#how do you make a modern build into an older style house

[dwellordream]

Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often

By Darby Saxbe, clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California

I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.

Parents in contemporary industrialized societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time. We feel guilty when we have to drag our children along with us to take care of boring adult business.

This intensive, often frantic style of parenting requires a lot more effort than the style Professor Hewlett described. I found myself thinking about those hunter-gatherers last month when I read the advisory from the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs. One is that we don’t ignore our children often enough.

The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.

Of course, just because a parenting style is ancient doesn’t make it good. But human beings have spent about 90 percent of our collective time on Earth as hunter-gatherers, and our brains and bodies evolved and adapted to suit that lifestyle. Hunter-gatherer cultures tell us something important about how children are primed to learn.

A parenting style that took its cue from those hunter-gatherers would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful underparenting.

Children learn not only from direct instruction, but also from watching and modeling what other people around them do, whether it’s foraging for berries, changing a tire or unwinding with friends after a long day of work. From a young age, that kind of observation begins to equip children for adulthood.

More important, following adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. There is evidence from neuroscience that a resting brain is not an idle one. The research tells us that the mind gets busy when it is left alone to do its own thing — in particular, it tends to think about other people’s minds. If you want to raise empathetic, imaginative children who can figure out how to entertain themselves, don’t keep their brains too occupied.

An excellent way to bore children is to take them to an older relative’s house and force them to listen to a long adult conversation about family members they don’t know. Quotidian excursions to the post office or the bank can create valuable opportunities for boredom, too.

Leaving kids’ screens at home on such trips can deepen the useful tedium. It also forces parents to build up their tolerance to their child’s fussiness, an essential component of underparenting. Parents too often feel the need to engage their children in “fun” activities to tempt them away from screens. But by teaching children to crave constant external stimulation and entertainment, intensive parenting can actually worsen screen dependence.

To be sure, when kids are upset, in danger or require guidance, parents can and should swoop in to help. But that is precisely the point: It is only by ignoring our children much of the time that we conserve the energy necessary to give them our full attention when they actually need it.

In recent years there has been a lot of hand-wringing about so-called helicopter parents and their hopelessly coddled children. But we rarely talk about what parents ought to do instead. In an ideal world, we would set children loose to roam free outdoors, unsupervised. As a small-town Ohio kid in the 1990s, I spent hours with my brothers playing in the creek behind our house, with plenty of time to get good and bored. When that sort of “free range” experience is not an option, however, mindful underparenting is the next best thing.

This approach can take the form of bringing children with you not just on boring errands, but also when you work, socialize or exercise. I was at my gym the other day when a father came in with his 4-year-old son. The two of them took turns working out with a trainer teaching them martial arts moves. When it wasn’t his turn, the 4-year-old scrambled around the gym and, when he got tired, lay on his belly on the mat and watched his father practice kicks. Observing the boy, his big eyes taking in a ton of social information, I thought about all the parents who say that they have no time to exercise because they’re too busy with their kids.

At the same time, I thought about all the gyms that bar small children. Even as parenting has gotten more intensive, public spaces, especially in the United States, seem to have become more hostile to the presence of children. I wrote most of my Ph.D. dissertation alongside my toddler in a coffee shop in my neighborhood that had a mini play area with stacking toys, board books and room to park a stroller. That coffee shop is gone now, replaced by a sleeker cafe where it’s hard to picture a stray plastic toy, let alone a rambunctious 2-year-old.

Parents have it easier in countries such as Germany and Spain, where you can find beer gardens and tapas bars situated right next to playgrounds, or in Denmark, where parents routinely park their infants in strollers outside cafes while they socialize. In such places you can relax and catch up with friends while children romp around — a reminder of how much easier parenting gets when we enjoy the social trust born from shared investment in care.

In other words, underparenting requires structural change, and not just the obvious changes that we think of as parental stress-relievers, such as family leave and paid child care. It also requires that as a society, we build back our tolerance for children in public spaces, as annoying and distracting as they can be, and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely. In a society that treated children as a public good, we would keep a collective eye on all our kids — which would free us of the need to hover over our own

[katkat030]

Hey Kat! o/

Could you answer your favourite question from your recent reblog '40 questions - meme for fic writers'?

I'm curious which one is your fav! (And what your answer would be ^-^)

(No pressure of course! :P)

Hello hello!

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

A fair few! From a glance at my documents, I'd say about nine, three or four of which are half-formed ideas that probably won't see the light of day unless I get a sudden burst of inspiration to finish them.

I know fic usually means fanfic, but I do also have a poetry-style project I picked up a few days ago for chipping away at as atmosphere building practice, based on an irl setting!

Among my wips is a college au that I decided to create solely because it's debilitatingly funny to take Life Series and Hermitcraft events and translate them into real world scenarios.

The cactus ring? Grian accidentally punched Scar as a fight-or-flight response and, embarrassed, crashes at his older sister Pearl's house, who just so happened to need someone to look after it while she goes away for a few weeks. When he returns to school, Scar isn't there, so he tells his friends jokingly that he murdered the guy.

Cleo's stitching like tattoos? Every time someone asks why she has them, Joe, her best friend and resident literature student, gets to come up with even more elaborate and blatant lies. That's where the rumours that she's a zombie came from. He takes great pride in quoting Frankenstein and insinuating she's some modern-day version of his monster, and they both find it hilarious.

The roomies get to be roomies, because I say so. <3 When left to their own devices, Etho and Bdubs sometimes stretch the duvets and blankets between the top bunks in some sort of blanket fort to sit under while they play video games together. They dub the tradition the making of snow forts (Last Life my beloved) because it's really cold in winter without blankets. If Etho lends Bdubs his puffer jacket, that's between them.

Before becoming roommates with Scar, Grian occasionally saw two smaller Jellie look-alikes (she often accompanies Scar to classes, and since they both take architecture he's learnt her name), and assumed that by some witchcraft, Jellie must somehow spontaneously split into two. They're actually just a pair of trouble-making kittens, Katy Bee and Mr Finnegan. After moving in, Grian, resident pranker, takes them under his wing and teaches them how to properly get up to mischief.

[doubleddenden]

More ZA talk, this time just talking about how a single city can work for a game.

I've seen a lot of poketubers talk about how they "have to" expand outside of Lumiose because it's so small, but- as the rare Pokemon player that's actually played a game BESIDES Pokemon (apparently we're a rare species)- I can assure you it is indeed possible to make an entire city work for a single game- Saints Row 3 and 4, GTAV, Infamous 1 and 2, Spider-Man PS4, *Detective Pikachu???* did we forgor that already? All of those take place in a city, and in some cases are bigger than Kanto, Galar, Hisui, and Paldea individually.

The entire game can take place in Lumiose- just probably not the SAME Lumiose from XY on the 3ds. Look at Hisui- that's old Sinnoh, but there's a lot of liberties taken in regards to certain area placements that wouldn't make sense (Obsidian Fieldlands is a good example, having Mesprit's lake to the northwest of what we assume to be future locations for Floaroma Town, as is the coast lands if we look at Giratina's location).

So, again, having played other games where you're basically in a big city, and having myself lived in a real city with more ground to cover than some entire Pokemon games, it can work, you just have to open your mind to the possibilities.

Yes, even in old Paris circa 1850s and especially modern Paris.

In fact, even though the game was shit for being a buggy and unfinished mess (not to mention a French ripoff of 2, imo), Assassin's Creed Unity takes place in Paris during the French Revolution- only a few decades older than the proposed 1850s setting- and AC games tend to be pretty thorough when it comes to historical accuracy of cities in their games (in fact, when the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned down, they gave data of the church to help in repairs since they mapped it out so well for their game). Bar some obvious inaccuracies, i point that out to give you some idea of the scope of an area size we could explore. It's a huge map with lots of ground to cover.

The main thing to understand is that it may be a different game than most expect. The first trailer for ZA talks about rebuilding Lumiose for city planning purposes- not quite the rugged, untamed wilderness (well, kinda tamed by the Diamond, Pearl, and Celestica clans, but mostly untouched) of Hisui.

So what kind of game could it be? That, I'm unsure of, but I'm sure there's plenty to work with in terms of exploration in a Pokemon game, just not the way you expect.

Here's what I'm picturing: streets, alleys, rivers, old buildings (inside, the roof, the walls, etc), factories, barns, the sky, sewer adjacent tunnels, ponds, rail road tracks and rail road tunnels, catacombs (and or an underground samctuary type place), and perhaps a reinvisioning of the 5 plazas for specific biomes.

Let's look at the map shown in the trailer

Idk about yall, but that's not the same Lumiose from the 3ds, and 3ds Lumiose is still the biggest city we've ever had. Take a look at all of those alleys and buildings and streets- assume this isn't like SV and we can actually go INSIDE places, and suddenly this place looks about 12 times bigger than imagined.

