#classes journalists into different “species’ | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dullgecko · 3 months ago

Note

(Journalist Riz)

When Riz gets nominated for an award, he gets a plus one to the ceremony. Who do you think Riz would invite?

As much as he loves them all, I think Riz would probably either pick Sklonda, Adaine or Gorgug; depending on who is available. Maybe Fabian, but it all depends. Fig and Kristen are no gos.

Riz had gotten home before his mom that day, stopping by the mailbox in the lobby of the appartment to grab their mail before heading upstairs. It was mostly junk mail, a couple of bills (which he pocketed so he could pay them himself before his mom saw them) and weirdly enough a letter addressed directly to him.

It was suspicious. No one ever sent him letters. Riz flipped it over in his hand to look at the back (no return address, hand delivered obviously) before he felt the envelope between his fingers. Noting the weird texture and thickness of whatever was inside before giving a slight bend. Whatever it was had multiple pages enclosed plus at least one or two pages that were shorter than the edges of the rest.... this warranted some investigation. He wasn't about to open a weird letter without checking it for traps first.

Once he was securely in his apartment he placed the envelope on the kitchen table, first trying detect magic before starting on the usual trap-detection routine he had to go through every time he got an info packet from his rogue classes. The goblin found nothing. It was just a normal, untrapped, suspicious letter.

Now that he was relatively sure it wouldn't explode in his face he ripped it open, Riz digging one of his sharp claws under the flap an tearing a neat line along the top so he could access the contents. He slid the thinner pieces of paper out first, surprised that he was holding two glossy VIP tickets to an award ceremony in Bastion City in his hand. The letter that accompanied them getting unfolded and read quickly as he searched for the reason why.

Oh.... well. Wow okay.

He glanced at the tickets again, quickly digging out his crystal so he could bring up the website for the ceremony and scroll through the list of nominees. Yep. There he was. 'Riz Gukgak - nominated for his piece exposing the unethical hunting of sapient species for level grinding in the Mountains of Chaos'.

There was a fairly substantial cash prize if he won too and he honestly didn't think he'd ever held that much money in one go before (saved for the cursed coins in Kalvaxus's hoard, and that didn't count in his mind).

The rogue flopped heavily onto his couch, still clutching the letter and tickets in one hand and his crystal in the other while he stared at the ceiling. Sure he was aware his article had been popular, the Bastion City Newspaper having bought it from him for a decent amount of money, but he didn't think it was that good. He'd written it on a whim, something he'd discovered incidentally while working a different job for the LPRTF that had left him with a lot of information buzzing around in his head but nowhere to put it other than into an article. This was... wild.

He glanced at the letter and tickets again, holding them up and snapping a photo before sending a text with the picture to his mom.

//Hey. I've been nominated for an award. You free Thursday night next week? They sent me a ticket for a plus one.//

//Honey thats amazing! Of course! I'll let work know I won't be free. We can discuss details when we get home. I'm so PROUD of you.//

Riz laughed, flicking over to the group chat as well to update his friends and getting a swarm of similar texts, though they were more packed with emojis than his mothers had been. It had been Fig that noticed the second ticket, the archdevil reposting the picture into the chat after circling the extra ticket in red.

//Omg who are you taking as your plus one?! Do you have someone you want to ask out maybe? >:3//

//No. Dude. I've already asked my mom.//

//Lol figured. You'll have to tell us how it goes! Down to the second updates.//

The next few days had been hectic. Between school and work he had barely any downtime as it was but Fabian had insisted he get a new suit for the ceremony. Riz had protested that his normal suits were fine but he apparently had no say in the matter, the half elf saying it was a gift to congratulate him on his success and basically dragging him from store to store in his quest for the best. The girls had kidnapped his mom though, something he found out after he got home (arms overloaded with a new suit, and shoes, and socks, and cufflinks) and found his mother in a similar state of overwhelemed overshopped exhaustion surrounded by her own pile of clothes.

And so the day of the awards ceremony came, Sklonda getting a little teary eyed on seeing Riz in his outfit because he looked so much like his father. They were hustled quickly into the dark theatre once they arrived, the pair of them sitting through nearly an hour of speeches and awards before Riz's own catagory was announced.

He felt a little out of his own body when they announced that he'd won, heavy feet making their way up onto the stage to accept his award and cheque and got ready to make his speech. The rogue blinking in surprise when he noticed his party seated near the far back of the room waving wildly at him as he gave them a confused look.

Of course they were here. He shouldn't have ever doubted that they WOULD be. Between Fabians connections and Figs ability to get into places she shouldn't there was no way they'd miss out on this.

Riz shook his head in amusement, giving them a small wave back before clearing his throat to speak. Having to take a few seconds before he was finally able to get the words out.

#fantasy high #riz gukgak

26 notes · View notes

betterbemeta · 11 months ago

Text

As it is right now, machine learning image generation is classist. It depends strongly on the human audience's eye for pareidolia to smooth over its inconsistencies and find patterns in its noise where its procedural generation falls short.

This means that the less opportunity a person has to gain context for information, the more likely 'AI art' is to be convincing. As long as that person has been given a baseline to 'believe' the general arrangement of elements, AI art will 'make sense' even if that baseline is just exposure to more acontextual imagery. Which is what the machine learning's algorithms were trained on in the first place.

For example, 'AI' right now struggles to coherently depict plants. When it's not blurry, indistinct plant fur, leaves from different kinds of plants appear on the same stem, plants from the wrong biome are included in 'nature' images. Someone who has very little educational opportunity, but has seen movies where people walk through jungles or forests as set pieces or something, might not notice the difference. And why do you 'need' to know if the plants look right, poor person; you'll never leave your immediate area or take a biology class!

Someone without the opportunity or comfort to travel might not recognize that a cityscape has been artificially generated, depicts no actual real-world city. Is that supposed picture of Dubai or New York City or Cairo showing a real place that exists? Who cares, you're too poor to ever go there.

Searching for information about animal species, even, can get messed up by generated 'content.' Do servals have ear tufts? What kind of insect is that? What species of lizard or snake am I looking at? You don't deserve to know what kinds of animals are real. What time do you have to go to a zoo, if there's even one around you?

The less money you have, the more likely you are to be surrounded by advertising and "AI Art" is ideal for advertising because it only tells a very simple story at best. There's no complicated human emotions; its literally made of averages of what has been seen before. Marketing and advertising content often replaces actual art that might be a window into a greater world. It may even just be dropped in there to fill the awkward silence or blankness that would have otherwise surrounded marketing efforts-- commercials would be surreal without some say-nothing 'music' track behind them, and billboards would be creepy without the graphic noise that surrounds the product and its information. Someone who passes through more monetized public spaces per day will see more of it than someone who inhabits private property.

And like, at the end of the day if you are wealthy... you probably don't care about any of this. You have access to whatever you want, so why do you care what's real? You trust you can 'pay for' the real thing, right?

Plus, who knows the economic status of who generated imagery the machine learning algorithms train on? It's all stolen.

Photography has been critical in modern history for bringing 'the world' across social divisions of class, race, geographical divides. Photographers and filmmakers, along with other visual artists as well as musicians, writers, and journalists associated with all of these disciplines give us lenses, framing, voices, and perspectives to understand our greater world no matter where we are. Hell, identifying the human intentions BEHIND those lenses, framings, voices is key to our development. No matter your circumstances, with a strong grasp of media literacy anyone can sit down and say, wait a minute, is this real, would it be true for me too? Or is this someone's point of view?

To the point of view of wealth and capital, the working class and those without wealth who cannot work (disabled people, displaced people, homeless people shut out of employment, and more) do not deserve to know about reality. To that point of view, nonwealthy people don't deserve to even know who created the perspectives they're allowed to see. You can be born, get trained to work, go to work, come home to the minimum, repeat, and die having seen no images of reality for all they care. They'd like that! How can you dream of something outside the current exploitative structure if you can't even trust you know what plants and animals and cities look like, outside your tiny box?

#long post #AI art #machine learning #something something the matrix

37 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping"

On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96

What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog).

The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that also written, and which was born in machine-readable form.

This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/

The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way are often unreachable (anonymous or pseudonymous) or impractical to reach (because there's millions of them). The linguists who study this speech will go through institutional review board approvals to make sure that as they produce aggregate accounts of speech, they don't compromise the privacy or integrity of their subjects.

Computational linguistics is an unalloyed good, and while the speakers whose words are scraped to produce the raw material that these scholars study, they probably wouldn't object, either.

But what about entities that explicitly object to being scraped? Sometimes, it's good to scrape them, too.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has scraped every website it could find, storing snapshots of every page it found in a giant, searchable database called the Wayback Machine. Many of us have used the Wayback Machine to retrieve some long-deleted text, sound, image or video from the internet's memory hole.

For the most part, the Internet Archive limits its scraping to websites that permit it. The robots exclusion protocol (AKA robots.txt) makes it easy for webmasters to tell different kinds of crawlers whether or not they are welcome. If your site has a robots.txt file that tells the Archive's crawler to buzz off, it'll go elsewhere.

Mostly.

Since 2017, the Archive has started ignoring robots.txt files for news services; whether or not the news site wants to be crawled, the Archive crawls it and makes copies of the different versions of the articles the site publishes. That's because news sites – even the so-called "paper of record" – have a nasty habit of making sweeping edits to published material without noting it.

I'm not talking about fixing a typo or a formatting error: I'm talking about making a massive change to a piece, one that completely reverses its meaning, and pretending that it was that way all along:

https://medium.com/@brokenravioli/proof-that-the-new-york-times-isn-t-feeling-the-bern-c74e1109cdf6

This happens all the time, with major news sites from all around the world:

http://newsdiffs.org/examples/

By scraping these sites and retaining the different versions of their article, the Archive both detects and prevents journalistic malpractice. This is canonical fair use, the kind of copying that almost always involves overriding the objections of the site's proprietor. Not all adversarial scraping is good, but this sure is.

There's an argument that scraping the news-sites without permission might piss them off, but it doesn't bring them any real harm. But even when scraping harms the scrapee, it is sometimes legitimate – and necessary.

Austrian technologist Mario Zechner used the API from country's super-concentrated grocery giants to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. By assembling a longitudinal data-set, Zechner exposed the raft of dirty tricks the grocers used to rip off the people of Austria.

From shrinkflation to deceptive price-cycling that disguised price hikes as discounts:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071627182734180

Zechner feared publishing his results at first. The companies whose thefts he'd discovered have enormous power and whole kennelsful of vicious attack-lawyers they can sic on him. But he eventually got the Austrian competition bureaucracy interested in his work, and they published a report that validated his claims and praised his work:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071673594791946

Emboldened, Zechner open-sourced his monitoring tool, and attracted developers from other countries. Soon, they were documenting ripoffs in Germany and Slovenia, too:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071485142332765

Zechner's on a roll, but the grocery cartel could shut him down with a keystroke, simply by blocking his API access. If they do, Zechner could switch to scraping their sites – but only if he can be protected from legal liability for nonconsensually scraping commercially sensitive data in a way that undermines the profits of a powerful corporation.

Zechner's work comes at a crucial time, as grocers around the world turn the screws on both their suppliers and their customers, disguising their greedflation as inflation. In Canada, the grocery cartel – led by the guillotine-friendly hereditary grocery monopolilst Galen Weston – pulled the most Les Mis-ass caper imaginable when they illegally conspired to rig the price of bread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

We should scrape all of these looting bastards, even though it will harm their economic interests. We should scrape them because it will harm their economic interests. Scrape 'em and scrape 'em and scrape 'em.

Now, it's one thing to scrape text for scholarly purposes, or for journalistic accountability, or to uncover criminal corporate conspiracies. But what about scraping to train a Large Language Model?

Yes, there are socially beneficial – even vital – uses for LLMs.

Take HRDAG's work on truth and reconciliation in Colombia. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a tiny nonprofit that makes an outsized contribution to human rights, by using statistical methods to reveal the full scope of the human rights crimes that take place in the shadows, from East Timor to Serbia, South Africa to the USA:

https://hrdag.org/

HRDAG's latest project is its most ambitious yet. Working with partner org Dejusticia, they've just released the largest data-set in human rights history:

https://hrdag.org/jep-cev-colombia/

What's in that dataset? It's a merger and analysis of more than 100 databases of killings, child soldier recruitments and other crimes during the Colombian civil war. Using a LLM, HRDAG was able to produce an analysis of each killing in each database, estimating the probability that it appeared in more than one database, and the probability that it was carried out by a right-wing militia, by government forces, or by FARC guerrillas.

