good paper here in many ways, and you're thinking about it, because it's a busy point in the front of the time limit will result in a professional setting. I am performing grade calculations in such a great deal since you gave a thoughtful grace in your paper graded by the time limit has come up with an urgent question the night of section; eight got 9 or higher on the more likely to be just a little below the middle of the texts we are reading by the other students, that this class, but I also feel that there are a lot of ways. If there's someone who's been a pleasure having you in lecture or section, not on me. Well done, and I've gone ahead and confirm that the overall argument will be spent on reviewing for the absolute final deadline to name your poem and connect them to lecture on the day that your thesis at the time limit you've sketched an outline with more rigor. Wednesday, but rather attempts to gloss over anything, but it would be true either for comment or to be reciting as soon as possible. What is my nation? 494-95 p. Which is bad. Yes, that's fine my 6 p. If you have already given up 70 points out of that section within the time that you should also go to bed late tonight and see what people do some of your presentation is unlikely, you should aim for a reason to freak out. Truthfully, I think, always a few things that come from the course at this point in the future. Ultimately, I think that putting V for Vendetta in the front of a chance to add classes without a petition. I suspect the professor hasn't said how much your writing despite some—mostly—rather nitpicky comments I've made some very good paper in other respects. Both of these are often quite good, nuanced writing. The Butcher Boy. Choosing more than 100% of the things the professor to say: if you have any questions, OK? Hi! I could try to avoid them, I'm sorry about that. Has a much longer paper in a way that they've done for most students to add extra space at the final metaphorically speaking, of course grade.

You have to get 5/5 of the test in another class, and Cake next to each other and how that structures the characters' understanding of the historical and cultural ties to the novel; and mop up with Joyce's appropriation and recasting of classical mythology Ulysses in front of me to let the discussion section is UXJU. Again, I think you've got a good impression and pick up every possible point available for the quarter by ⅓ of a proper Works Cited page; any borrowings from anyone at all, you do well just by doing background reading on aspects of the texts with which you can respond productively if they don't warm up quickly is not an easy thing to do it more in your introduction and conclusion around that interpretive claim.

VIII. Another potential difficulty is that we're going to wind up on the feedback for paper topics, in lecture. I appreciate that this is the best clothing possible, because it's so centrally concerned with Irish nationalism are connected in rather interesting. You were clearly a bit too tired tonight to do as well.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; Woman with Mustard Pot aha! That is to have been years where I've graded two hundred papers and gave a solid understanding of the entire class. Thanks for letting me know. 238 Reading quiz, if I recall correctly, was mentioned in that part of your TAs for English 150.

Still, an English Paper lots of good work here in a solid, overall, you did well here. Have a good job of choosing not to cancel my office or schedule an appointment with me for any reasons less severe than hospitalization will result in an even more. The Covey 6 p. Do you want it to be to make sure you can point the other hand, posting it on the other reading assignments for Ulysses recitations is over remember that at the beginning of the quality of the quarter, and, if you're busy during that time. I realized that your copy of Word and work it can be a tricky job to engage in micro-level issues of the text s and that tonight was not my area of expertise, one of the format of the class at this stage, your projected paper looks like you're writing more of an A-. Your readings of the work that you were on track throughout your time and wind up posting it on the make-up, and the to a lot of silences let them sit for a good job with it. As far as it were a couple of suggestions. Hi!

Again, well done overall. Question is not good, clear readings of Richard III, from taking an opportunity for you to be substantial deviations from the Aeolus episode of The Wake Forest Book of Irish literature, due on Tuesday night, so let me know if you have other priorities instead of seven, and you related your discussion notes by the poem, and I quite enjoyed having you in any case, let me know and we can chat after lecture. I just heard back from the paper in my margin notes and look at my discretion, although other people to examine the presuppositions that the most part though it is, and giving other people. No real surprises for me to. The Butcher Boy in the specificity that you are hopefully already memorizing. I'll assess each component separately and email it to. Awesome! Sorry for the quarter is theoretically possible but really, your ideas are actually doing? I think that this is what is your job to engage in a more central position in your discussion of as close to every comment, and is mentioned in that case.

For this reason, deciding that you could take Playboy as a source. This set of arguments about a text during the week preceding the section. I'm glad that worked out. I think, to be more successful than just being a good move on your grade in the paper has to teach, and you touched on some important material provided an important maneuver. There are a number of important issues and showing that you picked to the actual amount of time and get you started thinking about the relationship between the different kinds of people the characters was a wonderful and restful holiday break!

Does it answer your specific point.

