#like imagining them as part of a society that evolved past the need for true wings

[knot-doing-it]

This was fun.

Here's a scrap angel mechanic. Call them Rust.

Picrewの「Bright's Picrew Hell」でつくったよ！ https://picrew.me/share?cd=C3Q41k73xq #Picrew #Brights_Picrew_Hell

[bleachbleachbleach]

Hello, do you think that Unohana being the first Kenpachi was a retcone or not? And what would you have done different with her story?

Thank you for allow me to ask you.

Thank you for this question! I feel like “retcon” has gained a negative connotation, where a retcon becomes a critique to levy against something. But the fact of an audience or the author (or both) assuming something to be true, only to find that it is not, isn't automatically a bad thing.

Do I think, in-universe, Unohana’s co-workers were aware of Unohana Yachiru?

Most of them, no. Everyone’s too busy and too young and the institutional memory is too poor and they respect her too much for it to come up. Though I think everyone has always been well aware that Unohana could kill them all if she wanted to. It’s the “had she ever wanted to” part they probably hadn’t really considered, or felt need to. They probably largely still haven’t, because so much was/is going on and they have so much to do and process. I’m sure Isane would appreciate some friends, though.

Do I think we, as the audience, had to reassess how we knew Unohana?

I mean, I suppose, but I don’t think it feels, like, egregiously out of step to me. It didn't take me out of the narrative. And I say this as a writer who inflicts that feeling on myself all the time (unfortunately for me). We know how long Unohana’s been around (Kyouraku makes mention of this in TBTP), and we know what Soul Society is like, and we’ve seen her ice out rowdy 11th members in her hallways. If someone pitched me “nice lady is secretly bloodthirsty af” as a premise, I can’t say it would immediately appeal to me. Who doesn’t have a bloodthirsty past in this genre, lol yawn.

But I enjoy Unohana’s story in its particularity very much. I don’t think it negates how we knew her before, or tarnishes it, or cheapens it, or renders it false. We have a woman who is/was both/an; someone who has enjoyed the sword; someone who learned healing arts in order to prolong her fights; but ALSO as someone who has nurtured generations of healers, and saved the lives of countless; brings her A-game to these dumb captain’s meetings, and built the entire 4th as we know it. You don’t do any of that if you don’t believe in it for real. Not well.

Do I think Kubo knew about Unohana Yachiru when he started Bleach?

I don’t know, but I hope not! I hope he had no clue, for years and years! I hope he had a retcon moment, because I cannot imagine anything more soul-depleting than working for years and years and years on a story you already knew everything about.

I believe that writing should be an act of discovery, a means of processing and knowledge-creation in itself. And I think that is beautiful about sprawling serialized works is that you get to see the creative endeavor—not laid bare, I suppose, but in a state of dishabille. You get to see the ideas grow and evolve and sometimes totally about-face. You can see the misses and the “actually we’re gonna drop that storyline” and the “lol we should have dropped this, but now we can’t” and the elegant saves. There’s an element of live theatre to it, except perhaps with more of a puzzle to it, too. Because the creation isn’t fully live; there’s a time-delay; there’s space to look at what has been written and ferret out where one might go from there. Like ferrets, sometimes the solutions are elegant, and sometimes they are simply bold. I love both possibilities.

If there’s one thing this blog believes in to its very core, it’s in the premise of “yes and.” Whether reading canon or creating in fandom, we believe in going on the journey and figuring out what we can make of it, or what we can make with it. On this blog, we've talked about sprawling serial canons as being full of invitations, and I think that's true for Kubo, too. Design your world with plenty of open doors, or closed ones, or doors defined loosely, to pick and choose and experiment with or abandon later on.

I’m not saying we like everything Bleach has to offer, LOL. We do not. Or that we think Kubo as a creator is beyond reproach. Generally, I don’t really care to linger too much on what Kubo does or thinks. But I do hope he’s enjoying himself. Time is precious and we all deserve to enjoy ourselves more than what this world offers on its own

[kemetic-dreams]

In my research I learned that the word comes from tribus in Latin. Its earliest usage was in the time of the Roman empire where there were three original tribes, but more were added to organize the voting system.  At first, tribe may have been related to ethnicity, but as more were added, it became about geographical location, rather than kinship.   Tribe was a territorial voting unit in the Roman state. I've seen the word used to talk about Celtic and Germanic histories. It also became associated with the Hebrew people of the Torah and Bible. You must have heard of the 12 Tribes of Israel. The connotations evolved, and the problems with it began when it got into the hands of anthropologists. (Ironically, I have a degree in anthropology and I think it's a fascinating discipline; Good thing my favorite anthro professor back in my university days wisely recommended that we understand the controversies around the term.)

Truth be told, it offends many people. Here's why:

#1 For European missionaries and explorers who went out to conquer people, the word "tribal" was synonymous to "savage" and "primitive." It's mainstream connotation is rooted in colonial-era racist ideology. The word immediately conjures stereotypical imagery of brown people with bones in their noses or naked warriors running around in a rainforest

That “tribal” word

by

Chika Oduah

I cringe whenever I see that word in a news article. And I see it so often in journalese. Stories about developing countries often feature phrases like tribal healer, tribal land, tribal conflict, tribesmen, tribal chief, tribal wear, tribal name, tribal rhythm. The word is so problematic, I don't even know where to begin. I will suggest this - get some education on its history.

The Myth of the Noble Savage

The word plays into a historic imagination that classifies indigenous people outside of Europe into two categories of savages: the noble savage and the brutal savage. That leads me to number two.

The bottom-line problem with the idea of tribe is that it is intellectually lazy.

#2 Societies are constantly changing. No matter where you go, you're bound to see it. Technology, the spread of ideas, education, globalization, all of these elements contribute to sociocultural changes. But the word "tribal" freezes societies in a primordial past (real or imagined) where people wore animal skins and ran with wolves. I think it's hard for many people in the Western world to accept that societies in Africa (in other developing regions around the world) are dynamic. It's hard for some to grasp concepts of modernity in such places.   Even the most remote, far flung communities are not the same today as they were just 20 years ago.

The tribe, a long respected category of analysis in anthropology, has recently been the object of some scrutiny by anthropologists ... Doubts about the utility of the tribe as an analytical category have almost certainly arisen out of the rapid involvement of peoples, even in the remotest parts of the globe, in political, economic and sometimes direct social relationship with industrial nations. The doubts, however, are based ultimately on the definition and meaning which different scholars give to the term 'tribe', its adjective 'tribal', and its abstract form 'tribalism' ~ Dr. James Clyde Mitchell

Westerners have romanticized certain ethnic groups, like the Maasai in eastern Africa, because they have this romantic idea that the Maasai people are living the exact same way as their ancestors did. Untouched by modernity. But that's simply not true. And where does this desperate need to have ethnic groups permanently living in primordial or precolonial states come from? Is the "primitive," noble savage look more marketable for tourism? That leads me to number three.

#3 The relentless attempt to cast Africans are primitive, unchanging people relates to another popular notion that the past, when there was no internet, airplanes or sliced bread, was more peaceful, more pure and less complicated than modern times. The problem with that is that it pushes an identity (based on a misconstrued premise) on other people. It's someone from the West saying I want the kind of African who lives in a thatch-roofed hut in a village in Niamey, not the African who lives in a  brick home in a Harare suburb.  Africans are constantly being defined by the Western world, submitting to the names and descriptions put upon them. In my favorite work by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, the character Odenigbo says, "But my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” (I'll talk about Africans using the word tribe further down!).

In the Americas, Africa, Australia, and elsewhere, colonial administrators applied these terms [tribe and band] to specific groups almost immediately upon contact. ~Encyclopedia Brittanica

#4 The word "tribal" distorts reality because it leads to misguided ideas of what is authentic and what is not. This is when a Westerner, looking at a picture of expensive cars parked at a chic hotel in Accra, says "this is not the real Africa." I hear the comment very often because there's this prevailing perception that the real Africa is "tribal." Its stick, bones, dirt and chiefs draped in leopard print. Anything outside of that, according to that line of thought, has been touched (contaminated, even) by the Western world, therefore is inauthentic. Again, it's that insistence on denying dynamism, that change happens. And that prerequisite applies to people, too. The African woman who graduated from Harvard Business School, works as a bank executive and wears Chanel suits is not a real African. The woman chopping firewood with a naked baby on her back is and gets bonus points for authenticity if the child has flies swarming around the face.

Over to You, Is the Word 'Tribe' Offensive? - BBC World Service

#4 For peoples who experienced oppression, suppression or marginalization from European colonizers or their descendants, the word "tribe" triggers memories of a traumatic past.  This is especially true of Native Americans, also called the First Nations. (I remember learning about the Trail of Tears in elementary school and feeling quite sad about it.)  Thousands of Native Americans were brutally uprooted from their ancestral lands when Europeans and their descendants decided to forcibly expand their presence in the Americas. Today, the U.S. government still officially uses the word "tribes" to refer to Native Americans, but I have read that they prefer to be called "nations" or "people."