Now this is most likely a modern map of Lumiose, but you can still get an idea of the size of the area we have to work with. It's a big place- maybe we're not going to have a huge varied world to explore like usual, but imagine having missions and story that takes place in particular areas here. That's how many games work with singular cities- go to John Street to meet with Bert and do his bidding, go to the docks to meet with Hans to talk about shipments, go talk to Frank at his house on 123 Street, investigate the factories near city hall- it's not a usual Pokemon game, but it can work in that style of missions and progressions because many games DO work in that style.

Does that make sense? Open some minds here?

They're not gonna sell you a game you're gonna beat in 30 minutes or 2 hours- it's gotta tide you over til the next game, and Nintendo would absolutely rip John Game Freak's testicles out of their collective bodies through their goddamn kneecaps with TONGS if they had to refund games completed that quickly or because they made the audience that mad (i mean, theyve shown they can get away with selling unfinished games, but you know, at least they weren't short-). If it were really that small, they'd just tack it onto SV as DLC. They're not gonna try and make a city the size of Mezagoza City from Paldea into a game, make sense?

You'll probably have a hub or home base and explore the city, and portions of story take place in particular areas of the map- probably doled out to you by handlers, re go to 123 street to talk to Frank as mentioned above. Handlers being important to give an open sandbox and open progression system. Yes, you may be sort of all over the place, maybe coming back to areas you've been, being sent from one side of town to another- that can actually be fun if you have proper transport or modes of travel- something like Spider-Man or cars in some games, but in our case probably Pokemon (maybe a Kalosian Ariados evolution with web slinging lol). Remember, we're not here for badges, we're here for a specific purpose.

So what I'm picturing is that you get started and are told to go places for plot purposes with a minimap to guide you. You can find something like a Pidgey on a lamp post and throw a ball at it to catch it or start a fight with it in the street. Catch it, get on a Gogoat to run through the streets, go past an alleyway- whoa there's a shiny Gengar in there, go there and fight it and catch it- okay back to the objective.

In this sense, I think the trailer is actually a decent example of how Pokemon placement could work, not to mention city layout with multiple layers of urban exploration.

It's an "ambitious" game, like how Arceus was, so just go in with the expectation that it'll be very different compared to what we're used to. We likely won't hear anything about it for a while- I'll say August at the earliest for Worlds, then another drought. Maybe by then we can have a few eggs for this omelet.

[steampaul]

i've started a little series of weekly posts documenting every MoC i made (digitally) over the last few years:

Week 10: 2023

for the galaxy explorer, Some GWP ideas, the bricklink designer program,my gripes with an ideas set, being abandoned, some potted blocks, classic defender mini and a bit more Rock Raiders stuff

this is the last week.

i got the 10497 galaxy explorer as a christmas present in 2022 and i wanted to make a base for it. this is of course based on the printed baseplate that was included in the original 928 (or 497) galaxy explorer in 1979. its build atop a 50x50 baseplate.

my first idea of a possible GWP inspired by the trend of GWPs being remakes of older sets, like 40567 forest hideout, 40580 blacktron cruiser, 40601 majisto's magical workshop and 40581 tahu and takua was this MoC.

I chose 7708 Uplink from Exo-Force to base my GWP MoC on even though 7701 Grand titan was my first Exo-Force set (and the first one i got from shop@home), because it's a smaller set and thus more suited as a GWP (also i think that joker hair looks better in purple and would be more fitting as a modern version of the Exo-force rubber hairpieces for Ryo and less for takeshi imho)

the original Tumblr App-icon. but in lego.

i made this to be my current Phone background. the grey greebles are my lockscreen and the Ace flag is my homescreen, so that unlocking my phone imbues the background with colour.

this is my First MoC i posted on Tumblr at the same time i posted it on reddit.

i love 21340 tales from the space age, but i had a few gripes with the added fourth art piece and i felt the need to analyse why exactly i thought it wasn't as good as the others and how i would try to fix it.

Bricklink opened their designer Program to the public with series 1 in that year and i wanted to add something based on one of my favourite MoC ideas i ever had. the abandoned factory i posted back in week 2. i hd the idea of an old, abandoned industrial building that you could give walls using your (probably huge) collection of brick seperators. i cannot remember if i posted it anywhere or not. and why i didn't if i didn't.

yipieeee! it's Tbh, the autism creature. my first MoC iv'e only posted to tumblr.

oh god, this one. someone asked me to build them a MoC based on a house they wanted to buy on zillo. i made it for them, took a bit longer than i thought it would and even though i've been pretty transparent about this, they ghosted me.

oh well.

cheesy brick studios made a Video where he made some minecraft Potted plants inspired by 10329 tiny plants.

this then inspired me to make some bigger versions of (almost) all minecraft potted plants.

40650 creator land rover classic defender released that year and i wanted to make it look more like it's Icons counterpart (10317).

i think it looks nice. even though it is not on par with the 8 wide speed champions sets....

some More Rock raiders!!! this time in the style of another possible GWP, so no neon green or orange, sadly, because those colours were discontinued just as i finished building this MoC.

an who are these little guys?, you might ask. well they're also Rock Raiders MoCs, based on the a little one person Mining transport that i cannot find the reference i used. and i cannot remember what they're called.

this is it. the final week. i have no idea what to do to continue with my MoCs, maybe something yearly? making at least óne MoC every week? i dont know. but i know i'll make a master post sometime later this week where i'll link every one of these Ten weeks.

see ya!

first week last week

[arlechinav-blog]

Ancient Agricultural Rites Hiding in Plain Sight

Oral traditions are encoded in folklore that only makes sense if you understand the coding so looking at the practices themselves requires a bit of context. Folkloric coding is like slang but for actions. There is internal consistency to it and good reasons for all of it but it is not exactly intuitive. Every individual village or city that still has a tradition related to the agricultural mysteries (or collection of traditions) has a unique origin story for how it supposedly got started. In many cases these stories have changed over centuries, keeping the rituals relevant to whatever the living people of the region would most easily recognize but there is a common thematic "thread" and that is what you should keep an eye out for.

When it comes to the rituals I want to show you today, the story to look out for is:  

A hero in red fights off an opposing army that represents the forces of death. There will always be a young woman whom they fight over, who represents the Spring or the Land itself.

There are several features that I keep an eye out for but things vary from place to place because this ritual is probably one of the oldest that I have been able to track. The older a practice, the more local variation. But this is what I look for:

Time of Year: Death Season. Between mid December to March for the procession of the armies of death. With a few specific battle rituals or bonfire night vigils around the time of planting and harvest. There are usually at least 4 major ritual occasions that frequently line up with the embertides. But some areas have a different calendar so that has to be taken into account.   

Colors: Usually Red, White, Black, and sometimes Gold.   

Dance Fighting Style: If there are two armies, the ritual will go thwack. They will fight each other in circles moving in procession from place to place to bless the town. Sometimes participants do get injured and that is expected, part of the ritual. At one time these rituals were used for divination but now they are mostly for sympathetic magic or just for the sake of tradition.   

Shapeshifting/Transformation: The utilization of masks and very specific ornate clothing, almost always color coded into teams. There will usually be clearly defined "mummer" characters.   

Spirit Weapon: The old traditional form was to use sticks or bound stalks of grain. Sometimes the armies of death will use cudgels of bone. In regions where the traditions have adapted more to a modern populace, they will have traded out for swords.

Rhythm:  1-2  1-2-3 is very common and prominent but there will almost always be some kind of triple beat that works out to move-strike-strike-strike or step-jump-jump-jump. There are usually an odd number of different ritual dances and sometimes they will have variations of the same rhythm so there is a spectrum to it. Big drums and pipes are traditional but so is music being made with jingles worn by the dancers and the rhythmic clacking of their weapons.   

**The ringing of metal against metal is apotropaic so part of the purpose of the ritual is to process through the village/town ringing metal against metal to drive away malicious spirits. This is a ritual purgation of the space and a blessing. Sometimes the ritual characters will stop in front of various houses and important buildings in their path and bless the occupants and the structure with their encoded movements.

Who Gets to Participate: It is very important to the ritual that only locally born people perform these dances. They are the children of the local earth goddess. Participation in these rituals is not open to outsiders and the general public, though viewing is acceptable. Traditionally it is most frequently done by young unmarried men but since gender is one of the things shape shifted during this ritual, that may not matter as much in some places. At one time and still in a few places, the term of service would be 9 years. 9 being the number of transformation and ritually significant to lycanthropy traditions. Right now, many regions are scrapping the age and marital status aspect in order to keep these traditions alive. In the last 20 years or so these rituals have been opened to the public for viewing to boost tourism. In at least a few areas this has resulted in these rituals being staged multiple times per year (out of season) by professional companies or fraternities for the benefits of tourists.

