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niteshade925 · 10 months ago

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April 13, Xi'an, China, Shaanxi Archaeology Museum/陕西考古博物馆 (Part 3 - Qin dynasty to Sui dynasty):

First up is one of many bronze edict tablets of the 2nd emperor of Qin dynasty, made in 209 BC. Inscribed upon it in Seal script is one of two edicts, specifically the one from the 2nd emperor of Qin dynasty (秦二世), which basically is a continuation of Qin Shi Huang's edict on standardizing all weights and measurements. Here Qin Shi Huang/秦始皇 is referred to as Shi Huangdi/始皇帝, where shi/始 means "origin", and huangdi/皇帝 means "emperor".

^The edict inscribed is as follows (this is my VERY rough translation, please take this with a grain of salt, I'm not great at reading Old Chinese; original text is on bottom right of picture):

“First year (209 BC; first year of 2nd Emperor of Qin's reign), [We] issued an edict to chancellors Li Si and Feng Quji: Shi Huangdi pioneered this effort to standardize all weights and measurements, since then all such edicts have been inscribed on bronze. Now that [We have] inherited this Huangdi title, [We] shall not refer to Ourselves as Shi Huangdi here. Likewise, should Our descendants continue to produce tablets of Shi Huangdi's edict, they shall not take credit for Shi Huangdi's achievements. [We] hereby inscribe this edict on the left, so that all may be clear."

Ever since Qin Shi Huang tried to standardize systems of measurements for the entire country, every dynasty since Qin dynasty has also done the same. These are the standardized weights and volume measurements (all made with bronze) from Western Han dynasty (202 - 8 BC). Those volume measurement tools are very much like oversized measurement spoons, since they are mostly used to measure liquids and grains (in ancient China grains can be measured by volume).

Looks like I forgot about this one in part 2, this is a bronze sword from Warring States period (475 - 221 BC), I believe. It's decorated with carved pieces of jade (some are on the scabbard, but the scabbard has presumably decomposed over time):

The painted and carved stone doorway to a Eastern Han dynasty (25 - 220 AD) tomb. The actual (double) doors are in the middle, and the pieces around them are the side jambs and the lintel. Note the animals, mythical creatures, and humans depicted. On the double doors, in order from top to bottom, there's a pair of Zhuque/朱雀/Vermilion Bird, a pair of symbolic door knockers shaped like a beast carrying a ring in its mouth, and a pair of oxen. On the top right and top left of the lintel piece, you can also clearly see the sun crow and the moon toad, respectively.

The layout of some Western Han dynasty (202 - 8 BC) mausoleums. Note that the "pyramids" on the model aren't stone pyramids like the Great Pyramid of Giza, they are actually fengtu/封土, or artificial mounds of earth on top of the actual tomb to symbolically seal the tomb (feng/封 means "seal" or "to seal"), and can serve as tomb markers. Fengtu can differ vastly in size according to the social status of the deceased, so the fengtu of imperial tombs are usually huge, some so big that they are like small hills. However, while Western Han dynasty imperial tombs have these square-ish fengtu mounds, in Eastern Han dynasty (25 - 220 AD) the fengtu mounds became circular, and imperial tomb fengtu have been circular pretty much ever since. But fengtu wasn't just reserved for the elites, common folk also built small circular fengtu mounds on top of graves (these graves are called fen/坟; graves without fengtu are called mu/墓), and this is still practiced today, albeit much more common in rural areas since there are less people and more land. When people tend to the graves of their family members and ancestors on Qingming Festival, if the grave is a fen grave, people would pile more earth on the fengtu to make it rounder as part of the upkeep process.

A set of pottery figurines of entertainers from a Western Han era tomb. I love how they set the display up here, you can practically imagine the music and the dancing

More pottery figurines from Western Han era tombs

Western Han era hollow clay bricks depicting the Four Symbols/四象 of the cardinal directions: Qinglong/青龙/Azure Dragon of the East, Zhuque/朱雀/Vermilion Bird of the South, Xuanwu/玄武/Black Tortoise of the North, and Baihu/白虎/White Tiger of the West.

Left: a piece of intricately painted lacquered wood, I forgot where it's from but it was probably a piece of decoration on a larger artifact. Right: a piece of gold decoration inlaid with turquoise from Western Han era

The biggest decorated yubi/玉璧 (jade disc with hole in the middle) found so far, from an early Western Han dynasty tomb. Its diameter is 43.2 cm (~17 inches). If you zoom in, the inner band is decorated with these almost tadpole-like little swirls, and these are called gu pattern/谷纹, since they might represent sprouting rice kernels. The outer band is decorated with 4 sets of kuilong patterns/夔龙纹 and 4 sets of dragon-phoenix patterns/龙凤纹. It's speculated that the patterns here together depict the universe, and the hole in the middle is where the spirit of the deceased will travel through. This particular yubi also has 六百六十一 ("six hundred and sixty-one") carved discreetly on the side, presumably a "serial number" left by the artisan who crafted this piece.

Decorated backs of bronze mirrors. I didn't take a picture of the plaque so I'm unclear on what time period these are from (may or may not be from the time period indicated at the beginning of the post):

Left: a hand-held incense burner. Right: a particular type of incense burner called a boshanlu/博山炉, so named because the lid was made to look like a mini mountain

Various Northern Zhou dynasty (557 - 581 AD) painted pottery figurines. Below middle arranged in a circle is the metal pieces on a belt.

Sixteen Kingoms era pottery entertainer figurines:

#2024 china #xi'an #china #shaanxi archaeology museum #chinese history #chinese culture #qin dynasty #han dynasty #northern zhou dynasty #sixteen kingdoms period #archaeology #history #culture

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firenati0n · 1 month ago

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wip wednesday <3 :)

hello :) thank you for all the past tags!

i don't want to share anything from lake house au (posting soon), so here is a snip from a doc i have titled (mostly as a joke) henry wick. which should be explanation enough. don't look at me.

Henry isn’t sure whether to feel comforted or aggrieved at the fact that the interior of the Continental is almost the same as it was five years ago; the opulent and luxurious Art Deco features shroud the building in mystery, concealing the blood in the crevices. The entire structure is frozen in time, from the lavish architecture, to the suited attendants, to the rich jewel and gold tones. As he walks to the front desk, he steadfastly avoids the curious glances from guests lounging in the lobby, no doubt ready to spread the word—the prodigal son returns. Best not to make a fuss. However, no person on Earth is immune to the easy charm of the concierge. Henry smiles in greeting; pleasantries were considered inefficient. “Sir. You look well,” Percy says from behind the desk, hands clasped in front of him. He gives Henry a once-over behind stylish gold frames that complement his deep plum suit. “Two nights?” Henry flicks a spot of dried blood off his jaw. “If you would be so kind. I may need to extend my stay, depending on how business goes.” “That can be arranged. We’re only at seventy-two percent capacity.” Henry makes a show of looking around, taking in the new furniture and clearly remodeled foundation. No amount of paint can erase the bone-deep pain, though. “You’ve clearly cleaned up around here.” “We gave her a facelift around three years ago, but some things stayed the same.” The slightest raise of an eyebrow, anticipating Henry’s next question— “Same owner?” Percy gives him a knowing smile. “He’s expecting you.” “Is he now?” Henry slides a gold coin across the marble, and Percy hands him a key with a nod. “Thank you, Percy.” “Room 202. As always, a pleasure having you with us again, Mr. Fox.”

xoxo roop

p.s. just letting you know right off the bat that david is UNHARMED in this fic. arthur, however—

+ open tag and tagging folks back <3

@sherryvalli @cha-melodius @run-for-chamo-miles @porcelainmortal @suseagull5914 @anincompletelist @wordsofhoneydew @caterpills @onthewaytosomewhere @orchidscript @14carrotghoul @alasse9 @thighzp @zwiazdziarka @miharaikko @tailsbeth-writes @kiwiana-writes @stereopticons @getmehighonmagic @clockwrkpendrxgon @sophie1973 @eusuntgratie @rmd-writes @dumbpeachjuice @blueeyedgrlwrites @fairflowered @theprinceandagcd @incalamity @rockyroadkylers @judasofsuburbia @onward--upward @saguaroblossom @anchoredarchangel @myheartalivewrites @seths-rogens @indestructibleheart @everwitch-magiks @clottedcreamfudge @tintagel-or-cockleshells @cricketnationrise @smc-27 @cheesecurdsgravyandfries @leaves-of-laurelin @welcometololaland @ninzied @freneticfloetry @smugvillanelle @shesfromboston

#wip wednesday #roop writes #rwrb fic #rwrb #red white and royal blue #firstprince #idk what's going on here #fic: henry wick #john wick #my absolute beloved #why is the john wick series my go-to for comfort #what does that say about me as a person

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povlnfour · 2 years ago

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ੈ✩‧₊˚ PADDOCK TO PADDOCK (LN) PART 2

lando norris x fem!horse rider!reader

series masterlist | prev part | next part

mclaren just posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by landonorris, oscarpiastri and 206,311 others

mclaren always wanted to see the paddock in its full glory? go behind the scenes with todays special guest, @/yourusername, as she swaps one paddock for another to see a little of what happens on a race day!

view all 2,472 comments

user3 HELLOOOOO WHAT.

user7 WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

user9 lando needs to stay focused :/

user1 stfu

alex_albon @/yourusername this is betrayal i’m disowning u

yourusername noooo dad pls. i’ll come to williams next💙

user7 y/n calling alex and lily mom & dad… she’s just like us for real

landonorris 🧡

liked by yourusername

y/nupdates just posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by mclaren, landonorris and 21,305 others

y/nupdates y/n today after the race!!! she was seen leaving with teammates lando norris and oscar piastri, and oscar’s girlfriend lily! thank you @/mclaren for taking care of our girl today🧡

view all 202 comments

user4 prettiest baby in existence she is GLOWING

user6 can’t believe she’s an f1 fan this feels unreal

mclaren it was our honour🧡

meanwhile, in texts ੈ✩‧₊˚

yourusername just posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by landonorris, carlossainz55 and 128,119 others

yourusername back from my adventures into training. qualifications coming up which means extra work for this little (big) man🫣

view all 3,915 comments

user3 BEANIE BOYYYY🥹

user8 you got this y/n/n!!!!

flo_norris_showjumping best of luck for qualifying, let me know how it goes🩷

user2 carlos in the likes again i’m TELLING YOU lando is talking abt y/n to the grid boys

landonorris he’s kind of cute ig

yourusername DOES THIS MEAN YOU’LL MEET HIM

landonorris @/yourusername literally where did i say this

user4 petition for lando to meet mr. bean

f1updates just posted a status ੈ✩‧₊˚

f1updates asked about his growing friendship with showjumper y/n y/l/n, lando said today that the two are ‘just becoming friends’ and ‘don’t have much time to see each other’ now y/n is back in her home county. but sources close to the two say they’ve been facetiming most nights👀