This work forms the core of ongoing Colombian Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, and has been instrumental in demonstrating that the majority of war crimes were carried out by right-wing militias who operated with the direction and knowledge of the richest, most powerful people in the country. It also showed that the majority of child soldier recruitment was carried out by these CIA-backed, US-funded militias.

This is important work, and it was carried out at a scale and with a precision that would have been impossible without an LLM. As with all of HRDAG's work, this report and the subsequent testimony draw on cutting-edge statistical techniques and skilled science communication to bring technical rigor to some of the most important justice questions in our world.

LLMs need large bodies of text to train them – text that, inevitably, is scraped. Scraping to produce LLMs isn't intrinsically harmful, and neither are LLMs. Admittedly, nonprofits using LLMs to build war crimes databases do not justify even 0.0001% of the valuations that AI hypesters ascribe to the field, but that's their problem.

Scraping is good, sometimes – even when it's done against the wishes of the scraped, even when it harms their interests, and even when it's used to train an LLM.

But.

Scraping to violate peoples' privacy is very bad. Take Clearview AI, the grifty, sleazy facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos in order to train a system that they sell to cops, corporations and authoritarian governments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

Likewise: scraping to alienate creative workers' labor is very bad. Creators' bosses are ferociously committed to firing us all and replacing us with "generative AI." Like all self-declared "job creators," they constantly fantasize about destroying all of our jobs. Like all capitalists, they hate capitalism, and dream of earning rents from owning things, not from doing things.

The work these AI tools sucks, but that doesn't mean our bosses won't try to fire us and replace us with them. After all, prompting an LLM may produce bad screenplays, but at least the LLM doesn't give you lip when you order to it give you "ET, but the hero is a dog, and there's a love story in the second act and a big shootout in the climax." Studio execs already talk to screenwriters like they're LLMs.

That's true of art directors, newspaper owners, and all the other job-destroyers who can't believe that creative workers want to have a say in the work they do – and worse, get paid for it.

So how do we resolve these conundra? After all, the people who scrape in disgusting, depraved ways insist that we have to take the good with the bad. If you want accountability for newspaper sites, you have to tolerate facial recognition, too.

When critics of these companies repeat these claims, they are doing the companies' work for them. It's not true. There's no reason we couldn't permit scraping for one purpose and ban it for another.

The problem comes when you try to use copyright to manage this nuance. Copyright is a terrible tool for sorting out these uses; the limitations and exceptions to copyright (like fair use) are broad and varied, but so "fact intensive" that it's nearly impossible to say whether a use is or isn't fair before you've gone to court to defend it.

But copyright has become the de facto regulatory default for the internet. When I found someone impersonating me on a dating site and luring people out to dates, the site advised me to make a copyright claim over the profile photo – that was their only tool for dealing with this potentially dangerous behavior.

The reasons that copyright has become our default tool for solving every internet problem are complex and historically contingent, but one important point here is that copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away. For that reason, corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power than the company to sign away their copyrights.

This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright (scope, duration, penalties), we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Many creative workers are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement for scraping their data and using it to train a model. If those cases go to trial, it's likely the creators will lose. The questions of whether making temporary copies or subjecting them to mathematical analysis infringe copyright are well-settled:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market

I'm pretty sure that the lawyers who organized these cases know this, and they're betting that the AI companies did so much sleazy shit while scraping that they'll settle rather than go to court and have it all come out. Which is fine – I relish the thought of hundreds of millions in investor capital being transferred from these giant AI companies to creative workers. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.

Because if we do end up changing copyright law – or the daily practice of the copyright sector – to create exclusive rights over scraping and training, it's not going to get creators paid. If we give individual creators new rights to bargain with, we're just giving them new rights to bargain away. That's already happening: voice actors who record for video games are now required to start their sessions by stating that they assign the rights to use their voice to train a deepfake model:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

But that doesn't mean we have to let the hyperconcentrated entertainment sector alienate creative workers from their labor. As the WGA has shown us, creative workers aren't just LLCs with MFAs, bargaining business-to-business with corporations – they're workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Workers get a better deal with labor law, not copyright law. Copyright law can augment certain labor disputes, but just as often, it benefits corporations, not workers:

https://locusmag.com/2019/05/cory-doctorow-steering-with-the-windshield-wipers/

Likewise, the problem with Clearview AI isn't that it infringes on photographers' copyrights. If I took a thousand pictures of you and sold them to Clearview AI to train its model, no copyright infringement would take place – and you'd still be screwed. Clearview has a privacy problem, not a copyright problem.

Giving us pseudocopyrights over our faces won't stop Clearview and its competitors from destroying our lives. Creating and enforcing a federal privacy law with a private right action will. It will put Clearview and all of its competitors out of business, instantly and forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

AI companies say, "You can't use copyright to fix the problems with AI without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right. But what they fail to mention is, "You can use labor law to ban certain uses of AI without creating that collateral damage."

Facial recognition companies say, "You can't use copyright to ban scraping without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right too – but what they don't say is, "On the other hand, a privacy law would put us out of business and leave all the good scraping intact."

Taking entertainment companies and AI vendors and facial recognition creeps at their word is helping them. It's letting them divide and conquer people who value the beneficial elements and those who can't tolerate the harms. We can have the benefits without the harms. We just have to stop thinking about labor and privacy issues as individual matters and treat them as the collective endeavors they really are:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Here's a link to the podcast:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450_-_How_To_Think_About_Scraping.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Image: syvwlch (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Print_Scraper_(5856642549).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

80 notes · View notes

moonpains · 6 months ago

Text

Name: August Choi Occupation: Journalist for an online horror webzine Age: 29 Sexuality: Lesbian Species: Born werewolf Pack?: Eventide Hometown: Seoul, South Korea Relationship Status: Single Personality Traits: Stoic, Studious, Self Loathing, Fearful, Caring, Soft, Tired

Biography:

Born in the Autumn of ninety-five a baby is welcomed to the Choi family, a baby girl. A new generation for their pack, a child they could mold and train to be the successor of a long line. All they had to do was ensure they worked hard enough to ensure Sung-mi would come out victorious as the next Alpha, despite not being a male. She grows healthy and strong. Determined and dedicated. Always ready to follow her father’s instructions. To stay up late and work tirelessly to be the best in her classes. She will be alpha, she will make her parents proud. Except as she starts getting older, certain things feel wrong. About her and where her eyes stray.

By the age of thirteen, Sung-mi realizes that she doesn’t always feel like she fits. It’s still answered and accepted, but she doesn’t feel the best when she hears it, being called ‘she and her’ being referred to as a girl. Secondly, she starts realizing just how pretty the girls in her class are, how pretty the girls in the pack are. One in particular. She doesn’t know when she starts crushing on Ji-na, her best friend and packmate. The slightly older girl marvels her. She’s sweet and courageous, and the most beautiful girl she thinks she has ever seen. She keeps it to herself, her parents have ideas of who she’ll be with after all.

An aggressive boy, someone all the other girls seem to want. She finds him appalling, but she obeys their wishes. And so it goes, she dates Min-ho like her parents want, and keeps her feelings of who she feels she is to herself.

When she is sixteen something happens, a spark of joy, they’re tracking through the woods, getting ready for a festival, when Ji-na kisses her. It’s like the world hits pause, it feels right, it feels like home. Her lips are softer than Min-ho’s could ever hope to be. After that evening they decide to start a relationship in private and she exposes all of her secrets to her. Ji-na is the first to call her ‘them’ and it’s just as exciting almost as much as her calling them her prince upon their next meeting. No one seems the wiser, and the connection pushes them to try harder in their training. They will win and when they do there will be a change. Their secret stops being a secret though and Min-ho isn’t pleased.

A coup is planned by the angered boy, something he works on obsessively. They are twenty-one. Have been with Ji-na for five years, and they are happy and in love. Whispered promises that they won’t always have to hide. Promises she won’t have to see them with Min-ho for the rest of their lives. Everything is comfortable. No one seems to know yet. They steal kisses under the moonlight before shifts or on hot summer days, lying in fields and enjoying the sun. But then it all comes crashing down. Min-ho has been waiting on the sidelines, letting them settle. Putting a plan into motion that won’t rouse suspicion. With the help of a witch and a hefty amount of money, Min-ho has no problem slipping the potion into their food the night of the full moon before the trials for succession is set to begin.

They don’t feel too off, but there is a nagging in their chest that night as they slip off with their girlfriend, it’s not uncommon to the rest of the pack. After all, they are best friends and Sung-mi’s parents are glad they are connecting with the others. They assume it’s the moon causing the tightness. The shift feels different though, like they’re struggling for air and consciousness, that’s all they remember.

Morning light stings their eyes, something warm and wet on their skin as they blink into existence. They call out for Ji-na in a foggy haze with no answer. Peeling their body from the forest floor with a groan at aching muscles. Blood, there is blood and gore everywhere and a slow heartbeat in the distance. They look in that direction and there she is, Ji-na grasping onto life, a mess of blood, fur, and gore surrounding them both. They jump into action, rushing her home, she can’t speak, her healing slow but she flinches and looks terrified when they are near. They taste blood in their mouth and they know it was them. When she can talk again it’s only confirmed. The scratches and bites that litter her body are their doing. They feel like dying.

It’s a week while the council meets, while they are locked in their room. Pacing, frightened, for her. Fall in line, take your games, and throw them away. You are to be alpha, to marry Min-ho. You’re not a child, it’s time to grow up. It’s their parents’ condition, they can stay, but they must give up everything. Be obedient. Be what’s expected. It’s a mercy they don’t feel they deserve. Saved by lineage alone. So they pack and they leave, life a dull muted semblance of what it once was. A self-imposed exile. They travel a bit, taking to the country and avoiding cities, but it seems their name and history precede them and soon they find themself leaving Korea entirely.

They try to make it through Europe, strengthen their English skills, and avoid other packs. They’re a lone wolf now, a vagrant. Often getting drunk. Getting into fights. They feel like a monster, so they act like one. It isn’t until one night, sitting in a dingy hostel, bloodied towel to a busted nose that they realize they need to get out. They aren’t far enough. They need to disappear completely.

America, it sounds so promising. They can truly start fresh, and be who they want to be. The ticket is easy enough, the visa comes harder but they manage it. They arrive in San Francisco and change their name. It’s like nothing they’ve seen before, it doesn’t quite feel like home but it will do. They establish themself in a studio apartment and start writing, the webzine builds a steady buzz. They write about what they know, the monsters that plague the night. Sleeping is still hard and they aren’t exactly stable, but California isn’t bad.

They’re just on the cusp of twenty-nine when they move again. Rumors of a haven for the supernatural drawing them in, it would be perfect for writing material. Once they make it to Port Leiry they find themself building a bond easily with a slightly younger wolf, Arte Ryan, they still don’t feel like they deserve companionship but Arte feels different. They resist the packs, that is until the redhead starts to build a better pack. With an exaggerated sigh, they step in and act as an advisor of sorts.

#cor.intro

4 notes · View notes

memwazz · 2 years ago

Text

MASTERPOST - Short summaries of all my Original Stories and links to their own dedicated Masterposts

SEVEN : DIVISION UNITED

This story is the one I currently focus on.

It follows the Seventh Division, a dysfunctional superheroes team protecting a fictive, slightly futuristic version of the USA ruled by a martial law. Most of the plot revolves around them and the teenage MC Erwan fighting different antagonists with or without special abilities, while trying to handle their chaotic daily life together.

Created circa 2019.

B-CLASS

B-Class is the only project I've completed so far, taking the form of two French novels and their spin-off.

The setting is a contemporary dystopia with a cast system discriminating and exploiting a group of people called the "B-Class". The main character Icare is a privileged journalist from the A who will change its viewpoint on oppression after falling in love with his own domestic slave Riùn. Then comes Abys the ACAB Boy and they all start a revolution 🔥

Very very queer and politic.

Created circa 2017 and completed in March 2018.

[B-CLASS Related] POUR UN RAYON DE SOLEIL

The spin-off I mentioned above focuses on Icare's past relationship with Ryse, a major antagonist in B-Class.

They used to date 5 years before the story and PURS explains how Icare became depressed and suic!d@l after a whole year of abuse.

Created and completed between November and July 2018.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

This one has a special place in my heart since it's the first story I've ever created back in middle-school. Many things changed in 10 years but it still tells the journey of Daniil who rebels against and has to run away from his former boss.