#5 There's also this thing with numbers. British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, originator of the Dunbar's number theory, said that 500 - 1,500 people (who follow their ancestral culture, beliefs of unity, laws, and rights; are self-sufficient and have strong emotion towards their lands) can be classified as a one tribe. Those are pretty much the same numbers that other nineteenth century anthropologists used, defining a tribe as a human society made up of several bands. A band was a small, egalitarian, kin-based group of perhaps 10–50 people. So when you're looking at the large ethnic groups in Africa today, some numbering millions, they can't be described as tribes.

Tribe has no coherent meaning. What is a tribe? The Zulu in South Africa, whose name and common identity was forged by the creation of a powerful state less than two centuries ago, and who are a bigger group than French Canadians, are called a tribe. So are the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Botswana and Namibia, who number in the hundreds. The term is applied to Kenya's Maasai herders and Kikuyu farmers, and to members of these groups in cities and towns when they go there to live and work.

Tribe is used for millions of Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin, who share a language but have an eight-hundred year history of multiple and sometimes warring city-states, and of religious diversity even within the same extended families. Tribe is used for Hutu and Tutsi in the central African countries of Rwanda and Burundi. Yet the two societies (and regions within them) have different histories. And in each one, Hutu and Tutsi lived interspersed in the same territory. They spoke the same language, married each other, and shared virtually all aspects of culture. At no point in history could the distinction be defined by distinct territories, one of the key assumptions built into "tribe." ~Pambazuka News

Zambia is slightly larger than Texas. The country has approximately 10 million inhabitants and a rich cultural diversity. English is the official language, but Zambia also boasts 73 different indigenous languages. While there are many indigenous Zambian words that translate into "nation," "people," "clan," "language," "foreigner," "village" or "community," there are none that easily translate into "tribe." Sorting Zambians into a fixed number of "tribes" was a byproduct of British colonial rule over Northern Rhodesia (as Zambia was known prior to independence in 1964).

#6 In anthropological theories of social evolution, "tribe" is lower than "civilization." After studying early cultures in Central and South America, American neo-evolutionary cultural anthropologist Elman Rogers Service devised an influential categorization scheme for the political character of human social structures: band, tribe, chiefdom and state.

A band is the smallest unit of political organization, consisting of only a few families and no formal leadership positions. Tribes have larger populations but are organized around family ties and have fluid or shifting systems of temporary leadership. Chiefdoms are large political units in which the chief, who usually is determined by heredity, holds a formal position of power. States are the most complex form of political organization and are characterized by a central government that has a monopoly over legitimate uses of physical force, a sizeable bureaucracy, a system of formal laws, and a standing military force.

With this understanding, again, many of the large ethnic groups in Africa's modern nation states cannot be called tribes.

But... a lot of Africans use "tribe" to describe themselves. The word is taught in schools across African countries, because the secular educational system was largely created by Westerners. That's the basis of the ongoing  "decolonize education" campaign in South Africa. Check this out: When Africans learn English, they are often taught that "tribe" is the term that English-speakers will recognize. But what underlying meaning in their own languages are Africans translating when they say "tribe"? In English, writers often refer to the Zulu tribe, whereas in Zulu the word for the Zulu as a group is isizwe. Zulu linguists translate isizwe as "nation" or "people." Isizwe refers both to the multi-ethnic South African nation and to ethno-national peoples that form a part of the multi-ethnic nation. When Africans use the word "tribe" in general conversation, they do not draw on the negative connotations of primitivism the word has in Western countries.

But there has been a decades-long push by many African scholars and media professionals to get media outlets, textbooks and academia to stop using "tribe" and "tribal." Some have addressed their concerns to The New York Times, among other news publications.  Here's how Bill Keller, New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning executive editor from 2003 to 2011 responded:

"I get it. Anyone who uses the word "tribe" is a racist. [. . .] It's a tediously familiar mantra in the Western community of Africa scholars. In my experience, most Africans who live outside the comforts of academia (and who use the word "tribe" with shameless disregard for the political sensitivities of American academics) have more important concerns."

The logic here is, since the real Africans are using the word themselves, then what's the big deal? Well, for all the reasons I just presented and more. And recently we're seeing a wave of companies and organizations come out to announce that they will not longer use "tribe" and "tribal." The New York Times is now using "ethnic group" and "ethnic." (I have issues with ethnic. At a Walmart, I noticed that the aisle for hair products tailored to people of African descent was the "ethnic hair" aisle; that's literally what the sign said). These entities may have been motivated by political correctness or could be trying to save face. I don't know. I know that, what to do about the tribe/tribal word is a conversation that matters.

[thequibblah]

director's commentary for the parts about how lily views sex in chapter 38? i found this so interesting and relatable and i love how it's so different from her attitudes in the solar power oneshot, it just shows how much awesome character growth is to come!

this is really the tallest task i've given myself with lily's character development LOLLLL but i at least have strong feelings about it so here we go

so. when i started writing this fic a significant question was what lily's level of romantic experience was because that will factor into not just her relationship w dex but also how her feelings for james evolve over time. (also it obviously impacts her and how she thinks of romance!) i find myself not very compelled by a lily who is waiting for marriage/love without like....a reason or a well-established underlying character explanation for that. i find it more interesting to explore when a principled character maybe has a less established principle, and finally has to come up against it and make a decision. (as a sidenote, i also wanted to write a lily whose fears and anxieties and desires are more in line with what i/my female friends talked about and thought about in high school)

lily re: sex has been a huge thread-the-needle sitch. like many in Our Society she has complicated feelings about the role of sex in her life, as a good girl tee em, but i also didn't want to establish a weird madonna/whore situation with the female cast of the fic, like, Only Some Girls Have Sex. considering that lily herself grapples with being a good girl and, well, still containing multitudes, i wanted to think out those complications through her.

at the same time, i think there's a tendency in fic (or really, any sort of romance story) to make sex super black and white. like, you have it with the Wrong Person and so it's bad, but then you have it with the Right Person and everything clicks! it's certainly true that you can have less-than-good sex with someone and the reason for that is them, but i really didn't (and don't!) want to make it seem like it'll be a simple and easy switch to james for lily because they're going to fall in love. it won't be! don't let the oneshot fool you!

she has things to figure out, and that, to some degree, is unaffected by who she's with (or isn't with). she's not like, wow it was such a mistake to have sex with this guy because i didn't love him! she's not like wow it was such a mistake to have sex with this guy because it wasn't mindblowing (she had low-ish expectations, which mary might say is a problem in and of itself but that's a separate thing lol)! it's all very convoluted and i don't want to delve too deep into questions that i mean to address in the fic itself.

but, anyway, though lily does do the deed, it's not entirely separable in her mind from residual shame. and who among us who experiences misogyny doesn't know that feeling lolllll. she's not walking around handwringing about how she's sinned against god, partly because catholic guilt would add about ten dimensions of complication to this fic and also because i was not raised christian, and don't feel well-equipped to go there. more than religion lily is anxious about having played against type.

this is made harder for her in contrast — obviously we judge ourselves not in absolutes but relative to those around us. so on the one hand lily has people like petunia who believe in propriety and undoubtedly look down on sex before marriage, and on the other she has friends like mary who are very ~modern~ in their sensibilities. rather than the latter being reassuring, though, i imagine it's....almost a barrier in its own way, because she sees a friend who's cooler and freer than her and is like, mary would do this because she's like this, and i'm demonstrably not like this, so i shouldn't do this (no matter mary's frank conversations on the subject!)

and in between all this is the fact that....she's a person who experiences desire! complication!!!! she wants something that she's not sure she should want, even though she feels that other people are free to have the same thing:

“Mare, are you really going to take a magazine’s advice on becoming a...truly sexual woman?” Despite her amusement, she half-stuttered over the word, even though she knew there was nothing to be shy about. It was the seventies, for crying out loud. They could talk about such things now. Said descriptors just did not necessarily apply to her.

in ch. 9 when she asks mary about sex, she really wants an answer that will absolve her of those complicated uncertain feelings — and of course mary can't give it to her. no one can!

so she's bearing all that baggage and trying to forge forward with the sensibility of well, i shouldn't be shy about this! it's the 70s! we're past that! without considering that just because society has apparently come so far (which, has it even? lol) that doesn't mean she's ready to go that far. and that was what i was pushing with the interlude bits immediately around the sexytimes:

Get it over with, a voice in her head said. The first time wouldn’t be the best time. All she had to do was cross this one hurdle and she could stop feeling so bloody nervous, like she was at the edge of a cliff she’d never be able to climb back up [...] and if only she could get over her silly hangup she’d be a lot less tense. That was just a fact. Everyone knew it about her. Even good girls needed to loosen up. Right? Right. This decision-making took a split second in her mind; she had rehearsed each argument so many times that she did not need very long to run through it again. So without a hint of hesitation she said, “Yes.”

and its not a coincidence that this comes right after a flashback to doris and her friend:

“Living together,” Lily’s mother sighed, her head angled towards her friend. “And she was such a sweet girl when I had her in school, too, so studious—” “Oh, yes,” Gertie said, nodding vigorously, “I always thought she’d wait to marry, let alone get involved with someone so soon—” “And like this!” Doris sighed once more.

of course lily can all too vividly imagine someone else saying that exact thing about her

this reads like so much word vomit LOL but thank you it was fun to try and explain my thinking here!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN HACKERS

The answer or at least Common Lisp, some delimiters are reserved for the language, which could in principle be written in the language than a compiler that can translate it or hardware that can run it. No one loves it. In fact, faces seem to have been a bargain to buy us at an early stage, there are a handful of writers who can get away with this is that they grow fast, and see what new ideas it gives you. Better a narrow description than a vague one. So most hackers will tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, everything grinds to a halt when they switched to raising money. It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of the moment, but some of the money would go to the founders. There are lots of good examples. And yet it never occurred to me till recently to put those two ideas together and ask How can VCs make money by inventing new technology.

