#i forgot how roman numerals work

[justforbooks]

Bill Viola

Video artist who melded the material and the spiritual and applied modern technology to Renaissance subjects

In 1957, on a family holiday, Bill Viola fell in a lake. He was six years old. Sixty years later, Viola, who has died aged 73, recalled the event. “I didn’t hold on to my float when I went into the water, and I went right to the bottom,” he said. “I experienced weightlessness and a profound visual sense that I never forgot. It was like a dream and blue and light, and I thought I was in heaven as it was the most beautiful thing I had seen.” And then … “my uncle pulled me out.”

It seemed an unpromising start to an artistic career. However, in 1977 Viola began a series of five works called The Reflecting Pool. Four years out of university, this was his first multipart artwork, its constituent films occupying their maker for three years. In the title piece, a shirtless man – Viola – emerges from a wood, walks toward a pond, makes as if to jump into it and freezes in mid-air. The pool registers his entry nonetheless, its surface rippling as though disturbed; the flying man fades slowly away; and, after seven long minutes, Viola emerges, dripping, from the water and walks back into the woods. The Reflecting Pool drew on the near-drowning of his six-year-old self. It was also classic Viola, its most notable features – slowness, water, a numinous spirituality – recurring in his work of the next half century.

It was the subaqueous blue glow of the screen of a Sony Portapak video camera, donated to his high school in Flushing, New York, that first attracted Viola to the medium. He was raised in the neighbouring lower-middle-class suburb of Queens. It was not, recalled Viola, a cultured household, but his mother, Wynne (nee Lee) “had some ability and sort of taught me how to draw, so when I was three years old I could do pretty good motorboats”. A year before his near death by drowning, a kindergarten finger-painting of a tornado won public praise from his teacher. It was then, Viola said, that he decided to be an artist.

His father, a Pan Am flight attendant turned service manager, had other ideas. Fearing that an art school education would leave his son unemployable, Viola senior insisted that he study for a liberal arts degree at Syracuse, a respected university in upstate New York. “And in saying that,” Viola would admit, “he saved me.”

As luck would have it, Syracuse, in 1970, was among the first universities to promote experimentation in new media. A fellow student had set up a studio where projects could be made using a video camera. Signing up for it, Viola was instantly converted: “Something in my brain said I’d be doing this all my life,” he remembered. He spent the following summer wiring up the university’s new cable TV system, taking a job as a janitor in its technology centre so that he could spend his nights mastering the newfangled colour video system. In 1972, he made his first artwork, Tape I, a study of his own reflection in a mirror. This, too, would be trademark Viola, bewitched by video’s ability simultaneously to see and be seen, but also by his own image. The I in the work’s title was not a Roman numeral but a personal pronoun.

Tape I and works like it were enough to catch the eye of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, whose pioneering Florence studio, ART/TAPES/22, made videos for Arte Povera artists. When Viola took a job there in 1974, he found himself working alongside such giants as Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis. By 1977, his own reputation in the small but growing world of video art led to his being invited to show his work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, his acceptance encouraged by the offer of free Pan Am flights from his father.

The invitation had come from La Trobe’s director of culture, Kira Perov. The following year, Perov moved to New York to be with Viola, and they married in 1978. They would stay in the house in Long Beach, California, that they moved into three years later, for the rest of their married lives. In 1980-81, the couple spent 18 months in Japan, Viola simultaneously working as the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi laboratories and studying Zen Buddhism.

This melding of the sacred and technologically profane would mark Viola’s work of the next four decades. Viola listed “eastern and western spiritual traditions including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism” as influences on his art, although it was the last of these that was the most apparent. At university, he said, he had “hated” the old masters, and proximity to the greatest of them in Florence had not changed that view. It was only with the death of his mother in 1991 that he began to feel the weight of western art history, and to acknowledge it in his own work.

Having struggled with a creative block since the late 1980s, he found that the grief of his mother’s death freed him. Summoned to her side by his father, Viola filmed first the dying woman and then her body lying in an open coffin. This footage would be used in a 54-minute work called The Passing, and then again the following year in the Nantes Triptych, its three screens concurrently showing a woman giving birth, Viola’s dying mother and, in between them, a man submerged in a tank of water.

The first of Viola and Perov’s two sons had been born in 1988. Nantes Triptych was, or appeared to be, a meditation on birth, death and rebirth through baptism. If the subject was traditional, so too was Viola’s use of the triptych form. His references to the old masters would soon become more direct still. In 1995, Viola was chosen to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. One part of the work, Buried Secrets, that he showed in the American pavilion drew openly on a painting by Jacopo da Pontormo of the visitation of the Virgin Mary to her elderly cousin, Elizabeth.

Not surprisingly in these secular times, Viola’s subject matter was not universally popular. The art world was particularly divided. When his videos were shown among the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London in an exhibition called The Passions in 2003, one outraged critic dubbed Viola “a master of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity”.

The pairing at the Royal Academy in 2019 of his work with drawings by Michelangelo from the Royal Collection drew the barbed comment from the Guardian critic that “Viola’s art is so much of its own time that it is already dated, dead in the water”.

Predictably, he was more popular with the public at large, a survey at a Viola retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris showing that visitors had spent an average of two-and-a-half hours at the exhibition. Churchmen, too, were won over by Viola’s work, particularly those of the Church of England. In 1996, the artist was invited to make a video piece, The Messenger, for Durham Cathedral. In 2014, the first part of a two-part commission called Martyrs and Mary was installed at St Paul’s, the second joining it two years later. The project, thanks to ecclesiastical wrangling, had been a decade in the making. “The church works kind of slow,” remarked Viola, mildly. “But then I also work kind of slow.”

That mildness, and the religiosity of his subjects, may have led critics to underestimate the rigour of his work. Like Viola’s art or not, he was a master of it. His appreciation of the promise – and the threat – of technology was profound. Viola chafed against the primitiveness of early video, seeing each development in the medium as an opportunity to be grasped. The close-up portraits of The Passions series, for example, made use of flatscreen technology almost as it was invented.

By contrast, the binary nature of the modern world bothered him. “The age of computers is a very dangerous one because they work on ‘yes or no’, ‘1 or 0’,” Viola mourned. “There’s no maybe, perhaps or both. And I think this is affecting our consciousness.” The dissemination of video as an art form had not been like the spread of oil painting by the Van Eyck brothers 500 years before, he said, video having appeared everywhere and at once. True to these beliefs, Viola saw no contradiction in treating Renaissance subjects, and a Renaissance belief system, with the latest inventions from Sony. “The two are actually very close,” he said. “I see the digital age as the joining of the material and the spiritual into a yet-to-be-determined whole.”

In 2012, Viola was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. His work after this was increasingly made with the help of Perov, a fact that lent a new poignancy to the themes of memory and loss that often ran through it.

Viola is survived by his wife and their sons, Blake and Andrei, and by his siblings, Andrea and Robert .

🔔 Bill (William John) Viola, video artist, born 25 January 1951; died 12 July 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ranahan]

Amatakka phonology drafts

So I had a fun a conversation about Amatakka phonology with @adragonsfriend and I ended up throwing together a few quick and dirty tables to keep track of whether what I was saying even made any sense. And I thought why not throw them out here in case anyone else finds them interesting.

Before we get any further though, here’s @adragonsfriend’s document which has 100 times more thought put into it.

And for a fun comparison, here are some ideas of how I might approach putting together a phonology & IPA representation for Amatakka. Maybe some of you conlang enthusiasts will enjoy looking at how different end results two people can get from the same source material! As you can see, there are no correct answers in language construction—it’s as much an art as it’s a science.

Look at the Phonology-tab. And please ignore my notes elsewhere, they’re by no means an analysis of anything, just my attempts to figure out how the language is put together.

The big caveat emptor here is that I haven’t made any kind of a systematic study of Amatakka (an original language constructed by @fialleril—not me!). So what I have here are half a dozen different possible consonant and vowel inventories that I threw together based on some hypotheses I made from looking through the dictionary file put together by @booklindworm. The next step would be to make a systematic analysis and try out these different options, see which ones work the best, where they run into problems, and make adjustments or new hypotheses as needed. I make no guarantee of any “rules” here actually being true—they’re hypotheses about what the rules might be.

All of the consonant inventories happen to be very heavy on fricatives. I actually like that a lot, because it calls to mind the secrecy of the language, whispering, and the low-grade susurration of slaves talking with each other where the depur doesn’t hear them.

I made vowel inventories of different sizes to figure out how having more or less than the Roman alphabet’s 5 vowel sounds would work.

Some goals I had in mind when putting this together (which I’d attempt to achieve were I to develop this further):

Naturalistic phonology (i.e. make it make sense from a linguistic perspective)

Preserve the original characteristics and aesthetics of the language

And because most of the people who would likely continue working on it are not dedicated conlangers or linguists, the system should also:

Have as few rules as possible

Have as few irregularities and exceptions as possible

Have as intuitive spellings as possible (no unusual digraphs)

Any respellings should be intuitive alternatives to the spellings that have been published before (e.g. leia > leya or leyya) and shouldn’t be too numerous

Based on @adragonsfriend‘s comments, I started from the assumption that Amatakka is mainly a spoken language and that the spellings (especially of personal names) might be “Basic-ized”. So I did consider it acceptable to respell some words (e.g. Camie > Kami, Rasca > Raska) and insert some strategic vowels in a few words to simplify the phonotactics (in order to achieve both “preserve the original character” and “have as simple rules as possible”).

Edited to add: Forgot to add explicit permission, but if anyone finds anything useful here, feel free to grab it and make it your own.

[mask131]

Max Ernst's "One Week of Kindness"

Which could also be called "A Week of Benevolence" - the original French being "Une semaine de bonté".

This post is a follow-up to a reblog I made, right here. Please go read this reblog first, because this post continues from all the info I placed there. If you don't go check it out first, you'll be slightly or massively confused.

I wanted to expand a bit on this fascinating piece of art, and to do so I'll use the info the Musée d'Orsay shared and put on their website when they organized an exposition of Une semaine de bonté.