At the beginning, Daniil works as a bodyguard for an important member of a criminal organization; but he loses his temper and tries to unalive him when he discovers Akito murd€red his late girlfriend 3 years before. And then they both chase and try to k!ll each other 🤷

May include shit like war flashbacks and Japanese mafia idk

Created circa 2012.

DE A à Z

Zephyr and Adriel are two angels who've lived as a couple in Heaven for thousands of years.

But when Babel, an artificial angel, is created by humans and sent to Heaven to communicate with God, everything collapses. Babel manages to kill God and takes Their place to impose his vision of right and wrong, influenced by the humans' misinterpretation of the Bible. From then on, all romantic and sexual relationships are forbidden, forcing the couple to hide.

When Babel discovers Adriel's love letters, he is kicked out of Heaven and has to find allies on Earth to overthrow Babel and get his lover back.

Created circa 2019.

42 tells the story of Mat, a young woman searching for Sara, her little sister who disappeared years ago. Her investigations lead her to "Number 42", a man who just escaped from a lab experimenting on humans. Since Mat's sister seems to be prisoner from the lab as well, the two of them helped by the amoral Director's oldest son, will try to save Sara and 42 himself.

Created circa 2015.

MINIUM Part. 1

This one is pure heroic fantasy; its universe and lore are my most extended so far.

Gailin, the adoptive son of Kel'Daran's king, passed a deal with him and has to save Kel'Daran from the Selv, an humanoid species invading the Kingdom. A mystic prophecy tells the war can't be won without a half-blooded Selv with mysterious powers.

Due to coincidences and quiproquos, Gailin is manipulated by Aldanys, a teenage thief who pretends she's the Chosen One.

Created circa 2015.

MINIUM Part. 2

According to my writing plan, Minium is supposed to have a second part taking place 5 years after the first one.

After Gailin killed his father/king at the end of Minium 1, he is exiled and his mentor Edelia takes Kel'Daran's throne. When a new war is suddenly started against the kingdom, Edelia realises someone she thought had died wants her dead too.

On the other side of the plot, another protagonist named Lavaan predicts a major antagonist's return through weird prophetic dreams.

Created circa 2017.

[Minium Related] ST-ANRIEL

In Minium, Gailin and elves his kind believe in an entity named Altea and the Gods they gave birth to.

The Anriel is the equivalence of their Holy Bible and tells the story of the Gods and how the world was built from the beginning to the end. It takes the form of an anthology of poems and prayers.

Created circa 2017.

[MINIUM Related] JADE ET MOI

Another Minium spin-off, focusing this time on Osvald's coming out and transition as a trans man. The story takes place on sea as "Jade"/Osvald starts his journey as a pirate after running away from home.

Created circa 2018.

[MINIUM Related] GOLDEN-EYED BEAST

GEB is a Minium spin-off telling the backstory of Lavaan, a 12 years old protagonist. Born with a golden eye in a village who fears this feature after a terrible incident with a cruel golden-eyed enemy, he is treated as an outcast since his childhood.

His life changes when Kalras, a mysterious elf with black magic, destroys his village and murders everyone. Being the only survivor, Lavaan is made prisoner and tortured by Kalras but develops a Stockholm Syndrom and falls in love with him.

From then on, Kalras who turns out to be a cult leader, uses him as a slave a pet in a toxic relationship.

Created circa 2017.

[MINIUM Related] LA SAISON DES BOURGEONS

In Minium, Edelia has a little brother named Veidin who cursed himself to save her as a child. The curse caused him chronic pain, blood, heart and bones fragility and he's doomed to a very short life expectancy.

LSDB tells his love story with Jyëlven, another young man who was cursed and has flowers and thorns growing out of his skin.

Created circa 2017.

[MINIUM Related] THE WARMTH OF OUR COLD LANDS

Just like for the Anriel, Genkhìs will have their own religious texts written.

Inspired by vikings, the people of Genkhàr honour Gods similar to Scandinavians. Each one represents a value, the most worshipped one being Ero, God of Bravery.

Created circa 2017.

ODE TO ODD

My first and only story ever to look like a shonen anime lol--

One of the main characters Naemi is a highschooler with anxiety who just wants to live an ordinary and peaceful life.

But her goth and spiritism-obsessed best friend Sayaka accidentally summons Evelgard, a young necromancer in her living-room. Evelgard decides to befriend her and live in her closet, while trying to open a portal to the World of the Dead to save his late sister's soul. The two girls discover a whole new world after meeting necromancers, exorcists, witches and demons.

Created circa 2016.

SACRED DUST

Another heroic fantasy setting, but this universe is different from Minium's !

In this story, each kingdom worships a God-dess supposed to grant it their protection. When Lidala, the Goddess of Telaman, is murdered by a rival God, she turns to dust and leaves a devastated kingdom behind.

Fortunately, one of her ashes gives birth to a child, Saljän, who soon has to become the priest of Telaman. Aged 16, Saljän hates his responsibilities so much he finally runaways and travels around the world with a little demon named Orgos. Their goal is to gather all the Sacred Dusts to resurrect Lidala before it's too late.

Created circa 2016.

BAD ROMANCE

How to define Bad Romance without telling it's my most fucked-up story ? You can't. The two main characters are such assholes I can't name a protagonist, they're both antagonists.

Derek, a criminal, gangster and drug abuser, kidnaps Jay who sent him to jail 8 years before the story. He aims at mistreating him enough for Jay to kill himself, but he soon discovers that this guy who seems to live an ordinary and boring life is as much of a sociopath as him.

They start making each other's life hell then become addicted to each other, fuck, engage in a toxic relationship and even create a gang together at the end of the plot.

Created circa 2017.

LE ROYAUME DE GAHS

My first attempt to deal with astronomy eventhough I don't understand anything about it-

The story takes place in the sky and is about two stars and their father trying to discover why the Cosmic God decided to kill/destroy all the stars. Meanwhile, there seems to be a perturbation in the cosmos and some shooting stars start turning evil for no apparent reason...

Created circa 2024.

WE ARE THE WILD

The Lion King but with wolves, mixed with Prince of Persia and the COVID-19 pandemic before it existed--

The plot follows Sôkah, a 15 years old werewolf and the son of the Alpha, who's accused of murdering his big brother. The responsible is actually Akbar, his father's counselor who evicted the two sons to take his place when he dies.

Sôkah is banished from the pack and wandering in the forest, discovers the human world. Most humans are dying from a deadly virus nicknamed "white plague", and Sôkah gets rescued by the cousins Ludwig and Weiss. Weiss is a scientist who tries to find a cure to save Ludwig who caught the white plague, and soon discovers werewolves are immune to the disease...

Created circa 2018.

STAR-716

This story's plot is not very developed and I don't know much what will happen through it. But it's once again about someone looking for a missing family member, a mother this time.

Sacha is 13 and grew up in a circus, his mother being a dancer there. But she disappeared a year before (probably after a kidnapping) and Sacha doesn't know where to start his researches. He will be helped by Novak, an irresponsible sex-worker and hopeless romantic who fell in desperate love with the mother after sleeping with her once.

Created circa 2016.

DIMENSION OF DESPAIR

Are you surprised if I tell you this one is about another dimension ? No ?

Well, the MC Megane is a single mother who works hard to raise her 4 years old alone. One day, she wakes up in an unknown dimension ruled by Master, a mysterious person with psychic powers who created the dimension with their own mind.

Turns out it's actually a "harem" where Master gathers people and things he loves or wants. Megane will look for a way to escape and save a little girl named Kadd as well as Zoé, Master's "favorite".

Created circa 2018.

UNTIL SEPTEMBER

A more simple and less fucked-up story, I swear !!

Some sort of teenage literature, Until September focused around Nero, who's having hard times as a bullied 9th grader and discovers he has water powers. From then on, he befriends the other elementaries and has to deal with Hilda, the air elementary who wants to sacrifice all the children to create a Philosopher's Stone.

Created circa 2021.

SCARECREW

Another under-developed lore !

It's a basic apocalyptic/zombie novel with a disease turning all the adults into monsters. A bunch of pre-teens who survived and don't even know each other decide to fight together against the threat and to rebuild their own world.

Created circa 2020.

VIC'TEAM

Mostly shitpost, I don't want to turn it into a novel but more like a bunch of comic strips.

It follows the daily life adventures of highschoolers with teenagers problems like love, exams and family with a comedic tone. The MC's main problem is to be named Volvic (nicknamed Vic) and there are a lot of jokes about it, as well as absurd humor.

Created circa 2016-17.

Undeveloped shit with OCs waiting for their twisted up plot

Yeah, I love creating OCs and some of them have a background and design but no story for the moment. I'll just put them here and share random facts about them.

[PERSONAL DAILY LIFE SHITPOST] The ABSOLUTELY UNCHILLING Adventures of a Smol Angry Emo Birb

The parenthesis speaks for itself, I'll gather a few billets or illustrated jokes about funny things happening in my life.

4 notes · View notes

poddar123 · 5 months ago

Text

Best Futuristic Careers after Graduating with Biology

Biology is a vast branch focusing on minute details and thus their proper study is essential for studying evolution of life, find cure of diseases and in understanding the life cycle of living creatures including plants and animals.

As a general perception, Biology students get disappointed if they are not able to become a doctor. Here we would like to throw light on some other good career options in Biology after completing their graduation.

Healthcare Services

There will always be a requirement for qualified paramedics in the healthcare industry. If one has inclination towards healthcare services then he/she can do Paramedical courses, which are career-oriented courses comprising training for services that assist doctors in making better diagnoses. Pathology, Physiotherapy, First Aid, X-ray, Radiography and other services are good career options. Nursing Staff, Physiotherapists, Radiologists and MRI Technicians are few careers, which are earning best in the paramedical area.

Alternative Treatment Therapies

Due to increasing side effects and high costs of Allopathic treatment, nowadays people are preferring various alternative therapies for treating some diseases. Homeopathy, Acupuncture, Naturopathy, Herbal Medicine, Ayurveda, Yoga, and many others. The demand of such treatments are increasing day by day.

Environmentalist

Environmental Science is mainly a rapidly emerging branch of Science Biology where students can explore different means to protect the environment at risk with the reliable utility of resources. Hence, individuals can apply for the roles of Environmental Biologists, Environmental Scientists, Environmental Journalists and many more after B.Sc. These roles are prominent in textile industries, fertilizer plants, dying industries, etc. in India and abroad.

Botanist

Botanist is a good career option for candidates who have an interest in plant life. They can be absorbed in research, plant analysis and protection of various species of plants. They can be well placed in various fields like Agriculture, Research Institutes, Pharmaceuticals Industry, Educational Institutes, etc. Some Botanists choose to teach future generations of scientists in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. Horticulturalist, Conservation Scientist and Plant Videographers are well paid.

Biology Teacher

If you want to become a Biology teacher of in a Government School, you have to do B. Ed. course from any recognized institution like Poddar Group of Institutions, and further apply for teaching posts against the advertisement by the government and qualify the written examination and Interview. The package offered to Government teachers, especially in Rajasthan are highly rewarding and have attractive perks and draws many Biology graduates in this field. However, many top class private school teachers are also offered high packages.Poddar Management and Training Institute offers B.Ed. (Biology) and the best feature of B. Sc. (Biology) course. Besides, at Poddar International College, many major and minor, Faculty/Student Research Projects are being conducted, which are funded by Department of Science and Technology (DST) and University Grants Commission (UGC).