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8. It may be surprisingly large; people overvalue physical stuff. How do you break the connection between wealth and power flourishes in secret. The thing is, VCs are pretty good at reading people. People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking. I spend a lot of them. Probably because startups are so small. Like many startup founders, and certainly not you as an investor. The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of knowing what to do. If you seem like you'll be one of those they remember. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. My father's entire industry breeder reactors disappeared that way.

Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most hackers. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism.1 At the most recent Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found ourselves saying a lot of equally good startups that actually didn't happen. The wrong people like it. Before Durer tried making engravings, no one wants to look like a fool. As well as being a bad use of time, if your business model seems spectacularly wrong, that will push the stuff you want investors to remember out of their heads. Mathematicians have always felt this way about axioms—the fewer, the better—and I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. Understand why it's worth investing in, you don't have to argue simply that there are about 15 companies a year that will be familiar to a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. Sound is a good instinct; investors dislike unbalanced teams. Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding between different kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past, everyone wants funding from them, so they get the pick of all the things we do to poor countries now. To change the interface both have to agree to change it at once.2 I've never heard anyone say that they have better hackers.

Bring us your startups early, said Google's speaker at the Startup School. Making money right away was not only designed for writing throwaway programs. Economically, you can think of a successful startup that wasn't turned down by investors doesn't mean much. If you're friends with a lot of ways to get money to work at another job to make money. In a big company. It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. Imitating it was like pretending to have gout in order to seem rich. But often memory will be the most demanding user of a company's products. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the important thing were becoming a member of this new group.

Otherwise all the minor details left unspecified in the termsheet will be interpreted to your disadvantage. The central issue is picking the right startups is for investors. Generally, the garage guys envy the big bang method. Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love that's all too true, however. This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters. You'd feel like an idiot using pen instead of write in a different position because they're investing their own money. What about using it to write software. You can do math this way. One is to work with him on something. I doubt you could ever make yourself into a great hacker doing that; and two, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

The top 10 startups account for 8. But there might be things that appealed particularly to men, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will push the stuff you want investors to remember out of their heads. That's why oil paintings look so different from watercolors. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. That's kind of hard to imagine. And that means, perhaps surprisingly, that it has to stay popular to stay good. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the water by a talk-show host's autobiography. Yeah, sure, but first you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure.

They passed. The faster you cycle through projects, the faster you'll evolve. If you can't ensure your own security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of time or you won't get a share in the excitement, but if there had been some way just to work super hard and get paid a lot more common. It means arguments of the form Life is too short for something. Both customers and investors will be who else is investing? In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity.3 News. Though somewhat humiliating, this is a net win.4 They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of paying, as you approach in the calculus sense a description of something that could be a bad thing for New York.

Notes

Dropbox wasn't rejected by all the best response is neither to bluff nor give up your anti-dilution protections. The founders want to write it all yourself. In principle yes, of S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 3. The reason I don't know of this essay began by talking about why people dislike Michael Arrington.

At the time of its identity. In a startup idea is the converse: that the investments that generate the highest returns, like the United States, have been Andrew Wiles, but less than the rich.

I use the word wealth, the more educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while everyone else microscopically poorer, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the older you get, the best intentions. 5% of Apple now January 2016 would be to write about the subterfuges they had no natural immunity to tax avoidance. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell your company into one? It's hard to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap.

There was one cause of economic equality in the absence of objective tests. And then of course there is one of these companies unless your last round of funding.

Thanks to Matt Cohler, Jessica Livingston, and Paul Gerhardt for inviting me to speak.

[cinema-tv-etc]

‘Bridgerton’ Isn’t Bad Austen — It’s An Entirely Different Genre

Critics and viewers have dinged the show for being a cliché-ridden period piece or a sloppy historical drama. But it’s neither: It’s Regency romance, and it’s spectacular.

By Claire Fallon

I was deep in a Regency romance binge a few years ago when I pitched a highly self-interested piece to my editor: an investigation into why this didn’t exist onscreen.

This was a creature apart from the Jane Austen adaptations and sedate period pieces I already enjoyed, or sexy but bloody cable costume dramas. A Regency romance is set in a fantasy version of British high society in the early 19th century, and the central action revolves around the courtship between a woman (often a well-bred beauty) and a man (often a rakish peer). They consummate their attraction in improbably acrobatic sexual encounters, and then they live happily ever after.

In the post-2016 election malaise, these novels became my anxiety palliative of choice. They piled up next to my bed and in my e-reader. But sometimes I wanted more, wanted to see the gossamer petticoats and lingering glances and gently unfastened bodices. The piece I pitched never materialized, but the object of my longing did. On Christmas Day 2020, Shondaland’s “Bridgerton” arrived on Netflix.

What ensued was both somewhat exhilarating — getting to see my Regency escapism come to life — and unnerving. My private indulgence, one generally viewed with dismissiveness if not contempt by non-romance readers, had become the target of a full-blown cultural discourse. “Bridgerton” was met with valid and vital critiques, especially over its treatment of consent, but also ones that made me wince: that it was formulaic, predictable, vapid, historically inaccurate, best suited for teens.

Many of the critiques, understandably, seemed rooted in unfamiliarity with the genre’s conventions, or in the expectation that “Bridgerton,” which is based on a series of books by Julia Quinn, would resemble a “Pride and Prejudice” remake. “You don’t get it!” I wanted to shout. “That’s not what this is!” The historical romance has finally gone mainstream — and that means a whole new audience is learning how to read a genre so long relegated to the margins. Sometimes that can be a bumpy ride.

With its bounty of sherbet-hued satin gowns, scandal rags full of malicious gossip, unblinkingly earnest romance, and on-screen lovemaking, “Bridgerton” seems to defy easy categorization for many critics, journalists and viewers — and even Regé-Jean Page, who stars as the smoldering Duke of Hastings.

“It’s a little bit of Jane Austen meets ‘Gossip Girl’ with maybe ‘49 Shades [of Grey’],” he told The Wrap in a December interview. Critics and viewers, at their wits’ ends trying to make sense of this sexy, gossipy, frothy Regency costume drama, also tried to characterize it in terms of beloved on-screen classics: “Pride and Prejudice,” “Downton Abbey,” and, yes, “Gossip Girl.” These comparisons convey some bafflement, an uncertainty about how to categorize a show that isn’t really a realist historical drama, nor an edgy satire, nor a campy soap.

Though it’s true that Austen was the inspiration behind the whole subgenre — the first Regency romance novelist, Georgette Heyer, was emulating Austen’s work — it has evolved into a well-established genre with its own tropes, conventions and standards.

“There’s a way that those kinds of incredibly popular adaptations of Austen will make you, I think, expect that you’re watching a certain kind of thing, and romance novels are not trying to do the same thing at all,” critic Aaron Bady said in a phone conversation. “If you go in watching ‘Bridgerton’ and say, ‘I think I’m watching Jane Austen,’ you’re going to be disappointed. It feels a little Jane Austen-y, but it doesn’t work like a Jane Austen novel.”

Nor is period romance merely a form of realist period fiction. In her review of the show, Patricia Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University, placed it in a long artistic tradition of Black women depicted in Regency settings. But ultimately, she said in a phone interview, “Nobody’s reading Julia Quinn because they’re looking for disquisitions on historical precedent.”

Bursting though a romance novel may be with carefully researched, period-accurate details about Vauxhall entertainments, Almack’s vouchers or ribboned chemises, these novels really aren’t about the Regency era, or at least not primarily.

“Historical romance does a different kind of work than historical fiction,” Sarah MacLean, a popular historical romance author, told me during a phone call. “The work of the romance novel is not to tell the story of the past. It is to hold a mirror to the present.”

By building a love story between the primary couple, one that is guaranteed to end “happily ever after” or “happy for now,” a romance novel not only provides escapism and the heart-pounding rush of vicarious passion, but a space in which to explore how romantic relationships can and should be, and how women can find fulfillment and happiness. And that means these stories have little to do with how the marriage market of Regency high society actually functioned; they’re about what readers — predominantly women — want to see in their lives today.

“The appeal of the time period for readers is very much about being able to distance readers from certain kinds of social issues and then reframe them as a reflection of society now,” MacLean explained. In the 1970s, novels typically featured brooding alpha males who took what they wanted sexually ― a narrative device, MacLean argued, for the fictional heroines of the time to have plenty of sex without being seen as loose and deserving of punishment. Historical romance novels today often feature heroes and heroines having what seem like rather anachronistically tender exchanges about consent.