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user10 everyone leave them alone and let them have their private lives challenge

user11 good! lando should be staying focused on getting good face results. he can’t afford this right now.

user9 thank you! i’ve been saying this for ages!

user3 jobless ppl in the comments he’s a grown man and they’re just friends anyway

landonorris just posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by carlossainz55, danielricciardo and 226,382 others

landonorris p2 quali in home race, and some great company. what could be better🧡

👤 tagged yourusername, oscarpiastri

view all 10,400 comments

user7 WHAT HAPPENED TO BEING TOO BUSY TO HANG OUT MR. NORRIS?!

carlossainz55 well done brother❤️

user3 CARLANDO🥹🥹🥹

user1 y’all weren’t apart for very long i see👀

user5 OSCAR IS SO CUTEEE😭

yourusername 🧡 can’t wait to watch tomorrow

liked by landonorris

user6 SHES GOING TO THE RACE????

williamsracing just posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by alex_albon, yourusername and 52,118 others

williamsracing just call us mr steal your girl👀 @/mclaren

👤tagged yourusername, lilymhe, zoe_albon

view all 2,466 comments

user5 AHAHHA IM HERE FOR MCLAREN VS WILLIAMS

user1 admin i love u so bad rn😭

mclaren @/yourusername how could you?!

yourusername a rock and a hard place…

alex_albon the BETTER team

user4 y/n, lily and zoe all together🥹🥹🥹

landonorris …

user7 OH HES SNDJSJSJS

user9 you deserve better lando!

user1 @/user9 once again, stfu

yourusername answer my text douchebag

yourusername added to their story ੈ✩‧₊˚

y/nupdates posted a photo ੈ✩‧₊˚

liked by yourusername and 23,404 others

y/nupdates sending all the luck to @/yourusername and mr. bean today as they compete in the final qualification around for paris 2024!🩷

view all 233 comments

user2 good luck y/n🥹🫶

user5 eeee today is the day!!!!!

user12 came for lando, stayed for y/n. good luck hon!

yourusername thank you guys🥹🩷 hope i can make you proud

a/n: i realise this wasn’t v interesting but… attempting a slow ish burn bc i love pining

taglist for the next updates can be found here!

- giselle xx

#🐴 paddock to paddock #f1 x reader #f1 #lando norris x reader #mclaren #lando norris #lando norris smau #lando norris blurb #lando norris scenario #lando norris au #lando norris imagine

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argoscity · 2 years ago

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ULTIMATE SUPERGIRL READING GUIDE

since i've been asked a few times in the past for various reading guides for kara, i thought i'd compile them all into one post for the sake of convenience!

this guide has reading orders for supergirl comics in PRE-CRISIS (1959-1985), POST-CRISIS (2004-2011), NEW 52 (2011-2016), REBIRTH (2016-2021), and INFINITE FRONTIER (2021-present).

if you have any questions at all don't be afraid to shoot me an ask!

for each section bolded comics are required, italicized comics are recommended, and everything else is optional!

[PRE-CRISIS]

ORIGIN AND MIDVALE ERA (NOTE: you'll have to flip to the back of each issue to get to kara's section!) action comics (1938) #252, 258, 267, 276, 278-282, 285, 295, 309-310, 313, 317

STANHOPE COLLEGE action comics (1938) #318, 366-368, 372, 374 world’s finest (1941) #169 adventure comics (1938) #381, 386, 391, 395, 397

K-SFTV REPORTER — SAN FRANCISCO adventure comics (1938) #406-407, 410-415, 419-424

VANDYRE UNIVERSITY supergirl (1974) #1-10

STUDENT ADVISOR — FLORIDA (NOTE: every member of the superfamily has a story in the superman family (1974), so you'll have to flip through to find kara's section!) the superman family (1974) #165, 168, 171, 174, 177, 180, 182 justice league of america (1960) #132-134 the superman family #183, 184-186, 187-189, 191-193, 194, 196-198, 199, 200, 201-202, 203, 204-205, 206-207

ACTRESS — NEW YORK the superman family (1974) 208-210, 211-214, 215-216, 217, 218 superman (1939) #373 (second story titled “an eye (and ear) on the world!”) detective comics (1937) #508-510 the superman family #219-222

THE GREAT DARKNESS SAGA (i recommend this storyline in it's entirety, but kara only appears in the last issue!) legion of superheroes (1980) #290-294

LAKE SHORE UNIVERSITY supergirl (1982) #1-12 (cw: nazi imagery in the brief interlude in #12) supergirl (1982) #13-15 (cw: antisemitism, nazi imagery, depictions of the holocaust.) supergirl (1982) #16-23

LAST APPEARANCES AND DEATH legion of super-heroes (1980) #300-303 dc comics presents (1978) #28 tales of the legion of super-heroes (1984) #314-315 crisis on infinite earths (1985) #4-7

BONUS POST-COIE APPEARANCES christmas with the super-heroes (1988) #2 (last story titled “should auld acquaintance be forgot”) supergirl (1996) #49, 75-80 solo (2004) #1 (third story titled “young love”) convergence: adventures of superman (2015) #1-2

[POST-CRISIS]

ORIGIN superman/batman (2003) #8-13 (or you can watch superman/batman: apocalypse (2010) instead which I recommend! the art is a lot more tasteful and it's a very faithful adaptation of the comic so you won’t be missing out on anything.)

KARA WITH THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES supergirl and the legion of super-heroes (2006) #16-36

LOEB AND KELLY HELL ERA supergirl (2005) #1-5, 9-10, 19 (you don’t have to read any of this since it gets retconned anyway, but if you’re interested in kara’s early characterization, the beginnings of her friendship with cassie sandsmark, or her difficulty fitting in on earth then you’re welcome to read what i’ve provided.)

KELLEY PUCKETT ERA Amazons Attack! teen titans (2003) #47-48 amazons attack! (2007) #3 supergirl (2005) #20 amazons attack! (2007) #4 teen titans (2003) #49

supergirl (2005) #21-22 teen titans (2003) #50, 51-55 supergirl (2005) #25-33

Superman: Brainiac action comics (1938) #866-870

GATES AND IGLE HEAVEN ERA supergirl (2005) #34

New Krypton (new krypton is one of my favorite events and i recommend it in its entirety, but for the sake of brevity I’ll only be listing the issues relevant to kara.) superman: new krypton special #1 superman (1939) #681 adventure comics special featuring guardian #1 action comics (1938) #871 supergirl (2005) #35 superman (1939) #682 action comics (1938) #872 supergirl (2005) #36 superman (1939) #683 action comics (1938) #873

teen titans (2003) #66 supergirl (2005) #37-42

Friends and Fugitives superman: secret Files 2009 #1 supergirl (2005) #43 action comics (1938) #881 supergirl (2005) #45 action comics (1938) #882 supergirl (2005) #46-47

supergirl (2005) annual 1, #48-50

Last Stand of New Krypton adventure comics (2009) #8 superman: last stand of new krypton #1 supergirl (2005) #51 superman (1938) #698 adventure comics (2009) #9 superman: last stand of new krypton #2 adventure comics (2009) #10 supergirl (2005) #52 superman (1938) #699 superman: last stand of new krypton #3 superman: war of the supermen (2010) #0, 1-4

supergirl (2005) #53-57, annual 2, 58-59

END OF SUPERGIRL VOL 5 supergirl (2005) #60-64 supergirl (2005) #65-67

[THE NEW 52]

ORIGIN and SUPERGIRL VS THE WORLDKILLERS supergirl (2011) #1-7

SUPERGIRL and SILVER BANSHEE supergirl (2011) #8-11

SUPERGIRL and SUPERBOY superboy (2011) #6

SANCTUARY supergirl (2011) #12, 0, 13

H’EL ON EARTH superman (2011) #13 supergirl (2011) #14 superman (2011) #14 superboy (2011) #15 supergirl (2011) #15 superboy (2011) #16 superboy (2011) Annual #1 supergirl (2011) #16 superman (2011) #16 superboy (2011) #17 supergirl (2011) #17 superman (2011) #17

SUPERGIRL and POWERGIRL supergirl (2011) #18-20

CYBORG SUPERMAN supergirl (2011) #21-23 action comics (2011) #23.1 supergirl (2011) #24

KRYPTON RETURNS action comics (2011) annual #2 superboy (2011) #25 supergirl (2011) #25 superman (2011) #25

SUPERGIRL VS LOBO supergirl (2011) #26-27

RED DAUGHTER OF KRYPTON supergirl (2011) #28-29 red lanterns (2011) #28-29 supergirl (2011) #30 red lanterns (2011) #30 supergirl (2011) #31 red lanterns (2011) #31-32 supergirl (2011) #32-33

SUPERMAN: DOOMED (this is a whole storyline but I'll only be listing the issues that kara appears in!) superman/wonder woman (2013) #9 action comics (2011) #33 supergirl (2011) #34 superman: doomed (2014) #2 action comics (2011) #35 supergirl (2011) #35

FUTURES END supergirl: futures end (2014) #1

JUSTICE LEAGUE UNITED justice league united (2014) #1-5 justice league united (2014) annual #1 justice league united (2014) #6-10

CRUCIBLE supergirl (2011) #36-40

FINAL DAYS OF SUPERMAN (kara only appears in the issues i've italicized and bolded, but i put all the relevant issues if you wanted to read the full storyline!) superman (2011) #51 batman/superman (2013) #31 action comics (2011) #51 superman/wonder woman (2013) #28 batman/superman (2013) #32 action comics (2011) #52 superman/wonder woman (2013) #29 superman (2011) #52

[REBIRTH]

KARA IN NATIONAL CITY supergirl: rebirth #1

supergirl (2016) #1-8 batgirl (2016) annual 1 supergirl #9-12

supergirl (2016) annual 1supergirl #13-20

world's finest: batwoman and supergirl #1-2

ROGOL ZAAR and THE SINS OF THE CIRCLE the man of steel #1-2, 3-6 supergirl #21-33, #34-36

LEVIATHAN and BATMAN WHO LAUGHS superman: leviathan rising special #1 supergirl #34-36 supergirl (2016) annual 2 supergirl #37-42

HOUSE OF KENT action comics (2016) #1022-1023 action comics (2016) #1024-1028

FUTURE STATE superman of metropolis (2021) #1-2 kara zor el, superwoman (2021) #1-2