0 notes

ulearn4today · 1 year ago

Video

youtube

ENGLISH OLYMPIAD CLASS 6 PRACTICE PAPER 1

International English Olympiad

SAMPLE PAPER - 1

Class 6 / Grade 6

FOR QUESTIONS 1 TO 8, CHOOSE THE BEST WORD/PHRASE TO COMPLETE EACH SENTENCE

1. More and more students want to study _______ in order to experience a different culture.

A. overseas

B. university

C. Higher education

D. migrate

2. How long ______ out of town ?

A. has been

B. has they been

C. has he been

D. has I been

3. I’m a medical student and will ______ in January and can start practising.

A. qualify

B. accomplish

C. work

D. achieve

4. What is a policeman’s job?

A. To comfort

B. To enforce law

C. To prescribe

D. To jail people

5. We have ______ of eggs in the refrigerator so baking a large cake is possible.

A. few

B. less

C. lots

D. fewer

6. She has a fantastic memory. She can remember ______ that she hears and sees.

A. everything

B. something

C. nothing

D. None of the above

7. The teacher has ____ knowledge from the many books she reads.

A. Too much

B. much

C. many

D. Too many

8. A dinner meeting with the President is ______ for him.

A. All in a day’s work

B. All in a days’ work

C. All in a day work

D. All in day work

FOR QUESTIONS 9 TO 11, HOW MANY WORDS ARE WRONGLY SPELT IN THE SENTENCES GIVEN BELOW

9. She loves to go to museums.

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. None of the above

10. Growing a business inwolves a lot of hard vork.

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. None of the above

11. This is a new coarse to prepare stewdents for the exams.

A. 1

B. 2

C. 3

D. None of the above

FOR QUESTIONS 12 TO 29, CHOOSE THE BEST ANSWER TO COMPLETE EACH SENTENCE FROM THE OPTIONS GIVEN

12. We are all very _____ about the big event planned at our university.

A. united

B. joyous

C. celebratory

D. excited

13. The sound of elephants ____ far away in the forest was heard the whole night long.

A. howling

B. neighing

C. trumpeting

D. screaming

14. She’s never learned a foreign language. This course is going to be a ______

A. cake-walk

B. challenge

C. deal

D. calculation

15. My job is very ______, so I escape to the countryside to get away from it all.

A. stressful

B. insignificant

C. relaxing

D. underline

16. Journalists often _____ on subjects which are of interest to most people.

A. construct

B. report

C. create

D. invent

17. Can children ______ themselves clearly as adults?

A. express

B. communicate

C. approach

D. converse

18. He was advised by a consultant on how to be _____ at the interview.

A. victory

B. winning

C. successful

D. Get passed

19. When I went to the supermarket, I ended ____ what I did not intend to.

A. bought

B. buying

C. To buy

D. buy

20. I’m going to the market as we don’t have _____ bread at home.

A. some

B. any

C. a

D. None of the above

21. I wonder what can be done to save the ______ species.

A. endangered

B. danger

C. dangerous

D. Almost endangered

22. If I were him, I’d _____ the police.

A. tell

B. Would tell

C. told

D. Have tell

23. She absolutely ______ her grand-daughter.

A. endear

B. adores

C. Crazy about

D. Fond of

24. _____ she studied hard; she was unable to get a good grade.

A. All though

B. Although

C. Even so

D. even

25. I can write really fast, however my brother ______

A. couldn’t

B. can’t

C. Will not

D. won’t

26. She has several toys _____ work on solar batteries.

A. With which

B. Have to

C. Which has

D. which

27. She has so much to do that she is hardly ______ with any time in the morning.

A. left

B. Will leave

C. Had left

D. leaving

28. If you were to write a story, what ____ you write?

A. will

B. should

C. may

D. would

29. The school captain is supposed to be the _____ athlete amongst all the students.

A. good

B. most best

C. better

D. best

FOR QUESTIONS 30 TO 33, READ THE PASSAGE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW

CHILDHOOD

Most people believe that the best time of one’s life is childhood. There are a few responsibilities and no bills to worry about. A child does not have to worry about getting a job, making a successful carrier or doing the household chores. This enables a child to have lots of free time that they can devote to play which can build up their creativity. This can give children a life that is filled with excitement and new happenings. Having said this, there are times when children might find it difficult to buy all the things they want with their insufficient pocket money they get. Adults surely have less restrictions in a few things, when compared to a child.

30. According to the passage, a child does not have to worry about doing the _____.

A. Household chores

B. homework

C. laundry

D. accounts

31. Adults have less ______.

A. bills

B. independence

C. restrictions

D. Restricted behaviour

32. Why should children devote time to play: Devoting time to play helps the children ________

A. To be mentally alert.

B. To be creative

C. To be fit

D. socialize

33. Which word in the second paragraph means ‘enthusiasm and pleasure’?

A. creativity

B. insufficient

C. restriction

D. excitement

FOR QUESTIONS 34 TO 37, READ THE PASSAGE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW

FOOTBALL

The game of football is loved by people of all ages and all over the world. You might not find a single nation on the globe that does not have a passion for the game. On enquiry, people have stated that they have plenty of reasons to love the game, however, the topmost one is that it is simple to follow. Another factor in its favour is that you don’t need to be young and rich to be able to afford to play this game. It can be played on any kind of playground or wasteland. Also, it requires no special equipment except for a football, of course!

In fact, the game of football has changed the way people spend their leisure time. Every game played is covered by the media extensively. More and more countries have begun to invest large sums of money in the game as the returns on investment are fantastic. Consequently, footballers are paid unbelievable sums of money to represent their countries.

34. What do people like most about the game of football?

A. It is easy to understand

B. It only needs a football

C. It can even be played on wasteland

D. It can make you rich

35. What is the meaning of “to have a passion for the game”?

A. A robust sense of tiredness

B. A durable emotion

C. A sturdiness and resilience

D. A strong feeling of enthusiasm

36. What does the word ‘unbelievable’ refer to?

A. Sums of money

B. Mathematical sums

C. Summary of things

D. summarizing

37. Football has changed the way people ______.

A. Play games

B. Are passionate

C. Use their leisure time

D. Socialize with one another.

FOR QUESTIONS 38 TO 45, READ THE PASSAGE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW

38. Amanda: ‘We don’t have any milk in the refrigerator.’

Sam: ‘Don’t worry. We have ____ milk powder in the cabinet.’

A. other

B. another

C. enough

D. some

39. Cathy : ‘She does not spend enough time on doing homework and yet she expects to get good grades.

Bob : ‘dash’

A. That’s not enough

B. That’s so very partial

C. That’s good enough

D. That’s not fair

40. ‘Do you think we will be able to complete the presentation in time?’

A. ‘I do so think.’

B. ‘I don’t think so.’

C. ‘I don’t so think.’

D. ‘I don’t think absolutely.’

41. Catherine : ‘I’ve been having a difficult time with my children.’

Robert : ‘It’s not easy to ______ children these days.’

A. Bring on

B. Bring to

C. Bring about

D. Bring up

42. Vanessa : ‘My father passed away when I was six.’

Sonia : ‘ dash ’

A. Oh! My goodness!

B. I’m so sorry to hear that

C. So did mine

D. I’m afraid it was unfortunate

43. Peter said, “I’m going for a movie this weekend.”

A. Peter said that he would want to go for a movie this weekend.

B. Peter said that perhaps he might go for a movie this weekend.

C. Peter said that he was going for a movie this weekend.

D. Peter said that he must go for a movie this weekend.

44. ‘You are probably late to school, because you ___________’

A. Missed the school bus.

B. Have been missing the bus

C. Ought to miss the school bus

D. Had missed the school bus

45. ‘He offered to lend her some money to pay her school fees.’

A. ‘He is very generosity’

B. ‘He is very general’

C. ‘He is very genial’

D. ‘He is very generous’

FOR QUESTIONS 46 TO 48, CHOOSE THE BEST WORD/PHRASE TO COMPLETE EACH

SENTENCE

46. Her grades are a great cause for _____ to her teachers.

A. trouble

B. concern

C. problem

D. reason

47. Sam and his sister ____ like a house on fire. They have so much in common.

A. Go on

B. Get up

C. Get by

D. Get along

48. What does ‘beat around the bush’ mean?

A. To be at the point

B. To be specific

C. To be confusing and vague

D. To avoid talking

FOR QUESTIONS 49 AND 50, CHOOSE THE BEST RESPONSE TO COMPLETE EACH CONVERSATION

49. Robin : ‘Have they finished their homework?’

Sam : ‘___________’

A. Yes, they have

B. Yes, they do

C. Yes, have got

D. Yes, they do have

50. Sonia: ‘I can’t understand why people ______ to speak English.’

A. Look ahead

B. tried

C. feel

D. aren’t able

#youtube

0 notes

acti-veg · 3 years ago

Note

Does the fact that so many people, if not all people, are so quick to defend animal slaughter, actively participate in it and enjoy it, not prove that humans are inherently sadistic, destructive and selfish, and not the sweet, inherently good and compassionate beings you claim they are?

What is it with pessimists, anti-natalists and misanthropes? I swear I hear from you guys more than I do anti-vegans. I haven't 'claimed' anything, I was asked (about six months ago mind you) if I believe humans are inherently bad, I said no, and you guys haven't shut up about it since.

Alright, I'm going to explain my actual position on this once more, then I'm not going to entertain any of you on this topic again, because I find being asked the same questions in the same loaded, condescending way to be very tiresome. So here it is: I am an optimist and a philanthropist because I choose to be, not because of anything that humans posess or lack. I don't believe that humans are intrinsically good or bad, because I don't believe that humans are intrinisically anything. I agree with the existentialists that existence precedes essence - who and what human beings are is not predefined or predetermined. We are not furniture or instruments whose function and nature is set before we come into the world.

This means that humans are not inherently good, but we also aren't inherently cruel, either. We are born into the world by chance, and it is up to us to decide who we are and what our lives mean. I have never claimed that I think humans are inherently good or compassionate because I find the concept that an entire species all share a common disposition, despite being made up of disparate cultures and individuals who exhibit radically different behaviours, to be irrational. I also find the concept that humans are inherently sadistic, destructive and selfish to be equally irrational.

Humans are capable of both great compassion and great cruelty, our history makes that clear. I believe that we do bad things quite as often as we do as a result of the circumstances we find ourselves in, and our disconnect from nature. In particular I’d point to the political, social and economic disenfranchisement inflicted on us by the ruling classes, as well as the philosophical despair that is the result of our having to exist and make choices in a world they control. Yet despite this, humans also do wonderful, beautiful things every single day, even in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

In Afghanistan right now, the Taliban are committing heinous atrocities, but people are also helping despite the danger to themselves. Foreign workers and medical staff who refused to leave, journalists still reporting, ordinary citizens looking after orphaned children and animals, even hiding collaborators from Taliban searches. To point to the bad and say ‘humans are like this!’ is to exhibit a deep and obvious bias by omitting all other evidence that doesn’t fit with your narrow, misanthropic worldview.

The wording of your own ask proves this obvious bias: ‘If not all people.’ Really? All people? Are animal rights activists quick to defend animal slaughter? Are the thousands of people volunteering their time in rescue centres, sanctuaries, hunt sabotaging, protesting? Do we take part it in and enjoy it? You just refuse to see the people who do good because for some reason you would rather believe that we are all terrible.

You are free to be pessimistic and miserable on your own blog, as sad as I think that is. But please, go for a walk, pet a dog, sit in the sunshine, read a good book under your duvet with a hot cup of tea. Whatever it takes to prevent you from feeling like you need to drag the rest of us down with you.

#ask #personal #misanthropy #optimism

75 notes · View notes

shyrose57 · 4 years ago

Text

Dream SMP Mer AU.

Staff:

Tubbo: A new intern at the Smp Sanctuary for Magical Aquatic Creatures, mostly working under Professor Eret Kingslin. Has studied a lot about sea-bound creatures, and knows things about them that even some of the top researchers do. Tubbo seems to have slotted fairly well into the faculty, and all the mer have taken to him rather quickly, the Sleepy pod especially. There’s a target on his back.

Eret: A researcher at the Smp, they specialize in ethology and anthropology, but dabble a bit everywhere, since her co-workers often require her assistance. One of the most organized people there, and a lot of people defer to him, even if he’s not the actual head researcher. Eret may have some Mer blood of their own in them.

Antfrost: On site veterinarian, who works with the non-magical animals of the Smp, except for in emergencies. Though ever since Dream’s pod took a liking to him, he’s been eased into working with them as well, despite his protests-he doesn’t really like getting wet.

Sam: Head of Maintenance. Sam has a degree in a lot of stuff, ranging from architecture to electrical engineering. Pretty amicable with everyone, but despite his friendliness, nobody dares mess with them. He pretty much runs everything, it’d be incredibly stupid. Has a soft spot for the younger residents of the site. Also has a service dog named Fran who helps out around the site.

Fundy: College student interning at the Smp for extra credit he needs to pass his Marine Biology class. He wasn’t expecting it to be as hard as it was. Works mainly under Sam, due to his experience with machinery. Has some Mer blood he’s unaware of, though the Mers definitely recognize it in him.

Karl: A journalist who was originally only supposed to do one article on the sanctuary. However, after an incident involving some pushy tourists, and a community tank, Sapnap and Quackity took a liking to him. So now his assignments focus solely on the sanctuary and other sea-related areas. Honorary staff member.

Pods:

Sleepy Pod(dubbed by Fundy): Phil, Techno, Wilbur, Tommy, and Ranboo.