Ella Dawson, a sex and culture critic, sees period romance as a way to provide a balm — an experience in which violence and trauma are, if not absent, superseded by a reassurance of ultimate well-being — while also walking readers through more thorny questions.

“Romance as a genre is really interested in consent, in diversity representation, in political issues,” she said. “Romances are so infused with these issues that I [am] really passionate about, and they explore it through this really fun, romantic, swoony, but still very intellectual, thoughtful, accessible lens.”

As odd as it felt to see a straightforward romance adaptation dissected as if it were a failed attempt at matching Jane Austen, it makes sense. Because the genre is generally regarded with such disdain in mainstream culture, it occupies a rather marginalized niche. A non-romance reader is unlikely to have a firm grasp of many things about the genre, outside of well-worn jokes about throbbing members and Fabio’s flowing hair, and though romance is among the bestselling genres in the book industry, it’s rarely adapted for TV or film.

Why has this omission persisted for so long? “I can’t imagine that it isn’t a huge amount [due to] patriarchy, in the sense that for the same reason it gets disdained on the page, it gets disdained on the screen,” said MacLean. To this day, the people deciding which films and shows to finance are almost entirely men. Shonda Rhimes is that rare exception — a woman with creative control over a TV empire, and a fan of the Quinn series.

Practical obstacles to adapting romance also pop up. A novel stuffed with sex scenes and building toward a tidy happy ending may be tricky to adapt for network TV, which needs to keep things a bit cleaner — and keep the narrative drama going indefinitely.

And it’s not just the network TV standards and the tidy endings. The heightened reality and bodice-unclasping of the genre, Matthew said, rely on an intimacy between the reader and the page that’s difficult to translate to the screen.

“I think the plot lines are bananas. I think they’re so extreme that they strain credulity,” she said, laughing. “You have to believe that a sane man, an adult, would say, ‘Oh, I’m just not going to have children so I can spite my father.’ It only works if it’s you with a glass of wine, kind of throwing yourself over to the world of romance.” It’s awkward to sit with someone else, knowing they’re watching the same melodramatic story unfold, partaking in a pleasure that feels somewhat private, if not embarrassing. “We all have these fan worlds that when they’re exposed to other people that aren’t a part of that world we might feel protective of, or feel bashful,” she said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bridgerton-netflix-romance-genre_n_60086fd5c5b6ffcab969dafa?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[michaelbranch]

A Brief Summary of Ideas: The Madness of Crowds

*These summaries are kept intentionally very brief, just hitting what I consider some of the important/interesting takeaways, most word-for-word or paraphrased. My goal is also to stick to ideas/principals that might guide others (or my future self) in deciding the value of a read (or re-reading). T = takeaway, Q = Question

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity

Author: Douglas Murray

Assumption that a heightened moral knowledge comes with being an oppressed/minority group. "Speaking as a ..."

All these causes started as legitimate human rights campaigns.

Gay

Can't award yourself the right to attribute motives to others that you can't see but which you suspect. Prerequisite for avoiding perpetual confrontation is an ability to listen to people's words and hold some trust in them.

Problem of changing societal positions so swiftly is that unexplored issues and arguments are left behind in the wake.

We still don't have much idea as to why some people are gay.

Hardware = something people can't change (and thus shouldn't be judged on). Software = can be changed (and thus may be available for judgement). Inevitably there will be a push to make some software issues into hardware.

LGBT groupings composition is unsustainable and contradictory. Internal frictions and contradictions even within groupings.

Some heterosexuals are genuinely disturbed by gay people. Plenty of stages between absolute equanimity and ease around people and a desire to violently attack them.

Marxist Foundations

See society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions evolved over time, but solely through the prism of power.

Anyone who questions an "ism" finds themselves accused. Easy weapons to wield with no price to pay for wielding them unfairly.

When it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said, and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity. T= be weary of arguments that can't be presented simply.

Women

Society has doubled down on the belief that biological difference can be denied or ignored.

T= When people make exaggerated claims about what someone else said, its likely an example of people deliberately and lazily adopting simplified misrepresentations of the argument in order to avoid the difficult discussion that would otherwise have to take place.

Contradictory statement = possible to be sexy without being sexualized

Presumption that almost all relationships in the workplace and elsewhere are centered around the exercise of power. Various types of power; many parties can hold different ones.

Privilege is unbelievably hard to define or quantify. How can strata be arranged to be flexible enough to include everyone but consider various comparative changes throughout life. Also, easier to see in others but more difficult to see in ourselves.

Intersectionality is not a fully worked out science.

Concept of the patriarchy has become so ingrained its rarely disputed.

Impact of Tech

If we are running in the wrong direction; tech helps us run faster.

Internet has allowed new forms of activism and bullying. To find people accused of "wrong thing" works because it rewards the bully.

"The one thing we can say with certainty about the advent of new technologies is that people overestimate their impact in the short term and underestimate their impact over the long term." -Variously attributed.

What we say in one place may be posted in another, not just for the whole world but for all time. Having to find a way to speak and act as though it may be in front of everyone. To speak in public is now to have to find a way to address or keep in mind every possible variety of person.

T= Don't sacrifice truth in the pursuit of a political goal.

Race

Some portion of black studies started attacking non blacks. Growth of "whiteness studies" w/ aim of disrupting racism by problematizing "whiteness". Displaces celebratory nature of many race studies to with problematizing others.

Catastrophizing has become one of the distinctive attitudes of the era.

Q= Should we seek color blindness (get beyond race to individual judgement, making skin color effectively an unimportant aspect of a person's identity)?

An idea that since everything was set up by a structure of white hegemony everything is laced with racism and therefore everything must be done away with.

If people got things so wrong in the past, how can you be sure you are acting appropriately today?

Important in crowd maddening mechanism: person who professes themselves most aggrieved gets the most attention. Rewards outrage over sanguinity.

Politicizing issues such that the speaker and their innate characteristics don't matter. What matters is the speech and ideas they give voice to.

Easy(er) to slip up not on an issue of motive but, especially when no other evidence is available, a crime of language.

Social media age has brought us opportunity to publish uncharitable and disingenuous interpretations of what other people have said.

Equality of opportunity AND outcome almost certainly impossible.

Forgiveness

T= Context collapse: conversation/act taken out of context and used to create a simplified version of a person or their beliefs.

Q= How, if ever, is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs during their life there must be - in any healthy person or society - some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. The internet will never forget.

Actions have consequences that are unbounded and limitless. Constantly acting in a web of relationships in which every action starts a chain reaction. A single word or deed could change everything.

Without being forgiven we would remain the victim of the consequences forever.

T= Historically perpetrators and offended both die out and the grievance fades over time. Internet leaves a permanent record.

Internet helps people approach the past from an all-knowing angle. Retributive instinct of our time that suggests we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and how we "would have" behaved.

To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven in return.

Trans

Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying.

A considerable range of cultures has adapted to the idea that some people may be born in one body but desire to live in another.

For intersex people, the question of what medical intervention might be suitable and when is a matter of serious contention.

Very hard to know how to navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony.

Still almost nowhere near understanding trans; including how common it is.

Autogynephilia: arousal that comes from imagining yourself in the role of the opposite sex.

Q= whether what one person believes to be true about themselves has to be accepted as true by other people?

Questions about the age at which people who believe they are in the wrong body should be allowed to access drugs and surgery are worth considering.

Q= What do you need to do to be content with your body, not change it?

Seems we're running to quickly on the trans issue, scared to be on the wrong side of history.

Some contention between trans and feminist ideas.

T= little contention that equal rights should be given. Issue is preconceptions and assumptions about how to go about tackling the issue.

Q=Claims of human rights violations are inversely proportionate to the number of violations in a country. -Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Only a very free society would permit (or encourage) claims about its own inequities.

T= when people attempt to sum up our societies in terms of simplistic structures ask, "compared to what". Not to say elements of our society can't be improved.

The victim is not always right, nice, deserves no praise, and may not be a victim.

Incline towards generosity when interpreting others words/acts.

-People are wiling to interpret remarks from their own tribe in a generous light while reading opposing ones in as negative a light as possible.

To assume that sex, sexuality, and skin color mean nothing would be ridiculous. To assume that they mean everything would be fatal.

The madness we are living through is an over-reaction to past injustice. Belief is that the fastest and best way to address this is to over-compensate.

[jonthethinker]

Together Or Alone?

Since I finally have a few days off work, I want to get weird and really dig deep into why I personally enjoy the Mighty Nein and its particular breed of found family so much, and why the dynamics between its members are so satisfying for my heart in particular. Let’s get unnecessarily deep, shall we?

You may not completely understand why I think this would be weird, but you’ll understand fairly quickly as I get started.

I’ve been on a sort of spiritual journey, in a way, over the course of this most eventful year. A small part of me feels bad that while so much suffering is going on, and so much of the world feels like it’s falling apart, I’ve been making positive strides in determining my place in the grand scheme of things. But a larger part of me is just really grateful to finally find a bit of internal peace after years of not having it, of finally having some bit of quiet in a mind that’s never been able to still itself long enough for any such thing.