[INFINITE FRONTIER]

action comics 2021 annual

WOMAN OF TOMORROW supergirl: woman of tomorrow (2021) #1-8

WORLD'S FINEST batman/superman: world's finest (2022) #2-6, 8, 12

A WORLD WITHOUT CLARK KENT and RED MOON (kara is featured in the back-up story! if you want the full context of this plot i recommend reading the full warworld arc in action comics [action comics #1030-1046, superman: warworld apocalypse #1]!) action comics (2016) #1044-1046, 1047-1049

DAWN OF DC action comics (2016) #1051-1053, 1055-1056 superman (2023) #1-3 power girl special #1 steelworks (2023) #1-3

KNIGHT TERRORS knight terrors: superman (2023) #1-2

DAWN OF DC (continued) action comics: doomsday special (2023) superman (2023) #7 hawkgirl (2023) #4 supergirl special (2023)

NEW WORLDS [this arc starts on action comics #1057—kara doesn't appear in that issue but I recommend reading it for context!] action comics (2016) #1058-1060 action comics 2023 annual

JOURNEY TO FERIMBIA powergirl (2023) #5, 6-7

HOUSE OF BRAINIAC action comics (2016) #1064 superman (2023) #13 action comics (2016) #1065 superman (2023) #14 action comics (2016) #1066 superman (2023) #15

UNIVERSE END action comics (2016) #1070-1081

MISCELLANEOUS RECENT APPEARANCES: justice league unlimited (2024) #1, 4-6 superwoman special #1 superman (2023) #21-22 MISADVENTURES IN MIDVALE supergirl (2025) #1

UPCOMING: supergirl (2025) [monthly ongoing] new history of the dc universe (2025) #2 [out july 23rd] dc's kal-el-fornia love (2025) [out july 30th]

#kara zor el #supergirl #reading guide #reading order #kara danvers #linda lee danvers #linda lang

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miss-vanta-likes-to-write · 5 months ago

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I'm feeling sick and having fevered dreams. Had a dream and I'm about to subject you all to this idea.

Idk what the vision is but there's a vision to be had.

This is another one of my fevered dream ideas

The base that they were infiltrating was quiet. The emergency lights were on and flickering. The air smelt of copper and rot, and the deeper the 141 went into this base, the more dead bodies appeared. Plenty of guards and scientists, ripped apart, blood splatters and entrails. It looked like hell on Earth.

"Captain" Johnny's voice came through on coms, "Didn' intel say this was a workin' science lab?"

Gaz had answered back, "Room four is clear, and yeah intel did say that."

"Looks like a right horror movie." Johnny whispered, "all of rooms thirteen through seventeen clear."

John was still stalking slowly through the second floor, where most of the carnage was. There was the sound of the pitter patter of feet and a light giggle that was childish in nature. It took John by surprise because it sounded like a child. He followed the sound and turned his comms down significantly. It was just his boys calling off the cleared sectors. He stopped outside of a door that was cracked open. Voices could be heard inside.

"Mommy, you gonna be okay?" A little girl's voice calls out.

There isn't an answer at first, but a low groan and the sound of a sharp yip of pain.

He takes a deep breath and uses his foot to gently nudge the door open so he can see better. He is in shock at what greets him. A young girl who looks no older than 5, a small toddler and a woman who is clearly in labor. All of them look worse for wear, the woman is covered in dried blood, but the children look clean.

The little girl turns around quickly at the sound of the door squeaking open. She stands protectively in front of her mom. "Are you here to help us?" She asks, her big brown eyes staring up at him.

"Room 202 on second floor has survivors, Simon call for a medic, Soap and Gaz secure the area fully dint let anyone who isn't medical onto the second floor." John doesn't wait his men to answer before he turns the comms down again. He lowers his gun and crouches low. He keeps his attention split between the children and the watchful eye of the mother.

She's trying to sit up despite being far into her labor. Her eyes haven't left him, and she's baring her teeth. Something looks off about her, uncanny, and it translates to her children. The little toddler is hiding behind her, and he only leans around her briefly. His eyes are brown, too, but his pupils are slits before turning normal. John thinks he hallucinating the change.

"I'm Captain John Price." He says calmly with what he hopes is a warm smile, "You're safe now."

The woman stares at him and breathes deep through he thinks is another contraction. She groans and leans back onto her elbows. A thin sheen of sweat covers her brown skin. There's a sparkle to her that he notices like it's embedded into her skin. It looks like iridescent scales. The woman groans again. John is keenly aware that he knows not the first thing about child birth, but he does know that nature is gonna happen regardless if medical gets here in time or not.

"I'm going to help you." He gets closer to her but is stunned when instead of a regular voice, he is met with the low chitters, and a language he knows doesn't sound natural. The woman doesn't flinch away from him and nods her acceptance of help.

He takes a deep breath and settles into the role of helping her through her labor as best as he can.

Idk this would be one of those government conspiracies that TF 141 would have discovered. Reader or main character isn't human 🤷🏾‍♀️

#vanta talks #call of duty fanfic #black oc #captain john price #poly 141 x black!oc #poly 141 x oc #maybe a #x reader #but dead ass

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exposed-wires · 11 months ago

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Oooo you wanna see my Ishimondo fankids oooooo

AGE: 18

HEIGHT: 5'10

WEIGHT: 172 lbs

BIRTHDAY: April 30th

PERSONALITY: Sohan can be described as overwhelming, and a handful. Taking into consideration their upbringing, it's no wonder their intense nature is a force to be reckoned with. They're nice for the most part; welcoming to the people they come by. A big stickler when it comes to safety too! Rules...not so much, though they're still abided by for the sake of their father. However, it doesn't mean they're one to look for loopholes- because they do! The more specific you are with wording, the less Sohan is capable of finding a workaround.

While they are an intense individual, when it comes to intense situations, they are surprisingly calm. Then again, that's to be expected for someone who's surrounded by chaos. In the heat of the moment, evading the enemy, the person behind the wheel is the one to keep the most cool.

If Sohan were a storm, they'd be the eye of it.

EXTRA:

• Sohan's non-binary in their eyes, but they don't mind however you view them as. If it be more masc or femm [like a fill in the blank]. VERY rarely will they refer to themself as 'he' or 'she', depending on who they're talking to. They are comfortable with the non-binary label though.

• Also, Sohan's eyes flare up [emit a flame-like aura] whenever they're concentrating or focused.

• People call him 'boiled rice' as a nickname. [Sohan means 'coarse' and 'boiled rice', but the direct translation of the word is 'contradictory'].

• They have a red crested cardinal named Ducky

====

AGE: 16-17

ULTIMATE: ""Tutor"" [Immoral Compass]

HEIGHT: 6'3

WEIGHT: 202 lbs

BIRTHDAY: March 24th

PERSONALITY: Daichi is a stickler for the rules. It's something he finds comfort in, is well endowed to- like a set of commandments. Sure, the process of abiding to them is... questionable, but that's simply how he is. It works for him, it should for others. Education is no different from it, though he works himself to be at the top. The prime example, or..no, not example; the best. Surpassing him in any matter is unorthodox- especially his field.

His sibling, Sohan, is an unremarkable waste of potential. Intelligence thrown away for whatever they do- so when they got a letter from Hope's Peak Academy regarding that very 'wasted potential'- suffice to say Daichi was not thrilled. Though when he himself acquired his talent far into studies in the reserved course program: he had second thoughts.

As a prime example of academic achievement, why on earth was he given the title of an Immoral Compass?

EXTRA:

• He's in the same class as Sohan, as he skipped a grade or two back in elementary. He is incredibly gifted, though his sibling is much smarter than he is [which upsets him, as they don't put good use to that].

• Used to be a reserve course student, until he acquired his... less than ideal talent [grinded for the view, hated how it looked].

• Daichi HAS to be 1st no matter what. Sure, he's inclined to help others with academics but they CANNOT surpass him. He freaks out each time someone gets a better grade than him [has broken multiple pens].

• He has a notebook for any subject, including notes on other people he finds 'interesting' [putting them under a microscope], his own personal thoughts [one which his older sibling reads through like a soap opera], and everyone's grades that he keeps track like fantasy football.

• Is REALLY really good at videogames, which is shocking for someone like Daichi.

• His eyes flare-up when he expresses great feeling of embarrassment.

• With his anger, it marinades instead of immediately exploding. Teehee it festers until it blows up MUCH later.

====

AGE: 12

ULTIMATE: Recess

HEIGHT: 4'6

WEIGHT: 90lbs

BIRTHDAY: June 9th

PERSONALITY: A happy go lucky girl who has a knack for playing games, Tokika is a ball of unmanageable energy! She's good at what she does, creating games of any variety to keep everyone capable of playing, and the stakes to stay high! She's having fun if everyone else is having fun! She gets along well with her older siblings, and at times she does drag them into playing dolls or boardgames- but they're happy to do so!

Tokika is good at mediating conflict on the playground, your so called 'recess referee'. Though at times she does let both sides play out to find a middle ground so everyone's happy.

EXTRA:

• If she had a highschool level Ultimate she'd be either the Ultimate Gamemaster or the Ultimate Devil's Advocate.

• She shares a birthday with her father, Mondo!

• She's the one organizing family game night, and she INSISTS on it each and every time.

• Tokika stems from the word 'Toki' (time), and 'ka' (fun). 'Ka' can also come off as a question based statement at the end of sentences, so whenever she asks 'time?' it's like she's saying her name, asking if it's time to play.

• Her eyes flare-up whenever she's on a winning streak.

• Bit of a devil in disguise?? Just a smidgen.

====

The family's all here <33

I definitely need to post more, I'll try to post some stuff about them, I have some art in the folder kek :33

#art #digital art #danganronpa au #danganronpa trigger happy havoc #danganronpa #danganronpa art #mondo oowada #mondo owada #kiyotaka ishimaru #ishimondo #ishimondo fankids #danganronpa fankid #danganronpa oc #danganronpa thh

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skeptiql · 6 days ago

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Okay i gotta ask how long have cee and seven been on the job?

Cee has been “at work” for 202 earth years, Seven has only been there for 113.

Time works differently in the Theraprism to the point that they’ve become blind to its passing (purely because it’s relative).

In their minds it’s only been a few years.