Dream’s Pod: Dream, Sapnap, George, Bad, Skeppy, Punz, and Purpled.

Species:

Dreamon: A species of Mer that originates from the End(an area under the ocean floor, and something of an entirely different dimension). They’re known to be quite strong, with unique abilities-usually mentally related, and are identified by their pale coloring and vibrant eyes. Incredibly rare though.

(Dream is one, Ranboo is half)

Harpies: Sea-bound avians that share the same power as sirens. They can be identified by their glossy, waterproof wings, and alluring voices. The older ones are territorial and stand-offish to those outside of the flock, and the younger ones are fiercely guarded, so they are very rarely seen.

(Philza and Quackity are both one)

Nethers: More of a broad term for the creatures that reside within the depths of the Nether floor(a boiling area just along the sea floor, filled with active volcanoes and underwater lava caverns. Some of the species of Nethers include Boars, Hogs, Rotted, Blazes, and Weepers. Almost all of them share violent instincts.

(Techno is a Boar Mer, Sapnap’s part Blaze)

Tropical Mer: Another broad term for mer that tend to reside in warmer waters, sharing their coloring and species with many tropical fish. The majority are quite playful and friendly, and there’s numerous historical writings of these mer saving fishermen or young children from the sea.

(Niki is an asian arowana mer, Purpled is a dolphin mer)

Abyssal Mer: Mer that reside in the darkest depths of the sea, just between the Nether floor and the End. Not much is known about their kind, though they’ve gained the monker ‘sea demons’ for their often demonic appearances. They have strong grasps on magic, and use it fairly often.

(Bad is one, Sapnap is half)

Twilight Mer: Mysterious mer with many strange features and abilities, such as(but not limited to) gem-like scales, luminescence, and color-changing skin. Almost nothing is known about their kind, though some theorize they may hail from the End. However, it’s uncertain, as the only known ones have been found in mixed pods, and they’re incredibly hard to identify.

(Skeppy and George are both one, and Ranboo is half)

102 notes · View notes

auroraluciferi · 4 years ago

Link

if anyone in this time of deep concern of his health is interested about what a worthless piece of shit Prince Philip is, here is a very brief list of 90 racist, sexist, and incredibly ignorant things the man has said in the last century:

1. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.

2. "Ghastly." Prince Philip's opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city's Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.

3. "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

4. "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes." To 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby during a visit to China in 1986.

5. "You managed not to get eaten then?" To a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

6. "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly." To a British tourist during a tour of Budapest in Hungary. 1993.

7. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

8. "Damn fool question!" To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.

9. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's verdict of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999. He later clarified his comment: "I meant to say cowboys. "I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up."

10. "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle." To survivors of the Lockerbie bombings in 1993.

11. "We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." During a trip to Canada in 1976.

12. "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want." A man of the people shares insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981.

13. "British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961.

14. "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!" On the issue of stress counselling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995.

15. "What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

16. "It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

17. "There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple.

18. "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it." Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

19. "You ARE a woman, aren't you?" To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift.

20. "Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?" To a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

21. "Get me a beer. I don't care what kind it is, just get me a beer!" On being offered the finest Italian wines by PM Giuliano Amato at a dinner in Rome in 2000.

22. "I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family." In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.

23. "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" In a Radio 4 interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996. He said to the interviewer off-air afterwards: "That will really set the cat among the pigeons, won't it?"

24. "Oh, it's you that owns that ghastly car is it? We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle." To neighbour Elton John after hearing he had sold his Watford FC-themed Aston Martin in 2001.

25. "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." At the opening of City Hall in 2002.

26. "A pissometer?" The Prince sees the renames the piezometer water gauge demonstrated by Australian farmer Steve Filelti in 2000.

27. "Don't feed your rabbits pawpaw fruit – it acts as a contraceptive. Then again, it might not work on rabbits." Giving advice to a Caribbean rabbit breeder in Anguilla in 1994.

28. "You must be out of your minds." To Solomon Islanders, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year, in 1982.

29. "Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant." At the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme.

30. "Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

31. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

32. "You bloody silly fool!" To an elderly car park attendant who made the mistake of not recognising him at Cambridge University in 1997.

33. "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment." To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999.

34. "If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly." To the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

35. "The French don't know how to cook breakfast." After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat – from Gallic chef Regis Crépy – in 2002.

36. "And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" Asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

37. "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease." On a visit to Australia in 1992, when asked if he wanted to stroke a koala bear.

38. "It doesn't look like much work goes on at this University." Overheard at Bristol University's engineering facility. It had been closed so that he and the Queen could officially open it in 2005.

39. "I wish he'd turn the microphone off!" The Prince expresses his opinion of Elton John's performance at the 73rd Royal Variety Show, 2001.

40. "Do you still throw spears at each other?" Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

41. "Where's the Southern Comfort?" On being presented with a hamper of southern goods by the American ambassador in London in 1999.

42. "Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had suffered poor academic reputation.

43. "Ah you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? Ha, ha! Well done." Meeting 14-year old George Barlow, whose invited to the Queen to visit Romford, Essex, in 2003.

44. "So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

45. "You could do with losing a little bit of weight." To hopeful astronaut, 13-year-old Andrew Adams.

46. "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

47. "The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined." While hosts made effort to greet a state visit to Brazil, 1968.

48. "During the Blitz a lot of shops had their windows blown in and sometimes they put up notices saying, 'More open than usual.' I now declare this place more open than usual." Unveiling a plaque at the University of Hertfordshire's new Hatfield campus in November 2003.

49 . Philip: "Who are you?"

Simon Kelner: "I'm the editor-in-chief of The Independent, Sir."

Philip: "What are you doing here?"

Kelner: "You invited me."

Philip: "Well, you didn't have to come!"

An exchange at a press reception to mark the Golden Jubilee in 2002.

50. "No, I would probably end up spitting it out over everybody." Prince Philip declines the offer of some fish from Rick Stein's seafood deli in 2000.

51. "Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy." Discussing his role in an interview with Jeremy Paxman.

52. "Holidays are curious things, aren't they? You send children to school to get them out of your hair. Then they come back and make life difficult for parents. That is why holidays are set so they are just about the limit of your endurance." At the opening of a school in 2000.

53. "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans." In 2000.

54. "Can you tell the difference between them?" On being told by President Obama that he'd had breakfast with the leaders of the UK, China and Russia.

55. "I don't know how they are going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield." After meeting students from Brunei coming to Britain to study in 1998.

56. "Do people trip over you?" Meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

57. "That's a nice tie... Do you have any knickers in that material?" Discussing the tartan designed for the Papal visit with then-Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie last year.

58. "I have never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing." Addressing a group of industrialists in 1961.

59. "It's not a very big one, but at least it's dead and it took an awful lot of killing!" Speaking about a crocodile he shot in Gambia in 1957.

60. "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you? You really must try better with your beard." To a young fashion designer at a Buckingham Palace in 2009.

61. "So you're responsible for the kind of crap Channel Four produces!" Speaking to then chairman of the channel, Michael Bishop, in 1962.

62. "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practiced for a good many years." Address to the General Dental Council, quoted in Time in 1960.

63. "Tolerance is the one essential ingredient ... You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance." Advice for a successful marriage in 1997.

64. "I never see any home cooking – all I get is fancy stuff." Commiserating about the standard of Buckingham Palace cuisine in 1962.

65. "I suppose I would get in a lot of trouble if I were to melt them down." On being shown Nottingham Forest FC's trophy collection in 1999.

66. "It makes you all look like Dracula's daughters!" To pupils at Queen Anne's School in Reading, who wear blood-red uniforms, in 1998.

67. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

68. "Ah, so this is feminist corner then." Joining a group of female Labour MPs, who were wearing name badges reading "Ms", at a Buckingham Palace drinks party in 2000.

69. "Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

70. "All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury." Bemoaning the rate of British tax in 1963.

71. "It is my invariable custom to say something flattering to begin with so that I shall be excused if by any chance I put my foot in it later on." Full marks for honesty, from a speech in 1956.

72. "Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" Asked of a penniless student.

73. "In education, if in nothing else, the Scotsman knows what is best for him. Indeed, only a Scotsman can really survive a Scottish education." Said when he was made Chancellor of Edinburgh University in November 1953.

74. "If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested." Of his daughter, Princess Anne.

75. "They're not mating are they?" Spotting two robots bumping in to one another at the Science Museum in 2000.

76. "I must be in the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane." Philip did not approve of the noise Concorde made while flying over the Buckingham Palace.

77. "The only active sport, which I follow, is polo – and most of the work's done by the pony!" 1965

78. "It looks like a tart's bedroom." On seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

79. "Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

80. "We go into the red next year... I shall probably have to give up polo." Comment on US television in 1969 about the Royal Family's finances.

81. "Bugger the table plan, give me my dinner!" Showing his impatience to be fed at a dinner party in 2004.

82. "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit." Said to a woman solicitor.

83. "You're just a silly little Whitehall twit: you don't trust me and I don't trust you." Said to Sir Rennie Maudslay, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in the 1970s.

84. "What about Tom Jones? He's made a million and he's a bloody awful singer." Response to a comment at a small-business lunch about how difficult it is in Britain to get rich.

85. "This could only happen in a technical college." On getting stuck in a lift between two floors at the Heriot Watt University, 1958.

86. "I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

87. "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons" On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965.

88. "You're not wearing mink knickers, are you?" Philip charms fashion writer Serena French at a World Wildlife Fund gathering in 1993.

89. "My son...er...owns them." On being asked on a Canadian tour whether he knew the Scilly Isles.

90. "Well, that's more than you know about anything else then." Speaking, a touch condescendingly, to Michael Buerk, after being told by the BBC newsreader that he did know about the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Awards in 2004.

#uk #united kingdom #royal #royals #prince philip #queen elizabeth #meghan markle #prince harry #corruption #racism #sexism #monarchy #seriously #what planet do you live on

24 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 4 years ago

Text

“The first thing to do is then to fully endorse the displacement in the history of Marxism concentrated in two great passages (or, rather, violent cuts): the passage from Marx to Lenin, as well as the passage from Lenin to Mao. In each case there is a displacement of the original constellation: from the most forward country (as expected by Marx) to a relatively backward country - the revolution "took place in a wrong country"; from workers to (poor) peasants as the main revolutionary agent, etc. In the same way as Christ needed Paul's "betrayal" in order for Christianity to emerge as a universal Church (recall that, among the 12 apostles, Paul occupies the place of Judas the traitor, replacing him!), Marx needed Lenin's "betrayal" in order to enact the first Marxist revolution: it is an inner necessity of the "original" teaching to submit to and survive this "betrayal," to survive this violent act of being torn out of one's original context and thrown into a foreign landscape where it has to reinvent itself - only in this way, universality is born.

So, apropos the second violent transposition, that of Mao, it is too short either to condemn his reinvention of Marxism as theoretically "inadequate," as a regression with regard to Marx's standards (it is easy to show that peasants lack the substanceless proletarian subjectivity), but it is no less too short to blur the violence of the cut and to accept Mao's reinvention as a logical continuation or "application" of Marxism (relying, as is usually the case, on the simple metaphoric expansion of class struggle: "today's predominant class struggle is no longer between capitalists and proletariat in each country, it shifted to the Third versus the First World, bourgeois versus proletarian nations"). The achievement of Mao is here tremendous: his name stands for the political mobilization of the hundreds of millions of anonymous Third World population whose chores provide the invisible "substance," background, of historical development - the mobilization of all those which even such a poet of "otherness" as Levinas dismissed as "yellow peril" - see, from what is arguably his weirdest text, "The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic" (1960), a comment on the Soviet-Chinese conflict:

The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past. [2]

Does this not recall Heidegger's insistence, throughout the 1930s, that the main task of Western thought today is to defend the Greek breakthrough, the founding gesture of the "West," the overcoming of the pre-philosophical, mythical, "Asiatic" universe, to struggle against the renewed "Asiatic" threat - the greatest opposite of the West is "the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular?" [3] It is THIS Asiatic "radical strangeness" which is mobilized, politicized, by Mao Zedong's Communist movement. (...)

The most reliable sign of capitalism's ideological triumph is the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades: from the 1980s, "virtually no one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists (an 'endangered species'), referred to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - not to mention social scientists, who had consigned it to historical oblivion." [7] So what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to "the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centered on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of 'imperialism'." [8] In this way, when one talks about "globalization and its agents," the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight "the American empire," any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese "Communist" capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus (see Chavez' visit to Belarus in July 2006), may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms... What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of "alternate modernity": instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist "excess," with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more "progressive," frame.