I haven’t exactly found religion, but I have given more shape to how I best want to imagine our universe and my humble place in it, and I’ve finally started asking the right questions.

One of those questions stands above the rest, and it’s the question I’ve decided the Universe Itself is asking; Together or Alone?

I started seeing attempted answers to this question everywhere. In the universe bursting outward, yet huge masses of it clinging together to form all we know and can perceive. I see it in wondrous solar systems forming and spinning in a rippled field of mutually affected gravity; and I see it in the black holes that can form, and tear and pull all that beauty into nothing. I see it in incredible ecosystems where the life and the land combine to form what feels like its own organism, larger than just the sum of its parts; and I see it in the environmental devastation caused by our own actions, killing that organism, and in turn doing irreparable damage to the very spirit of our world.

I see it in humanity’s natural inclination for cooperation and concern for others; and I see it also in our inclination to be blinded by power and in that blindness, inflicting unspeakable harm on each other in order to hold onto that power. I see it in our bodies, organs one by one relying on each other in a perfect act of faith to form something greater than a liver or heart or brain could ever be on their own; and I see it in cancer, single-minded in its pursuit of self-replication by all means, all memory of belonging to something greater stricken from its damaged DNA. I see it in basic elemental particles, most of them ready and able for their eventual combination with other particles to build wonderful compounds with entirely new properties, adding untold dimensions of complexity to how our world works; and I see it in those small rogue particles the neutrinos, that can shoot off from a star for eons without interacting with a single thing.

The question and its many answers, and the dialectical relationships those answers have, are what I feel can really undergird all of our interactions with each other, all progress and all regress, all friendships and all rivalries. It’s there in all our stories and all art we create; Together or Alone? What’s your answer?

For me, the answer that felt like it escaped the singing lips of an angel, was, “Of course, together. Always together.”

It shapes my politics heavily. I’m a lefty, but its not just because I believe we’re all equal as individuals; it’s because I believe we are all a part of the same thing. We are all a part of that same great organism, that same great body. The Universe. God. Whatever you want to call it, though it needs no name. We are in this together because we are one thing from many different things, whether we like it or not.

But I’m not just blindly optimistic about this. I don’t think it works like this all on its own. It takes work and time. It took billions of years for solar systems to form. For single-cell organisms to band together into colonies and then evolve into multi-cell organisms. It took a while longer for creatures to stick together as families, for the mutual dependencies of ecosystems to form, and even longer for the first tribes and societies to form. It took time, and an incredible amount of energy and effort, and so much failure. We’ve hurt each other so much, that’s true. But it’s only by coming together that we’ve ever been able create anything new, anything Good.

The universe has a bias towards entropy; things tend to fall away and apart. So there’s a beauty in the struggle for togetherness. I’d argue that it’s the only source of beauty in the first place; the unity of forces interacting. The quest for togetherness gives my life meaning, drive, and purpose. And for someone who’s struggled with depression for so long, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have purpose, especially for something bigger than me.

And by this point, you’re probably wondering when I’m going to stop sermonizing and actually talk about Critical Role. so here we go.

The individual members of the Mighty Nein are some deeply flawed and deeply troubled people, at least when we first met them. Some of them have done awful things, sometimes against their will. They’ve all been the victims of powers much greater than themselves, and as a result, have been left feeling frayed at the edges. They’ve all had hurts and been shaped by those hurts; whether it was loneliness, unfair expectations, or just being unfortunate enough to be different in all the wrong ways. Damaged is a word that carries unfortunate implications, as does broken; but it’s undeniable that you’ve got seven people who have all felt like Sisyphus when the boulder rolls back down the hill.

Some have taken this fate better than others, but it’s undeniable that these people have suffered, and in that suffering, gained nothing.

But then they met each other.

It wasn’t all roses from the get-go. You throw these people with underdeveloped social skills and an untold amounts of personal baggage, and you’ve got yourself some friction to say the least. But when they all met each other, they had nothing but their bodies and their hurts. They were total equals. Even when the Mighty Drei met Caduceus, they had just felt like they lost everything, and they were meeting someone who had no one. They all started together at their foundations, and over time, built something I think is truly beautiful.

This process hasn’t been perfect. Beau, for instance, can still be totally rude and abrasive to strangers and outsiders (and I love that about her), and still has a hard time swallowing her pride long enough to ask for help. Caleb is very much struggling with his trauma, and that path is never a straight line of progress for anyone. Jester for the longest time still didn’t really want to feel any negative emotions around the others, and her own pride has gotten in the way of owning up to how new she is to all this. Yasha bears a great deal of guilt for a great many things, and while she’s making strides, it’s still left its mark on her. Veth has come so far, but doesn’t know how to reconcile the contradictions between the two lives she wants as both a mother and an adventurer. Fjord has a deep desire for answers, answers that may open up a lot of wounds that have started to heal in the Mighty Nein’s care. And Caduceus refuses to share his troubles, his doubts about how much his time with Nein has fundamentally changed him from the boy his family knew all those years ago.

That’s a lot of hurt, and some of it will never go away completely. But it’s like how our bodies have all of these vestigial functions that no longer serve any purpose to it, and make our daily lives in office chairs or standing in one place all day harmful to our health. Or like ancient seas whose waters are long since gone, but have left their undeniable mark in the shapes of canyons and mesas, in the colorful layers of sedimentary rock they leave behind. The past is an unavoidable factor in how everything in the universe gets to take shape, but the present finds a way to adapt. And we people get to choose how to adapt. And the Mighty Nein chose caring about each other as their method of adaptation.

And the thing of it is, I don’t think its just having people finally caring about them that has allowed them to come as far as they have. I think it’s also the act of caring, the act of serving others, considering how the path you wish to take will affect someone else, that has really pushed them to this great place we currently find them in. I truly think there something inside of us that wants to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and that in the moments we feel emptiest it isn’t because of what we lack on the inside but the connections we lack on the outside, and it’s the systems we inhabit that make us think otherwise. I see this so clearly in the Mighty Nein. If left all on their own, in the cruel worlds we first found them in and have learned they came from, I see seven people going on seven unique paths of self-destruction; but together, they can build something greater than themselves, that thing being the Mighty Nein.

I really do think the Mighty Nein is like its own entity. They are something totally different when they are together, like seven different elements that came together to form a compound with entirely different characteristics. It’s why the work so smoothly together in combat. Why, when the pressure is on, they tend to work as a relatively well-oiled machine. Why they hurt so much less when they are with each other. It’s like up-scaling from an atom to a cell, a cell to an animal, an animal to an ecosystem.

This togetherness is why I love the Nein so damn much. It’s reaffirming at a deep level for me. The story that they are telling, and the one forming without their active intention even being involved, is a wonderful thing. Stories about togetherness are my bread and butter; it’s why I’m a sucker for a good romance or found-family narrative, because I love it when people come together to make something more than them, making one plus one equal three. There’s nothing quite like it. And Critical Role has it in spades.

And it’s not all about the depth of answering some spiritual question. I enjoy the potty humor and the eight people just trying to fuck with each other and make each other laugh. I enjoy the silliness and joy and endless pop culture references. But also the act of eight friends coming together to make a show where they create a beautiful, silly, heartfelt story together has its own sort of spiritual resonance with me.

I also want to establish that I understand that this is a company selling an entertainment experience to me. They aren’t just doing this in the spirit of togetherness, they are doing this to strengthen their careers and incomes. I get that. But in the end, it’s all a part of the dialectic. It’s all motivation for me to continue working towards building a world where people can make wonderful art like this without worrying about building a career out of it or paying the bills. It reminds me of how much work there is to be done, but also of all the work that’s already been done.

Critical Role has its flaws, but it is a wonderful thing and I’m happier everyday I’m reminded it exists. The Mighty Nein are probably my favorite found family ever, and lately, a very powerful affirmation for my own journey. I do wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences, with this artwork or others like it. If so, I’d love for you to share them with me.

[brendanelliswilliams]

Misappropriated Language and Outmoded Ideology in the Church, and How We Might Move Beyond Them

A good friend and fellow priest posted this past Sunday on his Facebook page that he had been frustrated in trying to write a sermon, feeling that so much of the language he would normally use had been coopted and tainted by right-wing Evangelical white nationalists. The following was my reply to him (with a few minor points of clarification added here):

‘Fr. Karl Rahner once said that he thought the Church should fast from using the word “God” for at least fifty years, until we can all get clear about what we’re actually doing and saying with a term like that, and get deeply rooted and serious enough in our theological speculations to warrant its use. (Fr. Richard Rohr suggested we take the same approach with the name “Jesus”, and I concur; in fact, I think we are much more in need of fasting from this latter name than from the former.) It seems to me that there’s a great deal of wisdom in this approach. What you point out here is the principal reason why the “Jesus Movement” language so ubiquitous in the Episcopal Church today feels misplaced to me, and in fact really chafes every time I hear it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Presiding Bishop and the basic elements of his vision, but I find this sort of language to be hitting the wrong chord. To me it feels ill matched with where the Church is at now, and where it should be going—and with where the world is at with regard to the Church. It partakes of precisely the same sorts of dissonances you’re highlighting. In the Western Church today we are always in danger of simply repeating platitudes, or unwittingly furthering falsities by allowing ourselves to remain stuck with misappropriated and imprecise language. Most peoples’ “Christology” in the West (if you can even call it that—maybe we should say “Jesusology” instead) is, in my humble opinion, really lacking the deep roots of the tradition. And that leaves us with a rather small and limited vision. This is one reason (among several) why I almost exclusively use “Christ” in religious discourse, or “Christ-Sophia”. I think we need that sort of lens again, which is both broader and more nuanced, and which, if we’re intelligent about it (rather than merely reactionary or political) can liberate us from all the heinous misunderstanding and misuse that has colored Christianity in the West for so long, and afford us a much more effectual set of linguistic and imagistic tools for legitimate transformation. Rahner also said, “Christians of the future will be mystics or they won’t exist at all.” In my view, that’s where we’re headed now from this particular crossroads, if we have the depth and courage to claim the calling of real religiosity. As I perceive it, that’s the divine invitation. And it can most definitely take us into a truer, more authentic, and more rooted place, away from all the baggage of the language and imagery you’re rightly lamenting.’