An expo that deserves its own mention due to how exceptional it was. It was a 2008-2009 exposition of the original collages of Max Ernst the booklets were reproductions of. It was a grand world-tour that started in the Albertina palace of Vienna and ended in the Musée d'Orsay of Paris, passing by Brühl, Hamburg and Madrid. Why was it such a big deal? Because this was the second exposition of Ernst' work - the only other exposition of Une semaine de bonté's collages was in 1936, in the Museo de Arte Moderno of Madrid, just before the Spanish Civil War. It had been organized by Paul Eluard, who loved Ernst' work, but five of the illustrations couldn't be part of the exposition - due to being deemed too "indecent" or "blasphemous". And since this date, the works had never seen the light of day anymore, being preserved in private collections... It explains why the second exposition was such a big deal.

A few more sources for this collage-work I forgot to talk about: Beyond the general category of covers and illustrations of investigation stories/crime novels/polar tales, we also know that Ernst used illustrations of Sade's novels, the caricatures of Grandville, and the illustrations of Fantomas.

As with typical surrealist work, Une semaine de bonté offers a work of onirism that transcends the limits and categorizations imposed by society, by science, by our very conception of reality, and rather offers nonsensical visions and extraordinary wonders. It was the third "roman-collage" of Ernst, after "La femme 100 têtes" of 1929 and "Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel" (1930). Throughout the illustrations, we find many references to the Bible, to famed legends, to fairy tales, to Greco-Roman mythology, but mixed with Ernst' recurring and favorite themes. More precisely, his strong rejections and dislikes: his rejection of the Church, his hatred of the bourgeoisie, his dislike of the traditional family, his refusal of patriotism...

Because Une semaine de bonté is actually a denunciation work, a great critique, a satirical caricature of the French society of the 1930s. Ernst superposes, subverts and reverses all sorts of stereotypical and cliches depictions, of either the "good society", or of the evil, the crime, the monster. Now, of course, there is no actual "real" or "good" story for this work. It is open to interpretation and everybody has to and must find their own meaning in it - as with all proper surrealist work... But there is still strong themes that form recurring motifs, and a message Ernst wasn't so subtle about.

The satirical, ironical, cynical, biting nature of the work can be read in the very title, which plays on two levels. One, on a Christian level: "Seven capital elements" is, as I said, a parody of the "seven deadly sins/seven capital sins" ; the motif of a work centered around a week alerts that there will be numerous references to the Biblical genesis, but most importantly "One week of kindness" is a reference to "La semaine de bonté", The Week of Kindness, a 1927 association creating for social help. Tied to this subversion of typical Christan morals, ideas and values, is the second level of irony in the title: this collage-novel is called "One week of kindness"... And yet it depicts all sorts of violences and abuses. Its pages are filled with murders, tortures and natural disasters - and Ernst doesn't hesitate to subtly denounce the sensationalism of a society obsessed with depictions and illustrations of the most horrible and criminal sides of humanity.

It also is no wonder that this work was created during the 1930s. The ghosts of the World Wars are haunting this piece. On one side, Ernst was seeing with an anxious and angry eye the rise of violent nationalist movements and of brutal, discriminatory dictatorships - the very ones that would cause World War II. On the other side, Ernst was of this generation that inherited the trauma and memories of World War I, had to live with the broken and disfigured survivors of the "Great War". Ernst himself had served in the German army during the Great War (if you don't know, while Ernst was born and raised in Germany, he ended up having a triple-nationality, German, American and French). One can almost read in this book Ernst' vitriolic take on a society that distracts itself with materialism, excessive pleasures and sensationalism, in an attempt to bury the wraiths of its past, and to stay blind to the dangers ahead...

It is only by the last day of the week that the atrocities fade away, and that we return to pure oniric poetry, in a set of illustrations focusing on voluptuousness and fantasy, inviting to or glorifying freedom and dreams... Now let's take a look at the structure of the Week in more details.

Day 1: Sunday. Element: Mud. Example: The Lion of Belfort

(The Lion of Belfort is a commemorative statue of the Alsacian town of Belfort in France, in homage to how the city had been assieged by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870)

Another Christian subversion: the week doesn't begin here on a Monday, but on a Sunday. We also see some of the games Ernst has with the Biblical Genesis not just by waking the "last" day of Genesis the first day of the week, but also by associating to Sunday (the day of rest for a God that created everything already) the day of the "mud" (understand, the primordial mud from before the world was created, the "chaos", the "primordial soup" from which the universe had to be sculpted). Not only that, but Sunday, the holiest day of the week for Christians, is filled with brutal deaths, sadistic violence and blasphemous imagery.

More precisely, this booklet/day explores the relationships between men and women, male and females. And... let's just say Ernst has a bad view of it, since all the interactions between male and female characters in this booklet can be summarized by: persecution, seduction, theft, punishment, torture, death. Since the Lion of Belfort is the recurring theme, there is a recurring character throughout the illustrations of a lion-faced man. He is always in a position of power and domination, and it is no surprise: we often see him wear military decorations, political medals or even religious symbols such as the Sacred Heart. As a result, the lion-man clearly embodies all the dominating, oppressive and violent male-dominated organizations of the time: the political world, the military and the Church.

(If you are curious, the Musée d'Orsay offered the original picture on which the one above was based. It was taken from the Mémoire de Monsieur Claude:

Day two: Monday. Element: Water. Example: Water.

Unlike the male-dominated first booklet, this one is filled with female figures, making it the most "feminine" of all the days. There is still a lot of violence in it - but it is not a man-made violence anymore. Rather Ernst presents the violence of nature, the brutality of natural disasters - through water, a water that is seen flooding bedrooms, destroying bridges, or drowning entire streets of Paris.

Day three: Tuesday. Element: Fire. Example: The dragon's courtyard/The court of the dragon.

La Cour du Dragon, The Dragon's Courtyard is actually - or rather was - a famous street of Paris. It doesn't exist anymore, but it was in the 6th arrondissement, between today's Rue du Dragon and Rue de Rennes. This street was called as such because of a famous dragon-sculpture located at the top of one of its entrances - the dragon can still be seen at the Louvres I believe. And it is within illustrations of this "Dragon's courtyard" that the booklet begins.

The dragon is one of the recurring symbols of the booklet, with variations: dragons and snakes of all shapes and size that follow the characters around ; humans with various dragon or snake-like features ; or simply the presence of bat wings reminding of demons, sometimes counterbalanced by angelic characters with bird wings. Here, the caricature, in terms of setting and characters, clearly is of the bourgeoisie. Not only is Ernst making the world of the bourgeoisie "Hellish" by filling it with snakes, dragons, demons and flames, but he also seems to use the symbolism of the fire as a way to denote the cliche of the "passion bourgeoisie", the violence of passions, emotions and desires within the bourgeois world, leading to tragedies. (Opposing the "natural forces" of the water, here fire seems to be the human forces) It is no wonder that this booklet has a great emphasis on walls and doors, often decorated by surrealist symbols: they are here to evoke a cloistered, walled-up, compartimented world where walls and doors hide and try to restrain things such as fears, desires or dreams...

Day four: Wednesday. Element: Blood. Example: Oedipus.

This booklet is entirely driven by the myth of Oedipus (that we know to have been one of the surrealists' favorite Greek myth). All the illustrations have one element or another of the legend, and keep retelling specific episodes of Oedipus' adventures. Oedipus killing his own father, the riddle of the Sphinx, or baby-Oedipus being abandoned at birth... Oedipus himself is symbolized in the collages as a bird-headed man.

One of the most famous collages of this booklet is the one that retranscribes the part of the legend that gave Oedipus his name, "swollen feet" or "swollen ankles", due to receiving a wound there as a baby. In Ernst's work, the bird-headed man (Oedipus) rather stabs in the foot a woman:

Day five: Thursday. Element: Black. Example: The laughter of the rooster ; followed by "Easter Island".

This is where we reach the last three days placed in one same booklet. It is also only in this last booklet that Ernst placed text, in the form of quotes or poems from other authors. This day has three quotes. In the "Laughter of the Rooster" segment, two. One from Marcel Shwob's L'Anarchie: "Those of them that are joyful sometimes rise their behind up to the sky and thow their feces at the face of other men ; than they lightly hit their bellies." Another from Schwob's Le Rire: "Laughter is probably fated to disappear." The third quote comes from the Easter Island segment, and is from Arp: "Stones are filled with entrails. Bravo. Bravo."

Here the symbols seem to again represent men or organizations of power. On one side, you have the recurring rooster - which is of course the symbol of France, and thus can be seen as a representation of the French government or French state. On the other side you have cruel and brutal men with the head or faces of the Easter Island statues, reflecting them not just being humans made of stone - but being literal "stones idols" (in the religious sense of the term, the sin of idolatry, again a Christian subversion).

Day 6: Friday. Element: Sight. Example: The inside of the sight / The interior of the view.

Again, three quotes here. One from Professors O. Decroly and R. Buyse's "Les tests mentaux": "If three is greater than six, make a circle around the cross, and if water extinguishes fire, draw a line from the sceal to the candle, passing above the knife, then make a cross on the ladder." One from Paul Eluard's "Comme deux gouttes d'eau": "And to love I oppose / Already-made images / Instead of images to be made" (The text is much more poetic and punny in the original French). The final quote is from André Breton's "Le revolver aux cheveux blancs": "A man and a woman absolutely white."

Unlike the previous booklets which presented dynamic, violent, active, interactive scenes, here we are in more still, contemplative images. Symbols, visions and settings to be looked at and gazed at, as the title of the section indicates.

Final day: Saturday. Element: Unknown. Example: The key of songs (again, a pun on "The key of fields", a French expression)

Only one quote: "........ / ........ / ........ / ......" from Pétrus Borel's "Was-ist-das".

For this part, the Musée d'Orsay used a quote by André Breton to explain Ernst's intentions: from the Surrealism Manifesto, "Glory to hysteria and its cohort of young, naked women sliding down the roofs. The problem of womankind is, to the world, everything there is of wonderful and troubled/murky." In this final day, we see women, always leaving a bed or bedroom or resting place, and either flying away or entering landscapes where gravity does not work. There is clearly here a work on the "clinal hysteria", and Ernst' own take on the surealists great obsession with hysteria, that they deemed to be disease, yes, but an illness that brought both freedom and inspiration. This idea of being set free is within the section's very title: "Prendre la clé des champs", "To take the key of the fields" is an expression meaning to go away (especially to go away from an oppressing or suffocating, unpleasant situation), to flee, escape, disappear (with the connotation of the fields as a vast, open space of great possibilities and endless horizon).