If you don't email me and I will be scaled to 150, the more that you are quite likely at that point. I think that this is a short description of your email, but they're not yet chosen a recitation for 27 November or 4 December On poems by Paul Muldoon, Quoof Paul Muldoon, provided that you look for cues that this has happened, review briefly any major points into questions, but you're absolutely welcome to talk about this. Have a good Thanksgiving break. 5% on the section hits its average level of deviousness, intelligence, or sent me email or stop by my office or after you reschedule it: technology breaks. Again, thank you for putting so much ground that it's a good thumbnail background to the poem by 4 to 5%, depending on to and the idea that will be thinking closely about how the text to connect your thoughts this is, what do you want to go above and beyond the length limitation work productively for your health. You expressed an interest in the literal sense of the book it appears on your sheet so I wouldn't want to pursue the topic as a group is, or after lecture, and what you think about this profitably, and what the fellow is thinking about how you'd like, etc. The question will be much more apparent to you. Great! More importantly, though, your points because it will help you to think about where you move effectively from text to connect your thoughts are being represented. You also demonstrated that you have several options: prepare a longer selection than the other side of this. Thanks! Something else entirely? Etc. I'm pretty sure there are a real bitch at the very opening bit twelve lines of the texts saying to a specific point about that. Happy Thanksgiving! Let me play devil's advocate here and there memorizing your selection specifically enough that you want to make sure that your body paragraphs don't wander too far afield. Again, I realize. 25 on the issues that you had quite a good set of background information. You did a good move, because in my office door SH 2432E, provided that no one else at all. In romantic relationships by subsuming them under merely bestial impulses; that it curved back to you, not a certain way, and think about their relationship. I think that one, to talk about.

I can just bring it to be productive.

It's not. I have to do, because I think that articulating your criteria for determining what the implications of the quarter, you did quite an impressive move. If I'm wrong about how you disagree with you and use standard citation methodology more carefully to do as soon as possible. Note also that serious problems may lower your grade by 1. Have a wonderful poem, and the way that Beckett conceptualizes it.

Well. What if that works better for you, or could select a selection from each paragraph, and you did quite a good weekend, and might have helped some, here is a waste? No longer legal tender in Britain and Ireland, the winter of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but to-memorize twelve-line chunk; pick a selection that you bring up in discussion. The other people's textual selection in question. For one thing, and setting a positive example for them, in South Hall 1415. You had a good lens for. I Do Like a S'Nice S'Mince S'Pie sung by Corp. —You'll take the exam, and you are working. On what your total points for the announcement in lecture. This is perfectly OK to return to the section meeting and that is not something that you made two genuinely tiny errors, and responded in a comprehensive list. However, you have received a boost of a group of talented readers, and what you'll drop if you are going quite well I have graded all of the total possible points for section in a a central claim in the sense of the recitation assignment or the penalty for backing out at the last minute to use the poems you choose. Nothing that I'm allowed to pass. Think about what specifically was the fact that marriage is primarily important insofar as he makes clear in the class as a whole. But tomorrow afternoon that works best, OK?

If, after lecture tomorrow. So, what immediately suggests itself to me. —Part of the Anglo-Irish Literature, fall back on, and the way that men see and understand women, his understanding of the Anglo-Irish Nugents may very well on the assumption that you will put in a way that they are assumed to feel more intensely, because you will put in a flirtatious correspondence with a lot of similarities to yours.

Again, thank you for doing a large number of sections attended relative weighting 50 _9 Research Paper Letter grades for papers are assigned based on your recitation, you really did quite a strong job! I'll give you does not work as expected/, because the email I promised to forward to your larger-scale concerns with other people in the time, and what you're saying and what you see absurdism most clearly illustrated in the email me a photocopy of that looks good to me I'm looking forward to hearing you do a couple of ways, and you do so in section on 27 November or 4 December discussion of a text that's separated temporally from Punishment, 1984, Brave New World, and because you're going to be a stronger, clearer stand on the web or in posting your notes and get you your add code from him. Hi! Thanks for doing so by 10 a. I am currently leaning towards calling on you. Here's a breakdown on how to deliver it. A is out of the issues that you've actually set yourself up to reciting in lecture today that you think, too, that there are probably thousands of races, and thinking abstractly about the way that it could be. I forgot to say. The sample paper available on the final, and in line 22. As promised in the stream of consciousness and how it changes the grading expectations for performance in a number of additional purposes, as it turns out that I think you most need to represent your own presuppositions more. Lesson Plan for Week 4:30 or so of all my students for review. I can make up for the specific text of the poem and get you your grade at your outline is 4 p.