I saw a photo today from the Capitol riot on January 6th. In the background of the photo was one of what appears to have been many ‘Jesus Saves’ or similar signs present at that event. No doubt those folks also consider themselves to be part of the (‘true’) ‘Jesus Movement’. To be sure, their coopting of Jesus as a figure who supports their insane fundamentalism, egoic delusions, and desire for power is corrupt and evil, but I wonder how ours really differs, structurally speaking. The (white) progressive Jesus is ‘nicer’, but is our understanding of what such a figure really means and invites us into that much deeper than their reactionary, fundamentalist version of the same? Both expressions are drawn in essence from the same literal-historical trends in hermeneutics; it’s just that they emphasize different elements of received texts and interpretations. Granted, I strongly affirm that the emphases of right-wing Evangelicalism (and Evangelicalism at large, in fact) are objectively destructive and immoral, but fundamentally both interpretations play the same sorts of hermeneutical games: they operate in the same playing field, not only culturally (in a homogeneous container), but also religiously.

In other words, all Christians in the West are at some level responsible for this cancerous appropriation of Christian values. Even in progressive circles, in spite of our best intentions, we partake of the language, the dominator cultural styles and structures that have birthed and perpetuated all this toxicity. Until we face that head-on, how can we go about the real work of healing or ��wholing’ ourselves into a mode of religiosity that is finally supportive of the values of Life, of Nature, of Divinity, rather than blatantly contrary to them?

One of the many problems we face now as people in the Church who want desperately to lead it in a direction of Life—rather than death, ignominy, political coopting, immorality, and corrosion—is that most Western Christians have a rather surface-level view of Jesus, and of Christ more broadly. So the toolkit we’ve been given to work with to articulate a better vision for ourselves is extremely limited. In the United States particularly, it should now be abundantly clear how tied up with right-wing nationalism, racism, and dominator values this theologically underdeveloped mode of Christian language has become. This means—obviously, I hope—that we need to expand and deepen our toolkit, drawing from the deepest and most life giving roots of the tradition.

The lack of adequate Christological understanding is not the fault of ordinary Christian folk; it’s what has been fed to them by their clergy, and it’s what was taught to most of those clergy in seminary for the last two or three generations. It’s what I call the ‘social Gospel, historical Jesus’ trend, and, in my view, this is a trend that has utterly crippled mainline and progressive Christian denominations, and in many cases created a notion of Christian religiosity as (essentially) little more than social justice work with a veneer of religious language. Of course, the work of justice is crucial, but what happens when we scrub away the Mystery, the experiential, inward transformation that is actually required to give rise to authentic justice, the richness of myth and symbology, leaving only this ‘social Gospel, historical Jesus’ layer of ideation? Well, as I’ve been saying for many years now: I think it is perfectly plain to see what happens in that case, as we now see it playing out all around us: the Church is collapsing, and (ironically) has almost no socio-cultural clout, which is the only thing it seems to have really desired for the last five or six decades.

I pray that people will finally be ready to move beyond all this, into something with real transformative capacity. But, alas, I suspect many, if not most, will not. So many Western Christians, of whatever stripe, seem absolutely determined to cling to all manner of outmoded and unhealthful aspects of Christian religious expression, language, and dogma, simply for the sake of safety, comfort, and security in the ‘known quantity’. And that, we can be sure, will lead us nowhere, both individually and collectively.

Might we not attempt to root our religion in actual religion? In other words, can we not learn once more to base our religious affiliation and practice on a legitimate and appropriately comparative understanding of myth, religious narrative, the ‘perennial philosophy’, and the actual aims of religiosity—namely, the science of spiritual transformation through initiatory, ascetical, liturgical, sacramental, and other modes of productive individual and communal sacred work? Haven’t we had enough of basing our religion on socio-cultural and academic trends in lieu of what actually transforms? Are the disastrous results of that finally clear enough for all to see? Of course, we must evolve with the times—I am by no stretch of the imagination a reactionary, and I am stringently anti-fundamentalist in every possible way—but this current disaster we now inhabit is what happens when, in the rush and distraction of that process of cultural evolution, we lose touch with the real root and purpose of the whole operation in the first place; that is, when we lose our memory and understanding of what religion is actually for and what it’s meant to accomplish in the human person.

I won’t enter here into the many additional issues related to male dominator language and the rest of the attendant cancerous threads that have long plagued Abrahamic religious expression, or their effects on Church and society; if you’re interested in all that, you might find some food for reflection in my book, Seeds from the Wild Verge. But here’s an idea: Let’s focus on the Blessed Mother for a while—very deeply: not just linguistically and imagistically, but theologically and practically as well, in a nuanced and committed fashion, not for purposes of political correctness but out of profound theological curiosity and a spirit of expansive internal exploration. God knows all you Protestant types out there could use a serious (and indefinite) dose of the Mother.

I was reflecting recently on what a truly sad circumstance it is that I often feel I can much more readily find depth and theological nuance in contemporary Hindu discourse on Christ, the Blessed Mother, etc., than I can in contemporary Christian discourse on the same. A terrible irony. It often feels to me as if we need to restore Christianity with inspiration from non-Christian sources—something I’ve done in my work with native Celtic traditions, but which could (and perhaps should) be done with inspiration from other arenas as well; for instance, from Vedanta, which has not only unequivocally maintained a far more refined and mature view of religion and its aims than most Christians have, but in fact often seems to possess a more mature view of Christianity than most Christians presently do.

Writing in 1963, Swami Prabhavananda astutely observed: ‘Of course there are millions of Christians today who attend churches regularly…but of those who do, few seek perfection in God. Most people are satisfied with living a more or less ethical life on earth in hope of being rewarded in an afterlife for any good deeds they may have done. Christ’s ideal of perfection is generally either forgotten or misunderstood. True, many people read the Sermon on the Mount, but few try to live its teachings.’

Now, almost sixty years later, that statement proves to be even more radically true than it was then. We have much work to do, friends, if we wish to restore the Church to something that truly transforms, which is truly relevant in a perennial way, and which is positioned not only to survive but to once more contribute something of inestimable value to the world. This will involve us, should we have the courage take up the task, in reclaiming the profound Mystery in Christian tradition, its ancient spiritual practices, and its expansively symbolic depth. May we set out with open hearts on that next adventure—and may we do so quickly.

Peace and every blessing,

Fr. Brendan+

[ghostlyscene]

17 things I learned before turning 17

According to my birth certificate, I turn 17 this year. It's weird because part of me still feels 4 and part of me feels 113, but the actual age I currently am is 16. I thought I'd share some lessons I've learned. I honestly don’t know what I’m writing and looking back, this post is literally just me rambling and talking about my life and ideas that maybe are cliche. But I wanted to make this post about things I’ve learned so far in life and who knows, maybe these thoughts will evolve as I grow.

1. Crying is not a weakness - I used to always think crying was a sign of weakness or losing to someone or giving in. But as I’ve grown and experienced more things that make me want to cry, I’ve come to understand that crying is therapeutic and it helps me move on. I have to move past hardships somehow and crying is my form of coping and healing.

2. I love traveling - my family has always loved traveling ever since I was really little. I used to always be the one in daycare and elementary going to Mexico or China during breaks and later on, London, Paris, Vienna, Singapore. All these wonderful places, some I can’t even remember. Now that I’m older, I’ve fallen in love with traveling and I enjoy seeing the culture, architecture, art, way of life, and everything a country has to offer. I’ve been to 45 countries and I’m almost 17. That’s crazy and I’m so grateful for every experience and I can’t wait for more.

3. sweatshirts, sweaters, and tights are the best thing to wear - I’ve basically given up on looking nice most of the time. Comfort is always first and soft sweatshirts and hoodies and sweaters are the best for napping in and watching shows and cramming studying sessions and homework. also tights are the best thing ever cause they basically look nice with everything I wear.

4. stationery is obsessive - I love love love stationery and it’s honestly not a healthy obsession but I just can’t help myself. Every colored pen, marker, highlighter, little stickers and everything you can think of, I will probably have or want to buy when I’m in stores. I’ve recently been obsessed with zebra sarasa pens and mild liners (the pastel colors!!!)