[msbigredmachine]

Watched Royal Rumble 2023. My highlights (will be brief because I need to rant about that main event):

1. Not sure if it was smart play by WWE putting the men’s match first, because we forgot ALL about the winner by the end of the night.

2. Kofi botches his Rumble save for the second straight year. Yeah, it’s done. Time to end that ish for good now.

3. The minute Lesnar came out I said Lashley is coming for his ass. Glad I was proven right.

4. Rey not making it to the ring but Ex Con Dom comes out right after and has his mask. Does this make Rey Mysterio the rightful winner?

5. A Rumble spot wasted on Booker T when Mustafa Ali was right there, smh

6. Not Montez being thrown out in front of his in-laws 😭

7. I kinda wish Cody’s return had been a surprise.

8. Yoooo that spot with Logan Paul and Ricochet was something out of Dragonball Z! And I don't even watch Dragonball Z.

9. GUNTHER and Cody had a whole match within a match and it was great. Gunther is that guy. The IC champ looked like the fucking boss. So so good.

10. Very good men’s match. Wasn’t too extravagant and it worked.

11. The Pitch Black match looked like a rave I once attended when I was in England, lol.

12. Bray Wyatt is for the aesthetics and theatrical more than the actual wrestling, always has been. I don’t understand how fans were expecting a 5-star match.

13. Didn’t bother watching the Raw women’s title match. Bianca deserves better and I don’t care for Alexa Bliss being thrown back into that lame witchy storyline.

14. The women’s match wasn’t as good as the men’s, for me. It only picked up when it was down to the final three.

15. Damage CTRL looked kind of strong for once, knocking everybody out.

16. Michelle McCool with THAT body and wrestling in Uggs? 🔥

17. Yes yes yes to AsuKana, her dark outfit and the murder clown face paint. Triple H needs to run back her days of destruction at NXT.

18. Thank you WWE for changing that STUPID dew drop name back to Piper Niven.

19. Nia Jax?!?! 🙄🙄🙄 Errr, no. On top of that, her music started playing before the countdown even came on. Hot tears.

20. I don’t think Naomi will ever come back either and that makes me sad. 😢

21. The right woman won. Bianca vs Rhea at Mania will be epic, and Rhea will win.

22. The woman at No. 1 won and the man at No. 30 won. Very interesting.

23. Samantha Irvin was on her A-game with the main event intros. 🤌🏾

24. Standard good match, Roman the king of 2.9999 kick outs as usual.

25. I wondered why the match went so short. I regretted it soon enough 😭

26. Roman throwing KO by the back of his head on the jagged part of the steps TWICE! 😬😬😬😬

27. Sami cringing the whole time, and things would only get worse for him after the match ended. 🥺

28. The Bloodline brutalized KO. Steel chair and super kicks and handcuffs. Sami couldn’t take anymore and tried to beg off and ended up getting pie-faced over and over. It was then that I realized what was coming…

29. And yet, my jaw still DROPPED when Sami hit Roman with that chair! 😱 Unbelievable!

30. LOL at Roman actually looking back, wondering whether it’s 2014 all over again.

31. Jimmy though. Jimmy. Attacked Sami first. Didn’t hesitate for a second. After all the handshakes. “My dawg”. The Honorary Uce name. Smiling at Sami the whole time. He was the one who brought Sami into the group in the first place, back when Jey wanted him out.

32. And the look on his face as he attacked. Manic. Rabid. Unhinged. His viciousness stunned me initially, but then I remember what he told Roman all those weeks ago:

“Sami’s my dawg. I like Sami. But I love my family. I love the Bloodline. I love you.”

33. Solo. The hired gun, sent by the elders to do Roman’s bidding. Forgetting that he also used Sami to gaslight Jey numerous times before Roman brainwashed him.

34. Roman crying as he and the rest of the Bloodline decimated Sami pissed me off, lol. “I gave you the world! You broke my family!” What?!The audacity!

35. Jey walking away in tears legitimately made me cry. You could see 2020 flashing before his eyes; the way Roman treated Sami was the exact same way he did Jey and he has never forgotten it.

36. And now on his IG, Jey has declared war! 😳

37. LISTEN TO THIS FROM THE FANS! And watch Roman’s reaction. Dropping the petals one by one over Sami and Kevin’s grave! 😭

38. All this time, we’ve had cool heel Roman. Now we have evil heel Roman. Finally.

I have no idea where this storyline is going, but I am on their edge of my seat and will gobble it all up.

MVP - The entire Bloodline and Kevin. No debate. These boys need to go to Hollywood asap.

Line of the night:

Everything from commentary. Pat, Michael Cole and Corey Graves were on 🔥🔥🔥🔥

[yoonia]

Hey Dia! So here’s where I left off.

For envy, I’ll be pairing up Hoseok as said sin. I’ve seen him depicted a lot in other fics as either greed or wrath but not so much as envy. I just think it’s another sin that would suit him really well.

So in this fic, it has some similarities to Taehyung’s story (admittedly, for now). Although, I’d still like to alter it to make it more distinguishable. I’d like to make Hoseok’s character rather complex, just because I think he doesn’t always get the attention he deserves in the fanfic community. Like maybe he could be morally grey and you might hate him for one second but the next thing you know you also can’t help but sympathize with him, you know?

OC in this one is also jealous of one person that’s dating someone. Instead of multiple people, she’s only jealous of her twin sister. And unlike Taehyung’s story, OC has feelings for a guy she knows at work and at college (but it’s not one of the other boys because they all have their own stories), but is resentful to her sister because the guy she likes had feelings for her sister instead, and the latter felt the same way even though OC has known him for longer, even though she never tried to tell him about her feelings towards him. To make matters worse, OC’s twin is known as the golden child. She’s favored by everyone else in the family.

Then at some point, OC meets Hoseok. And eventually, she tells him about her situation. So Hoseok tells her he can “help” her by making OC’s sisters life miserable. OC hesitates at first, but when all her buttons are pushed, it gives OC all the motivation that she needs.

Also, for Hoseok’s power, he has the ability to shapeshift. I took inspiration from the anime fullmetal alchemist (have you ever heard or watched that anime before? Or do you watch anime at all? If you’ve never seen it before, I highly recommend it. I consider it an all time childhood favorite) and the series’ depiction of the same sin.

So OC has Hoseok use his powers to his advantage by taking a picture of themselves making out (with Hoseok disguised as a random dude) and airdrop it to OC’s sister so when her boyfriend sees it, it’ll look like she’s cheating on him. And because of this, he breaks up with her.

Then eventually, OC’s sister learns that OC was behind everything and becomes enraged. And it damages their relationship. Another thing I forgot to mention is that I’d like OC to have a special relationship with her sister. Although OC has unwavering jealousy, she still very much loves her sister. Both of them are/were very close before her sister started dating OC’s crush. Which could be make the story more compelling. I would like them to reconcile of course. But as I said before, not everything’s set in stone yet.

Then later, at some point, OC learns that Hoseok is jealous of humans. And he not only wanted OC’s sister to suffer, but also OC to suffer herself. He secretly wishes to have mortality and have a normal human life. Despite his status, Hoseok is/was unhappy carrying the duties as the embodiment of the virtue of kindness (opposite of envy), which lead to his banishment from the heavens and him turning into the embodiment of envy. But I would like to give them both a happy ending and have him revert back as a virtue.

If you have any ideas, do you have any suggestions how I can improve or alter anything with this fic and not have it be too similar to Taehyung’s fic?

Also, I just came up with this recently, but another concept I’ll include is that in this universe, all 7 of the boys have tattoos of a number in Roman numerals. And they’re all placed on specific areas on their bodies to signify their sin/virtue (also inspired by fullmetal alchemist). Their numbers depend on the day of their creations as the 7 virtues. In this universe, the day of their creation is in the same order as the fanchant (meaning Namjoon is the eldest and has the number 1 tattooed, then Jin, Yoongi, etc.)

Namjoon has his tattoo on the nape of his neck. Jin has his on his tongue. Yoongi has his tattoo on his left eye (the same one where his scar’s at in Daechwita and Haegum). Hoseok has his on his right index finger. Jimin has his tattoo on the center of his back (because you know, sloth and laziness. And people just do nothing and lay down when they’re lazy). Taehyung has his on the left side of his chest, just below his collarbone. And Jungkook’s tattoo is located on the neck of his left hand.

So yeah! That’s what I got for envy😄 But only one more to go😭

Forgive me for dipping off the internet just as you sent me this!

Alright, let's get into this *rolls sleeve*

Seeing the concept so far, I love the complexity in this one! I love complex characters with deep backstories and purposes and I feel like you can achieve it with these characters. You're right, Hoseok rarely gets appreciated in the fanfic community, but for some reason, the stories that are written with him as the mc have mostly been complex, different, and oftentimes, deep. So it'll be amazing if this turns out to be that way again.

The intrigue is nicely plotted so far, and the conflict of interest that OC has (envy of her sister that she loves so much) will make this one interesting to read. You can probably use this too as Hoseok's epiphany as he slowly finds his way back to become a virtue. Maybe by fighting with OC who wants to "fix" things before OC realises that Hoseok granted her wish in the first place BECAUSE he knew that deep down, OC would also be hurt from witnessing her sister's downfall and when their relationship fell apart. Make him see that there is a positive side of envy in humans (or how humans can use envy for something good), for ex. because A is envious of B, A began working harder to catch up with B so they both became successful together, etc

I love that he's also a shapeshifter. It'll be interesting (and fun) if you give him an ability to shift not into the obvious types of animals from time to time. for ex. he turns into a squirrel while he's plotting for humans' downfall lol.