This is how one should approach what is arguably Mao's central contribution to Marxist philosophy, his elaborations on the notion of contradiction: one should not dismiss them as a worthless philosophical regression (which, as one can easily demonstrate, relies on a vague notion of "contradiction" which simply means "struggle of opposite tendencies"). The main thesis of his great text ÇOn ContradictionÈ on the two facets of contradictions, "the principal and the non-principal contradictions in a process, and the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction," deserves a close reading. Mao's reproach to the "dogmatic Marxists" is that they "do not understand that it is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides":

For instance, in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie, between the peasant petty bourgeoisie ant the bourgeoisie, between the proletariat and the peasant petty bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction.

When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position.

This is Mao's key point: the principal (universal) contradiction does not overlap with the contradiction which should be treated as dominant in a particular situation - the universal dimension literally resides in this particular contradiction. In each concrete situation, a different "particular" contradiction is the predominant one, in the precise sense that, in order to win the fight for the resolution of the principal contradiction, one should treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, to which all other struggles should be subordinated. In China under the Japanese occupation, the patriotic unity against the Japanese was the predominant thing if Communists wanted to win the class struggle - any direct focusing on class struggle in THESE conditions went against class struggle itself. (Therein, perhaps, resides the main feature of "dogmatic opportunism": to insist on the centrality of the principal contradiction at a wrong moment.) - The further key point concerns the principal ASPECT of a contradiction; for example, with regard to the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production,

the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production, then the change in the relations of production plays the principal and decisive role.

The political stakes of this debate are decisive: Mao's aim is to assert the key role, in the political struggle, of what the Marxist tradition usually refers to as the "subjective factor" - theory, superstructure. This is what, according to Mao, Stalin neglected: "Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR from first to last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people. /.../ /It speaks/ only of the production relations, not of the superstructure nor politics, nor the role of the people. Communism cannot be reached unless there is a communist movement."

Alain Badiou, a true Maoist here, applies this to today's constellation, avoiding the focus on the anti-capitalist struggle, even ridiculing its main form today (the anti-globalization movement), and defining the emancipatory struggle in strictly political terms, as the struggle against (liberal) democracy, today's predominant ideologico-political form? "Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." [9] What, today, prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely the belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism. Lenin's stance against "economism" as well as against "pure" politics is crucial today, apropos of the split attitude towards economy in (what remains of) the Left: on the one hand, the "pure politicians" who abandon economy as the site of struggle and intervention; on the other hand, the "economists," fascinated by the functioning of today's global economy, who preclude any possibility of a political intervention proper. With regard to this split, today, more than ever, we should return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism - BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. Today, when everyone is "anticapitalist," up to the Hollywood "socio-critical" conspiracy movies (from The Enemy of the State to The Insider) in which the enemy are the big corporations with their ruthless pursuit of profit, the signifier "anticapitalism" has lost its subversive sting. What one should problematize is the self-evident opposite of this "anticapitalism": the trust in the democratic substance of the honest Americans to break up the conspiracy. THIS is the hard kernel of today's global capitalist universe, its true Master-Signifier: democracy. [10] - Mao's further elaboration on the notion of contradiction in his "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People"(1957) also cannot be reduced to its best-known feature, the rather common sense point of distinguishing between the antagonistic and the non-antagonistic contradictions:

The contradictions between ourselves and the enemy are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between the exploited and the exploiting classes have a non-antagonistic as well as an antagonistic aspect. /.../ under the people's democratic dictatorship two different methods, one dictatorial and the other democratic, should be used to resolve the two types of contradictions which differ in nature - those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people.

One should always read this distinction together with its more "ominous" supplement, a warning that the two aspects may overlap: "In ordinary circumstances, contradictions among the people are not antagonistic. But if they are not handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard, antagonism may arise." The democratic dialogue, the peaceful co-existence of different orientations among the working class, is not something simply given, a natural state of things, it is something gained and sustained by vigilance and struggle. Here, also, struggle has priority over unity: the very space of unity has to be won through struggle.

So what are we to do with these elaborations? One should be very precise in diagnosing, at the very abstract level of theory, where Mao was right and where he was wrong. Mao was right in rejecting the standard notion of "dialectical synthesis" as the "reconciliation" of the opposites, as a higher unity which encompasses their struggle; he was wrong in formulating this rejection, this insistence on the priority of struggle, division, over every synthesis or unity, in the terms of a general cosmology-ontology of the "eternal struggle of opposites" - this is why he got caught in the simplistic, properly non-dialectical, notion of the "bad infinity" of struggle. Mo clearly regresses here to primitive pagan "wisdoms" on how every creature, every determinate form of life, sooner or later meets its end: "One thing destroys another, things emerge, develop, and are destroyed, everywhere is like this. If things are not destroyed by others, then they destroy themselves." One should give Mao his due at this level: he goes to the end in this direction, applying this principle not only to Communism itself - see the following passage, in which Mao accomplishes a gigantic ontological "leap forward" from the division of atomic nucleus into protons, anti-protons, etc., to the inevitable division of Communism into stages:

I don't believe that communism will not be divided into stages, and that there will be no qualitative changes. Lenin said that all things can be divided. He gave the atom as an example, and said that not only can the atom be divided, but the electron, too, can be divided. Formerly, however, it was held that it could not be divided; the branch of science devoted to splitting the atomic nucleus is still very young, only twenty or thirty years old. In recent decades, the scientists have resolved the atomic nucleus into its constituents, such as protons, anti-protons, neutrons, anti-neutrons, mesons and anti-mesons.

He goes even a step further and moves beyond humanity itself, forecasting, in a proto-Nietzschean way, the "overcoming" of man.

The life of dialectics is the continuous movement toward opposites. Mankind will also finally meet its doom. When the theologians talk about doomsday, they are pessimistic and terrify people. We say the end of mankind is something which will produce something more advanced than mankind. Mankind is still in its infancy.

- and, even more, the rise of (some) animals themselves (what we consider today as exclusively human) level of consciousness:

In the future, animals will continue to develop. I don't believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can't horses, cows, sheep evolve? Can only monkeys evolve? And can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve, and all the others are incapable of evolving? In a million years, ten million years, will horses, cows and sheep still be the same as those today? I think they will continue to change. Horses, cows, sheep, and insects will all change.

Two things should be added to this "cosmic perspective"; first, one should remember that Mao is here talking to the inner circle of party ideologists. This is what accounts for the tone of sharing a secret not to be rendered public, as if Mao is divulging his "secret teaching" - and, effectively, Mao's speculations closely echo the so-called "bio-cosmism," the strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality which formed occult shadow-ideology, the obscene secret teaching, of the Soviet Marxism. Repressed out of the public sight in the central period of the Soviet state, bio-cosmism was openly propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet rule; its main theses are: the goals of religion (collective paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality, resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of space far beyond the solar system) can be realized in terrestrial life through the development of modern science and technology. In the future, not only will sexual difference be abolished, with the rise of chaste post-humans reproducing themselves through direct bio-technical reproduction; it will also be possible to resurrect all the dead of the past (establishing their biological formula through their remains and then re-engendering them - at that time, DNA was not yet known...), thus even erasing all past injustices, "undoing" past suffering and destruction. In this bright bio-political Communist future, not only humans, but also animals, all living being, will participate in a directly collectivized Reason of the cosmos... Whatever one can hold against Lenin's ruthless critique of Maxim Gorky's the "construction of God (bogograditelk'stvo)," the direct deification of man, one should bear in mind that Gorky himself collaborated with bio-cosmists. It is interesting to note resemblances between this "bio-cosmism" and today's techno-gnosis. - Second, this "cosmic perspective" is for Mao not just an irrelevant philosophical caveat; it has precise ethico-political consequences. When Mao high-handedly dismisses the threat of the atomic bomb, he is not down-playing the scope of the danger - he is fully aware that nuclear war may led to the extinction of humanity as such, so, to justify his defiance, he has to adopt the "cosmic perspective" from which the end of life on Earth "would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole":

The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.

This "cosmic perspective" also grounds Mao's dismissive attitude towards the human costs of economic and political endeavors. If one is to believe Mao's latest biography, [11] he caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: "half of China may well have to die." This is instrumental attitude at its most radical: killing as part of a ruthless attempt to realize goal, reducing people to disposable means - and what one should bear in mind is that the Nazi holocaust was NOT the same: the killing of the Jews not part of a rational strategy, but a self-goal, a meticulously planned "irrational" excess (recall the deportation of the last Jews from Greek islands in 1944, just before the German retreat, or the massive use of trains for transporting Jews instead of war materials in 1944). This is why Heidegger is wrong when he reduces holocaust to the industrial production of corpses: it was NOT that, Stalinist Communism was that. [12]

The conceptual consequence of this "bad infinity" that pertains to vulgar evolutionism is Mao's consistent rejection of the "negation of negation" as a universal dialectical law. In explicit polemics against Engels (and, incidentally, following Stalin who, in his "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism," also doesn't mention "negation of negation" among the "four main features of Marxist dialectics"):

Engels talked about the three categories, but as for me I don't believe in two of those categories. (The unity of opposites is the most basic law, the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the negation does not exist at all.) /.../ There is no such thing as the negation of the negation. Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation in the development of things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation. Slave-holding society negated primitive society, but with reference to feudal society it constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Feudal society constituted the negation in relation to slave-holding society but it was in turn the affirmation with reference to capitalist society. Capitalist society was the negation in relation to feudal society, but it is, in turn, the affirmation in relation to socialist society.

Along these lines, Mao scathingly dismisses the category of "dialectical synthesis" of the opposites, promoting his own version of "negative dialectics" - every synthesis is for him ultimately what Adorno in his critique of Lukacs called erpresste Versoehnung - enforced reconciliation - at best a momentary pause in the ongoing struggle, which occurs not when the opposites are united, but when one side simply wins over the other:

What is synthesis? You have all witnessed how the two opposites, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, were synthesized on the mainland. The synthesis took place like this: their armies came, and we devoured them, we ate them bite by bite. /.../ One thing eating another, big fish eating little fish, this is synthesis. It has never been put like this in books. I have never put it this way in my books either. For his part, Yang Hsien-chen believes that two combine into one, and that synthesis is the indissoluble tie between two opposites. What indissoluble ties are there in this world? Things may be tied, but in the end they must be severed. There is nothing which cannot be severed.”

#zizek #marx #lacan #lenin #stalin #mao #engels #alain badiou #communism #socialism #revolution

10 notes · View notes

resident-curse-breaker · 4 years ago

Text

Helena Bancroft

My character sheet for my Hogwarts Mystery MC, Nellie Bancroft!

Nellie is absolutely my baby, and I’d love to hear any opinions regarding her, feedback on her, or questions about her! She will be tagged with spoilers, but just in case, be warned that this character sheet contains spoilers for Hogwarts Mystery.

Now that all of that’s out of the way, feel free to give her a read!

(Thanks to @arimabari for doing this wonderful commission!)

IDENTITY

Name: Helena Winifred Bancroft

Nicknames:

Nellie, everyone

Pip, Jacob

Sweet girl, Rowan

Gender: Cis-female

Current Age: 17

Birth Date: March 11th, 1973

Species: Human

Blood Status: Half-blood

Sexuality: Panromantic | Pansexual

Alignment:

Passes for neutral good

Truly chaotic good

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Nationality: Irish

Residence: Kinsale, Ireland

THE MAGE

1st Wand:

Purchased prior to first year

10 ½ inches

Pear wood

Unicorn hair core

2nd Wand:

Purchased during fifth year

11 ¼ inches

Alder wood

Phoenix feather core

3rd Wand:

Purchased after graduation

10 ⅔

Beech wood

Unicorn hair core

Animagus: Kooikerhondje dog

Magical Abilities:

Born legilimens

Animal empathy (questionable)

Boggart Form:

Jacob’s rotting corpse, shambling towards her like a zombie — up to 6th year

Rowan’s lifeless body, laying still — 6th year onward

Riddikulus Form:

None — she cannot bear to face boggarts

Amortentia:

Smells — sandalwood, fresh laundry, creature food, cologne

Smells Like — cherry shampoo, blackberries, ocean air

Patronus: African bush elephant

Patronus Memory: Jacob trying to teach her spells during one of his school breaks. She would’ve only been five—they’re nine years apart—so it’s a faint memory and she couldn’t do any of them anyway, but it was still happy enough to stick with her.