Gods / Heroes Involved: Some areas still keep the legends tied directly to old gods while others just use code and do it symbolically. Sun gods and gods known to have gone into the underworld and returned are the most common, thus the red colors. But many living traditions have more modern origin stories (either layered on top of god legends or just replacing them). Some legends have switched to more recent characters, usually a Johnny "Good-Guy" McBeefcake coded person. This can be a named king or an archetype that everyone liked at the time vs. some military threat the local people faced that left an emotional scar on the town. Sometimes the two sides are led by brothers or twins--one solar coded and the other death coded. There are often a selection of goddesses operating in the background as well. One of those goddesses wields fire and releases the army of the dead around mid December. And, of course, there is always the Spring Maiden.

Shapeshifting traditions are occasions for elaborate and very specific regalia. So, colors are important and so are masks, and animal skins--usually worn over the head. In those cases, the person doing the shapeshifting takes on the attributes of the animal or the being that they are dressed as. There is a whole ritual process for who is supposed to do this, when they are supposed to do this, and there is always a proof of state involved. Proof of state is a common feature in all possession traditions, which shapeshifting/lycanthropy functions very similarly to. It will often involve the person doing the shapeshifting consuming something that they ordinarily would not or doing it in such a way that would be unusual outside of a ritual context.

When it comes to the mysteries of the grain cycle, there are two things commonly consumed by those who do the shapeshifting--wine and bread. On their own, this is not unusual. It is the quantity that these people consume and how they go about doing it that is the real proof of state. While in a state of ritual transformation, they consume bread and wine with the unrelenting, unquenchable thirst and hunger of the dead. Modern people usually translate this as "they feasted" which is quite the understatement. More like, "they ate everything that wasn't nailed down or hidden." And this wine connection, along with the undead associations related to shapeshifting, is what I think ties this to Dionysos and puts occasions like Anthesteria into proper context.

The bread of the dead is a whole thing. The dead want bread. It is just known. Death season is that time between what would be December and March, for those in the Northern Hemisphere. The dead are "controlled" by fire. So, pay attention to references to fire as they relate to life and death. Fire is used to bake bread. I know there is some kind of connection tying all of that together but I couldn't possibly phrase it well.

This was just the preamble. I haven't even started the dive yet. On that note, here we go!

Link #1: 'Ndrezzata of Ischia

The legend goes that Apollo played his golden zither and the nymphs of Ischia danced this dance. Then Apollo fell in love with one of them (Coronide), they were wed and had a son together (Esculapio). The wicked faun, Ischis, stole Coronide and in the fight between Apollo and Ischis, Coronide was tossed into the sea. Esculapio poisoned the spring of Ischia with herbs that filled hearts of the people who drank from it with hate. The two peoples of the area (ancient Murpano), the Baranesi and the Buonopanesi, both drank from it and it plunged them into an endless war. Frightened away by the war, the nymphs of Ischia abandoned the place but left their dance to the people there.

Here we have the red color coded hero-god figure and the wicked shapeshifter (faun), the two armies fighting it out over a local goddess (nymph in this case), the dances are definitely a variation of what I have come to expect (very strong resemblance to Moreska), and I can still hear the 1-2 1-2-3 in the striking of the batons. They are accompanied by drums and pipes. Glad to see they are still using wooden spirit weapons. The colors are a little different from what I would expect but this is a small island and maybe they happened to have an abundance of green dye. Totally within the spectrum of normal. Their goddess figure is removed by tragedy, effectively placing her in the underworld. And for whatever local reason there is, the heroic figures have departed leaving behind two opposing teams who are compelled by magical means to fight each other.

Next up!

Link #2: Janissaries & Boules of Naousa

This is the tradition of the Janissaries & Boules (Γενίτσαροι & Μπούλες) from the city of Naoussa in Greece. The character of the lead Janissary wears the bold red head scarf while the support Janissaries (his band of mountain bandits) support him in a slightly different shade of red. The Boules refer to the character of the young goddess/heroine who accompanies each troop. In the video there are many, many different troops so you will see several different Boules but they are all the same character. Her name is Boula and she dances with them and blesses people with kisses.

This ritual is tied to the god Dionysos. The procession order goes: children in the front, main body of Janissaries and Boules in the middle, musicians in the back. The ritual begins with the Janissaro appearing on the balcony or in the window of his home. He will vigorously shake his chest and jump three times on his two feet (1-2  1-2-3). Then he will go downstairs with Boula, cross himself 3 times at the door of his house and step out. Together they will bless the people who have gathered to see them with chest shaking, jumping, and Boula's kisses. They will then walk to the next house to pick up the other members of their "pack."

Once the pack is assembled (mountain bandits are often thought of as wolves) they all go together to the City Hall to wait for the town's blessing for them to begin their ritual dances. Once given, all of the packs will raise their swords and dance in circular patterns through the streets--stopping periodically to make blessings and shake/jump. This ritual takes a full day and it is repeated over 3 days. (Right around the time of Anthesteria.)

At the conclusion of the ritual everyone feasts (with the unquenchable hunger and thirst of the dead) on special grain cakes and wine. Do remember that the ringing of metal against metal is apotropaic so the movement of the coins and jewelry are specifically there to scare away malicious spirits. They do this through the whole town, clearing the spirits from the streets.

Looking at both 'Ndrezzata and the Janissaries & Boules. Even though no wolf-shapes or animal shapes are seen, they are still implied using the local folkloric coding. But if you don't know the coding or how this all fits into the bigger picture, then it is very easy to miss. Going up into the mountains is a major feature of these rituals, either in the background legend or as an actual thing still done as part of the ritual. Going into the mountains to fight spirits is one of the traditional roles of those involved in lycanthropy and shapeshifting traditions.  Keep Apollo Lykaios in mind as well here.

Now we head over to Korcula, Croatia for some Moreska!

There are few dances in this world as grossly misunderstood and misdocumented as Moreska but I can understand how it happened. If you do a search for more information about Moreska or the origins of "Morris Dancing," you will get led off in all kinds of weird directions that take each origin story of these rituals at face value. (I have a very fancy dance encyclopedia set created by one of the big names in dance ethnology and it doesn't mention any of what I am about to tell you or what I have already told you.) This is a good example of what happens when outsiders take a look at the exact stated history of an indigenous practice and completely miss the coding. Never take this stuff literally.

Moreska is a ritual play. The main characters are: 

Osman, the Red  King 

Otmanovic, the Black King 

Moro, the Black Prince 

Bula, the White Queen (same Bula as from the Janissaries & Boules ritual from Naoussa)

At the beginning of the ritual, Bula is abducted by Moro and taken away. The coding is that Moro is the Prince of Death and he has taken Bula (Spring) to the underworld. Osman is the local King/Prince and he descends into the underworld with his army of mountain men to rescue Bula and bring her back to the world above. Osman then has to battle the armies of King Otmanovic through 7 dances (battles). At the end, Osman defeats the army of the dead and releases Bula from her chains.

***

At some point these rituals seem to have been constructed with a divininatory purpose. The outcomes of the dance battles were not known and they could be used as a divination method to determine what kind of a year the locals were going to have. Whether there would be a lean harvest or whether there would be more sickness or death than usual. And that would allow them to strategize and prepare. But somewhere along the line the outcome of these rituals became fixed, with the red team always winning. And at that point it became a matter of sympathetic magic. They beat back the darkness of winter but there were also key points on the calendar where similar rituals had to be repeated throughout the year. Those mostly coincide with the 4 embertides but because calendar systems have varied widely, when those happen can be a bit different from place to place. Best I have been able to do so far is anchor them to the 4 old fire festivals, whenever a local population may keep those dates.

Most commonly you will find them running from about mid to late December and crossing into mid January. That is prime shapeshifter time, when the people who had been selected to serve for (what I have been calling) Team Death were compelled by spiritual means to go around at night raising hell. Frequently teenage boys and unmarried men but these practices are so dang old at this point that it can vary from place to place. In some areas they serve for 9 years and are released from their spiritual obligation to do this. In other areas they have 9 years to break their cursed state and if they are not able to in that time frame then it is permanent. In other areas it runs in the family and usually starts manifesting at age 9 or at age 18. That number 9 keeps coming up consistently so I have learned to keep an eye out for it in context with the rest.

I don't know the timeline for Morris dancing in Northern Europe so I couldn't tell you when it became a thing for that part of the world. It could have been introduced by the Romans during Roman colonization, as it was introduced to Tunisia. Or it could be indigenous, as it is in many, many parts of Southern Europe and Eastern North Africa. It experienced several resurgences historically as well. There was a revival in 12th century Iberia, and in 16th century Italy. If I focused more energy on researching Morris dancing in Northern Europe, I could probably find more information on it. So far I see evidence that could go either way, as indigenous or introduced in the Roman period. Best I can do right now is say that yes, these dances are all related to each other.