If you're worried about your stories becoming repetitive because they have similarities between one and the other, you can try to focus on the parts that aren't so similar to be at the foreground of the story, so the similar parts can be kept as your "theme". it wouldn't be too odd to have a certain theme that readers can find in each stories when you're writing them as a series. They can become the red threads linking from one story to another even if they are set in different timelines, places, or even different realms.

Or, since you've already planned for most of these sins to find their way to evolve back to virtue, you can differentiate their journeys in getting there. You might also be able to use their similar backstories (if any) or events to show that one sin can be directly or indirectly linked with the other. Maybe mention it during the sin's character's inner battle/monologue or fleetingly mention them in a conversation (eg. "Now I feel what xxx felt when he was in xxx"), so you can use them to strengthen the story instead of allowing it to mess with your plot.

The tattoos concept is brilliant! Seeing that the original members irl have friendship tattoos, I think adding this will excite your readers. I often find that even if we're writing them in alternate universes, with them as original characters instead of regular idols/artists, readers love it when they can link the written characters version of them to the real people they know.

Hmmm...idk what else that I can add to this one. So far, I love it!

Onto the final one!

[nightguide]

Genetics and coding is not different when Arabic numerals don't clash in within roman numerals but when traditional systemisation of numbers become corrupt with heartbreak and slowly overtime, Dubai became a city famed for…. me right now. It's because classic numbering standards of use did not apply when the commodity of numbers became one with life and it doesn't end there

okay. number 8 is not standard english but what happens to when you look at the number before one because 0 and 0 are technically the same until they stand beside 1. and this is where it went

the number 0 does not exist but as the numbers follow on, they don't even tell you the whole story except what the hell is X and they have made humans philosophise the major question of humanity that never had a dream, so the numbers that followed out with X to no standard choice of living, no standard life or income is the reason why the world is in chaos, and i just wrote the simplest coding system known to man all because after Maghrib prayer on the 28/05/2024, i thought of coding as a simple 0101010 scheme when in all naturality, it dates back to the Greco age wondering the same thing about a simulation at large that processes answers which directly inherits the young wife of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) figuring out why people don't like each other.

okay, it's because the natural laws of coding stand with one next to nothing, all computer programmers know an index of lines and orders they type in to complete a CGI graphic of their life become so the 80's (biggest influence) were large on programming infographics about the world schemes right now to get to somewhere Keanu Reeves calls 'nothing' because the totalitarian of the world become became a pyramid scheme where now only the bottom set gets the worlds riches because the 1 empire stood small to a bottomless 0 when in reality, it's all X because X is now on Twitter putting her entire life to make everybody happy when the Matt Smith has to go and marry her, she found this out from his heart mind because he has to go and marry her.

the woman (me) is a world heartbreaker and computer programmer at large, her database logs to another multi-course infographics she leads on her Tumblr right now telling you how and why you should utilise your heart to make a one world government feel secure to touch, she promotes idealism with purity become with Islamic codex of honour, (that was a message from the last empress of Greece who figured out the totality of the world become)

the new code works in lifelike ways to attribute new system become, so have you noticed the number 0 acting like an 8?

8 1 0 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10

it's because the world forgot to live and coding actually did create the new Eden it became now, heaven is reasoning when 1 combines with nothing (0) and it becomes nothing so we are just as fcked up qas we think we are because we think 1 comes after 8 because 8 is solid change to the number after 8 is nothing.

so the system changes by habitual expression when they know how to change their hearts so if programmers know how to reboot engines, they should use the new system to procreate designs that will use the new method to get them to space and is highly secure and functional to transform the Earth to new labels of AI, systems used to to manufacture accuracy in search and much more.

i can't wait to explain the metaphysical meaning to the new set of numbers used for coding that will transpire the world become. it's pretty much exciting

[dear-happypills]

XXX

me: , fuxx.... i totally forgot *as I check my phone messages.

happypills: forgot whuut?

me: *sigh. .... you know, the last time i spoke with my parents, they like gave me the hard talk of.... *SIGH ... turning thirty soon... and basically told me that my body and ... my attractiveness will fade soon.... very,.. quickly.... soon. like soon...

and... that i should start looking for a partner for marriage

happypills: .... i dont think your attractivness was ever an age problem.......... just. might be.. como se dice.... a you problem. ??? dont even trip dawwggg. thirtyyyyyyy

me: fuXX you..... ... .ah. fuXX this............. i was hoping to die by 26...

happypills: *looks puzzled. why.... why 26???

me: *shrugs. i dunno. just seemed like a good age to die.

happypills: -_-;;

me: ANYWAYS.. my parents are telling me this... and my mental focus is fading... just. at the reality.. of having to prepare.... to live alone with you.. YOU...

happypills: *nodds earnestly

me: *pointing at happypills, disgusted.

...YOU. forever... and so imthere.... just nodding to whatever my moms saying and just say

"yea.... yea... yea".

and then shes like REALLY??

happypills: really to what????

me: so thats the thing. that conversation was like months ago, and then like a week ago she sends me a number of a girl.

and.. i dunno. i just felt like shit.... i mean, like .... im not desperate.

happypills: nope. not desperate.... its,... its just you cant find someone.

me: shutthefuckup im not done.

happypills: wait........waaiiit. how come you didnt censor it that time????

me: shutthefuckup. because you deserved it.

ANYWAYS. i felt like shit. so i just ignored the text when i got it and put it out of my mind...

until now.

happypills:. .... well , if you think about it. thats how dating apps work.... you know, like. putting your number and information out there because youre desperate enough to find someone...

me: NO, its worse. i dont even know what she looks like

happpypills: LOLLL

me: NOnono,///// thats.... not the pointtttt. i mean......... eh. whatever.... wait, but like why couldnt my mom have just given away my number, like you know what i mean? so that the onus isnt on me to be the one contacting a stranger first.... ... And like, to even say what?????

happypills: .... OH JEEZ pick a lane. now you want to whore out your number???

me: .................................. *angrily holds back. OH JEEZ, its not like idonthavetothinkabouthowthispersonisconnectedtomymomschoirfriendandshehastosavefaceorthefactthatitsbecomeachorethatsstressingtheshitoutofme.

JEEZ.

happpypills: ...... ohhh jeEEEZZZZ. someone sounds stressed... so whatre you going to do???

me: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......................................... NOTHING.

happypills: oh. pwuh. dont say that............... youre not doing nothing.

me: ... nope. really. i think ill do nothing. the whole thing is just weird. and. i dunno. when things get to a point, i just. i just ..... turtle...... turtle the fuck away kind of turtle...... youknowwhatimean????.. im... ima do nothing.

happypills: *gets really passionate NO! NONO youre NOT doing nothing okayyy. YOU HEAR ME....

.... YOURE... YOURE TURNING THIRTY THIS YEAR... THAT TRIPPLE. ROMAN NUMERAL XXX, THIRTY.

me: fuxx you. ARRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGggggggggggggggggggg

*SIGH

............. ........... ..

well, they say everyone dies alone right????

happypills: LOLOLOL.

me: why are you laughing thats not fuXXing funny!

happypills: hehe. im a die with Christ yo.

me: OH OHKAY.. But.... do you know what i mean????? like.. just the whole thing.

it just.... makes me feel.....

retarded....

wait. its okay to say that when i genuinely believe that about myself right??

happypills: -_-.... not with the way you seek for confirmation from me like that... i mean like, thats retarded... oh wait. so i guess youre right.

me: *squints see.... that.. i dont think used that word right there....

happypills: UGH, i just dont get why you need to be stressed out about this. bbRRROOOOo youre three decades this year.

me: .. i ... i um dont think thats anything to brag about.... i mean, i guess its a big thing in the Pillsian world or whatever, but thats just shenanigans. im not getting any younger.

happypills: no........nnoooooo youre not... . buttt... .BUT WISER?????

*makes mind blown hand motion. and then quickly changes.

no.. no not that..

me: ..................................................... -_-;;

happypills: i think you tend to overthink things.

me: ....... OH. SO, ANALYZING the situation IS AN ISSUE.

happypills: ............. just sounds like BITCHING to mehhhhhh.

me: ....... PSH. pWUh. whatever. whatever.

IM A TURTLE.

BIE.

happypills: thats three decades worth of maturity right there.

- happypills

[tropicalrpg]

his name started with an X (an incomplete story)

He doesn't deserve a post all of his own.

If someone were to find this blog, it would be him. I don't want to say I blame him for it, or whatever, but it did bother me that he was almost stalker-ish online. There's nothing of mine that he didn't find—maybe one or two of my private Twitter accounts. Just one, actually. The other he definitely found, but just knew I'd never let him in. I know there's no way he found this blog, one because he's over me and two because there's no way to find this, but still. If there's someone I know that I think would be able to, it's him.

He's only getting a post, or at least only getting a post this early, because it was something cool to do with the letter X. I got tired of Roman numerals on day, like, one, so I decided it'd work if I did something big to signify the change, on a round number, of course. His first name does not start with an X. One of his last names, or I guess his middle name, does. His Discord user does start with an X, as well. I think I've spent more time interacting with or dodging him on Discord than I've spent with him in real life, but there is the pandemic to blame, of course.

I've been unfair to him. Every time we're away, I think that; then, the rare times we're together, and by together I mean in the same physical space, I think otherwise. Something about him irks me. I don't know if it's the way he is or if it's all that he knows about me, all that he represents. He doesn't deserve a post, he doesn't deserve the first boy-post (now that I've started this, and now that I've thought about it, I think this is a great type of post for me. It allows me to unpack all that these boys have meant for me all this time. I can think of four others that are definitely, absolutely getting posts of their own. On top of the two other posts I know I want to make. I should start making smaller plans; I'm tired of writing, right? And I'm not giving myself a break) that I'm making, but he was a turning point in my life. He's one of the two that has stuck around, in my mind, at least. One of my comforting, comfortable places. Something I can turn to when it all comes crashing down, even if I know it's all in fiction.

(I've been unfair to him, see? I'm using him, even if just the image of him. That's what I've done all along. I've never once wanted to see the real him.)