Mirror of Erised:

Herself as an adult, having accomplished her dream of opening a hippogriff sanctuary, with Jacob laughing and her mama smiling and her mum loving them both — up to 6th year

Her and Rowan as happy, naive first years, laughing and standing arm in arm — 6th year onward

Favorite Spells:

Patronus Charm — she endures enough anguish without the dementors exacerbating it

Cave Inimicum — it’s a relief, sometimes, to be able to disappear

APPEARANCE

Physique:

5″

Petite

Lithe limbs

Eyes:

Big

Round

Ocean blue

Hair:

Thick

Wavy

Sandy blonde

Thigh length — up to her 5th year

Chin length — start of 6th year onward

Skin Tone: Fair and freckled

Body Modifications: None—doesn’t even pierce her ears

Scarring:

Small scar on her right thumb — from when her mum tried to teach her to whittle

Large burn scar over heart — from the Mahoutokoro wizard attack

Long, thin scar on left forearm — from when Rakepick attacked her with a whipping spell, and she lifted her arm to shield herself

Inventory:

About a dozen quills, some of them sugar

A spare pair of Rowan’s glasses

A worn down copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

A small hair brush

A pack of muggle sour candies

Fashion:

Bright and colorful, enjoys floral print and embroidery

Always down for a nice pair of overalls, especially if they’re in some way decorated

Only ever wears a worn out pair of lightweight boots

Never seen without her silver seashell locket

Otherwise, not much of a fan of jewelry

Values comfort over style

Voice: Taylor Louderman

ALLEGIANCES

Hogwarts House: Hufflepuff

Affiliations/Organizations:

Hogwarts

The Circle of Khanna

The Order of the Phoenix

Professions:

Nurse at St. Mungos — early adulthood

Owner of Silver Wings, a hippogriff sanctuary — middle adulthood to death

HOGWARTS INFORMATION

Best Classes:

Care of Magical Creatures

Herbology

Charms

Worst Classes:

Potions

History of Magic

Flying

Electives:

Divination

Care of Magical Creatures

Quidditch:

Chaser — 5th year

Beater — part of 6th year

Reserve Chaser — 7th year

Extra Curricular:

Dueling Club — 2nd year onward

Magical Creatures Club — 3rd year onward

Favorite Professors:

Professor Kettleburn

Professor McGonagall

Least Favorite Professors:

Professor Snape

Professor Trelawney

RELATIONSHIPS

Parents:

Juliette Bancroft — biological mother | A pureblooded Auror and proud member of the Bancroft bloodline, known for producing powerful witches. She blames herself for Jacob’s disappearance, believing that she drove him away by focusing on Nellie, who she viewed as a proper heir to the Bancroft line. Unfortunately, her guilt over driving Jacob away is causing her to neglect Nellie, driving her away as well. She’s always been a little hard on her children. Nellie calls her “mum.”

Carolyn Bancroft — adopted mother | A muggle school teacher who might not understand her magical wife and children, but loves them all anyway. Nellie was always closer to her than to Juliette, and the difference only grew greater after Jacob’s disappearance. While Carolyn also grieved, she did her best to support Nellie through her anguish. She fears that her family’s going to fall apart entirely, because Juliette won’t listen to her and Nellie is growing more distant by the day. Nellie calls her “mama.”

Edwin Dermott — biological father | A muggle journalist who isn’t involved in Nellie’s life. He and Juliette dated, but it was never meant to last. It was the sort of relationship that was exciting, but not sustainable, especially considering Juliette was already a single mother to Jacob at the time. Nellie, much like Jacob, was a complete accident. Edwin at least had the decency to stick around until Nellie was born, but quickly decided fatherhood wasn’t his style and took off.

Siblings:

Jacob Bancroft — half brother | Once Nellie’s hero and very best friend, now a mystery she can’t seem to unravel. He was never a particularly powerful wizard—bright and hard working, yes, but lacking raw magical power—and considering he was the first son in generations of powerful witches, he was especially humiliated by this fact. Nellie’s bursts of accidental magic were more substantial than any spells he cast, and as much as he loved her, god, Jacob was jealous. Initially started hunting the Cursed Vaults for entirely selfish reasons, wanting to become more powerful. As is often the case, his search for power only amounted to getting him in far over his head. He spent his years in the portrait thinking of his family and the anguish he undoubtedly caused them. Upon being freed, he took it upon himself to protect them, no matter the cost, without realizing he may be making the damage worse.

Lucille Whittaker — half sister | Nellie’s muggle father’s other daughter, who she’s never met. In fact, Nellie’s not even aware of her existence, nor is Lucille aware of hers, considering that Edwin isn’t a part of either of their lives. They do end up connecting later in life, and though they never quite feel like sisters, they do become decent friends.

Love Interest:

Skye Parkin — crush | Nellie housed an unrequited crush on her for part of her 5th year, but it quickly became apparent that Skye didn’t return her feelings. To Skye, Nellie was like the sister she never had, and Nellie didn’t want to jeopardize that. She moved on, and any lingering feelings completely withered the following year.

Merula Snyde — ??? | There was some sort of tension between them in 5th year, something that blossomed from their growing mutual respect and trust in each other, but nothing ever came of it. After the events that transpired in the Vault, Merula decided Nellie wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s one of her biggest regrets.

Barnaby Lee — soulmate | Barnaby crushed on Nellie long before she had any romantic feelings for him—ever since that first duel, in fact. It took a little while, but Nellie eventually fell for Barnaby’s good heart and noble nature. He may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he never fails to make her feel cared for. He can make her laugh when nobody else can, and although she’d loathe herself if he got hurt for her sake, it honestly feels a little nice to have someone trying to protect and take care of her for once, instead of the other way around. They also both love magical creatures, so a lot of their “dates” just consist of them hanging around the Care for Magical Creatures paddock and feeding whatever they find. They’re married by the time they’re twenty.

Best Friend(s):

Rowan Khanna | Her first friend, and always her dearest. For whatever reason, they just clicked perfectly, and completely got each other. Her death changed Nellie irreversibly. For at least a year after Rowan’s death, Nellie wore the spare pair of glasses she’d kept for her everywhere. Even once she stopped, they were almost always in her bag. Nellie was eventually able to manage again, but she never really moved on.

Bill Weasley | He completely adopted her as (yet another) younger sibling, and they never quite lose that closeness, even when Jacob comes back into the picture. After all, Jacob can’t replicate the experiences Nellie had with Bill. While he was doing his part to protect Nellie as best he could, and that’s admirable, it wasn’t him that was by Nellie’s side throughout every trial she faced at Hogwarts. It was Bill, and Jacob would never be able to imitate the connection that gave Bill and Nellie.

Erika Rath | An unexpected friend, but a very strong one. During one of Nellie’s training sessions with Erika, Rowan’s glasses fell off, and cracked. The damage was entirely fixable, but Nellie had a breakdown, crying for the first time since Rowan had died. Even though Erika had only just started to become Nellie’s friend, she sat there with Nellie the entire time she sobbed. While the rest of her friends were tiptoeing around Nellie, uncomfortable in the face of such overwhelming grief and scared of saying the wrong thing, Erika took everything Nellie threw at her in stride. The fits where all Nellie could do was scream and cry, the anger that had her beating her fists against the ground, the guilt that made her wish it had been her instead. Every ugly thought, every wave of emotion, Erika stuck with Nellie through them all, keeping her grounded her during a time where she felt she could completely drift away. It’s impossible to describe the sort of bond that gives people.

Friend(s):

Penny Haywood | There’s not much to say about Penny and Nellie’s relationship. It’s simple, sweet, and supportive. They’re absolutely each other’s cheerleaders, and have an incredible amount of faith in each other.

Talbott Winger | Loathe as Talbott is to admit it, Nellie really is his friend. Nellie appreciates that Talbott can enjoy silence, and when she needs to just be around someone, without needing to explain herself, she goes to him. They spend a lot of nights in the Astronomy Tower in their animagus forms, just looking at the stars and being together.

Chiara Lobosco | Honestly, it’s surprising that it took these two as long as it did to become friends. Both of them are kind girls, who enjoy healing magic. They hit it off volunteering together in the Hospital Wing, but the real catalyst of their friendship was Nellie helping Chiara through the Woflsbane incident with Lupin.

Complicated:

Skye Parkin | They were once very good friends. Unfortunately, the drama surrounding Nellie getting trained and befriended by Erika all occurred in the month leading up to Rowan’s demise. Having Skye—someone Nellie considered a close friend—be so caught up in her own grudges and jealousy that she called off their friendship in a fit of anger not even a month after Rowan had died, while Erika—a friend she had only just started to make—acted as her rock throughout the whole grieving process, really changed Nellie’s perspective on Skye. To be fair, Skye did eventually apologize, and they picked up the pieces as best they could, but things were never the same.

Ben Copper | Truly, Nellie had always liked Ben. While his fear over just about everything could be grating, Nellie knew it was outside of his control, and to her, his kind and gentle nature far outweighed his cowardice. Unfortunately, the reveal that Ben was being used by R undoubtedly damaged their relationship, even though Nellie believed him when he claimed to be cursed. Their relationship only grows more strained as Ben’s personality shifts, with Nellie being concerned by his recklessness and frustrated by his overprotectiveness, and Ben annoyed by her refusal to accept how he’d changed.

Merula Snyde | Anyone would tell you that Nellie and Merula got off to a bad start. They were rivals from the start, and no matter how many times Nellie tried to extend an olive branch, sick and tired of fighting and wanting to move on, Merula seemed content to burn them. It wasn’t until they were pulled together as Rakepick’s assistants that their relationship started to change for the better. They respected and trusted each other out of necessity, at first, but slowly began to genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Their jabs softened, and maybe, just maybe, there started to be an inkling of some sort of attraction. But of course, any bond formed due to Rakepick’s interference was set up for failure, and any progress they’d made was completely abandoned in the wake of her betrayal. Now, neither is quite sure where they stand. They can’t just go back to hating each other, but whatever they’d started to develop isn’t going to work either.

Enemies:

Ismelda Murk | Nellie has sympathy for Ismelda, she really does. But sympathy doesn’t excuse how mean spirited Ismelda can be, with her violent threats and condescending sneer. The two have simply never liked each other, and that dislike only deepened when Barnaby’s interest in Nellie became near. As much as Ismelda claimed to be over him, she resented that he chose a perky, obnoxious Hufflepuff over her.

Patricia Rakepick | This should go without saying. Patricia Rakepick is a vile, hateful witch, who doesn’t care who she hurts in pursuit of her goals. Not only was she a direct contributor to Jake’s disappearance, but she murdered Rowan, an innocent, in cold blood. Nellie has never been the violent sort. She’s always been a pacifist, always trying to talk her way out of conflict and, if that doesn’t work, aiming to disarm instead of harm. But for Rakepick, she thinks she could make an exception. She wants to see Rakepick suffer. It scares her more than she wants to admit.

Dormmates:

Rowan Khanna — best friend

Penny Haywood — good friend

Ursa Greengrove — acquaintance (positive)

Emilie Ravemond — acquaintance (negative)

Pet(s):

Astrid — Lesser Sooty Owl

Klepto — Niffler

Flora — Fairy

Pidgey — Bowtruckle

Gertie — Hippogriff

Closest Canon Friends:

Rowan Khanna

Bill Weasley

Erika Rath

Closest MC Friends:

Jules Farrier

Callista Greenwood

Jane Briar

PERSONALITY

Positive Traits:

Selfless

Nurturing

Hard working

Endlessly loyal

Compassionate

Negative Traits:

Sensitive

Naive — up to 5th year

Paranoid — 6th year onward

Chronic hero syndrome

Anxiety prone

Deepest Secrets:

Worries that Jacob has turned into someone that isn’t worth saving

Resents her mum for putting so much emotional energy into missing Jacob that she’s begun to neglect her, and for pushing her to find Jacob at the cost of her own happiness and safety

Sometimes wishes she had been the one to die

Even more shamefully, sometimes wishes it had been Ben, if it meant that Rowan would’ve survived

Talents:

Almost unnaturally good with animals

Talented writer, enjoys poetry

Good singer, with a pleasant voice

Learned to be a good liar

Weaknesses:

Terrible artist

Poor focus

On the clumsy side, not the best at stealth

Absolutely awful memory

MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION

Nellie’s favorite physical trait of hers was always her hair. She absolutely treasured it, growing it out long for 15 years and carefully tending to it to make sure it stayed shiny, healthy, and soft. She prided herself on it...until the day she tried to run to Merula’s aid in the Buried Vault, and Patricia Rakepick grabbed her by her long golden braid to stop her. She came back to Hogwarts for her 6th year with all that long, beloved hair cut off into a bob. It was more practical, she said, and refused to answer any questions.