[dandelionapril]

heyyy babydoll! i was just wondering how i could start dressing and doing my makeup in your aesthetic? i’ve always loved that style so much and you’re literally my dream! 💕💕

angellll!!! ☁️💕☁️

hmmm, this is such a good question. lemme see if i can wrap my head around my own style and aesthetic

i feel like my approach to style, to it’s essence, is taking oftentimes vintage silhouettes and upping the kitsch factor and making it girly and absurdly hyper feminine. i’m very drawn to the 60s and 70s. i love the big hair, the lots of liner with stacked lashes look, and babydoll dresses of the 60s. and i love the early 70s bc they took that look and made it slinkier and sexier and sleazier and dirtier. i love the female leads of giallo films and grindhouse films. i also love 90s and 00s fashion. like the 90s does the 60s is quite possibly my ultimate favorite. bc they took vintage silhouettes and made them brighter and more kitsch. like that’s the dream to me. think lady miss kier or the looks from the movie jawbreaker! i believe style and fashion should be fun. and i do treat it like a game of dress up. and i love pop culture and just exaggerating fashion. as i said, i looove over the top absurdly hyper feminine looks!

so what i look for when shopping? um does it come in pink? lol! but i do love pastels and candy colored garments. i like ruffles and frilly details. things that lean super girlish. and i pay attention to silhouette. bc i like to play around in different decades and i think that’s important. i’ll occasionally look for something a little moodier and darker bc sometimes i feel a little moodier and darker. but i’m a libra rising through and through and if i’m not a valley of the dolls wannabe? i wanna look like your best friend’s cool older fashion forward sister. ya know?

as a fat girl. i’ve had to rely heavily on makeup, hair, and accessories. so i love wearing ribbons bc they’re easy and sweet and make quite a statement. i love hair barrettes! like anything rhinestoned! fun shapes like hearts and butterflies! so cute! i also like to lean into my own culture. as a latina, i love a gold nameplate necklace and wearing hoops. as for makeup, i love sparkly and pastel eyeshadow and lashes and blush and gloss! i don’t feel quite me without it! and i love using vintage makeup looks as inspiration and modernizing them in a kitschy way. and for hair, im like full 60s/70s or like bridget marquardt from the girls next door. there is no in between lol. just kidding there is. i do branch out into other decades. but that is my wheel house tbh.

umm where do i shop? i like to thrift (head to your lingerie sleepwear section right NOW bc that’s where the cutest things hide i swear), i know they kinda suck but dollskill has really been a place that i’ve found some of my most favorite pieces. i still do forever 21 and torrid (for pants and shoes), unique vintage is great, shopcider, the wild fable line from target. i’ve lucked out with some things at fashion nova. like i said not the most ideal places to support, but some of the few options i’ve had as a fat person. but u can shop anywhere. just remember vintage silhouettes, flirty colors, girly details, and kitsch! that’s me lol

this is all over the place. i may make a youtube video in the future discussing more in depth about my style inspirations and how i shop and stuff bc this is a lot to unpack. but i hope this can serve as some type of guide into not only my own style but how you can go about curating your own. i genuinely just borrow from things i like and find cute and then try to make it my own. how can this fit into my current style? i don’t do too many basics anymore. like i think that’s the smart thing to do. like build a closet full of versatile garments. but it’s not true to me. i like statement pieces. i like being over the top. i’m there’s no such thing as being overdressed in my world lol.

good luck angel, i hope this all made sense! and if u have any more questions or want me to elaborate more, just lemme know! ☁️💕🍒🎀⛓☁️

[cyborg-squid]

I do like Fire Emblem Engage, but I just keep finding myself increasingly frustrated with it, especially after the successes garnered by Three Houses. TH wasn’t a perfect story, there are many aspects of it that could have used either more refinement or more time in the oven (Three Hopes also filled in some (but not all) of the worldbuilding shortcomings of Houses), but me and so many others loved it regardless, and you could very clearly see where it built upon the positives of previous Fire Emblem games, especially in the use of ‘routes’ first introduced in FE Fates (now without having to buy multiple versions), as well as continuing the support conversation focus from Awakening.

Engage, while having a dozen different minor gameplay improvements that are genuinely cool and I would love to see moving forward, really fails to build on the larger successes of the previous games, aside from maybe their popularity. I understand that not every FE game needs to or should have branching paths, and that the devs are right in saying that players may feel overwhelmed by them, but if your game is going to have only one path....... make it a good one. And Engage fails to do that. I literally groaned when I saw that the 4 kingdoms in the game were just Peaceful Flowerland, Mountainous Warland, Desert Freedomland, and Cold Evilland, with nary a drop of complexity or really anything truly interesting about them. The same goes for the plot being yet another Good Dragon vs Evil Dragon power struggle. At least other modern FEs tended to wait until the third act or so to ramp up the Morality Dragons. i played Tactics Ogre Reborn recently so maybe it’s just spoiled me as to a good story with politics and intrigue

The cast of playable characters (I specify them for reasons I’ll get to later) is where the game and it’s writing does have a chance to come out of it’s shell. I’d previously complained about the lack moral variance in the cast, I do rescind my complaints about that somewhat, because I’m certainly seeing some interesting stuff with Yunaka and Zelkov, as well as the Elusian princesses, even if it’s not as much as I’d like. I’ve still got a lot of supports to dive in to, and while a fair portion of the cast is Just Some Guy, I can say at least half of the playables are Pretty Damn Good.

The Emblems, though, that’s where the cast falls miserably short. As a gameplay mechanic, Emblems and Engages are very interesting and fun to play around with, but really flounder in the narrative department. I don’t know enough about the older Fire Emblem characters/protagonists to fully comment, but it does feel like everyone has had their edges filed down, reduced to mostly “I fight for my friends!!!”. Which I guess makes sense, that is what they did in their own games, but they all just feel so... same, and completely detached from the world they’re summoned in to. Their presence feels like... an early chapter of a gacha game? You know, where they throw out a bunch of fan favorites and recognizable faces in order to establish a connection to previous franchise entries, but they end up having little to no stake in what the plot actually is. These Emblems, these part Fire Emblem protagonists, have already had their stories told, and told well, in their own games, and their addition in Engage, despite the interesting gameplay mechanics, smacks of vapid fanservice.

Design wise, I actually don’t mind the art style or the character designs, it was surprising seeing Alears design at the first reveal, but it grew on me, and I like most of Mika Pizako’s stuff. Defintely a change of pace from previous Fire Emblem but I don’t hate it. What does give me some cause for concern is... well, it’s kind of hard to explain, and maybe I’m just noticing something where there isn’t anything. But does the game look Genshin-y to you? Like, in how the characters are presented in the 3d space? Like I said, I’m largely fine with the designs and the art style, but just something about how everything is 3d rendered now, and how there aren’t any sprites or the like now, feels very off to me, and I really hope the franchise doesn’t continue too far in that direction.

There are also only. 2 Paralogues which introduce new characters, and literally every other one just unlocks the bond cap for the Emblems.

Just... a lot of the game, in some ways, smacks of what’s been happening lately with the Pokemon franchise, Engage’s writing ultimately feels rushed and fails to build on the successes of the previous games, instead feeling like it was pushed out to keep the franchise dollars flowing in.

[hash-mashh]

i think a lot of people mistake what they want for other things. do you really wish you could go back in time(if you legitimately do, that’s awfully concerning), or do you just want to experience life in the modern day but wish you could use all the old junk and communicate with others in an older styled way?

if you’re more about the limited technology/vintage stuff, you can still easily live like that and still keep in touch with all the modern such and such

flip phones are on the rise i think, but you can still use the PHONE feature on your PHONE if you want to keep in touch with others but don’t want social media. you could also check your email/go online still if you need it for work/school

you can totally cop good vintage clothes, music and portable CD players and radios from the thrift if you look hard enough and know how to look

THRIFT STORE FOR CHEAP VINTAGE HOUSE ITEMS. i’m seeing full sets of retro dishware all the time

disposable film cameras are at your nearby supercenter and some of those stores even sell reusable film ones now. i know those can get pricy though. you can get a cheap digital camera and have basically limitless fun! just need to change out storage cards sometimes

get a watch for cheap. now you don’t need to look at your phone if you want to know the time!

read more(borrow from your library!!), be more involved in your local community and go to local events, learn how to hand make/repair things, experience the outdoors(even if you’re waiting outside, look up at some trees or buildings or sumthin or others around you. people have been doing that for forever), create your own style and personality that isn’t based on whatever is being churned out by influencers(yeah, that includes vintage influencers too) BE YOUR OWN PERSON AND CHOOSE HOW YOU WANT TO VIEW AND SPEND YOUR LIFE!!!

know your history, always understand the contexts behind it, and even if life isn’t super hot currently, never take for granted the rights we have now that minorities in previous eras dreamed of having and fought for

[jjaybrown4-blog]

The 12 Olympian Greek Gods Challenge by Allie Mcsims

Introduction:

Do you find Greek Mythology interesting? I know I do! So…Hello and welcome to the 12 Olympian Greek Gods Legacy Challenge! First off, I would like to give credit to CheetahAlyssa for creating the original Greek God Legacy Challenge. I have taken her rules and changed them a bit to suit my own play style. You can find her set of rules here.  