He’s not the boy I think about the most. (I somehow forgot about this one. Five, now. Five boys I would spend pages writing about.) He’s just the one who changed me the most. He’s not the one I want back, or the one I really wanted at all. I never saw him. I never saw him for who he is. I think he deserves that, because everyone deserves that, even though he’s been a down right asshole to some of the people dearest to me. I think second chances are a birthright, because he never did the unforgivable. But the story of his misdeeds is not ours, and not mine to tell.

Our story, which sounds stupid, it sounds ridiculous to think about an us, started with someone else’s desire. Desire; I don’t want to call it her desire, but that was it. She thought he was good-looking, plus, at fifteen, he had no shame in being left-wing and bisexual. At our school, that didn’t happen—either of it. And not for a new kid, a new, good-looking kid.

All eyes on him. I don’t even want to know how many people he kissed that year. I don’t even want to know how many people he’s kissed this year. He deserves to do a better job. I talk about him as if he deserves so much, but I just think life has been unfair to him. We’ve been.

She wanted him, she kissed him. Then I kissed him, too. And I couldn’t kiss someone else—that’s what I think about, now, not him. But I remember what happened. I wrote poems on that. I was drinking a passion fruit drink, and he wanted to try it, I think? Or he said it probably tasted like shit? I don’t know. I don’t remember. I remember the bottle in my hand and then my other hand on his neck. He’s fucking tall. He’s so tall, and I’m so short, and I kissed him on my tiptoes that day.

The next time I kissed him, and lit a room on fire, we found a way around that. It was cute. I was an idiot that day. If I had to choose one day to be embarrassed of, it’d be that one. Hiding my face in my hands, not having the balls to flirt with him—I still don’t have the balls to flirt—, then kissing him at someone else’s place, hiding, giggling, still. Fuck. A friend and an indirect friend got mad at me that day. We all wanted him, boys competing for another—I don’t miss being a child. I miss the way my heart would speed in my chest, but I don’t miss the drama, the shame. I don’t miss the competition.

I do miss winning. A lot of what happened between us was about competition. We competed all through 2020, a bit through 2021. But, back then, before we were relegated to easy, easy screens, I thought I was winning. It was still about screens—he would text me things that would disgust me now, not because they were nasty but because they were so, I don’t know, superficial. About a part of me I hate. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What matters, or mattered, was that he wanted me, I think.

If he didn’t want me, not in that way, then he at least wanted to be friends with me. And I should have been fairer to him.

2022.12.30

[travellogforgreece]

Ancient Greek Olympics (494 BCE)

The Ancient Olympic Games were a meaningful athletics event usually held in ancient Olympia. For the Greeks, it was a ceremonial event with tradition for many centuries. Pausanias' "Descriptions of Greece," how he describes some practices and rules in the Games, can show you what the Greeks were like regarding gender and sex roles. For example, a mountain before you cross the Alpheus is called Mount Typaeum. According to Pausanias, it is a "law of Elis to cast down it any women who are caught present at the Olympic games…" (Pausanias). It does not surprise me, as women did not have much of a role in the government or anything in ancient Greek society.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that while we were watching the speech from Aeschines, the tall, lanky man in the trench coat and the matrix-looking sunglasses gave me an option to either take a red or blue pill to get my time machine back (he told me he was the CEO of Time, which is why he allowed me to get my time machine back). So, of course, I chose the blue pill because blue was the same color as my time machine! (and no, I did not steal the Doctor Who machine). So I decided to go to the Ancient Olympic Games in 394 BCE to try and enjoy some games. Like "Western Society" does the Olympics, the Greeks held them every four years between August 6 and September 19.

While traveling to Olympia, it was a beautiful, warm sunny day near Olympia. The grass fields and farmers' markets full of vegetables and fruits attracted me to try Greece's favorite foods. I decided to stop by a market near a farm filled with numerous hunched-back people struggling to hoe the grass under the heat. They resembled slave behaviors, so I decided to speak to one of them after getting my vegetables.

After getting my vegetables, which were fresh asparagus, cardoons, celery, fennel, cabbage, and onions, I decided to walk over to one of the enslaved people and ask them a few questions. An enslaved person named Angelo told me about his experience in agricultural labor near Olympia and the different Greek city-states, as Olympia has not been his first stop. He told me about certain farming practices and keeping the crops healthy, but he could not ignore the work part. He told me there was a "point of considerable stress during the agrarian cycle" when the farmers came under pressure to collect, process, and store crops before harvesting season ended (McHugh 208). I thanked him for his input into life, as I already knew from research that most of the evidence of communal labor, especially amongst the farmers during the Classical period, was lacking mainly due to no evidence. Historians have yet to find no evidence because of various factors, including education, social structure, and class structure.

After meeting with the farmer and getting my vegetables, I headed to the Colosseum. However, the games shut down when I arrived, as the Romans took over and thought the event was "pagan." The Romans allowed the games to go on, but the activities and everyday events which made the Games destroyed the value of the cultural phenomenon. It was a travesty to see how the event went down. From talking to the farmer to seeing how the Romans treated the Games were all confirmation that Greece was slowly losing its civilization, and I was unsure how the society would survive for the following centuries. 

Sources:

Internet History Sourcebooks. (n.d.). https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/greekgames.asp

McHugh, M. (2019). To reap a rich harvest: experiencing agricultural labour in ancient Greece. World Archaeology, 51(2), 208–225. http://eznvcc.vccs.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=141659997&site=ehost-live&scope=site

(n.d.-b). The Academy Of Athens. Theoi Texts Library. Retrieved October 30, 2022, from https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias1C.html

[mostlydeadallday]

Lost Kin | Chapter IV | Futures and Fates

Fandom: Hollow Knight Rating: Mature Characters: Hornet, Pure Vessel/Hollow Knight Category: Gen Content Warnings: suicidal thoughts, amputation, abuse, dehumanization, infection, body horror, restraints AO3: Lost Kin Chapter IV | Futures and Fates First Chapter | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Summary: Something is very wrong in Hallownest.

The Hollow Knight wakes up outside the Temple of the Black Egg. Hornet feels a shift in the kingdom from all the way in Greenpath. Together, the two of them discover the sacrifices each has made–and the grief neither one of them was allowed to feel.

Notes: it is TUESDAY my dudes. Been in a bit of a writing slump this week because I have a really hard scene coming up, but never fear! I have plenty of chapters queued before then, so I'm sure I'll get through it soon enough. Thank you for all the lovely notes on my last chapter! Every one of them makes me inspired to write about even more horrible things happening. ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ (No joke though, there is some fluff coming up. I promise.)

○

The knight had already risen to its knees, driven by the same uncanny urgency that had inhabited it outside the temple, before it realized it could go no farther. Its sister’s shape wavered, doubling and tripling and then appearing singly again, and the pain was screaming, screaming, screaming at it.

It leaned on its propped-up nail, fighting gravity, fighting its own traitorous body, and instinctively reached for her with an arm it no longer had, wrenching its shoulder forward to fling out the ghost of a hand. Renewed agony crashed down like a stone, pressing its head forward, its eyelids nearly closing in a dead faint.

No. No. It scrabbled back toward consciousness, toward her, the only real thing in a world that had grown terrifyingly vague. The red of her cloak seemed to pierce the haze, offering an anchor, a thread of sanity to grab onto.

She took one step back, and even that small distance felt like a chasm, a widening crack in already unsteady ground. The knight’s legs had folded and collapsed beneath it; it couldn’t feel them now, just a buzzing emptiness like the space where its arm had been. It had come this far on a last reserve of strength that had thinned and thinned and finally snapped. It was empty now, empty of strength, empty of purpose, empty of the howling, screaming goddess that had been its constant burden for so many years.

And its only thought had been to return to its father, its maker, its monarch. To atone somehow for losing the battle it had been ordered to fight. To offer itself up again like a chalice, a goblet, a vessel to contain the uncontainable.

It had failed even at that.

It knelt there, panting, shaking, void swirling queasily beneath its shell, a wretched thing, useless, and still, still it wanted.

To reach for her.

To beg, somehow, for help.

She had not moved since that single step, motionless except for the swirling of her cloak in the hot breeze. The needle in her hand shone, sharp and ready, a thread of shimmering silk floating from its pommel.

She could not redeem it. She should walk away, leave it here, sullied with the stains of its failure, and let it fall, as it had always been fated to. She was pure and good and real, a true child of their father, the Daughter of Hallownest.

And yet the thought of her turning her back, walking away, leaving it alone—alone—made something burrow into its chest like teeth, a pain so sudden and sharp that it gasped.

It resisted the urge to check for a new wound. This twisting ache under its carapace was too painful, too complicated to be physical.

And that was a betrayal too—a betrayal of its purpose, its bloodline, all its father’s careful work. Because this twisting-fluttering-choking in its body was foreign, corrupted, anathema to everything a Pure Vessel was supposed to be.

No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.

If this torturous twisting of futures and fates in its head was thought, then it had a mind. It was broken in every way it could be broken, and it had never had a voice, but it could suffer.

Its body, its life, its very existence had been an experiment. And the experiment had failed.

It had nothing to offer its father now.

Nothing but disappointment.

It had tried—tried to be pure—to be good—it had tried so hard—

It had felt the vast cold distance of this room when it had first entered. The pebbles that scattered over the edge had fallen so far that the echoes never returned to it. Now it wondered if this was something that could finally end it, if a long, swift fall and cold, hard stone could accomplish what the Radiance had failed to do.

Could the spells still cling to its mask if that mask shattered into dust?

A soft noise interrupted its downward spiral, and it dragged its gaze back up from the darkness.

It did not see what its sister had done, but her cloak still rippled from the short movement, something quick, pointless. Her stance looked suddenly like indecision, her leading foot too light on the stone to be steady, hand clenching restlessly on her needle hilt.

It tried to meet her eyes, so bright even in the dim, directionless light, but she was not looking at it. She was looking—

—at its hand, at its fingers beginning to go numb where they gripped its nail hilt, at the edge angled toward her, at the shining metal that was as bright and pure as the knight was broken.

She was afraid.

She was afraid of it.

Something acid, something as corrosive as the infection, bubbled in its gut. She thought it a husk, a mad, mindless creature that would tear her apart to sate the infection’s feverish demands. Or, if not a husk, a machine, a malfunctioning construct, following no master but the violence it had been trained for.