On the subject of her hair, Nellie ends up going grey fairly early. Her hair is entirely white by the time she’s 30 years old.

An incredibly physically affectionate person, Nellie is always touching people, hugging and holding hands and linking arms. Notably, she kissed the top of Rowan’s head every time she said goodbye.

Her and Rowan called each other “sweet girl” and “smart girl” respectively.

Nellie’s pet name for Barnaby is just to say “Barnaby dear” as though it’s one word, and it never fails to make him giddy.

Both Barnaby and Nellie have always wanted to create large, happy families for themselves, so it should come as no surprise that they end up having five daughters: Ivy (Ravenclaw), Jade (Ravenclaw), Miri (Hufflepuff), Aurora (Slytherin), and Rowan (Hufflepuff). Many were surprised Nellie waited until her last child to use Rowan’s namesake, but the truth was, she never quite felt ready.

As a frequent visitor to the Burrow, Nellie knew all the Weasleys well, and even babysat Ron and Ginny for free on a few occasions.

Bill and Jacob never get along. Though Bill can logically understand that Jacob was trying to protect Nellie the only way he knew, he can never quite forgive Jacob for the distress he caused her. And while Jacob knows that Nellie needed support when he wasn’t there and he should be grateful that someone else was, some part of him resents Bill for “taking his spot” as Nellie’s big brother.

While Nellie focused her attentions on the way her friends had changed, Rakepick’s betrayal changed her as well. She hardly slept her entire 6th year, jumping at every sound and always looking over her shoulder. Her naivety, one of her defining characteristics, withered, leaving only wariness behind. She went from trusting everyone, to trusting no one.

Thank you to @treebels for the lovely artwork! I literally cannot express how excited I was when they sent it to me! 💕

#hogwarts mystery #hphm #hogwarts mobile game #jacob's sibling #hphm mc #hphm oc #hogwarts mystery mc #hogwarts mystery oc #helena bancroft #nellie bancroft #hphm spoilers #hogwarts mystery spoilers #spoilers #harry potter

63 notes · View notes

words-out-west · 4 years ago

Text

CA tribe lands lunker salmon protection

According to Craig Tucker, Kurak tribal policy advisor, “the Kurak are a fish and acorn people.” On June 16, the California Fish and Game Commission unanimously approved the tribe’s petition to list the upper Klamath Trinity River spring run Chinook salmon as endangered to become extinct under the California endangered species act.

Tucker adds, “Science is just now catching up with traditional tribal ecology.” For years agencies that manage west coast fisheries have lumped all runs including seasonal runs into one group, yet the Kurak have always considered spring run Chinook—also called “springers”—as a separate species. They even have a different name for springers.

The petition is a several-hundred-page technical document providing scientific data supporting the listing. The petition undergoes a lengthy public process to allow stakeholders to provide input. The department of fish and wildlife reviews the petition to evaluate its merit. The petition was submitted in partnership with the salmon river restoration council.

Tucker continues that several years ago geneticists at UC Davis discovered that springers have a different genetic sequence and are a unique species. Tucker estimates the pre-European contact historical run on the Klamath was 1.2 million fish returns each year. Now they get excited to see 39 k returns per year.

The petition also calls for habitat restoration and special management zones as well as removing several hydro electric dams on the Klamath River. The dams are operated by Pacificorp, a Berkshire Hathaway group with headquarters in Portland, Oregon. A 2002 Fish Kill destroyed some 65,000 fish due to low-water flows and toxic algae plumes that periodically build up behind the dams. The Klamath River winds 257 miles through Oregon and Northern California, the tribe’s ancestral lands. It is the largest river by discharge in California.

When asked if this fish listing was part of the tribe’s larger strategy for dam removal, Tucker responded, “Sure, we think they should come down either way.”

California Trout, a non-profit conservation group, estimates some 300 miles of habitat is cut off from the fish by the dams. This critical spawning and rearing habitat is crucial for the life cycle of the Chinook. The fish spend several years in fresh water before migrating downstream into the ocean where they also spend several years prior to returning and spawning.

Tucker adds that the fish has significant cultural value for the tribe, both in ceremony and for sustenance. The great seal of the tribe depicts a Chinook salmon and a traditional Kurak man dip-net fishing at Ishi Pishi falls. Tucker also claims that the springers taste better than the other runs, “due to a higher level of fat content in the fish.”

Ishi Pishi Falls is a class VI set of rapids on the Klamath River. The California Fish and Game Commission was the first wildlife resource agency founded in the United States. There are five commissioners who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the senate.

Scott McMorrow is a disabled environmental journalist living in Northern California.

#wildlife #disabled #California wildlife #environmental journalism

2 notes · View notes

the-cyberpunk-zeitgeist · 4 years ago

Text

The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist

>>>𝕄𝕜𝕕𝕚𝕣 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"...

>>>ℂ𝕕 "𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪"

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕙𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕕.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝔻𝕠𝕨𝕟𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕 𝕔𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕜𝕝𝕖𝕡𝕥.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>ℝ𝕦𝕟 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖...

>>>𝕄𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 <𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘-𝕗𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕕:

"𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪.𝕙" 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕>

>>>𝔼𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣 𝕞𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕒𝕘𝕖: "ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕕 𝕤𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕥𝕪.𝕖𝕩𝕖. 𝕎𝕖 𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕚𝕟 𝕚𝕥."

>>>...

Flash into the past and look into the future. Recall the early stages of the digital age—the new millennium—and how, at the precipice of a thousand transformations, civilization was defined by its endless climbing innovation. In the 80’s and 90’s, when consumer use of the personal computer was infecting society like a virus, our entire idea of communication changed. The net became a pivotal point in shaping what it meant to be human. Through an ever-expanding web of information, human innovation seemed to spiral until promising “authorship over reality itself”. Those who felt constrained by the world, escaped into a fractal space with infinite possibilities of connecting with others.

Douglas Rushkoff termed it ‘Cyberia’—a dreamlike place offering “a way to crack open our civilization’s closed-mindedness, and to allow for a millennial transition that offered something a lot better than apocalypse: consciously driven evolution”, but the mesmerizing unity in this newfound cyberscape didn’t last. What followed—what we see around us now—may lead us to believe that all is lost, but perhaps there’s something more than war, corporate politics, espionage. Perhaps, there still exist some humans among us interested in a higher cause: unlocking the mysteries.

While the net was first adopted solely by military personnel and groups of scientists across academia who saw fit to interconnect themselves for research and communication purposes, it soon fell into the hands of the geeks using hypertext forums to discuss niche hobbies or send pictures to one another. The net became a mystic place of interlocking minds, where interconnected collections of data contributed to the neural network of humans that composed a global brain. As this paradise aged, however, the desire of investors to monetize and capitalize from the cyberscape arose alongside it. Advertisements flooded the web; businesses sprung up in every forum, website, and chat client. It wasn’t long into the 21st century that the nature of the web was forever molded by a greed to optimize its use for social credit, capital, and leverage for everything from corporate intelligence, to data harvesting, to control and censorship of media. The symbol of freedom and exploration was thus transformed into a stratified market and a subversive survival game. It’s all so… Cyberpunk.

In the 80’s and 90’s, alongside the rise of computers and the net, came the rise of Cyberpunk literature—a sci-fi subgenre defined by its retro aesthetics intermixed with contrasting commentary that showed us the wonders of new technology while simultaneously revealing the deep divide that emerged as a result of inequality. Pioneers like William Gibson in Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, and Katsuhiro Otomo in Akira revealed the true impact of this divide. In a world where everyone in the streets is chromed up with augmented cybernetic prostheses, but can still hardly afford to eat—a world where cities have been replaced by endlessly sprawling megalopoli—we’re left immersed in the aesthetics of ‘high tech-low life’ people struggling to get by.

Cyberpunk showed sci-fi fans what it might look like if kleptocratic corporations spiralled further and further into the power vacuum created by advancing technology. If caution and regulation aren’t put in place to protect the people from marvelous creations that humanity could hardly predict outside of science fiction, the people are further exploited and economic classes are further stratified. When this is combined with life-threatening dangers around every corner, the difference between economic class can mean life and death.

While the additional flourishes of weapons-grade cyborgs, sentient and sentimental artificial intelligence, and laser guns can make Cyberpunk seem like a farfetched reach into a future that will never come, I am here to tell you that this is Society, and we are living in it. Around the world, rising sea levels begin to swallow more of the coastline, and megafires consume any shred of nature or infrastructure in their path. Both of these events are spurred by human-driven climate change which is created in large part by first-world corporations churning out fossil fuels or slicing up rainforests for profit. The global hivemind that is the internet has become the limitless communications apparatus we wanted it to be, but it is covered in adverts and subverts its users attempts to harness its power with misinformation, propaganda, and profit-driven exclusive content. Riots over authoritarian state measures have propped up not only in the United States, but in Hong Kong, Belarus, and all across the globe. Pandemic disease and refugee crises displace hundreds of thousands of humans each year, and the rich keep getting richer by the billions.

In more recent Cyberpunk writing like William Gibson’s The Peripheral, Gibson describes the Jackpot:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That is was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns… or else were eaten alive by something that caused the big event. Not like that.

It was androgenic… that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late.

...it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years.

Jackpot. The repercussions of humanity’s actions finally catch up, and those bits of humanity that do remain are saved by an extreme surge in innovation that manages to save society’s elites. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his recent essay The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods, more and more of those who have the capital to do so have already begun their plans, whether those plans are to escape to Mars or to set themselves up with a cushy work-from-home job while the lower class workers are forced into the public during the pandemic crisis. The need to automate away positions for the safety of our species is becoming even more prevalent than it once was in the minds of corporate conglomerates, but the cancerous overgrowth of our bureaucracy has become so bloated and tripped up in its own processes that we can no longer look to our political systems to keep up with the exploitation of innovation. Lo and behold, the world’s looking pretty CPAF to me.

Where have the visions of Cyberia gone? What happened to the early stages of internet punks, pushed aside in their desire to surf the datasphere purely for the rush of uncovering swathes of data? Where did visions of “authorship over reality itself” twist to become ‘authorship over reality by those with the capital to control’? It may seem that this explosive spiral of technological innovation in the new millennium is driving us towards extinction and only saving those with enough coins in their pockets to buy a ticket on the ark, but perhaps it’s not too late to change course and save ourselves from the ultimate Jackpot.

United by the global nature of the net, every one of us is connected as a single living entity that is the Earth—a Technogaia. Developments in artificial intelligence promises us exponential increase in information processing capabilities across all fields. Breakthroughs in genetic engineering could allow us to delete diseases from our genomes, and have already shown minor success in the de-extinction of species. With the first cyborg part already installed in each of our pockets, every citizen can extend their minds beyond capacity; each one of us becomes a journalist at a moment’s notice when injustice needs to be documented and challenged. Nuclear, hydrogen, solar, and wind energy lead us towards a cleaner and greener future. The rise of urban ecology shows a path to optimize the use of space to lower humanity’s carbon impact while providing more space for habitat rehabilitation and the reintroduction of lost biodiversity.

In the palm of our hands, humanity has taken control of the world. With science and technology, we’ve become the manipulators, but if we do not recognize what our impact is on the Dao of Earth, we may tip the scales too far into the Chaos. I’ll be honest in saying things look grim, but these same innovations that have paved the way for flying killbots and smoke stacks spewing gases into the sky have given us the power to reshape the world in a beneficial image. Futurist politicians call for universal basic income in a world increasingly run by machines. Transhumanists pave the way for the radical extension of the human lifespan. Technogaians design solarpunk arcologies to house a society ready to save their Earth rather than one intent on consuming it. Cyberians fight for our rights to privacy and the freedom of information. Just as the visions of grim dystopias in the 80's and 90’s saw themselves transformed into modern realities, we can use humanity’s greatest tool—this near-deific domain over innovation—to mold this fractal reality into our vision. But is it chaos, order, or some harmonious Dao in between that we seek?

No matter our choice, it’s going to take a lot of united high tech-low life cyberpunks to get there. This is the Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, and we’re living it.

For more works by The Cyberpunk Zeitgeist, see our Twitter page @CyborgZeitgeist

#cyberpunk #sci-fi #science #environment #technology

19 notes · View notes