#corona study

[harrowharkwife]

thinking thoughts about how nona was so obsessed with crown, and crown specifically- not coronabeth. crown, with her boots and her cargo pants and her guns and her hair tied back, with all her charm and strength, all her rage and determination.

was that really just nona? or, walk with me here- is there a chance that that was actually alecto, too, bleeding through and rising to the surface?

alecto, seeing a kind of kinship in crown- in this big, tall, strong blonde with a sword strapped to her back, hot and lovely and kind and awful and powerful and perfect. this woman who refuses to give up- on her sister, on saving jody, on BOE's resistance. who's unafraid to throw one hell of a tantrum, if it means being listened to, for once. crown, who everyone thinks of as dumb, who everyone underestimates, who no one ever takes as seriously as they should, even though she's clearly capable of plenty of atrocities in her own right. this woman who's been described over and over again as someone who positively radiates life, and energy, and vitality, and strength. this woman who wanted nothing more than the chance to be herself, to be free, to serve as cavalier and guardian and protector, but was instead sentenced at birth to a life of being a princess and wearing dresses and looking pretty and loving less and staying out of the way and keeping her mouth shut and playing second fiddle to a necromancer obsessed with power and glory. familiar, no? this woman who was betrayed, left behind, left alone, and left utterly in the dark by the one person who's supposed to love her the most- only to then be told that being abandoned was in her best interest, really, for her own safety.

thinking about all the times we've seen ianthe insult crown's intelligence and praise her beauty in the same breath. you big dumb bimbo, what can you do? of all the times we've seen ianthe fussing over crown's appearance. thinking of the sister-lyctor makeover-montage ahead of dios apate minor, and how harrow hated every second of it, and how ianthe treated it like nostalgic second nature. thinking about the third house: fucked-up planet gossip-girl with all its betrayal and espionage and flesh magic and debauchery, three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile. thinking about the pressure that must have come with keeping up the double-necromancer ruse, about ianthe having successfully played the part of two necromancers from the age of six. exactly how much practice must that have taken? thinking about the casual, automatic, possessive, offhanded, violating nature of ianthe playing god and giving harrow a full head of fast-growing hair without asking, without even telling her, just to make harrow prettier, just to piss her off, just because she could. how she did it so easily, and without hesitation, almost as though she's maybe done that sort of thing before.

thinking about preservation. about a perfect body frozen in ice for a myriad, about ianthe spending all her downtime on the mithraeum figuring out how long she can keep an apple core in perfect stasis before the rot sets in.

thinking about corpse puppeting: a deceased world leader here, a trusted cavalier and friend you've known from the cradle there. about i picked you to change, and this is how you repay me? about she took babs. and who even cares about babs? babs! she could have taken me!

thinking about alecto, and hollywood hair barbie, and you have made me a hideousness.

thinking about crown, who's by her own admission boobs and hair and talk and a hell of a swordhand.

thinking about something as simple as stud earrings, and about how much grief ianthe gave her for daring to wear them.

nona loved crown.

something tells me that alecto might, too.

[moonilit]

This is all about Jote now

[eskildit]

as yet unsent modern au but its just that judith coronabeth and camilla have a group project for an undergrad poli sci class. comparable levels of torture to being held in captivity.

[prestonmonterey]

if you got to live in one of the seven *cough cough eight cough* kingdoms, which would it be?

options:

- corona

- galcrest

- ingvarr

- pittsford

- koto

- neserdnia

- bayangor

- selene/sceptra/dark kingdom

hmmmm

i mean

somehow corona seems the most functional from what i remember?

which is honestly. such a low bar.

but uhh

yeah i mean like

dark kingdom pre evil moonstone stuff

otherwise

i guess

corona

[greyborn2]

maybe weird thought that just hit me; a locked tomb AU set in the Disco Elysium world could actually work... kinda awesomely? IDK, the vibes just somehow align in a way that *works* in by brain. Can 1000% imagine Harrow latching onto Dolores Dei as her 'alecto' in it like crazy. Gideon as some shipping dock worker. The Second just *reek* of that pathetic cop energy that try to come into Martinaise and be 'The Law' and fail spectacularly. Just... so many things lining up perfectly in my head. Plus as someone who normally viscerally dislikes modern AUs I think it could actually work pretty well as a modern-adjacent locked tomb AU. That kinda 'almost modern, almost our world... but not quite' energy that preserves the weirdness of tlt.