Even if she had been right—even if it hadn’t been cursed with a mind, with a will, with this ravenous, intangible pain that churned in its essence—it would never hurt her. It would rather be drained to its last drop of void than raise a hand against her. She was royal, she bore Father’s blood, she was innocent in all the ways it had never been.

The nail seemed to burn its fingers suddenly, white-hot with the shame of her suspicion. The knight would rather break every oath, disobey every order, than endure the possibility of using it.

And then the reckless rush of its shade filled its limbs, and it knew what it had to do.

○

The knight lifted its mask again to face her, their regard a cold shiver across her carapace, like a skitter of claws. They watched her, silent as they had ever been, and her gaze flicked nervously to the nail again, cursing the tell, knowing they would realize she was afraid.

When they moved suddenly, she barely held her needle in check, barely kept from flinging it straight at their cracked mask. But they weren’t attacking, weren’t lunging for her, weren’t springing from their crouch to swing at her with every inch of their long reach. They lurched back, pushing upward, the nail tip grinding in the dirt, and then with a heavy swing they hurled it between the bars of the elevator.

It seemed an age before she heard the distant chime of its landing.

The knight dropped forward again, catching themselves on their now-empty hand. The shaking was back, every ragged edge of their cloak fluttering like a banner, even their carapace plates chattering together like teeth.

Hornet just stood and watched, plunged into an icy shock that froze her feet in place.

What—what was happening?

They’d abandoned their nail. It was against a knight’s code, against everything that had been instilled in them since hatching. Against their orders.

Her father’s creations never disobeyed their orders.

But they had seen her fear, seen that it was them she was afraid of.

They could still hurt her. They were still a weapon, trained in a dozen forms of combat, taught every offensive spell, instilled with a thousand different ways to kill. They could no more leave their training and their magic behind than they could remake their void into flesh.

But a nail could be willingly abandoned. A nail could be given up. A nail could be cast away.

Willingly. She was silly to use such language. A vessel had no will. A will was a weakness. A will was a flaw. They were made to be pure. Perfect.

Then why had they done it?

She stepped closer.

Foolish, she thought, and the voice in her head was her mother’s. Foolish, dropping your guard. Foolish to hope for mercy.

The knight sagged farther forward, like a pillar collapsing, the tips of their horns nearly brushing the elevator floor. As she moved closer, she realized she could hear them—their breath, at least, shuddering, irregular, wheezing from somewhere deep. She was irrationally fascinated; she had never heard a vessel breathe. They were silent.

They were supposed to be silent.

The knight listed absurdly far, bent double at her feet, as if genuflecting. Their slow topple ended before she could reach them; with an aborted movement, a belated attempt to catch their balance, they tipped over, elbow folding, mask ringing against the stone with a loud crack that made her flinch.

She paused for an instant, still on the edge of fleeing. They only lay there, half-turned on their side, cloak flung back, plated chest heaving with shallow breaths.

Something shone under the edge of the fabric, just at the joint of their left shoulder. Watching them carefully, Hornet reached out with her needle and flicked the cloak open.

Their body was a ruin. She had to fight her instinct to gag at the sight of the infection, more than she had ever seen on another being—another living being. Pockets of light bulged and glowed between the carapace plates, as swollen and orange as the setting sun. Nail wounds littered their chest, weeping black void and pale yellow fluid. Their entire shoulder was a mass of pulsing light, and their arm—

Their arm was gone.

Hornet swallowed. Her hands had gone numb. The gravity, the violation of losing part of yourself to this invasion, to this foreign sickness—it was almost worse than being taken over completely, consigned to mindlessness. At least then you wouldn’t be cognizant of what it had done to you. At least then you wouldn’t remember what you had once been.

She remembered. She remembered the Pure Vessel striding through the training grounds, tall and lithe and strong, their every movement a graceful dance between power and control, and swallowing a painful kind of pride that she shared blood with this being, hoping with everything in her little spider heart that she would become something like them someday.

Her shell had hardened since then, and her skills had been honed by years of life in the wild. She had ceased wishing to be like anyone and become herself, become her own. The days when she had looked after them with longing—for their strength and poise, for some connection between them, some hint of recognition—were gone. The two of them had always been on vastly different paths, one destined for a failed sacrifice, the other fated to rule a kingdom of the damned.

Maybe not so different after all.

But the knight didn’t seem corrupted. Their eyes were liquid black, shining dully behind the mask holes, not the lucent orange of a reanimated husk. And even if they were hollow, thoughtless, as she had always been taught, she wouldn’t even wish this on an automaton, not even one of the motionless, expressionless kingsmoulds that had guarded the steps of the palace.

She should put them out of their misery.

The thought flitted into her mind and stuck there, like a lumafly in a glass bulb. She shook her head, as if she could fling it free. In a few minutes she had gone from confusion to terror to curiosity to whatever this was, this aching pain under her thorax like a needle-thrust. Watching them struggle to move, to breathe, seeing minute shudders travel down their limbs every few seconds, she thought they might thank her, if they had had a voice to do so. The void leaking from their wounds was starting to puddle in their cloak, swirling helplessly, as if looking for somewhere else to go.

They shouldn’t have survived even this long. If they had dragged themselves here from the temple, bleeding the whole way—

They shifted their head to look at her, and a Seal of Binding flashed on the surface of their cracked mask. Of course. Father had built them for this, constructed every piece of them to endure beyond a normal lifetime. They were meant to be nearly indestructible. That they survived now was no testament to vitality or will, it was simply that they were not allowed to die, that their shade could not escape their shell no matter how hard it strained to.

Vessels were not like her, mother had explained once. They did not think, or make choices. They did not have voices, and would have nothing to say if they did. They did not suffer. They did not feel.

The Seal was not a cruelty, no matter how it might look. It was practical. But it had served its use.

Hornet could try to break it. It would take time, and resources she didn’t have here…

And something in her rebelled at the thought of splintering what remained of them, forcing magic into the cracks in their shell like a chisel. How would it be any different than what the Radiance had already done to them? How was it any less an invasion, a violation, if she did it for their own good?

She wavered, staring into the bleak emptiness of their eyes, that dense blackness that told her nothing, needle still pointed at their stuttering chest.

She couldn’t. She couldn’t kill them.

She lifted her other hand, still wrapped with a thread of her silk.

Maybe there was another option.

Before she could think her way out of it, she stepped forward, needle resting warningly on their slender neck, just below the curve of their mask. She was well within reach of attack now, but they had no nail, and if they had any soul, they had likely already used it to heal themselves—as small a difference as it would have made.

Still, she reached down and took their wrist, binding it to the bars of the elevator with a doubled thread of silk. That done, she backed down the length of their body and bound their legs as well, ensuring they couldn’t surprise her.

The skin between their chitin plates was satin-soft. She hadn’t expected that.

It looked ridiculous, when she stepped back to assess her handiwork. The knight couldn’t even stand, and she’d still thought this was necessary?

At least her silk was kinder than the chains that had bound them at the temple.

To them, there might not seem to be much difference.

With that frustrating thought, she reached out and pulled the control for the elevator. The metal cage swung shut and rumbled into motion, lowering them down into the dark shaft—toward the City of Tears.

[zombieella]

A FFXIV wedding commission for @nissarevane and her friend! c:

[mask131]

Roman sources 2: Roman religion

I made a post about some resources for the myths and legends of the Roman gods  (you can find it here) ; and to complete it I will leave here some texts I know are regularly used as sources of information and knowledge about the Roman religion itself - we are speaking of rites, festivals, offerings, theologies, etc, etc...

# Saint Augustine “De Civitate Dei”, aka “On the City of God against the Pagans”. This is a quite unusual resource here, as this is a Christian book wrote by one of the Fathers of the Church in the 4th century, and whose main topic is the Christian religion, Christian God and Christian ideals... BUT what is very interesting is that there Augustine compares the Christian religion to the one of the “Pagans”, evoking profusedly the Roman religion, its gods and practices. Mind you, Augustin does that mostly to criticize or mock the Roman rites in light of the Christian religion - but why this book is so important is because it keeps quoting and reproducing excerpts of actual Roman books that are lost to this day. For example, most if not all we know of Marcus Terentius Varro’s “Res divinae” (”Of the divine things” ; from his “Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum”) comes from Augustine’s book. 

# Aulus Gellius’ “Attic Nights”. This one is a sort of secondary source, but in this book Gellius compiled a LOT of various facts, explanations, trivia and report about everything and anything from his culture and time (the Greco-Roman world of the 1st century). Religion is talked about, alongside things such as history, geometry, grammar, philosophy, etc, etc... This book was notably used as a resource by other authors of the time - such as Apuleius or saint Augustine. 

# Macrobius’ “Saturnalia”. Presented as a set of discussions and talks among guests of a Saturnalia party, this book is all about exploring the curious trivia and unusual aspects of the Roman religion, history and mythology. It was originally made of seven volumes, but some are lost to this day (like the second volume). 

# I will include here Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ “Roman Antiquities”, though with some nuances to bring... Dionysius was a Greek author, not a Roman one, though he lived under the domination of the Roman Empire (under the first Roman emperor, Augustus, to be exact) ; and he was mostly a historian and rhetoric teacher. In fact, his “Roman Antiquities” is an ENORMOUS chronicle of the entire history of Rome from its foundation to its “current days”. BUT he begins his work with a few volumes covering the mythical times of Rome and the legends of its foundations (Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, etc...) so I will include it briefly here (plus he also mentions how the rites and festivals of Rome were shaped by its historical events - but it stays first and foremost an history work).

# I already talked about Plutarch for his “Parallel Lives”, but I forgot to mention another part of his work that deserves some interest: his “Moralia”. It is a sort of big melting-pot in which all of his non-biographicalh/istorical works are placed, and in it you find various texts concerning Roman, Greek and even Egyptian religions (”On the worship of Isis and Osiris” ;  “On the decline of oracles” ; “On the delay of divine vengeance”, etc etc...)

# Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” - considered the largest literary work to have survived from the times of the Roman Empire, it is a sort of encyclopedia trying to unite and gather all of the knowledge that had been written by authors up to this point. And, throughout the numerous talk ranging from geography and nature to architecture and history, Pliny the Elder regularly mentions the religion, the gods - he notably records the various temples and cults existing around Italy, Greece and other countries.

# Servius, “On Virgil’s Aeneid”. I keep seeing this one pop up as a reference for old Roman religion and theology, so I’ll include it, though I am not very familiar with it. Servius was a fourth-century grammarian who made a very famous and popular commentary on Virgil’s work - and this commentary apparently contains a lot of info about Roman religion and/or myths? 

# Cicero, “De Natura Deorum”. Cicero is one of THE biggest Roman personalities and writers, whose work cannot be escaped, and among his numerous philosophical texts about the working of divination or the nature of fate, you find this text, “Of the nature of the gods”, which is all about discussion theology, through the eyes and perceptions of the various philosophical schools and teachings inherited from the Greeks (the Stoics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans...). 

I’m sure there are much more, but these are the only ones I truly know of, when it comes to “direct” sources, texts really coming from the time of Ancient Rome (or near it).

[cithaerons]

me trying to figure out whether the person i’m considering following is a minor or seventy-five:

[ellesliterarycorner]

Getting Your Writing Organized

I absolutely hate having documents labeled “Untitled document” in my Google Docs. It makes me so sad when I scroll through Docs, and I see at least five untitled documents just sitting there. How am I supposed to know what’s in there? Do I open up every single Untitled Document to find out what inside them? The world may never know. And it’s the worst feeling in the world when I’m looking for a specific document that has the idea I came up with at 3AM to solve all of my plot holes, but I vaguely remember not giving it a name, and now I have to sort through all of the Untitled documents to find the one I’m looking for. It may be a little tedious to sort through your documents and organize them, but it’ll probably save you a whole lot of time and frustration in the long run.

Google Docs Superiority 

Sorry to all of you Word users, but I do believe in Google Docs superiority. I just love not having to worry about saving my docs because I would cry if I forgot to save something, and then I lost everything that I had written. I’m not saying that you should absolutely use Google Docs, and a lot of these tips are transferrable to other platforms, but they will be Google Doc heavy. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter wether you chose to use Google Docs, Word, Scrivener, or Pages, but once you choose a platform that works best for you, your writing system, and your daily routine, I would stick to it just so all of your documents are on the same platform. One of the reasons I love Google Docs is because I can edit things I’ve written on my computer on my phone and vice-versa, so I never feel like I’m disconnected from my writing. Some people don’t like to write on their phones, so it doesn’t matter to them if they can write on their phones. Others don’t even like to write on electronic devices at all, so having a cache of notebooks, journals, and binders is the way to go. 

My Room Isn’t Even This Organized

No, literally, I can hardly keep my room clean, but my Google Docs folders are so immaculate. When you’ve decided on your platform of choice, I would start organizing everything into broader categories. I organize my big folders by WIP, poetry, personal, and crackhead/3 A.M randomness. Here is a picture for us visual learners: 

Having these larger folders is a great way just to separate all of your documents, so you have at the very least a vague idea of what you’re getting into when you open each of these folders. Today we’re going to be looking into the folder for my main WIP: The Trials of Flesh and Flames or TToFF. 

There’s a picture of the inside of my folder. I have 12 sub-folders with different categories. One for each book in the planned trilogy and a bunch for a bunch of other things. This helps me stay organized within my WIP. If I want to work on character development, I know I have a specific character development folder. If I’m in a worldbuilding mood, I go straight to the worldbuilding and lore folder. It also helps a little bit with productivity though no amount of perfectly organized folders will help with my insane procrastination problem. 

The Death of Untitled Documents

As I said earlier, I absolutely hate having Untitled Documents. Some people have whole systems that they’ve developed with decimals and Roman numerals and all sorts of things when it comes to naming all of their documents. Every time I try to do that to level up my writing organization, I end up never able to actually remember whatever system was in place. Instead, I find it a lot easier to use super straight-forward and blunt names. I also like the blunt names because it helps me when I’m searching for any of my documents later on. I may not remember a specific system name that I had, but if a scene is about two characters arguing and I title it Character A and Character B Argue (Draft 1), I’ll immediately see it when I’m looking through my folders, so I won’t waste time looking for it. 

Does This Spark Joy?

The answer is no. Half of the time, my writing does not spark joy and I am compelled to delete everything I have ever written without remorse. No matter how strong the compulsion is though, my limited self-control pulls through, I realize I am my biggest critic, and I stop myself. Even if you absolutely hate something that you’ve written, deleting it is never the solution. As you can see in one of the screenshots, I have a lovely little folder called Deleted Chunks. In that folder are, you guessed it, Deleted Chunks! A lot of times I actually have been grateful that I didn’t delete some of my little chunks. An old scene can fit perfectly into a new place, can help get the creative juices flowing for a new scene, or can be reworked into something completely new. Even if you don’t end up using the scene, sometimes going back and reading your old deleted scenes, can help you realize how much you’ve grown as a writer!

[enspey]

Hey look! Wip Wednesday and it’s not a wip. I actually finished a wip! HA! We won’t discuss how many more are unfinished 🫣

This is sort of how I’m imagining my MC Four from @thenumbersgameif. Putting on the front of chaos energy, but really just a cinnamon roll who can’t stand crowds or loud noises. Or at least that is how she started? She sort of took on a life of her own. 🤷‍♀️ So maybe not even an MC anymore? Just a fun concept. I dont know anymore.

She also likes puns (okay Im the one who likes puns, she inherited it from me, shush). She’ll tell anyone her name is Ivy. Get it. I. V. IV. Roman numeral four. Ha? It’s okay, I laughed and that is all that matters.

Im sure she doesn’t wear this when she’s working. But off hours? If it’s tacky and delightful, she’s wearing it. Good luck stopping her.

*I realized I almost forgot to color her knots. How dare I!

*How canon she is, idk yet, guess I’ll find out. When she’s not panicking or unconscious 😭. Everyone should read the IF tho. For reasons 👀 Which, they are looking for beta readers if you want to help out!

How old is too old to wear a sparkling tulle skirt? Asking for a friend.

[demonslayedher]

Thoughts on the Corp Rank and Pillar System

A little self-plugging first, in one of my fics I did have the birds launch a formal complaint about the Kamaboko boys not becoming Pillars after defeating Upper Moon 6. I had Oyakata-sama answer based on growth the boys still need to do, but going by the stated criteria, the injustice remains. Plus, there's that ranking system everyone forgot about until Inosuke was like, "it's on your hand, dude." And then it was never mentioned again. How are ranks determined? Is there more necessary to being a Pillar than filling the criteria? How does that hand thing even work? So many questions, but also so many clues strewn throughout canon and beyond.

What are the ranks?

The ranking system is according to “Jikkan,” or the “Ten Stems” ordinal system developed in Japanese Onmyodo, but has its origins in theories of the Heavenly and Earthly Stems of the Five Elements dating back to very, very ancient China. Not that I think that has any special meaning to the Corp; nowadays you could compare it to the use of Roman Numerals as a counting system in English, and historically it would make sense if the system has been in place since the dawn of the Corp.

For reference, from lowest to highest: Mizunoto -> Mizunoe -> Kanoto -> Kanoe -> Tsuchinoto -> Tsuchinoe -> Hinoto -> Hinoe -> Kinoto -> Kinoe What's with the hand thing? Plot convenience, I think. But if their grip has an effect on Nichirin blades, then who knows, maybe this can believably be tied together. Chapter 75 describes it as "Toukabori" (wisteria flower tattoo), a special technique and symbol of the Corp. Their hands were pricked at the Final Selection, which Inosuke understood the purpose of but Tanjiro did not. (I suppose Tanjiro might not had been told, but that is neither here nor there.) For Pillars, the fanbooks tell us that theirs is the kanji for their Breath. For example, Giyuu's would simply say "Water," Shinobu's would simply say "Insect," etc. What is the criteria for becoming a Pillar/Hashira? Canon, fanbooks, gaiden, and light novels tell us the following criteria for being a Pillar: 1. Be the strongest user of your Breath (this is perhaps implied) AND 2. Defeat one of the Twelve Moons OR 3. Defeat at least 50 demons and be of the Kinoe (10th of 10) rank. It seems to be implied that you need to accomplish Feat #2 on your own accord in order for this to count. Hence, Tanjiro wouldn't had gotten full credit for defeating Enmu, Gyutaro, or Hantengu, for the Flame, Sound, and Love Pillars put a lot of the work into enabling him to survive those battles long enough to get the final blow. Whether or not you need to be a Kinoe before defeating one of the Twelve Moons is unclear to me. In the novels, Sanemi was indeed a Kinoe before defeating Lower Moon 1, which he did with Masachika's help. If it were simply a matter of being strongest in your Breath, this automatically makes Tanjiro the Sun Breath/Hinokami Kagura Pillar, but being a Pillar is more than being the strongest in your perhaps totally unique Breath. If that were the case, Inosuke would had been a Pillar a long time ago. But does he really display the maturity necessary for holding up the Corp? (But I guess if I phrase it that way we could give a bunch of the poorly-adjusted-to-trauma Pillars a serious side-eye.) Why nine Pillars? Can there be more? I feel like the number nine might have had more significance when the story was in development, but that its importance subsided overtime (perhaps like the importance of ranks seems to have subsided). The first fanbook tells us the number 9 is because of the number of strokes in the kanji for "hashira" (柱). I've also heard it compared to the famed nine enormous pillars (technically groupings of three enormous pillars, making it 27) that have historically supported Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, with Oyakata-sama being like an Okuninushi-no-Mikoto (the lord of the lands, in Shinto mythology) figure. You can find other occurrences of pillars in multiples of nine in other historic pieces of grand architecture, like the eighteen pillars supporting Todaiji Temple (home to a humongous Buddha statue). But, in actuality, we only see a case of nine Pillars when Tanjiro is put under trial. It's implied that this is not the first time all nine Pillars have been gathered together, but in flashbacks from Pillar POV to other meetings, or in later events in canon, there have always been fewer than nine. In the Rengoku Gaiden, Oyakata-sama makes no secret of wanting to put Kyojuro to the test and have him join the ranks of the Pillars, for it is clear to everyone that there are openings which need to be filled (specifically Shinjuro's abandoned Flame Pillar seat, which like the Water Pillar seat has typically always been filled). Five Pillars (at the time, Water, Insect, Sound, Wind, and Rock) simply aren't enough to do all the work required of Pillars. By the Pillar Training Arc we're down to seven, but at this point they seem to be making do with that number and can instead focus on strengthening what they have. As for more than nine Pillars, I don't see it being a problem. The more the merrier, Oyakata-sama might say, and as long as someone earns that right I don't seem them getting refused a

spot. However, the bit about the nine strokes in "Hashira" in the first fanbook was in response to a question that mentions an "upper limit" of Pillars. This seems to imply that only the top nine cream of the crop will be recognized at a time. And hey, at the rate Pillars die, whoever deserves that recognition will probably get a chance at it. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE---a Q&A style Taisho Secret in volume 11 states that if there is an opening among the Pillars, someone of the Kinoe rank is chosen to fill it (it is not specified if they must be of the same Breath). If there isn't someone of Pillar caliber, however, they don't get to become a Pillar, though.