#inbox #prismatic guard

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cryoniide · 1 year ago

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could you do a house x male reader where reader is also struggling through a drug addiction to the point they overdose, and house wonders why they arent responding gets mad at them but then finds out reader is in the hospital due to the OD? angsty comfort? sorry im struggling at the moment and this sounds nice, i understand if its a bit too serious to write about tho

of course i can, i tried my best sorry if it isn’t exactly what you want, i can redo it if needed ^^

i’m here now

gregory house x male reader

it was monday, a universal day that was hated by everyone. why? no one really knows. but, today was a very bad day for y/n l/n. he was an employee at princeton-plainsboro teaching hospital. he was under the finest doctor there, dr. gregory house. now, no one knew why the boy wanted to work with the drug addicted sadist. no one but him. his reasoning? because him and dr. house have one thing in common. drug addiction.

for y/n, it started when he was in high school. he had a shitty childhood which continued into his teen years. only when he found drugs had he found peace. but, as the years progressed, so did his addiction. it’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even remember a time he was sober, besides the weeks leading up to his every-6-month checkups, which were the closest thing to hell on earth.

but, why was it a shitty day for y/n? well, he had given the wrong diagnosis, and got called an idiot for almost killing a patient. he missed breakfast. got his lunch stolen by his boss. but, the worst thing of all was that there was a new patient. someone from his past. someone he never, ever, wanted to see again. his mother. when he saw her, he turned around.

‘fuck this shit.’

after that, no one saw him the whole day. it was only a few hours after y/n left when house started to get angry.

“how dare that brat leave right after we get assigned a case!” he complained to wilson, who rolled his eyes in response, “have you tried, i dont know, asking him?” wilson replied, not bothering to look up from the folder in his hand.

the whole day, house toyed with the patient to release his frustrations. to be homest, he was starting to get less angry and more worried. he made an excuse saying that y/n is the sharpest one on the team and that the rest of them can’t function without him. when, in reality, house was the one that couldn’t function. wilson was the only one who knew why house was actually worried. why? well, the two sort of have a..romantic relationship.

he tried reaching him. call after call after call, but it all went straight to voicemail. after treating the patient, house found out it was y/n’s mom. he was about to go to his lovers home, when he got a page.

‘room 202, now.’

it was from lisa. he rushed down to the room, seeing the unconscious body of his lover. he rushed to his side grabbing y/n’s hand and looking up at the cuddy. “he overdosed…on oxycodone.”

‘fuck.’ house thought.

how could he had let this slip past him? how could he have not noticed that you were suffering all this time? he wanted to beat himself up over this, but he knew you wouldn’t want that. so he waited, sitting in the chair and watching your vitals all night. he didn’t want to risk losing someone so close to him. not again.

you woke up the next day, your head pounding and your feelings all over the place. you were glad to be alive but, god you wish you weren’t. “y/n?” you turned to the voice, seeing greg sitting next to you. he looked miserable, the bags under his eyes darker than they were before. “are you okay? why didn’t you tell me?” you didn’t say anything. to be honest, you wish you could’ve told him. that you were suffering. that you wanted help. needed help. but, it wasn’t easy to admit you were an addict.

“i know it’s hard, but please, talk to me.” you looked in his eyes. he was worried. genuinely worried. right there, tears escaped your eyes, streaming down your face. he got up, wrapping his arms around you in a tight embrace. “it’s okay, y/n. i’m here, now. you’re safe, i promise.”

a/n; I HOPE THIS IS OKAY. i tried my best. again, loveeee writing angst, decided to throw in a sad lil backstory hope you dont mind and i hope you enjoyed. on a serious note, if any of you are struggling with addiction, please don’t be afraid to talk to someone and get help, even if its with a friend at first. i have a family member who’s an alcoholic, and i know it isnt the same as drugs but it hurts me to see that person going down this path. i worry that one day they aren’t gonna be here anymore and i really dont want that to be soon. so please, talk to someone, anyone, and don’t be afraid to ask for help <33 you are loved and cared for i promise

#❄️ cloud attlas ❄️#house x male reader #house md #gregory house #angst #comfort #tw drugs

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tamsinsfanfictionrecs · 2 months ago

Text

Fanfiction Recommendation 202: and salt the Earth behind you (Good Omens)

and salt the Earth behind you - Chapter 1 - sunrisesinthesuburbs - Good Omens (TV) [Archive of Our Own]

A wonderful murder mystery fic that balances the investigation with the forbidden relationship between Profiler Aziraphale and Criminal Informant Crowley.

It's written by the great @sunrisesinthesuburbs, so let her know if you liked it.

#fanfiction #fanfiction recommendations #aziraphale #good omens #crowley #human au #murder mystery

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bamfdaddio · 4 months ago

Text

Uncanny X-Men Abridged: 1986

The X-Men, those depressing mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men!

(X-Men 202 - 209) - by Chris Claremont and John Romita, Jr.; June Brigman; Barry Windsor-Smith, Dan Green

Before a crisis crossover takes over this title, 1986 is basically all about Rachel Grey. In previous years, I’ve never been much of a fan of her: she’s is depressing, she’s self-involved and she basically keys into the worst aspects of a Claremontian character: they angst angst angst on the inside and never spit it out. She is all trauma, all the time and she’s not even fun about it. While I understand the horrific depression that accompanies the feeling you get when you see the world descend into hell in a handbasket because people keep making the wrong choices and voting for Mutant Registration Acts and nazis, her forever frustration about not being able to do anything about it doesn’t necessarily make her an engaging character.

This year, she ramps it all up, proving my point that the Phoenix makes everyone one hundred percent more dramatic. Combine that with her dad’s flair for exaggerated angst and, well, you’ve got a doozy of a character on your hands.

Using your cosmic powers to dramatically blink on like a porch light? Baller move, Rachel. (Uncanny X-Men 203)

What’s the Buzz?

Xavier? Is alive, but whisked off into space.

Magneto? Recently became an X-Man. Decidedly not a villain.

Jean? No longer dead! Read elsewhere for more details.

So, is this a new instalment in the Phoenix Saga? Nnnyo, not really. It’s more like a sagalette. Like a reboot of an original with new actors, excepts it’s… not great. So this is like the Phoenix Saga: New Class. I apologize beforehand for the lack of jokes: this is a pretty grim year. Before we get on with it, a quick reminder of our cast:

Phoenix: Rachel Summers. X-Man. Telepath, telekinetic. Future child of Cyclops and Marvel Girl from a dark future that has since ceased to be. Depressed. Makes it everyone’s problem.

Storm: Ororo Munroe. X-Man. Currently depowered. Recently beat Cyclops in a duel for the leadership of the X-Men. Badass. We all simp for her.

Wolverine: Logan. X-Man. Healing factor, adamantium skeleton, claws. Currently has fewer plotlines than Cyclops, and he isn’t even in this book!

Colossus: Piotr Rasputin. X-Man. Turns into steel. No relation to Cyclops.

Nightcrawler: Kurt Wagner. X-Man. Fuzzy, BAMF-y, bouncy. Like all the other men, currently a little neglected in the storyline-department.

Shadowcat: Kitty Pryde. X-Man. Can turn intangible. Always and forever the junior on the team, but no longer as innocent.

Rogue. X-Man. Steals powers and memories by touching people. Can’t quite control that. Southern accented sweetheart.

Magneto: X-Man. Silver daddy, former terrorist, magnetic powers. Recently promised his long-time rival/ex-boyfriend that he would teach the Dream to young mutants.

Callisto: Morlock. Even though Storm pretends to be their leader, she’s really the leader of the sewer dwelling outcast mutants. Presumably has powers, but other than dressing like a Sex Pistol and being a badass lesbian, I have no idea what they are.

Caliban: Morlock. Childlike mind, pale, bald. Can track other mutants.

Selene: Immortal psychic vampire that can manipulate inorganic matter. Powerful, scary. Member of the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. Good villainess seeks good storyline.

Nimrod: Deadly mutant-hunting Sentinel from the same dark future as Rachel Grey. Deadly serious about killing all mutants on Earth, but apparently only intermittently.

Secret Wars 2

Ugh, Secret Wars II. I can’t even skip it, because this time, the Beyonder – more like the Beyawnder – is part of ongoing plots. He’s in this world. Bah!

Well, at least Rachel kicks off the narrative with a bang.

Instead of leaving a note, this bitch rigs a projector to tell everyone she means to murder someone. So extra. <3 (Uncanny X-Men 202)

After their run-in with the Beyonder in the crossover, Rachel Summers has decided that this omnipotent god/manchild needs to die. (Apparently, he scrubbed the New Mutants from existence on a whim, so she’s not entirely off base here.) Since she’s currently the host of the cosmic powers of the Phoenix, she’s the woman for the job!

While Magneto uses Cerebro to track Rachel – yes, even Claremont somehow doesn’t realize that telepath =/= magnetism – Rachel confronts the Beyonder in San Francisco. He toys with her for Reasons Unknown and gives her infinite power and a choice:

Kill him;

Save the X-Men he just teleported over to the West Coast and put into mortal danger by also pulling in some lethal Sentinels from her future. For no apparent reason, he forgot to bring over Nightcrawler; no, this is never really explained.

These Sentinels are clever little bastards, by the way. A lot more clever than the toaster ovens we’re used to. Check out the beautiful way they take out Rogue:

Sure. Rogue, previously a terrorist, would definitely use the word bozo rather than artifical asshole, robotic wingnut or fuckwad. (Uncanny X-Men 202)

Rachel then makes the choice to save her teammates (through another awesome display of power), instead of killing the Beyonder. She does give him a good slap for toying with her, so there’s at least that.

It’s obvious Claremont is trying out a lot of things to shake up the status-quo and make his stories feel fresh again. He replaced Xavier with Magneto and now he’s shifting the X-Men to San Fran, where they stay to help rebuild the city. It’s a change of scenery that won’t last a long time - presumably, somewhere the idea of the upcoming Mutant Massacre got pitched and Claremont realized he needed the X-Men in NYC for that – but still, Claremont is trying. Not very successfully, sadly: while the Mutant Massacre will, actually, shake up the status-quo a lot, for now we’re very much in the narrative doldrums.

Kitty, meanwhile, has realized she can summon the Soul Sword and Illyana’s accompanying armour, but when she tries telling anyone about this, they’re all like: “New Mutants who?”

I wonder what kind of intense bond Kitty had with Illyana, ahem, roommate that she does remember Illyana whereas even her brother Colossus doesn’t. - Uncanny X-Men 203

Kitty realizes that the Beyonder means to erase the X-Men from reality as well, just like he did the New Mutants – what can they, mere humans, do against such reckless power?

This is where Phoenix points out that she:

is not a mere human;

still possesses the power that the Beyonder lent her in his twisted little game.

Rachel means casually to erase and rebuild the universe without the Beyonder in it. “You can do that?” asks Kitty (and the viewing audience). Surely it would be easier to just erase the Beyonder? In any case: she needs power to do so. Rogue, Kitty and randomly Spider-Woman give it up willingly, Magneto, Colossus and Wolverine relinquish power while sleeping and Ororo tries to talk Rachel out of it, but she still just takes it.