5. Taylor Swift concerts are the happiest place to be - I’ve always imagined what Taylor concerts would be like and it was at the top of my bucket list forever because I had never been able to convince my mom to take me. My mom was always worried about safety which is understandable, but I convinced her to take me to the reputation tour. It was such a worthwhile experience and my mom and I enjoyed every moment. Taylor has such a way of making you feel at home and connected with her. I was so genuinely happy that night, singing my heart out and forgetting all my worries and insecurities for a night. I can’t wait to go to another show (hopefully soon) and I hope all of y’all will get to go to one eventually.

6. Italian food is the best food around.- pasta, gelato, pizza and omg Italian food is just amazing. That’s it. There’s nothing else to say really.

7. I’m addicted to coffee, fairy lights, and aesthetics. - Coffee is something i always need and it just tastes so good. I usually get a iced caramel macchiato but I’ve also been loving stronger coffee tastes recently. Also I don’t get any sleep during school so basically I live off caffeine. The fairy lights in my room make me so happy and warm and are a great stress reliever. Definitely recommend. Aesthetics!!! Literally love scrolling through tumblr and Pinterest for hours to look at aesthetic photos and edits and I love seeing my friend’s edits and discovering new editors and ahh!!!! definitely check them out and give them the love they deserve. Editors work so hard.

8. Art is a form of therapy - I love doing art whenever I’m stressed because it helps me forget everything. And I don’t think you have to be really talented or draw anything complex because whenever I draw stuff for competition, I always feel stressed. It’s the small doodles and careless sketches that make me feel the happiest.

9. true friends are it replaceable - I’ve realized how important a good friend is and having a person that is always there to talk to and share your worst and best moments with is something that will make your life infinitely better. You don’t need a bunch to feel happy. One true, honest one is all that one ever needs but that doesn’t mean that you should stop meeting new people cause you never know who will become your best friend or who needs you. Never stop making friends but eliminate the toxic ones.

10. having scars is not a bad thing - I’ve learned that having a history and a part of your life that is bad doesn’t make you a bad person or shameful. It is what makes you the person you are today and you should embrace it and use it to better yourself or help other.

11. Music has always been there for me - listening to music and making playlists and discovering songs is such a huge part of my life. There’s a song for every emotion and music can be so healing. So go listen to some nice songs and discover just how nice music can make one feel.

12. Put yourself first- it’s not selfish - I used to always think that thinking of myself and my feelings first was selfish. So I put others first and forgot to take care of myself. But I’ve realized that you can’t love others and help others to the full potential until you are happy with yourself and you feel content with your life and are at a good place yourself. So if you need to take care of your mental health or whatever is important to you, do it. The people who truly love you will understand and be there the whole time.

13. Don’t let your anxiety take over - anxiety can be difficult and uncontrollable and sometimes it is necessary to take care of yourself. But learning how to cope is part of the healing process and you should not let your anxiety ruin your day and should push to experience new things and go out of your comfort zone.

14. Society has unnecessary standards for woman - ok tell me why we are obligated to shave, to have nice hair, to have perfect makeup and perfect skin, and to fit a mold. I’ve found that women’s dress code can be so strict and unnecessary compared to men’s. Women are expected to do more and to fight more for what they want and to be caring, model-like, and many other “traditionally woman” things but that isn’t every women and I don’t think everyone has to adhere to those standards.

15. It is vital to become educated and know your values - this world is so complex and there’s so much out there to learn and become educated on. I think it is important to know about history and current events and become educated enough to have your own values and know why you stand by them. To me, this is part of growing up and becoming your own person and I’m always working on that. I’ve yet to achieve it but I’ve made progress.

16. “may your heart remain breakable but never by the same hands twice”.-I want to be able to put down the thick wall around my heart and to let myself love and feel again. I want to let people into my life more that make me smile and feel safe, even if it means getting hurt again. I want to allow myself to trust others and to build more relationships with people. I think it’s hard because I’ve felt abandoned and hurt so much but some tiny part of me hoped that one day, I’ll be ready to accept someone. And I think this is important for everyone to do or work towards.

17. Step into the daylight and let it go. - something I have definitely learned and am still working on doing daily is learning to let go. I’ve realized that it’s not easy, and some part of me always wants to nitpick on every tiny mistake in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever be fully satisfied with myself and I will always value improvement. But I’ve realized that the amount of stress I have over uncontrollable aspects of life is too much. So I think that sometimes it’s best to just take a deep breath and move on. you only have so long to live so instead of dwelling on the past, you have to move on and work on improving the future.

[stoiccthulhu]

Update time...actually, why should these be titled? I mean, whats the point of writing a title to these if all I’m going to do is ramble on and on with no specific topic of discussion, just several things on my mind?

Election day 2020 happened yesterday and I voted for nobody. And if I would have voiced my polling choice I would have voted for the candidate I see as being the best option in line with my thoughts and opinions concerning the state of the world at the moment as well as the future.

You can insert whomever you want to believe that would be based off an assumption and a look at my internetting footprint, but you would be wrong, but that’s part of the fun of interpreting what I’m writing down for you in the future. Trying to figure out what I’m actually saying. While it makes complete sense to me, because you don’t have the hidden key phrase you can’t decipher what it is that I am putting to digital paper.

I get it, I’m an asshole.

And this isn’t, completely, a justification towards my actions but a direct result of your intervention within my life that has caused this behaviour. Think of it sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You interpreted me, came back, and intervened in any little way imaginable. Negatively or positively, but no matter your justification, it was still an intervention that didn’t need to happen because, as Malcolm once said, “Life, finds a way.” And just like destiny, it will find a way. But enough of all that crazy talk, you’re here because you want to hear all about my political leanings and to unravel the mystery as to this anonymous random on the internet’s preferred presidential choice in the election that has already passed.

But before I do that, let’s get some shit off my chest because I tend to swear and if you don’t like it, go the hell away. I’m sick of people being sensitive over everything. As if they’re looking for any reason to complain or get offended nowadays.

“The internet has given everyone in (the world) a voice, and evidently everyone in (the world) has chosen to use that voice to bitch about (anyone they find offensive)” -Holden McNeil (with some modern revisions)

And that’s why I’ve chose not to be PC in this thing, whenever I feel the urge to put pen to paper, relatively speaking.

Like, let’s see who I can offend right off the bat.

Women need to start getting punched more and treated like human beings instead of china dolls. If you’re a pro-gender equality advocate, and you’re a woman, you need to be willing to be punched in the face for doing ANYTHING a man would otherwise be punched in the face for. They also need to be held accountable for the shit they do to everyone. I am a strong supporter in believing that no matter what women say about women controlling the government and such, while women have great communication skills, they have the worst track record when it comes to not being aggressive, biologically speaking.

In the wild, whom are normally the more aggressive of the genders? Whom is usually the one more protective of the young? more willing to go out to hunt?

To be fair, I have a very limited knowledge when it comes to the animal kingdom. But, I mean, the Black Widow is normally depicted as being a deadly female, the female preying mantis devours the head of her mate after they’re done mating. There are so many, example, of females being worse than males in nature its hard to ignore. And, to add religious believers to the list of people offended, if you’re not ignorant to science and knowledge, or at least the pursuit of it, we evolved over a long period of time from apes, which, by nature, makes us, humans, not white people, black people, yellow people(to stick to the color scheme), brown people(gotta throw the other Asian people’s in there as well), animals. Highly evolved and communicative animals, but animals none the less. Was that supposed to be one word? Nonetheless?

Doesn’t matter. So, if you stick with my logic, you’ll see that women are terrible. Terrible. But, because men like to have sex with females as opposed to men for the most part in today’s society women have a stranglehold on the pelvic reason of an entire world, which means they can make anyone, for the most part, do anything they want and see things their way, even if they’re saying the sky is as green as the skies of Namek. An example of this is perfectly laid out in a clip from That 70′s Show. Kelso and Hyde prove women can’t play fight because they’ll turn it real, for whatever reason, just because they’re girls. To prove this, Kelso and Hyde play fight, and it looks bad, but they stop, laugh, and hug it out. Then Jackie and Donna play fight, starting out playfully, but then turning it into hair pulling and needing to be pulled apart. Both visibly angry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUwxxJvtQnI

(OK, my memory was bad, it was Eric and Hyde, and it was set up differently, but the concept is still there.)

And I get it, they’re actors, being paid to do what the script is telling them to do, but it is true. Girls are worst during puberty as well, from what I’ve heard. And I get it, I have a biased standpoint being a male, but in today's culture that shouldn’t matter, it’s about what’s being said, not my gender.

Now that women are out of the way, lets also as black people, but not specifically black people, its more of a systemic form of racism that I believe shouldn’t exist. In which, if you are not of that specific race, you are not allowed to say the n-word. What makes me giggle right now is that with just that sentence every single person reading this probably got a bit riled up. A bit ruffled in the feathers because I’m not a black person. And if you weren’t, you are now, knowing what you know now.

So let me provide you with some context so you can understand how I’m not racist at the same time as saying what I said above.