[tgtbata]

you’re still here and i’m still here so i guess we’ve (almost) made it through another year. 2022 had weird ups and downs for me but it’s ending on an up so i’m very grateful for that. i drew a lot of art i’m proud of and i hope you guys enjoyed some of it as much as i did :)

thank you for every nice word, comment and tag you’ve ever left on my art! huge shout-out to all my friends who deserve the world <3

[collectorcookie]

Can someone please tell me to go do my homework? I am. Procrastinating.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

What do you think about the experiment where pastors asked chatgpt to write a sermon? Is this a good thing, bad thing, or somewhere in between?

Among sermon writers, there is fascination – and unease – over the fast-expanding abilities of artificial-intelligence chatbots. For now, the evolving consensus among clergy is this: Yes, they can write a passably competent sermon. But no, they can’t replicate the passion of actual preaching.

“It lacks a soul – I don’t know how else to say it,” said Hershael York, a pastor in Kentucky who also is dean of the school of theology and a professor of Christian preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Sermons are meant to be the core of a worship service — and often are faith leaders’ best weekly shot at grabbing their congregation’s attention to impart theological and moral guidance.

Lazy pastors might be tempted to use AI for this purpose, York said, “but not the great shepherds, the ones who love preaching, who love their people.”

A rabbi in New York, Joshua Franklin, recently told his congregation at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons that he was going to deliver a plagiarized sermon – dealing with such issues as trust, vulnerability and forgiveness.

Upon finishing, he asked the worshippers to guess who wrote it. When they appeared stumped, he revealed that the writer was ChatGPT, responding to his request to write a 1,000-word sermon related to that week’s lesson from the Torah.

“Now, you’re clapping — I’m deathly afraid,” Franklin said when several congregants applauded. “I thought truck drivers were going to go long before the rabbi, in terms of losing our positions to artificial intelligence.”

My main question is, what's the difference? I don't mean that in just a snarky way, but legitimately. What is the metaphysical difference between a sermon produced by a human and a sermon produced by ChatGPT? How do you detect "soul" or "not-soul"? How do you measure "soulness"? How do you distinguish between the divine effectiveness of a sermon generated by A.I. from a human-authored one? If we did a blind study - putting together, say, a dozen sermons with a mix of human and A.I. - could the clergy tell the difference?

I previously posted about black Americans leaving Xianity, and one of the examples given by an ex-Xian was:

The last time I went to a church it was a lovely and inspirational sermon until the pastor started disparaging gays for absolutely no reason. Even at my grandfather’s funeral, the pastor there managed to blame gays for the state of the world. Just random unnecessary hate.

What is the metaphysical distinction between a nasty magic spell written by a human and a nice magic spell written by an A.I.? Which one does "god" choose to ignore? Either? Both? How do you tell?

I've said before that if any of the gods was real, it should be obvious which one. its adherents would survive cancer at a higher rate, pass exams at a higher rate, live longer, be more prosperous, more successful, more prone to getting carparks. But that isn't true.

If it's about sincerity, what happens if you give the A.I. sermon to a deacon or more junior cleric who doesn't know where it comes from, and who preaches it sincerely? If it's about intent, then it's not about the content.

There's a few things this reminds me of.

--

Firstly, there was the Catholic priest who was baptizing people with one incorrect word.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/14/us/pastor-invalid-baptisms-resignation/

Father Andres Arango, who performed thousands of baptisms, would say, “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” But Olmsted explained the words “We baptize” should have been “I baptize” instead.

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted wrote in a message to parishioners posted last month.

The error also means that because baptism is the first of the sacraments, some people will need to repeat other sacraments, according to the diocese webpage for frequently asked questions. CNN has reached out to the diocese for comment on other sacraments.

But nobody ever noticed. For 20 years, nobody said, "Father, I don't think it worked, I don't have that Jesusey feeling in me." Nobody ever came back to haunt him and tell him off for getting it wrong and condemning them to purgatory.

The magic spell never actually went identifiably wrong. It's not like the budget didn't balance or the app didn't work or the cake didn't rise.

How do you metaphysically distinguish someone who's had the spiritual hotfix applied, and someone who hasn't?

--

Secondly, Surah Corona. If you're not aware, Islam insists that the divine origin of the quran is self evident within the quran. That nobody but Allah could write verses like those in the quran, and challenges doubters to do so.

https://quranx.com/10.37-38

And it was not [possible] for this Qur'an to be produced by other than Allah, but [it is] a confirmation of what was before it and a detailed explanation of the [former] Scripture, about which there is no doubt, from the Lord of the worlds.

Or do they say [about the Prophet], "He invented it?" Say, "Then bring forth a surah like it and call upon [for assistance] whomever you can besides Allah, if you should be truthful."

https://quranx.com/11.13-14

Or do they say, "He invented it"? Say, "Then bring ten surahs like it that have been invented and call upon [for assistance] whomever you can besides Allah, if you should be truthful."