The Phoenix rises again and, once more, takes for the M’Kraan Crystal and touches the cosmos. (I told y’all it was Phoenix Redux.) But after touching all those countless lives of people just living, Storm gets through to her – I mean, killing the entire universe would lay heavily on anyone’s conscience – and Rachel ultimately doesn’t do it: she teleports everyone back to San Francisco.

The Beyonder appears, furious: Rachel undoing the universe was all along his plan, because then he could return to the Primal Unbeing without making his hands dirty. Rachel was his catspaw, and she failed even that. Why he doesn't just end the universe himself is beyond me (pun not intended). But before he can kill them all, Rachel returns her Phoenix powers to him, along with the insights she gleaned. And, just like her, he realizes that life is precious. Rah rah rah. He disappears, leaving the X-Men alive.

Ffs, the Beyonder is the most boring villain ever. An omnipotent teenager who just realized that he’s not the only living thing in the universe. This whole arc is just… such a nothingburger. The Beyonder turns out to be irrelevant, the New Mutants are restored to life and even Rachel’s new lease on life is extremely temporary. Absolutely the worst kind of tie-in to a Crisis Crossover. The only fortunate thing is that I don’t think I’ll have to read about the Beyonder ever again.

Nightcrawler’s Solo Adventure

Kurt is still back in New York, angsting about the Beyonder and the implications of the existence of something so terrifying and so godlike. His Catholic butt big sad, y’all. But then, he hears someone getting kidnapped by Arcade and saves her in a swashbuckling Mad Max side quest! When returning the captured girl to her apartment it is revealed she is… Judith Rassendyll, the lost Queen of Ruritania!

Yeah, we never ever see Judith again and the next time we see Nightcrawler he’s back with the X-Men, so this one off is truly madly deeply the onest off of all one offs.

Yes, just like Spider-Man, Nightcrawler recognizes the sound of Arcade kidnapping someone by the very specific sound the truck makes when it uses a… pipelike contraption to sweep someone off the sidewalk. It’s a superhero thing, you wouldn’t get it.

Wolverine’s solo adventure: Reavers & Deathstrike

Somewhere, Spiral – previously of the Freedom Force in order to hunt a fugitive man called Longshot – is modifying a bunch of guys called the Reavers and Lady Deathstrike (she’s new!) in her Body Shoppe. I always have a bit of a tonal whiplash with that, because to me, the Bodyshop is a bougie store that sells cruelty free soaps and scents. Needless to say, Spiral’s Body Shoppe is decidedly not cruelty free.

Fuck, but I really love Windsor-Smith’s artwork. Lush (which is incidentally what the Body Shop was rebranded to) (Uncanny X-Men 205)

The Reavers are some ex-Hellfire Club-goons that Wolverine once cut up. Since then, they’ve become bionic, in an effort to become strong enough to face Wolverine. Deathstrike – neé Oyama Yuriko – also wants vengeance on Wolverine for Something Mysterious he did to her dad. She is one of Wolverine’s many foils, and she’s beautifully designed too: she shares his idea of honour, but not the humanity or morality to wield it well. Also, whereas Wolverine had his humanity forcibly stripped from him when he got his adamantium skeleton, Deathstrike gave up her humanity willingly.

Meanwhile, it’s Christmas in New York! (It’s never really explained why Logan is in NYC, so don’t worry about it!) Whilst out shopping in the snow, Katie Power (Energized from the Power Pack) gets snatched by a half-naked feral Wolverine, which arouses obvious suspicion from the police. (Fair.) There’s no quicker way to unendear me from a comic book than by introducing precocious preteen superheroes. Like, eight year olds shouldn’t be vigilantes. Still, this is a convincing narrative, mostly because Katie is a good innocent foil to Wolverine.

Anyway, Katie and Wolverine flee from Deathstrike and the Reavers, proving once again that Wolverine can’t be near young girls without forming a paternal bond with them. Finally, Wolverine goes berserk and picks off the Reavers one by one, before dueling Lady Deathstrike and defeating her. In a cute detail, Katie keeps her eyes closed during their whole battle, so as to preserve her innocence.

Solid one-shot that, like Windsor-Smith’s Storm issues before this, mostly serve to flesh out one X-Man. It also introduces Deathstrike and the Reavers, who’ll be important later.

Rachel’s breakdown

The X-Men decide to stay in San Francisco for now, with Jessica Drew (a former Spider-Woman) and, uh, a rando. It’s all so normal that Kitty even has a date! (Which brings out the mother in Storm, always a highlight.)

It’s never really explained why they don’t want to return to the Institute. Is it because Magneto rules Graymalkin Lane now, and the X-Men want to let him know that they’re not okay with that? It’s never said aloud, but…

Anyway, a postcard from Scott, Madelyne and baby Nathan is enough to send Rachel in yet another tailspin how she can’t meet her dad’s family and I’m so over her. Fuuuuuck, this is exhausting.

I mean, I guess props to Claremont for writing an annoying, drama-prone teenager convincingly, I guess. (Uncanny X-Men 206.)

AND THEN FREEDOM FORCE ATTACKS. For this raid, Freedom Force, formerly the Brotherhood of Mutants, consists out of:

Spiral. Dimension dancer, we saw her three paragraphs ago.

Pyro. Idiot Australian. Can control fire, but not create it. Thinks he’s a lot smarter than he is.

Avalanche. Idiot Greek. Creates earthquakes, but maybe gave himself his codename during a ski trip? Is about a smart as he thinks he is, which isn’t a lot.

Blob. Big, big guy, cannot be moved if he doesn’t want to. The perfect lackey.

Spider-Woman. Presumably the reason Jessica Drew isn’t Spider-Woman anymore, but I’m not invested enough to run a background check on her.

Mystique. Rogue’s foster mom, Nightcrawler’s actual mom. Calculating shapeshifter. Usually the leader.

Destiny. Rogue’s other foster mom, Nightcrawler’s actual other mom, Destiny’s paramour, though those last two covertly. Can see the future, usually. Schemer.

Mystique and Destiny aren’t actually there, which means the Brotherhood is at about 15% of their usual competence – and 14% of that is Spiral – and therefore quickly dispatched with.

Avalanche and Pyro, burning through their last braincell. (Uncanny X-Men 206)

When the police arrive, the Freedom Force reveal they're federal officers working for the USA, having been pardoned by the government. Since the X-Men have built some goodwill rebuilding the city, the cops want to see a warrant first. The Freedom Force didn’t bring one – again, these guys don’t do well without Mystique – so they are forced to let the X-Men go for now. They vow to return, however, necessitating the X-Men to flee, making their stint in San Francisco the shortest-lived status quo shake-up ever.

Prelude

The X-Men then go to live with the Morlocks for… some reason? Look, I don’t mind a little show rather than tell, but this year just feels so… disjointed. Why was Wolverine in New York? Why did none of the X-Men go pick up Nightcrawler? Why aren’t they going back to the Institute? I get that the Morlocks’ Healer is healing Wolverine after the fight with Deathstrike, but surely the mansion's med bay is a better recovery place than the fucking sewers. Some allusions on why we’re doing what we’re doing might be nice.

I think it’s mostly Claremont spinning his wheels. Highlighting the Morlocks is not a bad move, considering what will come Later This Year, but it’s all done so haphazardly, so randomly.

Anyway. Fine. There’s more Rachel Angst: despite her Life-Is-Worth-Living epiphany with the Beyonder, she’s slipping back into her depression. She senses that the X-Men don’t trust her, her volatile powers and the way she almost went Dark Phoenix. And, while that might be an accurate depiction of depression and the way you can regress while dealing with it, narratively it’s very frustrating to see Rachel keep hitting that same fucking button.

Welcome, gentle readers, to Symbolism 1.02: The Shattered Mirror as a Metaphor for the Shattered Self (Uncanny X-Men 207)

Rachel and Wolverine keep invading each other’s nightmares and then Rachel flees, afraid of the X-Men’s dirty looks and the way they keep her at arm’s length. On the surface, she then has the bright idea to go and kill Selene, in some… misguided effort to do some good, I guess? Wolverine follows her, tipped off by her nightmares.

To her credit, Rachel actually succeeds in infiltrating the Hellfire Club and nearly murders Selene, but Wolverine stops her, claiming that heroes don’t do murder. (Again, not a wrong take for the X-Men, but Wolverine is perhaps the least qualified to have a strong opinion about this. Now if this were Storm or Kitty…)

Rachel is (again) in a dark place and is (again) losing it. She refuses to stop:

Suicide by Snikt. Damn. (Uncanny X-Men 207)

Anyway, he fails at killing Rachel and she gets away. Wolverine reports back to the X-Men, who vehemently disagree with him trying to kill Rachel. All except Storm, who “understands but does not sanction” his actions. Well, I guess that's not a discussion worth having any further, right? Then, they set out to find her.

The narrative then proves Rachel’s point, when a weakened Selene immediately slaughters a mugger and his would be victim. She then rallies the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club to go after Rachel (Sebastian Shaw is reluctant) while somewhere else, Nimrod emerges from his weird self-imposed exile – seriously, he’s an undercover robot who lives with a family and it’s yet another weird character turn that I don’t quite fathom – to hunt down Rachel, because her power levels have been spiking. (Sure, but Selene running around doesn’t ping your radar, you weird mutant-huntin’ murder!bot?)

Meanwhile, a desperate, lethally wounded Rachel happens upon the bodies of the people Selene killed and immediately does a long distance lash-out at Wolverine. Both Storm and Rogue realize they should have treated Rachel kinder, that they should have recognized her depression. With Wolverine out, the Morlock Caliban becomes their tracked.

Caliban, we can only applaud your shirt! (uncanny X-Men 207.)

Chaos erupts when these groups meet each other. You’ve got:

The X-Men;

The Morlocks Callisto, their leader, and Caliban;

The Inner Circle: Selene, Sebastian Shaw, Tessa (Shaw’s assistant), Harry Leland, some enforcers and Von Rauhm, Selene’s Black Rook;

Nimrod, who senses twelve X-Men, which is at least five too many(!) But more on that later.

When Nimrod very easily kills the Black Rook, it has, at the very least, the quick effect of uniting everyone against him, like when a bear stirs up a hornet’s nest. In the ensuing chaos, a traumatized Rachel once again flees the scene: she fears Nimrod from the alternative future she comes from. And then she hears music and slips into a supposedly abandoned theatre...

Apparently, Rachel’s idealized self doesn’t have a lesbian haircut. Boo hiss. (Uncanny X-Men 207)

The observant reader recognizes this interdimensional Body Shoppe by now. And just like that, with a promise to take all the pain away, to leave everything that Rachel was, Spiral spins and twists and dances Rachel out of the narrative.