This is my first attempt at making a challenge so things may change as I play it. I am currently doing this challenge on my YouTube channel if you would like to follow along with me. 

This is a 12 Generation Legacy Challenge. I have added in the option to do a 13th & 14th generation as well. I love playing generational/legacy challenges for the Sims 4. I love Greek mythology, so I wanted to see if there was a challenge out there that explored Greek myth. I stumbled across CheetahAlyssa’s Greek Gods Challenge. I love the idea of this but because her challenge is not a generational family per say (you play each god separately), I wanted to try and create my own legacy style challenge using her rules as a basis. I also wanted to try and do something with the 12 Olympic Gods because I am just so fascinated with them! So here is what I have come up with.

Things to know for this challenge:

The 12 Olympian Greek Gods according to the Greek pantheon, consisted of Zeus and his 5 siblings which were: Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Demeter, & Hestia. Six of Zeus’s children also became Olympic Greek Gods: Athena, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite & Hermes. 

I have also included Hades & Hestia as optional generations to play. Hades was originally in Olympus but went down to the Underworld where he reigned. I thought he had an interesting story so I have included him as an option. In some stories Hestia is listed as one of the 12 olympians and in others she is not, but instead of her is Dionysus. I have also included her as an option to play.

Because the 12 Olympian Greek gods are a bit complicated as far as relations go (I didn’t want to make this challenge be all about their incestious relations). So in this challenge, you will be playing as the embodiment of each god instead of  the actual god. Each generation has specific traits, aspirations, and careers that you will need to complete. There are different objectives to complete for each generation in order to progress to the next generation. This challenge can either be set in modern times or Ancient Greek times. You may use mods or CC as long as it doesn’t give you an unfair advantage. 

Getting Started:

Start by creating your founder in Create-A-Sim (CAS). There you must start out creating the very embodiment of Artemis. Your founder can be a young adult or adult. You can name him/her whatever you want. Since you are playing as an embodiment of each god, you do not have to name them the God’s name. You can make them look like whatever you want, though it is more fun to try and make them resemble the god that they are portraying. There are a ton of pictures of the Greek Gods on the internet if you want to draw from that. But, it is believed that each  god had a certain look to them. For instance, Zeus is usually portrayed as being an older strong male with white hair and a beard. For added fun you can give each generation a specific color and symbols. I have included symbols, under each generation in their backstory. These symbols were thought to represent what each Greek God stood for. For example, Zeus was the god of thunder so his symbol is the thunderbolt. I have also included a color association that is optional. Feel free to change to whatever colors you like.

Once you have created your sim, move them into an empty lot. To make the challenge more difficult, start on a 50x50 lot or larger. Depending on how difficult you want to make it, you must cheat your money down to §1800 or §0. You may start in any season and in any world you like. Build them a house as you get the funds to do so. No money cheats are allowed. You may use custom content to achieve a greek feel. You may use mods as long as it doesn’t give you an unfair playing advantage. For fun, you can try and make their home based on what their colors & symbols are. Make sure that your gameplay is set to normal.

I will put a disclaimer here that this is a work of fiction. It is based on my own knowledge or what I have researched from the internet or seen in a documentary/tv show. Please do not take this challenge as fact! This challenge is meant to be fun and interesting.  Feel free to change this challenge to suit your needs or gameplay! But most importantly, have fun!

 Generation 1: Artemis

As a child your mother told you stories of the goddess Artemis. She told you how Artemis was the protector of all young women & girls. And so, you felt a special bond with this goddess. So now, you strive to be like her. You are the goddess of the hunt, wilderness & wild animals. With your virtues intact you became the protector of all young women & girls. You will destroy any who dare cause them any wrong.  Your emblems are: the bow & arrow, the moon, and a hunting dog.

Colors: Silver

Traits: Dog lover, good, & loves outdoors

Aspiration: Friend of the Animals

Career: None

OBJECTIVES:

1. Have a dog with the hunter trait, and make your dog go out to hunt.

2. Cannot have a job. Make money by fishing, scavenging, or selling artworks.

3. Complete the aspiration.

4. Get max level of pet training & Fishing

5. Can never woohoo or try for a baby. Must adopt at least one child and have a close relationship with that child.

Generation 2: Athena

When you were young, your mother told you stories of the gods and goddesses. She talked about how Artemis and Athena were close companions but yet very different. Even though you were adopted, you felt a special bond/closeness with your mother. You saw your mother have the qualities of Artemis. You liked this. You decided that you wanted to be like her but different. So you decided to strive and be like the goddess Athena. You are the goddess of war! You are compassionate and generous. You are the protector of all civilized life! You are the protector of Athens. Your emblems are: owl, olive trees, snakes, aegis, armor, & spears.

 Colors: red\grey

Traits: Genius, Ambitious, & Active

Aspiration: Renaissance Sim

Career: Painter, Politics, Law Enforcement

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete the aspiration.

2. Get to level 3 of the painter career, quit and then get to level 3 of politics and then quit.

3. Reach level 10 in law enforcement (your final job)

4. Reach level 10 in fitness, charisma, & painting.

5. Cannot marry & never have children.

 6. Adopt one child.

Generation 3: Zeus

Colors: blue/yellow

Traits: Hot Headed, Romantic, Active

Aspiration: Leader of the Pack

Career: Astronaut (Space Ranger Branch)

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete the aspiration

2. Get to max level of the charisma, logic & fitness skills

3. Get to max level of career

4. Get married to someone and have at least 2 kids with them (one of these will be the heir)

5. Have 5 other kids with 5 different women (these children do not need to live with you)

6. Have a weather machine and use it at least once a day

Generation 4: Hera

Colors: white\rose

Traits: Jealous, Family-oriented, Proper

Aspiration: Mansion Baron

Career: Politician (Politician Branch)

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete the aspiration

2. Reach level 10 of the Politician career

3. Get to max level in logic, mischief, & charisma skills

4. Get married to someone who is non-committal, handsome, and a cheater

5. You catch your lover cheating on you and so you bind a voodoo doll to every mistress they have

You are god of the sea, earthquakes, storms & horses! You are an ill-tempered, greedy, vengeful moody god. Your emblems include: Trident, dolphin, horse, bull and fish. After your brother saved you from your father’s imprisonment, you took your place as god of the sea. Even though you should be grateful for your rescue, you feel anger and hatred for your brother instead. You should have been king of the gods, not him! None the less you called the sea your home and settled there with your 3 children and wife.

Colors: bluish-green like aqua or turquoise

Traits: Hot headed, Child of the Ocean, Child of the Islands

Aspiration: Beach Life

Career: Conservationist (either branch)

OBJECTIVES:

1. Must move to Sulani when Poseidon becomes a teenager, or when he’s younger if you want.

2. You must become a mermaid (buy Mermadic Kelp from rewards menu)

3. Complete the aspiration

4. Reach level 10 of the Conservationist career

5. Try your best (as an individual) to keep the island clean, and help improve life in Sulani

6. Date at least 3 other people before settling down, and have at least 3 children

Generation 6: Demeter

You are the goddess of the harvest!, fertility, agriculture and the seasons. You preside over grains & the fertility of the earth. Your Symbols are: the poppy, wheat, torch, cornucopia, & pig.

Colors: Green\Brown

Traits: Vegetarian, Loves Outdoors, good

Aspiration: Freelance Botanist

Career: Gardener (Botanist Branch)

OBJECTIVES:

1. As a child, be in the Scouts

2. Complete the aspiration

3. Get to level 10 of gardener\botanist branch

4. You never marry, but have at least one child

5. Get to max level in gardening

 Not only are you the god of sun & light but of many other things including: music, poetry, healing & plagues, archery & agriculture. Your emblems are: Lyre, bow & arrow, laurel wreath, raven & python.

 Colors: Gold

Traits: Music Lover, Cheerful, & Creative

Aspiration: Friend of the World

Career: Doctor

OBJECTIVES:

1. Reach level 10 of the Doctor career

2. Reach level 10 of either the guitar or piano skill & the creative skill.

3. Have at least one child.

 Generation 8: Ares

You are the very embodiment of violence, for you are the god of war! While you are the most unpopular god in all of Olympus, you are very smart and strategic. You were also the lover of Aphrodite. Your emblems are: spear, helmet, dog, chariot, boar, vulture, & flaming torch.