And if they do not respond to you - then know that the Qur'an was revealed with the knowledge of Allah and that there is no deity except Him. Then, would you [not] be Muslims?

So, someone did.

And (some) Muslims completely lost their minds.

Tunisian authorities have arrested a young woman for publishing fake verses of the Quran about the novel coronavirus.

Amna Al-Sharqi will be investigated by the Tunisian public prosecution, El Bashayerreported, for posting a text on her Facebook page entitled "Surah Corona".

Al-Sharqi sparked outrage on social media for the fake verses and even received death threats.

Never mind that the quran literally challenges you to, it seems like the reaction to it telegraphs the success of the project.

More to the point, if we can't metaphysically distinguish A.I. sermons from human-created sermons, if we can't supernaturally distinguish divine surahs from human-authored surahs, why do we trust the "real" ones at all?

Especially given the known unreliable origin of both the bible and the quran.

--

We need not stop there, though. In the Grievance Studies scandal, three academics wrote papers that passed through the review process of several journals and were published, some of them even receiving awards. These papers included:

the "dog park" paper which questioned how dog humping in parks reflects rape-condoning attitudes in human clubs.

a paper which argues for non-competitive "fat bodybuilding."

one which recommends chaining white male students to the floor in the classroom.

a paper that argues that astronomy is sexist and needs to include feminist and queer astrology.

a rewrite of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism.

and a paper which suggests straight men stick things up their butts in order to overcome "transphobia."

All the papers were ultimately retracted, but the authors argue that there's no basis for doing this.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00491241211009946

In particular, we agree that our papers did not constitute hoaxes and that our intentions when writing them should not be understood to diminish the worth of their content. We also agree that either “Fat Bodybuilding” and our other theory-only papers should be reinstated or else all papers from which ours are indistinguishable should be retracted as being based upon unsound methodologies. Our papers containing false data should remain retracted, and the retraction notices should be amended to reflect genuine scholarly reasons for their retraction: namely, reasons based on the fraudulence of the alleged empirical data, not on the subjective state of mind of the authors.

The papers followed the theory, made the arguments, many were accepted, and several actually published. The "dog park" paper was honored by the journal for its 25th anniversary.

As Helen Pluckrose said:

We set ourselves to the task of writing grievance studies papers. These were real papers. Some people have misunderstood our project to be one in which we wrote nonsense and showed that journals will publish anything. No. They only publish a very specific kind of nonsense.

The reason we got seven papers accepted is because our papers were indistinguishable from genuine ones. Ones that influence social justice activism, politics and culture today.

[..]

All this involved becoming very familiar with the scholarship and reading an enormous number of books and papers. We are legitimate grievance scholars. Our papers average 30 citations, all of them real, but we still turned out a paper every two weeks by essentially recycling and repurposing the same sets of theories.

This is not scholarship. It wasn't scholarship when we did it to show the problem, and it isn't when it's done absolutely sincerely.

We had to conclude our probe early, but it was not the reviewers of grievance journals who caught us. They did not see our claim to have examined 10,000 dog genitals and analyzed this according to black feminist criminology as a bit fishy.

To this day, all three authors have received requests for the completed versions of the papers that were in revision at the time the probe was revealed, and have received feedback from the scholars they cited, that they agreed with the points made in the probe's papers, and have been told that they understood the material better than anyone else.

--

So, the same question could be asked in all these cases. If an A.I. can write a sermon, a priest can say a blessing, a human can write a divine surah, a critic can write an academic paper, when those products conform to the ideology and are indistinguishable from the "real" thing, either they should be all equally valid or all equally invalid.

And brings into question of why we trusted the "real" thing in the first place.

I don't know that the preachers who are discussing the use of ChatGPT have thought about this, and I don't know that anything will come of it, but I think there's some good questions to be asked about what makes their thing legit, and ChatGPT's not legit.

As to whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't see any way that this is a bad thing, to non-believers at least. Unless there's something I'm missing that someone can point out. It could be a good thing if believers start wonder about these matters. It could be more neutral than anything else.

Still, it opens up an opportunity. One need not study theology or complete any of the various religious training camps. Hang up your shingle, log into ChatGPT and start preaching... and collecting.

--

P.S. Pissed off I had to write this twice when Tumblr's stupid editor crashed. Save. Your. Drafts. 😡

[borrelia]

thinking about this. sorry . thinking about this

now i know. that like. economy of storytelling etc etc but sonic's friends never succeed with the "nooo this isnt you" thing bc super. hates sonic. but ebony (super's friend) at least gets him to slow down, if just to sike her out, bc she appeals to super's true nature. and cares about super. him. do you see.