Man. Even the ending of her storyline is kind of a bummer. Rachel abandons her family and friends simply so she can escape all of her pain. She sees no other recourse but to scrub herself from her life. There’s very little hopeful to be gleaned from this, even though Rachel at some point returns – although by that point, she’s so different you can kind of wonder if this Rachel actually survives.

Back in the park, Nimrod takes out Rogue and Nightcrawler, and uses Sebastian Shaw’s powers – to absorb any and all kinetic impacts, shrugging off even the most powerful of punches – against him, punting him into the stratosphere. It takes the combined effort of Harry Leland’s gravitational powers, Colossus’ pure strength and Shadowcat’s electricity-frying phasing to slow Nimrod down a little, but the effort of the fight gives Harry Leland a heart attack.

The old man doesn’t go out without a fight though:

Took the words right out of my mouth, Wolverine. (Uncanny X-Men 207)

Aw, I’ve always liked Harry Leland. He always seemed a lot more grounded than most of the Hellfire Club, even despite that silly burglar mark.

I think this issue marks the first time that Tessa and Storm successfully work together. Tessa (the one in the stylish shroud) will turn out to be very important later.

Shaw’s deep impact takes out Nimrod, but just when Wolverine prepares to cut the robot to bolts, it teleports away. It’s a little dissatisfying, but that’s kind of par for the course at this point. With sirens blaring in the background, Tessa offers Storm shelter at the Hellfire Club and, strapped for other options, Storm accepts the offer.

And with Rachel gone from the story for now, and the X-Men needing to regroup, we end the recap. Next up will be the first mutant crossover, something that will become a yearly staple henceforth: the Mutant Massacre.

What to read: I’m sorry to say, but you can skip it all. Turns evil: Rachel. Sort of. Poor girl. You can tell she was one of Claremont’s favourites, considering all the abuse he put her through.

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niteshade925 · 8 months ago

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April 14, Xi'an, China, Shaanxi History Museum, Qin and Han Dynasties Branch (Part 3 – Innovations and Philosophies):

(Edit: sorry this post came out so late, I got hit by the truck named life and had to get some rest, and this post in itself took some effort to research. But anyway it's finally up, please enjoy!)

A little background first, because this naming might lead to some confusions.....when you see location adjectives like "eastern", "western", "northern", "southern" added to the front of Zhou dynasty, Han dynasty, Song dynasty, and Jin/晋 dynasty, it just means the location of the capital city has changed. For example Han dynasty had its capital at Chang'an (Xi'an today) in the beginning, but after the very brief but not officially recognized "Xin dynasty" (9 - 23 AD; not officially recognized in traditional Chinese historiography, it's usually seen as a part of Han dynasty), Luoyang became the new capital. Because Chang'an is geographically to the west of Luoyang, the Han dynasty pre-Xin is called Western Han dynasty (202 BC - 8 AD), and the Han dynasty post-Xin is called Eastern Han dynasty (25 - 220 AD). As you can see here, in these cases this sort of adjective is simply used to indicate different time periods in the same dynasty.

Model of a dragonbone water lift/龙骨水车, Eastern Han dynasty. This is mainly used to push water up to higher elevations for the purpose of irrigation:

Model of a water-powered bellows/冶铁水排, Eastern Han dynasty. Just as the name implies, as flowing water pushes the water wheel around, the parts connected to the axle will pull and push on the bellows alternately, delivering more air to the furnace for the purpose of casting iron.

The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art/《九章算术》, Fangcheng/方程 chapter. It’s a compilation of the work of many scholars from 10 th century BC until 2 nd century AD, and while the earliest authors are unknown, it has been edited and supplemented by known scholars during Western Han dynasty (also when the final version of this book was compiled), then commented on by scholars during Three Kingdoms period (Kingdom of Wei) and Tang dynasty. The final version contains 246 example problems and solutions that focus on practical applications, for example measuring land, surveying land, construction, trading, and distributing taxes. This focus on practicality is because it has been used as a textbook to train civil servants. Note that during Han dynasty, fangcheng means the method of solving systems of linear equations; today, fangcheng simply means equation. For anyone who wants to know a little more about this book and math in ancient China, here’s an article about it. (link goes to pdf)

Diagram of a circle in a right triangle (called “勾股容圆” in Chinese), from the book Ceyuan Haijing/《测圆海镜》 by Yuan-era mathematician Li Ye/李冶 (his name was originally Li Zhi/李治) in 1248. Note that Pythagorean Theorem was known by the name Gougu Theorem/勾股定理 in ancient China, where gou/勾 and gu/股 mean the shorter and longer legs of the right triangle respectively, and the hypotenuse is named xian/弦 (unlike what the above linked article suggests, this naming has more to do with the ancient Chinese percussion instrument qing/磬, which is shaped similar to a right triangle). Gougu Theorem was recorded in the ancient Chinese mathematical work Zhoubi Suanjing/《周髀算经》, and the name Gougu Theorem is still used in China today.

Diagram of the proof for Gougu Theorem in Zhoubi Suanjing. The sentence on the left translates to "gou (shorter leg) squared and gu (longer leg) squared makes up xian (hypotenuse) squared", which is basically the equation a² + b² = c². Note that the character for "squared" here (mi/幂) means "power" today.

This is a diagram of Zhang Heng’s seismoscope, called houfeng didong yi/候风地动仪 (lit. “instrument that measures the winds and the movements of the earth”). It was invented during Eastern Han dynasty, but no artifact of houfeng didong yi has been discovered yet, this is presumably due to constant wars at the end of Eastern Han dynasty. All models and diagrams that exist right now are what historians and seismologists think it should look like based on descriptions from Eastern Han dynasty. This diagram is based on the most popular model by Wang Zhenduo that has an inverted column at the center, but this model has been widely criticized for its ability to actually detect earthquakes. A newer model that came out in 2005 with a swinging column pendulum in the center has shown the ability to detect earthquakes, but has yet to demonstrate ability to reliably detect the direction where the waves originate, and is also inconsistent with the descriptions recorded in ancient texts. What houfeng didong yi really looks like and how it really works remains a mystery.

Xin dynasty bronze calipers, the earliest sliding caliper found as of now (not the earliest caliper btw). This diagram is the line drawing of the actual artifact (right).

Ancient Chinese "Jacquard" loom (called 提花机 or simply 花机 in Chinese, lit. "raise pattern machine"), which first appeared no later than 1st century BC. The illustration here is from the Ming-era (1368 - 1644) encyclopedia Tiangong Kaiwu/《天工开物》. Basically it's a giant loom operated by two people, the person below is the weaver, and the person sitting atop is the one who controls which warp threads should be lifted at what time (all already determined at the designing stage before any weaving begins), which creates patterns woven into the fabric. Here is a video that briefly shows how this type of loom works (start from around 1:00). For Hanfu lovers, this is how zhuanghua/妆花 fabric used to be woven, and how traditional silk fabrics like yunjin/云锦 continue to be woven. Because it is so labor intensive, real jacquard silk brocade woven this way are extremely expensive, so the vast majority of zhuanghua hanfu on the market are made from machine woven synthetic materials.

Chinese purple is a synthetic pigment with the chemical formula BaCuSi2O6. There's also a Chinese blue pigment. If anyone is interested in the chemistry of these two compounds, here's a paper on the topic. (link goes to pdf)

A list of common colors used in Qin and Han dynasties and the pigments involved. White pigment comes from chalk, lead compounds, and powdered sea shells; green pigment comes from malachite mineral; blue pigment usually comes from azurite mineral; black comes from pine soot and graphite; red comes from cinnabar; ochre comes from hematite; and yellow comes from realgar and orpiment minerals.

Also here are names of different colors and shades during Han dynasty. It's worth noting that qing/青 can mean green (ex: 青草, "green grass"), blue (ex: 青天, "blue sky"), any shade between green and blue, or even black (ex: 青丝, "black hair") in ancient Chinese depending on the context. Today 青 can mean green, blue, and everything in between.

Western Han-era bronze lamp shaped like a goose holding a fish in its beak. This lamp is interesting as the whole thing is hollow, so the smoke from the fire in the lamp (the fish shaped part) will go up into the neck of the goose, then go down into the body of the goose where there's water to catch the smoke, this way the smoke will not be released to the surrounding environment. There are also other lamps from around the same time designed like this, for example the famous gilt bronze lamp that's shaped like a kneeling person holding a lamp.

Part of a Qin-era (?) clay drainage pipe system:

A list of canals that was dug during Warring States period, Qin dynasty, and pre-Emperor Wu of Han Han dynasty (475 - 141 BC). Their purposes vary from transportation to irrigation. The name of the first canal on the list, Hong Gou/鸿沟, has already become a word in Chinese language, a metaphor for a clear separation that cannot be crossed (ex: 不可逾越的鸿沟, meaning "a gulf that cannot be crossed").

Han-era wooden boat. This boat is special in that its construction has clear inspirations from the ancient Romans, another indication of the amount of information exchange that took place along the Silk Road:

A model that shows how the Great Wall was constructed in Qin dynasty. Laborers would use bamboo to construct a scaffold (bamboo scaffolding is still used in construction today btw, though it's being gradually phased out) so people and materials (stone bricks and dirt) can get up onto the wall. Then the dirt in the middle of the wall would be compressed into rammed earth, called hangtu/夯土. A layer of stone bricks may be added to the outside of the hangtu wall to protect it from the elements. This was also the method of construction for many city walls in ancient China.

A list of the schools of thought that existed during Warring States period, their most influential figures, their scholars, and their most famous works. These include Confucianism (called Ru Jia/儒家 in Chinese; usually the suffix "家" at the end denotes a school of thought, not a religion; the suffix "教" is that one that denotes a religion), Daoism/道家, Legalism (Fa Jia/法家), Mohism/墨家, etc.

The "Five Classics" (五经) in the "Four Books and Five Classics" (四书五经) associated with the Confucian tradition, they are Shijing/《诗经》 (Classic of Poetry), Yijing/《易经》 (also known as I Ching), Shangshu/《尚书》 (Classic of History), Liji/《礼记》 (Book of Rites), and Chunqiu/《春秋》 (Spring and Autumn Annals). The "Four Books" (四书) are Daxue/《大学》 (Great Learning), Zhongyong/《中庸》 (Doctrine of the Mean), Lunyu/《论语》 (Analects), and Mengzi/《孟子》 (known as Mencius).

And finally the souvenir shop! Here's a Chinese chess (xiangqi/象棋) set where the pieces are fashioned like Western chess, in that they actually look like the things they are supposed to represent, compared to traditional Chinese chess pieces where each one is just a round wooden piece with the Chinese character for the piece on top:

A blind box set of small figurines that are supposed to mimic Shang and Zhou era animal-shaped bronze vessels. Fun fact, in Shang dynasty people revered owls, and there was a female general named Fu Hao/妇好 who was buried with an owl-shaped bronze vessel, so that's why this set has three different owls (top left, top right, and middle). I got one of these owls (I love birds so yay!)