 Color: red

Traits: Mean, Evil & Active

Aspiration: Public Enemy

Career: Military (either branch)

OBJECTIVES:

1. Reach level 10 of the military career.

2. Reach level 10 of the fitness & mischief skills.

3. Can never get married.

4. Get in fights/brawls often, make at least 6 enemies.

5. Have at least one child

 You are the goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. While you sometimes are jealous or unfaithful, you have the power to make men fall in love with you. Your emblems include: dove, rose, swan, dolphin, shell, myrtle, mirror, magic girdle.

 Traits: Romantic, Outgoing, Noncommittal

Aspiration: Serial Romantic

Career: Actress

Color: pink & white

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete your aspiration

2. Get to max level of the charisma & flower arranging skill

3. Get to max level of the career

4. Can’t get married until the aspiration is completed, you’ve had at least 5 children, & have hooked up at least 3 sim couples (*click on sim* -->friendly-->other sims--> hook up with...)

Generation 10: Hephaestus

 Color: Black/grey

Traits: Creative, maker, & loner

Aspiration: Master Maker

Career: Freelance (crafter) or Retail store owner (selling what you make)

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete Aspiration

2. Get Handiness, Fabrication & Creativity to level 10.

3. Have an unhappy marriage & have at least 1 child

You are the god of trade! You became known as the “leader of souls” because you were the only god that could travel between the living and the dead. You were also known as a trickster and are the most mischievous of gods. Your emblems are: tortoise, lyre, & rooster.

 Color: white\gold

Traits: Active, Kleptomaniac, & Creative

Aspiration: Chief of Mischief

Career: Athlete

 OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete Aspiration & Career.

2.Get charisma, mischief, & writing to level 10.

3. Must buy & sell when the flea market is in town.

4. Never marry, but either adopt or have 1 child.

You are the god of wine, vegetation, pleasure, festivity, madness and wild frenzy. Some say you were born twice! Once in your mothers womb & then rescued by your father and then born from his thigh. You are all about having fun! You are often misunderstood. Your emblems are: ivy, chalice, masks, goat, grapevine, & bull. 

 Color: purple/green

Traits: Outgoing, Cheerful, & Good 

Aspiration: Master Mixologist & Party Animal

Career: Culinary (Mixologist) 

OBJECTIVES:

1.Complete the both aspirations

2. Reach lvl 10 of mixologist career

3.Get the charisma & dancing skills to lvl 10

4. You are constantly moving around. Live your young adult life in one place. Then move once you are an adult. Then move again once you are an elder.

5. Get married (always remaining faithful) and have at least 5 kids. 

You are the god of the underworld. You are stern & unyielding. Some refer to you as the god of wealth. Your emblems are: Cerberus, drinking horn, scepter, cypress, key. 

Color: black

Traits: Evil, materialistic, & Self-assured 

Aspiration: Public Enemy

Career: Paranormal Investigator

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete the aspiration & career

2. Be friends with at least 3 ghosts.

3. Pretend to be really nice to someone and eventually propose, but after marriage start being very mean to them. That sim will be forced to stay in the marriage for as long as you want. 

4. Have at least 1 child.

You are the goddess of the hearth, home, architecture, domesticity, family & state. You oversee all meals and cooking. You have sworn to remain a maiden forever, thus making you one of the three virgin goddesses. You never married or had children. Your emblem is the hearth and it’s fire.  

Colors: reddish orange

Traits: Family oriented, foodie, & Good

Aspiration: Master Chef

Career: Food Critic

OBJECTIVES:

1. Complete the aspiration & career

2. Get cooking, baking, & gourmet cooking to level 10  

3. Have at least 1 fireplace that is always on, never put it out. 

Never marry

4. You can either adopt 1 child or end your legacy here.

[rickscarpentry]

Deck Repair Gretna LA: Bringing Life Back to Your Outdoor Space

A well-kept deck can be a great place to have outdoor parties, read a book or eat dinner under the stars. However, decks tend to deteriorate over time as they are exposed to extreme weather conditions, foot traffic and simply growing older. This is what we specialize on at Deck Repair Gretna LA services:

Assessment and Inspection: Members of our team will carry out an extensive examination on all parts of your deck in order to detect any problems like boards that are not fastened securely, splitting timbers and damages in its framework. 

Repair & Replacement: We shall repair or replace those parts which have been destroyed completely making sure that your deck remains firm and dependable. 

Maintenance Tips: We shall give you tips regarding how to care for you deck after its repair so as to help it last longer.

Carpentry Door Installation New Orleans LA: Welcoming You Home in Style

A carpenter is able to install a door whether you need them to install one for security or for beauty and that too with Carpentry Door Installation New Orleans LA services. More than just an entryway, your front door is also the first impression that guests will get when coming over to your house.

Wide Range of Options: If only wooden doors are what you like, you're at the right place. But if you prefer steel designs, you have found the perfect home. We offer a large variety of doors that will blend with the design of your house. 

Precise Installation: At our disposal are experienced carpenters who ensure that each individual door installed meets the dictates of precision thus guaranteeing proper fit and operational fluency. 

Increased Safety: Your residence might additionally benefit from the installation of modern sensors that will certainly improve safety levels.

Deck Repair New Orleans LA: Keeping Your Deck in Prime Condition

Outdoor structures tend to be more damaged by the weather in New Orleans as the humidity can be quite harsh, not just rain but even occasional storms can also harm it. Our Deck Repair New Orleans LA are aimed at everything concerning your deck.

Comprehensive Repairs: From minor fixes like nails and screws replacement to major structural repairs, we take care of everything. 

Custom Solutions: Circling in on the deck’s very particular need, we provide specially designed ones. 

Preventative Care: Besides, we offer the necessary advice to ensure that the deck lasts long by preventing it from getting future damages.

Do not worry about your deck when it is built by us because we have the skills to make sure it remains safe enough even after many years have passed.

Deck Installation Services: Building the Deck of Your Dreams

Are you thinking of setting up a novel deck? We can bring your dream into reality by putting up this deck. Rick’s Carpentry LLC, we have enough capacities for installation of either a plain platform deck or a complex multi-leveled one.

Design Consultation: We will work in tandem with you to create a deck that suits your need and blends well with your home. 

Quality Materials: Our choice of materials is a guarantee for durability and long life. 

Expert Craftsmanship: The deck designed by our team IS both functional and attractive.

Get in Touch

Contact Rick’s Carpentry LLC today to enhance your homes exterior with Deck Repair, Door Installation, and Patio Cover Needs. Create the perfect outdoor space for your family to enjoy.

[mynextekservice]

Use Expert Remodeling Services to Improve Your Living Area

Our home is no more just a place to live; today it is an extension of our life style and our identity. People and their requirements are not stagnant, and therefore, the spaces they live in should not remain static either. Whether the client’s goal is a contemporary, minimalist kitchen or opulent bathroom, or full-scale renovation of their home, professional remodeling service can make it happen.

Why Choose Professional Remodeling Services?

When one plans on renovating one’s home, it isn’t just about changing the looks, it’s about working to make it more useful, efficient, and comfortable.

1. Expertise and Experience:

- Professional remodelers came with experience and knowledge in this type of business. They appreciate the finer details of how your home is built and managed, making sure your remodel is seamless and professional.

2. Creative Solutions:

- From layout design, future-proofing, or choosing appropriate finishes, professional remodelers give practical recommendations that consider your lifestyle and personal taste.

3. Quality Craftsmanship:

- Regarding any carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, professional remodelers guarantee a high level of performance. Companies employ reliable sources of supply and sub contracting to produce structures that are strong and beautiful.

4. Time and Cost Efficiency:

- Despite the opportunities such do-it-yourself undertakings present, they lead to various difficulties and take longer than planned. Professional remodeling contractors break the process down and manage it efficiently, which may be cheaper in the long run as a result of the efficiency.

Services Offered

1. Kitchen Remodeling:

   - Upgrade the look of your house with a kitchen makeover to work with the latest trends while adding luxury. The family can get the most out of this important area of the house by selecting professional remodelers and choosing between traditional or modern designs of custom cabinets, countertops, appliances, and ways of storing food and cooking equipment.

2. Bathroom Remodeling:

   - Make your bath area look like a spa by starting a bathroom remodel project. Specialist can update lighting, enlarge shower area and make fully equipped with features that make everyday life more comfortable such as heated floor and smart mirrors.