[elijones94]

👑 Queen Arianna and her sister, Willow 🌸🎨

[tardis--dreams]

Pompeii came out 10 years ago: sounds right. that's not even that long ago?!

Last all time low concert was 5.5 years ago: absolutely not. that's literally impossible. that's like half a lifetime, the Fuck?!

[pressecop24]

Studie zeigt, dass die COVID-19-Injektion von Pfizer MEHR ALS 500-mal zulässige DNA-Kontamination aufweist https://behoerdenstress.de/studie-zeigt-dass-die-covid-19-injektion-von-pfizer-mehr-als-500-mal-zulaessige-dna-kontamination-aufweist/

[omg-erika]

Does Alternative Medicine Have a Future?

by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext What the mainstream media is hiding The more effective alternative medicine is, the more popular it is and the more likely it is to threaten its continued existence. Because their success endangers the profits of an overpowering opponent who can destroy them. Their humble future lies in the health economics niche where word of mouth leads – under the radar of…

[manuhigueras]

The salary of a female soccer player is ten times lower than a man´s.

That´s why they decided to play ten times more.

[thatneoncrisis]

i wrote a big long essay talking about tlt and how it engages with describing the skintones of brown characters its under a read more bc it is so long.

I already left a long comment about this on someone else post but I wish I could study tazmuirs odd little habit of dancing around the fact that Gideon and Harrow are women of color when she describes them, and how this kind of extends to other brown characters

We get a million descriptions for how sickly pale ianthe Silas and cytherea are, what a lovely golden tan corona has, the odd tannish yellow hue of colum, all imagined by her, in her own words, to be white. Then when it comes to Marta and Judith they're called dark like Once in the text. I don't think it's even mentioned for Jeannemary and magnus in the entirety of gtn though I will gladly stand corrected if I missed something. It's such a non factor for them, which normally I would overlook if it wasn't for the aforementioned specificity of how white characters are described on Top of one of the major themes of the book being how John, a Maori man, resurrected a largely Polynesian population and then proceed to rule them using the exact same methods that actively colonized new zealand. Like I just think it's really interesting that in many ways, the story is about two young Maori women completely stripped of cultural heritage, they can't even speak te reo maori they cannot even conceptualize the scale of that kind of loss. Theyve been to earth once and during her brief time there Gideon literally died on it's soil it feels so poignant

Back to them specifically being Not Pale, this is not me saying they would be "less" maori if they were light-skinned that's total bullshit and the entire paradigm exists as a product of European bullshit. My fascination is more with the fact that tamsyn has clearly thought of them as midtoned to dark skinned. I'm going to be really generous and disregard the Tommy Arnold covers- he is a talented artist but he's not the author and Taz stated in an interview that she didn't envision Gideon with an undercut either so he clearly has little liberties he can take and I'm fine with that get your coin dude. For these two I'm going to have to focus on Nona the Ninth, bc for the entirety of gtn, harrow is described as grey, and while I understand that's bc she's constantly under a mountain of white and black facepaint, we basically never get an objective description for either of them. Gideon stand out features are her build, hair and eyes, like a lot of characters, but it could have been pretty easy to throw in a line about how she seems less desaturated than what one might expect from a ninth cavalier, like a rich warm brown, possibly hinting to other characters that she isn't a ninth native

Htn also gives very little to work with, again harrows primary colors are the blacks whites and greys of facepaint and her hair and the reds of constantly sweating blood. The character who's darker skintone is Most remarked upon (also one of the few ever constantly headcanoned) as black, is g1deon. I've actually spoken to a few people about this and there seems to be some actual Mandela effect shit going on where people remember Taz saying he's black despite me never once finding evidence for this. However, this is not a case where I'd be overjoyed to be proven wrong, because g1deon being the one black guy in this entire cast, the one who's dark skintone is commented on the most, being the guy who barely speaks, tries killing harrow with a spear 14 times and then dies offscreen. Not good. Bad, actually