And that concludes the museums I visited while in Xi'an!

#2024 china #xi'an #china #shaanxi history museum qin and han dynasties branch #chinese history #chinese culture #chinese language #qin dynasty #han dynasty #warring states period #chinese philosophy #ancient technology #math history #history #culture #language

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nyhti · 3 months ago

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So years ago I randomly found a Finnish Superman special at a flea market that included the story ”Crisis on Three Earths” (DC Comics Presents Annual 1 (1982)). I didn't know much about Lex Luthor at the time, so the name given to Earth-2 Luthor ”Alexei Luthor” confused me as I had thought that Lex is short for Alexander and always has been, right? So I wondered if Luthor's first name had really been Alexei during the Golden Age or was he named so retroactively? I tried to look for an answer online, but I couldn't find any, so I did what any sane person would do and simply decided to read every single Pre-Crisis Lex Luthor story to get to the bottom of this mystery. And to spare others the suffering I went through, here's a brief history of Luthor's name during Pre-Crisis: Action Comics #23 (1940) First appearance, only called by his last name Luthor Adventure Comics #271 (1960) He is given the first name Lex Superboy #131 (1966) The first time he is called Lexy (and it's by Clark) Joker #7 (1976) Joker calls him Lexie and Lex reveals his mother used to call him that (This little tidbit is more of a joke than anything and since this whole issue is very comedic, I'm personally ready to completely ignore it.) Action Comics #512 (1980) Lex is revealed to be short for Alexis Superman Family #202 (1980) Golden Age Luthor is retroactively named Alexei Luthor (there you have it!) DC Comics Presents Annual 1 (1982) Earth-3's Luthor is called Alex Luthor Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (1985) Earth-3's Luthor's name ”Alex” is revealed to be short for Alexander

#lex luthor

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Aimee Semple McPherson was barefoot when she left Room 202 at the Ocean View Hotel. Wearing only a bathing suit, a dressing gown, and a swim cap, McPherson—the founder of one of America’s first megachurches and just about the most famous woman in the country—had a street waffle for lunch, then settled in the shade of an umbrella just north of Venice Beach to work on a sermon.

It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as “God’s Best Publicity Agent.” McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord’s patrolmen. “Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,” Charlie Chaplin once told her, “half due to the props and lights.”

More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the ocean offered an escape from their attention, and she liked going to the beach to read Scripture and to write, and then to take a break from both to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a title for her sermon, “Light & Darkness,” and wrote for almost an hour before wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale on his way to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta, but no one knows what happened to McPherson after she wrote the following in her notebook: “It had been that way since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.”

More than a month later, and two days after her own memorial service, the lady preacher reappeared, still barefoot but now wandering around a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away. McPherson never wavered in her version of what had occurred, but for the rest of her life her friends and family, her followers and detractors, the newspapers and even the courts debated where she went and what she did during the five weeks she was missing. She became—as the journalist Claire Hoffman argues in a new biography—a schismatic figure in religious history: blessed sister to some, conniving sinner to others.

McPherson’s Angelus Temple, in Echo Park, still stands, although her celebrity has largely faded compared with the days when she was played by Faye Dunaway in a Hallmark movie and inspired one fictional character after another: Reno Sweeney, in Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”; Sister Sharon Falconer, in Sinclair Lewis’s “Elmer Gantry”; and Mrs. Melrose Ape, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies.” Not even Pete Seeger’s goofy refrains of “hi dee hi dee hi dee hi” and “ho dee ho dee ho dee ho” would reliably get the answer now that they did when the folksinger first crooned: “Did you ever hear the story of Aimee McPherson?”

With “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” Hoffman has written her own ballad, resurrecting much of the glory and tragedy of McPherson’s ministry, along with the origins of Pentecostalism and the early days of L.A. At the heart of every biography, though, lies a lacuna—something unknowable, no matter how candid or heavily documented the subject, no matter how familiar or diligent the biographer. There’s a kind of vanishing act in the story of any life, but part of what makes “Sister, Sinner” so gripping—and leaves its author so ambivalent about essential aspects of her subject’s character—is McPherson’s literal disappearance, the nature of which remains contested to this day.

McPherson was born in 1890 in Ontario to Mildred Kennedy, an orphan who became a teen-age bride. When she was just twelve, Kennedy, who went by Minnie and then Ma, joined the Salvation Army, an organization not yet known for its thrift stores but storied for its promise of “soup, soap, and salvation,” which Minnie needed as much as anyone until she found work as a maid for a farmer whose wife was sick. After that wife died, the fifty-year-old farmer, James Kennedy, married the fifteen-year-old Minnie, who soon had a daughter to take with her to Salvationist meetings.

Like the future congressman John Lewis preaching to his family’s chickens as a child, the young Aimee Semple McPherson loved to play church, arranging her toys as if they were a congregation, sermonizing and singing them hymns. She claimed to have memorized most of the Bible by age five, and when she started school she made a drum kit and led the other children around the schoolyard like she was a sergeant major and they her Salvation Army band. Raised by parents who eschewed alcohol, dancing, tobacco, and anything else Lucifer might like, McPherson once persuaded her father to take her to a “Holy Ghost” revival, where she hoped to see some of the charismatic Christians known as Holy Rollers—the spiritual equivalent of catching a glimpse of Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” At first, she disapproved of the alarming teakettle-like shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah,” but soon she found herself taken by the preaching, drawn into the shaking and the swaying, rapt when much of the room fell to the floor in the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit.

By the time that spirit found McPherson, Pentecostalism had travelled a long way from Topeka, where the preacher Charles Fox Parham founded it just after the turn of the century. One of the many strengths of “Sister, Sinner” is Hoffman’s nuanced treatment of the breakaway Protestant movements of this period, when the factions of old-time and newfangled religion fought their way across the American landscape. Parham, a former Methodist married to a woman from a Quaker family, had come to Kansas from Iowa, after touring holiness camps and talking with global missionaries, some of whom told him about seeing recent converts slip into trances and speak in tongues. Convinced that these were signs of the Second Coming, Parham sought to hasten Christ’s return by training his followers in gifts of the spirit like those found in the Acts of the Apostles—everything from faith healing and prophecy to glossolalia.

Parham preached that his was a new apostolic age, and he inspired a flock of notable disciples. These included William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, who escaped poverty in Louisiana and went on to lead the Azusa Street Revival, in Los Angeles, and Robert James Semple, an Irish department-store clerk who left the sales floor for the sawdust trail, where, in the winter of 1907, he preached Pentecostalism so passionately that McPherson fell newly in love not only with Jesus but also with him. Instead of starting her senior year of high school, she married Semple and committed herself to a life of evangelism.

In 1909, she and her husband were both ordained in Chicago. They had travelled there together from Canada, and then headed to Europe, where they met his family in Ireland, before making their way to Hong Kong to spread the Gospel. While there, they got malaria, and Semple died a month before McPherson gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Roberta. It was Minnie who took up a collection to bring her stranded daughter and granddaughter home, getting them seats on a ship called the Empress of China, which carried the pair from Shanghai to California. McPherson preached aboard the ship, and its passengers, spellbound by her blossoming charisma and moved by her plight, gathered just enough funds to buy the young widow and her baby train tickets to New York City, where Minnie would meet them in the fall of 1910. All along the route, McPherson said, the train’s wheels clicked and clacked a question: “What’ll you do? What’ll you do? What’ll you do?”

At first, the answer was: not much. Mother and daughter and granddaughter fell back into the arms of the Salvation Army, with McPherson keeping some of the coins she collected while ringing a bell in theatres up and down Broadway. She still wanted to serve God, but she had left most of her nerve and verve in the Happy Valley Cemetery, where Semple was buried. Then she met Harold McPherson—neither a charismatic preacher nor a courageous missionary but an accountant who had dropped out of a Baptist college in Missouri. She was down at the heels; he was head over heels. When Harold proposed, McPherson accepted on the condition that God would be her real husband, and should He “call me to go to Africa or India, or to the Island of the Sea, no matter where or when, I must obey God first of all.”

Harold agreed, but didn’t exactly acquiesce, hoping that his bride would simply settle into life as a happy homemaker. The newlyweds soon left New York and ended up, fittingly, in Providence, where McPherson had another baby, a boy named Rolf. Although Harold encouraged his wife to dust the furniture and feed her two children, those children watched as their mother seemed to lose her mind, shuttering all the windows, refusing to leave her bed, and crying out for Christ from behind her locked bedroom door. Within a year, her condition had become so severe that she went into the hospital, the first in a series of admissions, for vomiting and heart tremors, one nervous breakdown and then another, followed by a hysterectomy. “The poor, unconscious ‘what-there-was-left-of me’ was put back in bed,” she recalled after the surgery. “I opened my eyes on the white walls of the hospital—quivering with pain from head to foot, which, instead of growing better grew worse and worse.” Minnie was summoned more than once to her daughter’s bedside to say goodbye, but, in 1915, a different voice rescued McPherson from death and despair. “GO! Do the work of an evangelist,” she heard one winter day. “Preach the Word ‘The time is short; I am coming soon.’ ”

On this occasion, McPherson’s answer to God’s call was a definitive yes. Her pain and depression disappeared as soon as she’d said it, and she felt giddy with certainty that God not only had healed her but was calling her to new ventures; when she left the hospital, it was for the streets. She took her children, abandoned her husband, and set off to preach again, starting with “hallelujah runs” near where she’d grown up, in Canada. She would stand silently on a chair on the sidewalk, then raise her hands toward Heaven until strangers stopped to ask what she was doing. Once a crowd formed, she’d jump down and shout, “Quick! Come with me,” and run into a nearby theatre. An usher would lock the door behind anyone who’d followed her into the venue, and she’d work to captivate the audience she had captured.

Around this time, McPherson began wearing white nursing uniforms and answering to Sister. She bought a revival tent, and then, after a few successful weeks, she invited Harold to join her. “I have tried to walk your way and have failed,” she wrote to him in a telegram. “Won’t you come now and walk my way?” Together, they graduated from travelling by foot to road-tripping, driving around New England, then expanding their circuit to the entire Eastern Seaboard. Following a prophecy that McPherson believed was calling her to Florida, of all places, they ended up buying an Oldsmobile they dubbed the Gospel Car, painting “JESUS IS COMING SOON—GET READY” on one side and on the other, more ominously, “WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”

McPherson’s sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry.