3. Whole House Remodeling:

   - If a homeowner is building an addition onto a historical home or they just need to refashion an older home, it’s possible to call on proficient remodelers and the specialists shall be able to manage a complete house overhaul. This entails modifications on the exterior and interior of buildings, as well as, design elements’ transition to new as well as old constructions.

Our Approach to Remodeling

At Mynextekservice we are proud to present to offer unmatched remodeling solutions to fulfill your requirements that will suit your lifestyle. Our process is designed to ensure a smooth and satisfying experience from start to finish:Our process is designed to ensure a smooth and satisfying experience from start to finish:

1. Initial Consultation:

   - In this phase, we have to identify the objectives of the task, your expectations, and your financial capabilities. To meet your specific needs and vision, our team works closely with you to provide a specific detailed plan on how the project will be undertaken.

2. Design Phase:

   - The experienced designers create designs with the meaning and concepts given by the clients and draft the designs along with 3-D images. We work with you in considering overall plans and choices of materials and intricate constructions to enhance the concept picture.

3. Construction and Installation:

   - The construction phase is carried out with precision with focuses being done by our professional craftsmen. This means we provide overall project coordination along with monitoring the timing and quality of each stage.

4. Completion and Satisfaction:

   - Finally after project completion, we do a walk through exercise to check every aspect to make sure it meets the set standards. Your satisfaction is ensured by workmanship guarantees because all our work is always done to perfection.

 Transform Your Home Today

Even if you planning to make minor changes to your home or wish to transform your living space completely, professional remodeling service offer both experience and tools to complete successful projects. At [Your Company Name] Real Estate Team helping you make your living space becoming one you will be proud to come home to daily. To plan the transformation of your home book a consultation with us now and we will tell you how will enhance your home through our exceptional remodeling solutions.

[jesncin]

addition by user mae (@/atfruitbat) from Cohost:

Yeah. This reminded me (again) of the talk by Achimostawinan Games on Growing Indigenous Worlds in Games...

... in last month's Game Devs of Color Expo. The setting of their game, "Hill Agency: Purity Decay", is in the future, in one of the last cities remaining in North America that has been reapproriated by Indigenous people. They said they had some criticisms about the city setting: people wanted to know why they were using present day-style buildings, rather than a longhouse. Because a longhouse would fit the idea that some people have, that the aesthetics are primarily what codes it as Indigenous. But as the devs pointed out, Indigenous people would be reusing all the perfectly sound buildings that were still standing there!

"What's the point of tearing down anything if these are perfectly good, beautiful houses? [...]."

As quoted in this writeup.

And, this fits the idea of a flattened view of cultural representation:

"[Incidentally] when an Indigenous person does not make something, you'll know because there's an excess of Indigenous signifiers."

Esquivel noted the fictional Akomish Longhouse from Insomniac Games' 2014 title Infamous Second Son. The closest proximity to that is the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center in Seattle. However, they noted the location in-game looks more similar to a Las Vegas attraction instead of the non-descript modern-day building that belongs to the Duwamish. Bryne explained this is similar to making a racist Wild West show.

As Indigenous creators, Byrne said there is a dichotomy for the creative work they would like to do and what is more palatable to potential supporters for their game projects.

They explain, "You don't have a market that expects [non-stereotypical work], and we've had this conversation come up with funders; there is a push on Indigenous creatives to go that direction [of stereotypical work]."

Signifiers or aesthetics alone tend to be what outsiders conflate with culture. But usually people inside the culture can tell when something is superficially applied, when it approaches stereotyping. Or when it's there to sell something to people that is about you, but not made for you. All the signifiers might be there, but what are they grounded in? What do they actually mean?

The point above:

"is this temple actually a place of worship or is it just a set piece for a goddang Indiana jones booby trap action fight sequence"

is spot on, and it also mirrors this point in a piece by Daniel José Older that I often go back to, on writing the Other and the Self:

"Ritual ≠ spectacle.

I recently edited Long Hidden, an anthology of speculative fiction from the margins of history. My co-editor Rose Fox and I received a number of submissions that had no speculative element at all but featured non-Christian ceremonies. Other people's cultures/beliefs are not fantasy. It's one thing if a demigod or spirit is out walking around, interacting with the world, and even that walks a complex line, but to have people simply celebrating their beliefs be a "fantastical" element is racist cultural imperialism.

Further things other people's cultures are not: a circus act, a freak show, a music video prop, a kitschy household accoutrement, a Halloween costume, a stand-in for having your own sense of self.

[...]

In her breathtaking essay "Is Paris Burning?" bell hooks writes: "Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning … beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display. … those elements of a given ritual that are empowering and subversive may not be readily visible to an outsider looking in. Hence it is easy for white observers to depict black rituals as spectacle." Later, hooks discusses how the documentary Paris Is Burning reinforces this dehumanizing depiction of spectacle over ritual when one of the people depicted in the film is murdered: "Having served the purpose of spectacle, the film abandons him/her … There are no scenes of grief. To put it crassly, her dying is upstaged by spectacle. Death is not entertaining."

It will feel pretty obvious to people inside a culture when their culture is reduced to set dressing, or used mainly as sensationalist fodder for people outside the culture. It will feel a certain way when the main knowledge that is being presented of your culture is as if it's been flattened out into aesthetics alone.

When there's a scarcity of representation overall, then there is this ambivalent feeling of, like, yeah, I know this is stereotyping, but maybe it's the closest I can get to seeing something like myself or my life, in mainstream media. But I could wish for a better world, where that kind of media is easier to leave behind because there are also other resonant pieces of media made by own voices, or by thoughtful people who don't just want to say something facile about you, but who want to speak to you, to your sense of the world too.

Thinking about Disney and how we talk about Cultural Representation

(concept art by Scott Watanabe)

Old essay originally written on Cohost in November 2023. With additions.

With all the promo stuff about Disney's upcoming animated film Wish, I can't help but think about Raya and the Last Dragon again. I spent a year intensively researching things about that movie and the discourse surrounding it for a series of videos on Xiran Jay Zhao's channel, and oh boy did that reveal a lot about the current way we talk about cultural representation in casual media criticism.

Lately we've grown a habit of looking at signifiers to culture, things like a cultural dish, a nod to a martial arts style, a piece of clothing, maybe a hairstyle, a weapon and so on, and then projecting a bunch of intentions onto the work regardless of authorial intent. I witnessed this a bunch of times in discussions surrounding Raya and the Last Dragon.

You basically get a bunch of 4d chess-style justifications for the lazy implementation of culture in Raya.

random examples cuz there's too many to name:

The movie will do something like make the leaders of the villain nation women, and people immediately assumed it was some kind of bespoke reference to Minangkabau matriarchical society.

the art book of Raya specifically stated that they purposely misplaced things as a stylistic fantasy choice "we could take something that is known and place it in an unexpected location, like coral in the desert and cacti in the snow". But when people saw a water buffalo placed in the desert they assumed it was some super clever environmental story decision.

The movie will tell you it includes things like Borobudur, Angkor wat, Keris, and most people will take their word for it without hesitation. Never mind that Southeast Asians could barely recognize these nods to our culture through how amalgamated the designs are.

(early concept art by Scott Watanabe)

Moving forward, I think we need to talk less about "what" parts of a culture are being represented in these movies, and more about HOW they're being included, we need to ask:

What is this piece of media's relationship with the cultures it represents?

Because Raya and the Last Dragon is not a cultural movie, it's a monolith film pitched and written by white people and a Mexican director with 2 SEA writers added later in production to avoid backlash. Culture serves the purpose of aesthetic set dressing in the film, as opposed to something that informs its themes and characters.

it wasn't even initially pitched as a Southeast Asian movie. The white writers who pitched it were going for a vague East Asian sci fi fantasy story under the working title "Dragon Empire". Southeast Asian culture was an aesthetic change added much later.

This is what happens when a corporation tries to put representational value on a shallow aesthetic. Because of the way Disney constantly marketed Raya as this big authentic cultural film, it primes its audience to read cultural intention in the most benign details. And when we get lost in the details, we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Contextualizing Cultural media criticism

(visual development art by April Liu)

We need to start demanding more context in our analysis. The next time we see a reference to culture in media we consume, take a step back and ask what purpose it serves in the narrative. And most importantly!! What Is Its Relationship With The Culture It Represents? We shouldn't just accept things at face value.

start asking yourself,

through what lens is this cultural dish and its spicy flavors being presented to us? Are the customs surrounding the food being respected?

If martial arts or dance is represented, how is it translated in the adaptation? Are you getting generic hollywood-fu or are you seeing specific movements with purpose and motivation? Are the philosophies or spiritual contexts of these traditions present in the text?

Are the clothing, hairstyles, and presentation of the characters being de-yassified through a colonial filter? Is the non-conformity of the cultures' different framework for gender presentation being adjusted to fit a more recognizable binary?