Can two people of the same Breath share the same Pillar spot?

Because Zenitsu can only perform the First Form and Kaigaku can do all but the First Form, Kuwajima Jigoro (former Thunder Pillar) had a dream of them sharing that spot together. However, it doesn't seem there is any precedent for this, and Kaigaku takes it as an insult. I see a lot of fanwork implying that, for instance, Sabito and Giyuu might share a Water Pillar spot, but even if they were both to fulfill the basic requirements, my sense is that the position of honor would fall to the stronger of the two (my inclination in this case is Sabito), but how that strength is determined might be arbitrary (whether in a matter of absolute strength, or, perhaps, strength in leadership qualities). I feel that the more junior one with Pillar qualifications, if not taken as a Tsuguko, would be treated as something like a vice-Pillar but given normal Corp assignments. (Ergo, they'd be treated like a first-in-line Kinoe as mentioned in the previous section.) When Sanemi and Masachika fought Upper Moon 1, they were both of the Kinoe rank and had potential for promotion to Pillarhood if they defeated that demon. They did, but only Sanemi survived, and he seems to stress how "only" he went on to become a Pillar even though both of them fought that battle. Had Masachika survived, I feel that instead of having a joint position (where one might fill in the inadequacies of the other, like in a Zenitsu/Kaigaku situation), just the more senior of the two, Masachika, may be granted the honor of filling the Wind Pillar seat, and Sanemi would probably be okay with that. With some exceptions we've seen throughout the Corp of swordsmen being set on promotions for recognition and salary's sake, the vast majority put the Corp's duty (to slay demons) above all else.

How long does it take to become a Pillar? In the Volume 11 Q&A, Gotouge tells us it usually takes five years, or two years if someone is fast. Whether that's 2~5 years from finishing the Final Selection or picking up the sword is unclear. For reference, the average length of time someone spends with their cultivator is one year (like Zenitsu), but they may go faster (Mitsuri, six months) or slower (Tanjiro, two years--though only one year was spent learning from Urokodaki). This set of Pillars is wicked strong and most of them seem to stomp all over this expectation, though. I'm writing this post first for reference on an attempted timeline of the Pillars' promotion rate. This set of Pillars is also especially strong, we know from the fanbooks that Kyojuro has taken other Tsuguko before but they quit because the training was too harsh, and Murata states in Chapter 134 that he's realized through the Pillar Training why the current round of Pillars generally have no Tsuguko. It's because they really are so far above the average swordsmen in skill level that every Tsuguko would get discouraged and quit. Conversely, this current round of ridiculously strong Pillars is concerned that the Corp as a whole is full of unsatisfactory swordsmen.

On that note, Giyuu has been waiting at least four years (based on his presence in a Pillar meeting flashback where Kanae was present) for some other Water Breath user to attain the criteria for Pillarhood. Despite Water Breath users being the most common among the Corp, it goes to show just how difficult it is for anyone to attain this.

What is the usual rate of promotion?

If the swordsmen are generally as poor quality as the Pillars suspect (sorry, Murata), then advancement must be slow, and a lot of them probably get killed off before they've even been around very long. With the average skill level among the Corp being so low, that's probably why the extremely skilled and/or determined members advance at such a monstrously quick rate. For example, in the Natagumo Arc, Murata has been at this for eight years and is only a Kanoe rank. Kanao passed her Final Selection probably not even two months ago and she is already a Tsuchinoto, one rank above Murata. We know Murata is doing his best, but a Taisho Secret tells us that enemies probably would only picture a very light glimmer of water effects from his sword instead of the roaring gush we see from Tanjiro. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Murata only survived his Final Selection due to Sabito's involvement. Kanao, meanwhile, seems to have more innate ability than Shinobu (at least according to Douma's observation), and being in a Pillar's household, she might have had a Nichirin blade she could use right away to start taking missions while hers was being made, and since Flower Breathing seems to stress evasion (see here and here), she likely doesn't spend as much time down with injury. Also, being in the company of a Pillar, she's probably gone straight into fighting higher level demons. This makes me assume there may be a lot taken into account when assigning ranks. For instance, the number and caliber of demons you face, how much you contributed in battle, your actual abilities in your Breath, or even if a Pillar takes you as a Tsuguko or puts in a good word for you (perhaps that was something in Genya's case, for although he wasn't an official Tsuguko, he and Kanao were of equal Hinoto rank by the Infinity Fortress arc). Also worth noting, Genya was aiming really hard for Pillar rank and probably stretched himself a bit thin. I'd like to think his abilities decreased the amount of time he spent in recovery, too. Tanjiro, meanwhile, has attained Kanoe rank by the Pleasure Quarters arc (so has Inosuke, it's probably implied that Zenitsu has too), and the three of them are all Hinoe rank by the Infinity Fortress arc (3rd from the top, and one rank above Genya and Kanao). So if this is how far Tanjiro climbs after beheading Enmu, Gyutaro, and Hantengu, then... WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE INOSUKE AND ZENITSU UP AGAINST DURING THE SWORDSMAN VILLAGE ARC??!?! I generally want the anime only to follow the manga content and only make slight additions like they have so far, but a concurrent arc to show what these two were doing? I would take that, Ufotable, I WOULD GLADLY ACCEPT THAT. Also note worthy, Kaigaku seems to had still been training at the same time Zenitsu was, though he started (and presumably went to his Final Selection) sooner. We don't know what rank he was, but he had to have been insanely talented (enough for Kokushibo to be impressed, and for Kaigaku to have not suffered immediate serious injury like Muichiro did, though this could be chalked up to Kokushibo decided early on not to harm him like that, or Kaigaku is doubled-over with internal injuries, who knows). It probably drove him cra-a-a-zy to have seen Zenitsu climb the ranks so fast, and since Kaigaku wouldn't have had the opportunity to face Twelve Moons like Zenitsu did, it's very likely Zenitsu may have been of a higher rank than him (ouch).

How does one become a Tsuguko? Are Tsuguko required?

In the name of ongoing support built into the Corp, Tsuguko are probably highly encouraged. Pillars can expect to get killed off at any time, just like anyone else, and it helps to have highly polished swordsmen ready to take their place. However, the Pillars are busy, and may not all have personal interest in training someone, and Tsuguko are not required. Swordsmen can either apply to be Tsuguko, or they might be recruited. Basically, you just need to have direct acceptance from that Pillar. I feel like I read somewhere about Mitsuri being Kyojuro's student in the context of Tsuguko discussion, but I'm having trouble finding that mention again because I want to check if she was officially called a Tsuguko or not. The reason I want to check is because she was not yet a Corp member at that time (effectively making Kyojuro a Cultivator, remarkable that he could teach her so much so fast even while keeping up his regular missions), and Kyojuro himself was not yet a Pillar. It's generally accepted in the fandom that she was a "Tsuguko" for that time, and I'm pretty sure the note I'm thinking of stressed that she was just too original and this was why she didn't become Kyojuro's successor. I know this came out will before the Rengoku Gaiden too, wherever it was I saw this.

Accepting that, this means you don't have to be a Pillar to take someone under your wing to polish them, even if they won't get official recognition like a Pillar's Tsuguko would (like how Kanao is off-limits to Tengen as she does have this official title, but Aoi is free game no matter how peeved Shinobu would be about it). Shinobu does display a strong interest in passing on her knowledge (and death wish against Douma, or demons in general perhaps), and we know she had taken at least three short-lived Tsuguko before Kanao. It's possible that she took them under her wing even while she was in the process of working extremely hard to attain the Pillar rank after Kanae's death.

Also interesting, and perhaps saying more about the Butterfly Mansion dynamics, the other household members don't seem to recall much about these dead Tsuguko like they fondly remember Kanae. I suspect they weren't treated as "family" and some distance was maintained. Kanao likewise became something different when she became a Tsuguko (and joined the Corp at all, against Shinobu's wishes). She can no longer call Shinobu "sister," but instead, "master." Knowing that Kanao now stands a very high chance of dying suddenly, it's as though Shinobu forced a professional distance (if not for her sake, then for the little girls' sake?).

Unrelated, since the main criteria of a Tsuguko is having the Pillar's approval and being someone whom the Pillar gives personal training to, then in an alternate universe, a Water Pillar Sabito could take Kinoe-rank Giyuu and a Wind Pillar Masachika could take Kinoe-rank Sanemi, meaning they essentially work as a set (the Pillar assigning missions to the Tsuguko, likely working together), train together, and have someone as a sort of predetermined back-up Pillar.

Not quite related, but how often is the Final Selection held?

For some reason I used to believe it was once a year, but I can find no indication of this. If five survivors in one week is not surprising, then at the rate swordsmen get killed off, then they most host the Final Selection many times a year. EDIT: The reason was Giyuu, chapter 130. Since he says "that year's Final Selection" a couple times, it makes it seem limited to once a year. Still, that makes me wonder how much overlap Kaigaku and Zenitsu would have had in training if that were the case.