But McPherson mostly preached love, not fear. A novelty of sorts as a “lady preacher,” she always attracted intrigue and occasionally censure, but she was ready with a sharp defense whenever someone quoted Corinthians or Timothy to condemn female ministers. After Pentecostalism divided along racial lines, she still sometimes held integrated religious meetings, periodically pitching her tent in Black camps and even requesting that a Black preacher baptize her son. If her gender and racial politics gave certain people pause, her ministry gave many others hope, and she quickly outgrew her tents and the small municipalities where she’d first staked them. Some revival-goers said she worked the pews so hard that she ended any service soggy with sweat, water pouring out of her shoes. Her crowds multiplied exponentially once she began performing miracles—leaving arenas, opera houses, and convention centers littered with discarded canes, casts, crutches, and wheelchairs as parishioner after parishioner claimed to have been healed by her laying on of hands.

Word of mouth might have been enough for Jesus, but Minnie was relentless in promoting her daughter’s ministry, and McPherson herself embraced one medium after another for spreading her message. Mother and daughter saw to the distribution of flyers, postcards, and advertising ahead of every appearance. They wielded megaphones, started a magazine to disseminate transcripts of McPherson’s sermons, and opened a Bible college to train disciples. Calling herself Your Sister in the King’s Glad Service, McPherson published an autobiography, and told her life story on any radio station that would air it. Realizing the potential of that technology, she then started her own radio station, Kall Four Square Gospel (KFSG), becoming one of the first women in the United States to hold a broadcast license. She once told reporters to meet her at a local airfield, where she preached a short sermon, climbed into an airplane, took off, and dropped fifteen thousand leaflets advertising her next revival series, which went on to attract more than ten thousand people.

In 1918, after Roberta almost died of pneumonia, Sister Aimee heard another voice, this one telling her to pack up the family and move to California. Once again, Harold stayed behind, while she loaded her mother and two children into the Gospel Car, taking two months to travel across the country. They arrived in Los Angeles as the city’s population was booming, transforming from a farming-and-ranching town to a modern metropolis, wild with drugs, prostitution, and gambling, just waiting for a savior.

McPherson seemed like an angel in the city that was named for them, not least because she was so physically beautiful and kept up her habit of wearing white. She collected souls as her mother counted cash, millions of dollars pouring into the offering plates while the airwaves of KFSG made their way around the world. At the same time, criticism of McPherson grew. A rival minister even published a takedown tract called “McPhersonism: A Study of Healing Cults and Modern Day ‘Tongues’ Movements.” Hoping to quiet the controversy and attract more mainstream Protestant audiences, McPherson tried distancing herself from the practices of the Holy Rollers, not only refusing to speak in tongues but also admonishing overly exuberant attendees at her services. Although she had been ordained by the Assemblies of God, she started her own denomination, which she called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

In 1921, McPherson broke ground on her megachurch, while the fed-up and upstaged Harold filed for divorce. She kept his name but nothing else, barely mentioning him in her autobiography, devoting many more pages to Angelus Temple. Where King Solomon had used cedar and cypress trees, Sister Aimee opted for concrete, marble, and steel. The sanctuary, situated on Glendale Boulevard, opened on January 1, 1923. Minnie, who had long been her daughter’s personal assistant, officially became her business partner in the newly incorporated Echo Park Evangelistic Association, overseeing a hundred employees, who helped welcome more than seven thousand people a day for multiple services seven days a week—plus a thousand children for Sunday school.

The main auditorium of Angelus Temple seated five thousand people in two balconies and rivalled Grauman’s nearby Chinese and Egyptian theatres in size and production values. McPherson’s “illustrated sermons” were performed alongside a brass band, a fourteen-piece orchestra, and a hundred-person choir. When those performances lost their novelty, she began staging “sacred operas” with even larger choirs and sets. Her charisma kept the church’s so-called Watch Tower humming with volunteers, who prayed twenty-four hours a day in two-hour shifts, and filled the Miracle Room with almost every medical device imaginable, all of them cast aside after Sister Aimee’s healings.

McPherson was at the peak of her fame when she vanished. Several weeks later, when she walked out of the desert and into the back-yard garden of a casita in Agua Prieta, just south of the Arizona border, she claimed that she had been kidnapped from Venice Beach. According to her, a couple tricked her into their car by saying that they had a baby who needed healing, then hit her over the head and drugged her before fleeing south. Her kidnappers were enraged, she said, because her preaching had made it harder for them to run their human-trafficking ring, and they threatened to sell her into slavery. It was a Joseph-type tale without an amazing Technicolor dreamcoat—or, for that matter, any clothes at all, beyond the swimsuit she’d been wearing at the beach. Despite her pristine appearance at the time of her return, McPherson insisted that she’d been tied up and tortured by her captors. She described a harrowing escape from a remote shack which involved sawing through ropes with the discarded lid of a syrup can, slipping out a window, and making her way across twenty-two miles of an arid and unforgiving landscape. Authorities observed that McPherson’s lips were not chapped, that her skin was pale and unblemished, and that her feet were practically pedicured, except for two small blisters on her toes. Needless to say, they had questions.

So did the whole world. Throughout McPherson’s absence, her fans and followers, as well as the merely curious, had scoured the Venice Beach area and beyond for clues about her fate. Divers, airplanes, and police boats had mobilized in the effort to find her; one rescue diver drowned, and an acolyte of McPherson’s was said to have died by suicide at the scene of her vanishing. Reporters covered the story with the same avidity that they would later bring to the disappearances of the Lindbergh baby and of Amelia Earhart. Now, with McPherson abruptly un-disappeared, an even larger group of people—the relieved, the vengeful, the doubtful, and the desperate-for-a-byline—set about trying to vet her story.

A major manhunt turned up not even a footprint of the supposed kidnappers and not a splinter of their desert shack, and it didn’t take long for an alternative theory of McPherson’s disappearance to materialize. Many people claimed to have seen her, or someone who looked like her, during the time she went missing, and a great many of those sightings had been in Carmel-by-the-Sea—where, it seemed, a married man with whom she was rumored to be having an affair happened to have rented an oceanside cottage. The man, Kenneth Ormiston, ran McPherson’s radio station. Before the disappearance, his wife had shown up at Angelus Temple to accuse McPherson of adultery, and Minnie had tried to keep the two suspected lovers apart after congregants heard them flirting over the church’s intercom.

Perhaps that is partly why even Minnie turned against her daughter. The day McPherson went missing, Minnie declared her dead, anointing Roberta, then a teen-ager, as her successor. But McPherson never wavered from her story. She insisted that her enemies were the enemies of God, seeking to undermine her integrity in order to thwart her ministry and protect many of the city’s evildoers, from street gangs to corrupt Catholics. As McPherson defended herself, she wove an ever-expanding conspiracy theory that stretched all the way from Venice Beach to the Vatican.

The district attorney of Los Angeles had a less complex explanation: McPherson wanted sex, her mother wanted money; one was a Jezebel, the other a Judas. But the effort to prosecute either of them, or Ormiston, for any kind of fraud quickly devolved into chaos, with witnesses, experts, and lawyers on both sides stretching the bounds of morality, to say nothing of legality. When McPherson’s case finally went to court, the resulting trial was the longest and most expensive in California history, a record broken only after the arrest of Charles Manson and his followers.

The charges were ultimately dropped, and McPherson resumed her preaching and her leadership of Angelus Temple. She got married again, too, this time to the three-hundred-pound baritone who’d played the part of Pharaoh in her staging of Exodus. During the Great Depression, she rallied her membership to the task of Christian charity, feeding and clothing more than a million and a half people at her church’s twenty-four-thousand-square-foot commissary. The church also ran a community laundry, an employment office, a nursery school, and a clinic of sorts, with free medical and dental care. Even McPherson’s critics had to concede that she had at least some amount of saintliness, whatever they made of her miracles, holy hustle, and notorious disappearance.

Years of investigation and interrogation failed to definitively solve the mystery of McPherson’s vanishing. Her church is now even deeper in the heart of the city, which continues to sprawl around it, and plenty of people worldwide still identify as Foursquare Christians. But she made no confession before she died—in the fall of 1944, of an apparently accidental overdose of sleeping pills—and she doesn’t seem to have availed herself of the afterlife to clarify what happened in Carmel-by-the-Sea, or anywhere else. If she had, Claire Hoffman would surely have found out. Her book is wonderfully thorough, the type of biography in which you learn just the right amount about everything, from the idiosyncrasies of American religious history to the idiocy of modern celebrity culture.

Before turning to books, Hoffman profiled the likes of Prince, Amy Winehouse, Jane Fonda, and Michael Jackson for this magazine, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times, so it’s unsurprising that she brings the lens of celebrity to her account of McPherson’s life. In this version, the controversial evangelist is somewhere between tragic feminist icon and pioneering proto-influencer—a kind of Kabbalah Kardashian or St. Taylor Swift. “Aimee’s life story prefigures so much about the world we live in today in terms of belief, power, truth, and the corrosive nature of fame,” Hoffman writes, arguing that “this is not a story about the sins or the spectacle. Instead, I see nested inside Aimee’s story a cautionary tale about fame.” Of course, plenty of famous people manage their fame—and their infidelities, sexual or otherwise—without going so far as to stage a kidnapping hoax. “Her relationship to reality was different from that of those around her,” Hoffman writes of McPherson, as if fame was not merely explanatory but exculpatory.

But deflecting questions about McPherson’s disappearance by blaming her celebrity status and the toxic scrutiny that accompanied it is just another way that fame obscures the person it elevates. If there is a flaw in Hoffman’s book, it is that she suspends disbelief beyond belief about the central episode of the evangelist’s career, sidestepping some of the most tantalizing aspects of McPherson’s life. If you never resolve the matter of whether she lied, you never get to ask why she might have done so, and then kept doing so for decades.

Was walking away from the Ocean View Hotel a sudden impulse or a premeditated plan by McPherson to get away from her mother and get some time with her lover? Or was it actually another mother-daughter scheme, a con to refill the ministry’s coffers hatched by Minnie and then derailed by McPherson’s lust? Or was it an attempted renunciation of authority and responsibility which the fame-stricken, but also fame-addicted, preacher came to regret?

It could have been any of the above, of course—or maybe a brain worm, literal or otherwise, entered McPherson’s body between the beach and the breakwater, causing her to forsake her life’s work. Who knows? But it seems representative of the moral confusion in our own society that whether or not one of the nation’s leading religious authorities perpetrated a grand fraud on the public is not seen as a question in need of answering. Instead, Hoffman finds it more interesting to consider how the media covered the case and what happened after the charges were dropped. As a result, by the end of this otherwise magnificent biography, McPherson has once again managed to disappear.

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