Finally onto ntn, in the beginning chapters Nona remarks her (harrows) skintone is the color of an egg carton. I assume she means the light tan, desaturated brown of the cardboard used in certain cartons, which is fitting for harrow, girls lived in an ice cave for 17 years. This is basically the only word we get on it. I believe a few times the text will say something about pyrrha's (g1deon's) brown Everything; brown skin, russet brown hair, rich brown eyes. that character gets to be viewed and constantly affirmed as a brown character in teh way gideon and harrow arent, it kind of others pyrrha. to contrast camillas hands are called tanned way at the beginning while recording nona's dream, then at the way end it says, "Her face still looked grey beneath its nice normal olive," olive being used to describe her once before in gtn as far as i can see. pyrrha's (g1deon's) skintone is one of her most notable features, its brought up to a noticeable agree the text wants you to keep it in your mind when you think of the saint of duty; "Most of Pyrrha was the colours of the building site: deep dried-out browns, dusty hunks of clay, rusted metal." "Pyrrha wouldn’t burn any colour other than her deep cool brown." "Nona took the water from Pyrrha’s brown, work-chapped hand and even sipped it" "Pyrrha had carried Camilla to bed in her big brown arms like Cam weighed nothing" "Pyrrha said, “Thanks, Nums,” and drained the whole thing. Nona,fascinated, watched the brown column of her throat move as she swallowed." its just notable to me when alternatively with nona you'll get a line like "Camilla didn’t say anything to that either, only rubbed her wrists where the tape had been. Nona’s skin was already back to its nice normal colour." like just the vagueness in nice normal color, we get one line about what shes supposed to look like in the beginning and thats it

towards the end during the broadcast, nona gets her first clear look at kiriona, described as: "warm-coloured skin that should have been a similar brown hue to Nona’s, except that there was something wrong with it." break out the champagne its official

Obviously, dying takes some color from you. If anything, gideons desaturation should make them More comparable given the egg carton comment and harrows general state of constant anemia. Has Nona gotten darker during her time on new rho? Was Gideon lighter than the cover led us to believe? We don't know. We well never know, which is odd, bc these books fucking love purple prose about people's appearances. We have like seven different synonyms for the shade of ianthes hair. New words for black have to be invented in order to convey harrows eyes which are Black, not the dark muddy brown of someone like ortus. It's less that I'm bothered by the text not hyperfocusing on their skin and more it picking and choosing when it will laser focus on a detail like that, and how often it's skipped over to the point that I like, constantly see people draw harrow as incredibly pale, which is very different from being light-skinned

Finally, I know people can dismiss this as like an audience interpretation thing. I know I actively draw harrow darker than Gideon which I know isn't canon. But this is less about Fandom response to the text and more the text itself and how it's like. Afraid to say brown. near the end of ntn i found One instance of it referring to gideons "slim brown hand" on nonas cheek and that is direct as it gets. even her other like, strongly non european traits are sort of danced around. her nose is "a nose that was the complete opposite of Nona’s nose, one that put her in mind of those big poison desert cats Born in the Morning was crazy about." a very fanciful description, you have to infer that nona means that its probably flat and wide, also giving us the information that harrows is most likely narrow and straight, possibly downturned. im not opposed to this, especially given the character talking about her is nona, but then you get the following paragraph:

"Her skin was very much dead-person skin, ashen and tinted the wrong colour around the nostrils and the mouth. But even if she hadn’t been dead, Nona was critical. Her eyelashes were very dark, but short and curly, whereas Nona thought all eyelashes should be long and straight (her own eyelashes were long and straight). The corpse had too much mouth and a dimple (nobody in her home had a dimple). You could not, at least, see the veins in her eyelids, which were heavy and cold and deep-set. But Nona thought it was going to be a shame to go from being so lovely as she was to being so—redheaded."

its a very frank description. dimple, curly lashes, red head, dead skin, probably a wide mouth. her nose is contrasted against nonas nose, which is also never directly described, and then compared to a fantasy animal we have never heard of until right now

kicks rocks. there isnt a point to this. the series is almost over, there is zero reason to like, knock on taz's door and ask why she did this or that. it doesnt stop me from loving the series, and the insinuation that noticing this means i must dislike the series is frankly insane (real thing that happened). if someone got the impression that harrow was white given how shes described i wouldnt blame them honestly, its most apparent she isnt in the third book (with the cover art being incredibly ambiguous) and a single blog post from taz mentioning shes maori, immediately followed by an "oh i dont care how you see the characters" addendum, which i think is like. an odd thing to tack on bc them descended from kiwis is like, very integral to the story, and gideon being the daughter of the maori man who took everything from her she didnt even know she could have and the (presumably, given her name and a very brief description) maori woman fighting to get that world back its like. damn. it feels a little important. that the audience knows theyre maori. like a little. it feels intertwined with the whole thing about john using european standards of imperialism and general aesthetics to hurt his own kid. actually.

[elijones94]

🌼🌸 Rapunzel is ready to defend herself, by any means necessary! 🎨🦎🐴