If language is present, what role does it serve? Is it presented as other through being exclusively used by villainous beings? Is it being made a monolith as one "non-English" language?

is this temple actually a place of worship or is it just a set piece for a goddang Indiana jones booby trap action fight sequence

This way, instead of unquestionably defending a piece of media because a character wore a traditional outfit one time, or because some characters took their shoes off at a temple, or because there were Arnis sticks in that one fight scene, we can approach the text with a more nuanced and holistic understanding of how culture informs narrative.

To quote Haunani K. Trask (author of From A Native Daughter):

“Cultural people have to become political… Our culture can’t just be ornamental and recreational. That’s what Waikiki is. Our culture has to be the core of our resistance. The core of our anger. The core of our mana. That’s what culture is for.”

[f0xgl0v3]

Silly Billy on the internet talks about how much they hate minimalism for 5 minutes; a post.

Know what? I was going to go and make the post about Camp Jupiter’s views on powers (which- my synopsis is; they don’t like them, or value them much and they are somewhat like ostracized as something not to be relied on- ties in with a bunch of stuff I’ll explain but yeah-)

But then I got a giant spike to shout to the rooftops about how much I hate minimalism.

Sure minimalism is whatever and whatever. But you know what it is? The rich man’s aesthetic, it’s ruined so much of interesting things simply for the measure of trying to look more expensive.

There was a rant I once went on about how I hate modern architecture. But this adds on to my hate of the Minimalism umbrella. It takes away any life that has been put into homes and sucks it dry. Like- look at some of these photos,

I’ll be honest I pulled these off of google, do I have background knowledge. No? Do I have the innate urge to sob and give up on humanity when I see them. Yes. The removal of these beautiful and graceful architectural styles is (also the removal of a lot of history and important parts of history because architecture plays a big role on that and blah, blah, blah) icky. I don’t like seeing this ultra-modern architecture, it makes me feel nervous when I see Seattle and these beautiful historic buildings and worry that someone with big pockets and a ego will go turn it into giant glass tower because of whatever stupid reason.

Please, minimalism makes me feel gross and I refuse to like it. Am I too upset at the moment to form a solid argument, yes. Do I want to come onto my tumblr where everyone probably agrees with me and argue to the brick wall about how much I hate minimalism, no? But am I feeling irrationally angry at any minimalistic, modern aesthetics, modern high art (you know the type of modern high art I mean, I’ll be honest I don’t like abstract pieces-)

I am a biased source because I personally am 6-feet-under in the opposite direction for maximalism, (it’s not hoarding, please look at maximalism beside minimalism and tell me what looks better. I know that’s personal opinion but this is my i am very upset about something that isn’t just a fictional book series moment) along with just older styles. I don’t like modern architecture.

Anyway on that note I love what they did for the big house in PJO tv show and it is amazing and every set makes me so happy because it directly makes me giggle and kick my feet and like hainensnfksjdbfjsjsnfjs. I love it and I want more people to build in the same vein as them because I garuntee they look 10x as better than the awful black and white box mansions.

Also I have a family friend who works in architecture and like making houses and I cry everytime they bring me to their next work site and it’s this beautiful building that is amazing. I remember being brought to an old run down 1910s-1940s era farmhouse and being really excited only to come back maybe a year later and finding a sickening black and white monochromatic farmhouse nightmare that I genuinely almost sobbed at.

But I love my family friend and the work she and her husband do and that to a degree it’s also client opinion but like- she makes a lot of the choices for these things and the next time I am brought out to their project sight I will be sitting there strongly encouraging to fight against the oppressive hand of minimalism. That was extreme, but I really like architecture, never talk about it- but genuinely one of my favorite things in this world is architecture and interior design

(If anyone cares my current favorite building is the La Sagrada Familia that is being constructed in Barcelona.)

Anyway that was a angry rant because I just got very upset for no reason over current western (I live in america and therefore don’t speak for the rest of the world, but in regards to the U.S.A which is Tartarus trust me) mainstream trends and culture deciding to lean into this minimalism clean era, which has been influenced by a myriad of things (see I can use myriad in a sentence- only know the word because of Heathers: The musical lol-)

But I’ll be posting that Camp Jupiter powers post… at some point when I write it. I hate minimalism and I pinky promise that I have more interests outside of Percy Jackson.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (Roberts, 2021)

I think the comparisons to John Carpenter are a tad generous, and like 90% of modern movies, the lighting is garbage, but I have to hand it to the movie for being as stylistically confident as it is. The widescreen frame is put to consistently good use. There are moments like the oner from inside Donal Logue's car and the shootout lit by muzzle flares that find ways to meld stylistic flourishes to actual tension. (I should note that the latter was technically done earlier by Uwe Boll in Alone in the Dark to less acclaim, and I'd like to correct the record by pointing out it was a good stylistic touch there as well. Literally the only good stylistic touch there. But good nonetheless.) It's pretty obvious this was a COVID production, but I think the smallness and sense of depopulation work in the movie's favour.

All that being said, this has the unfortunate stench of a YouTube fan film stretched out to feature length. As nice as this sometimes looks, there's a ponderousness to the look that suggests it's trying really hard to elevate the trite source material. Aside from a few minutes of the fourth one which I picked up during a Steam sale, I haven't played any of the games, so the significance of a lot of this probably went over my head. But much of the dialogue here is a mix of callbacks and exposition that the mostly bland cast can't do anything to sell, beyond saying it slowly and awkwardly enough so you don't miss it. Probably the worst example is when Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine introduce themselves to each other, followed by Claire Redfield loudly saying "We have to find my brother, Chris Redfield." And there are of references to relics of the '90s like chatrooms and Blockbuster as if characters are reminding each other what decade they're in. The only actors who emerge unscathed are Donal Logue, who gets some semblance of personality by being a gruff asshole, and Neal McDonough, who gets to chew some scenery in the climax.

And while I'm not a fan of the Paul W.S. Anderson movies, those at least move along at a decent pace, while this jerks from one set piece to the next, presumably building them around callbacks without much sense of how to stitch them together. That being said, the things this does well make me think I'd like it more if it came out fifteen years ago or so, at which point it likely would have been shot on film, better lit and had at least some practical effects. This actually feels like the 2021 equivalent of a movie I would have caught on the Scream channel during my high school days and logged on to the Rotten Tomatoes forums to post "Cool flick, especially the car scene and the shootout, 7/10" and posted a fresh tomato emoji or "This" underneath a bunch of other posts saying how much better it was than the Anderson movies. Now, I'm older and wiser, and have warmed up to the bozo nu metal style that was de rigueur in those days, and realize that both this and the Anderson movies are kinda lame, and that the best zombie video game adaptation is actually House of the Dead, where characters stand around and shoot at oncoming zombies light-gun-style, or Resident Evil: Apocalypse, where a character is introduced ass-first and fires wildly into a crowded police station and headshots all the zombies. Yeah, I'm all about quality cinema these days, although if somebody else had posted this back in the day, I'd probably have replied with a rotten tomato emoji.

[abkaprojects]

How to Find a Team of Home Renovation Builders

If you want to improve the look and feel of your home, you can hire a team of qualified and experienced home renovation builders in Sydney. These professionals will transform your old house into an exciting new space that you will love for years to come.

Renovating an older traditional or federation-style home is a great way to modernise it and give it an updated look. These houses have classic features that you can rework with contemporary furniture, carpets, and wallpapers to make them look fresher and more modern.

Getting a quote from home renovation builders is important because it ensures that you are getting the best price for your project. They will be able to provide you with an accurate idea of the work they will need to do, including how long it will take and what materials it will cost.

It is also a good idea to find out about the experience and qualifications of the team you are hiring. Ideally, they should have an NSW builder’s licence and be able to prove that they have two or more years of relevant building experience.

You should ask to see their previous projects if you can. This will help you to see their skill level and if they can finish a job quickly and correctly.

Talking to family and friends who have had a recent renovation is another good way to find out about a team of home renovation builders in Sydney. They can tell you how much they liked the work they had done and who did it for them.

Using online reviews is another way to find out about the quality of a builder’s work. These reviews will be more reliable than word of mouth recommendations because people will be honest with their opinions. They may not recommend someone they don’t like, so you can be sure that these reviews will be unbiased and helpful.

When looking for a team of home renovation builders in Sydney, it is important to look for ones who have a reputation for quality workmanship and customer service. This is the only way to ensure that you get a home renovation that you will be happy with for many years to come.

You can also check out their ratings on different platforms such as Tradesman and Consumer Reports. This can give you an indication of how long they have been in business and their level of customer satisfaction.

Having a home renovation done is a huge investment, so it’s important to choose the right team of experts. Whether you need a bathroom renovation, kitchen renovation or terrace renovation, there are a range of professionals available to help you achieve the home you’ve always dreamed of.