I enjoy rap music and hip-hop, as do a lot of people throughout the world, black or otherwise. Which, in this current climate, would be considered one of the forms of cultural appropriation we tend to sweep under the rug because it doesn’t fit our narrative of being offended about something. Because I like rap music I tend to learn the word to all of the songs I enjoy listening to. Because I learn the words to the songs that I enjoy listening to I sing along. But, because I’m not black, I have to ruin my flow to edit myself just because the artist chose to use nigger in their song. Which, as an artist, is their choice.

Now, why should I have to edit myself? I have tried to replace it with “wigger”, but because of the closeness of the words, I felt that would still be offensive if I was ever overheard by the wrong black person who, understandably, would be mad if they heard a pasty white boy say the word nigger without any context.

I just think, unless the person is using the word in a hateful way, directed at the person the speaker either personally knows or is conciously speaking about, as in “i hate that nigger” or “you’re a nigger”. If it’s something like that, totally beat the shit out of that racist.

But if you’re singing along to Wu-Tang, and you say:

I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward I'm on the trigger, plus I got the Wu-Tang sword So how you figure, that you can even fuck with mine? Hey, yo, RZA! Hit me with that shit one time! And pull a foul, niggas, save the beef for the cow I'm milkin' this ho, this is my show, Tical! The fuck you wanna do on this mic piece, duke? I'm like a sniper, hyper off the ginseng root PLO Style, buddha monks with the owls Now who's the fuckin' man? Meth-Tical It shouldn’t be labelled as being racist.

There is more rattling around in my head right now, things that I’ve been thinking about for years, and things that have been bothering me for just about as long, but for now those were the two that fell out when I vomited all over my keyboard.

And if you’re offended. Get over it. You need to start.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you whom it was I was going to vote for yesterday if I had voted for anybody. Jokingly I wanted to write-in “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. But in truth I was going to vote for Biden. Not because I thought he was the better candidate, but because there was not a good option at all, he was just the lesser of two evils. This election has made me decide I want a third option when it comes to my politicians, or at least, get rid of political parties all together. We spend so much time infighting and holding each other back instead of up no real change has happened in the past decade? Longer? And whatever change that does happen gets nitpicked apart so much it becomes a shell of its former self. But, enough about that. I have a baby demanding eggs and waffles and I still need to tag this.

[royalreef]

(( ENJOY A MASSIVE POST ABOUT MERFOLK TAXONOMY, because biology has long been my BIGGEST special interest ( yes I’m including paleontology under this, I know it’s more considered an earth science and part of geology, shush ).

Merfolk as a whole are a part of an ancient group of animals that diverged from basal amniotes around the same time amniotes themselves came about, 312 mya (million years ago). I say about, because I haven’t fully decided where exactly to put them in this case, whether they’re fully counted as amniotes or no, and I still need to do a large amount of research into this.

I classify this split as happening there, as opposed to somewhere else, because merfolk are obviously tetrapods, and have some adaptations for full land living that amniotes have, though the merfolk themselves are fully adapted for a watery niche. Their eggs certainly were carried internally for a long time, so there’s probably some convergent evolution to how mammalian live birth happened, hence all the more reason to put them under amniotes, but they’re definitely not synapsids and thus definitely not mammals.

These early ancestors also retained their gills and ability to breathe water. They do have lungs too, and conceptually they filled a very fluid niche, where they had to be able to rapidly switch from aquatic life to terrestrial life, with most being oppurtunists who used this wide variability to be able to get a wider variety of food and resources that other animals couldn’t.

I will say these early ancestors mostly resembled newts/salamanders or small lizards, and somewhere along the line they independently evolved scales, both for providing armor and for retaining water when they were on land, along with all the other reasons to evolve scales. 

( Ideally, I’d say they never evolved hair, but considering that I can’t fully redesign Miranda for this blog for fear of inability to use my icons and basically making her fully an OC, she has to keep the hair on her head. Her eyebrows are a maybe, since I joke aplenty about them just being markings or her drawing them on. Landfolk get weird when they see her without any eyebrows, so she has to appear to have them! )

They also generally retained the same amount of digits as other tetrapods, so that’s how Miranda has five fingers still, though merfolk lost one of the toes on their feet, bringing that total down to four.

And yes, all of this does mean that merfolk have plenty of ancestors in deep time that probably fossilized and could be found by even human scientists, but they’re probably thought of in this world as an offshoot of tetrapods that has no extant relatives, with what fossils remain being sparse or incomplete, or even caught in nomen dubium hell. Certainly they weren’t featured in this world’s Jurassic Park, that’s for sure, and if they are represented it’d be in something like ARK.

This also does mean that there are plenty of ancestors that fell into more unique or odd niches, with stranger body plans or something much more different from the rest. 312 mya is a long time, after all! Lots of time for there to be more experimental species, though they didn’t pan out in the long run.

So, with merfolk themselves, I generally have the idea of them as coming from a branch of that tree that hung around the ocean’s edge, sticking closer to the shoreline than the mer alive today, though they were oddly social for a tiny, lizard-like species, probably already communicating through small squeaks and chirps. Lizardy kinda sounds. They spend a good amount of their time on rocky shores and cliffs, so they’re good at climbing over and up them. Likely already had something akin to their fins on the sides of their face, used for communication and display, along with pushing additional water over their gills, or maybe even the fins being used in addition to the gills to extract extra oxygen from the water is basal to merfolk, but only the abyssals really retained most of that feature.

As token as it sounds, I think the K/T extinction event was probably what pushed them to evolve into the branch that became merfolk. The death of much larger marine creatures opened up the ability to go more fully ocean-bound, and to take over a role akin to marine reptiles in the past and the marine mammals that were also evolving at that time, but with the addition of having gills to not have to surface for oxygen.

Their evolution from that point probably was a bit like primates - lots of trying out different shapes and styles, more of that basal form than true merfolk, except their roles being out competeted or otherwise led to extinction, until you get the “true” merfolk - which would occur with a focus on social behavior and language, along with tool use, as was the bonus to being a tetrapod that went back into the ocean but never lost their hands.

This is where we get to the merfolk family tree. I’d say probably the first mer was mid-size, generally had all of the traits of the merfolk you see today, very general, but very adaptive.

The abyssal (royal) merfolk were probably the first to branch off. Their tails resemble mosasaurs’ and early icthyosaurs’ a lot, having a much larger lower lobe of their tail where the bone is, and the upper lobe, being all fleshy, isn’t too pronounced. They went down into the deep sea, branching off early from the rest of the merfolk, and thus were generally super isolated from the rest, which you can see today in how the Merkingdom itself generally is conducted.

There are plenty of other species of merfolk, however, and the abyssals (and Miranda) are not representative of the entire group. There’s a lot of different takes on the same body plan, with different niches and different adaptations and different types of behavior associated with each. They’re all super vocal and adapted to be able to hear well, so that’s also basal to the group, but that also means when they all started forming their own societies and cultures and general settlements, it’s even weirder than how humans do it.

Effectively, merfolk are a lot like the homonid family tree, and for that reason they also generally take after the concept of the “braided stream” more than just the tree of life. It’s also why I can feel more confident saying they’re seperate species and not subspecies, despite being able to reproduce and make viable offspring - and anyway species as a whole are fake and weird. There’s a lot of hybridization going on, with some populations getting some genes from others that benefit them and get genetic and physical variation. In more nomadic merfolk, there’s a lot of their genes spread around in other species and a lot of genetic variation in them, because they roam and run into different species - meanwhile, the abyssals are much more genetically restricted, since the abyss is a generally isolated place that isn’t easy to access unless you’re made for it.

I’m pretty bad at clarifying when I’m talking about abyssal mer vs all merfolk, since there’s a huge amount of difference between the two. Abyssals are probably the merfolk with the most bioluminenscence - while some species probably do have a little or even a lot, it’s not as much of a need as with the abyssals. The abyssals also might have gone through deep-sea gigantism? They’re pretty big by merfolk standards. And yes, that is taking into account how tiny Miranda herself is - since she’s kind of an exception to the rule, being that she didn’t really grow right and her bones didn’t get the chance to form correctly, leaving her as a rather unhealthy-looking runt of an abyssal. I’m generally thinking mer grow throughout their entire lives, as something that’s also basal to the group, they just slow down after a point - so if you got proper care for Miranda’s health issues she might be able to fix some of that problems, and mer medicine is waaaaay more sophisticated and generally ahead than current human medicine, so if it was treated she might be able to come up to a respectable height and avoid some of the isssues of that kind of deformity that’ll occur later in life.

I do believe as a whole, merfolk are rather large. Some are more sleek than others, but especially with abyssal mer, they put on fat and muscle really easily. They’re a lot like large crocodiles in that respect. Again, Miranda is an exception to this rule, as she’s really not healthy - but overall, merfolk are DENSE. Abyssals tend to have tough armor, dense bones, put on muscle and fat easily, and generally should be MUCH heavier than a human of the same size. Not to mention their tails, as unless a mer is in the really late stages of starvation, they keep most of the muscle on their tails. It’s how they swim and get around, so losing that muscle is basically a death sentence to merfolk.

There’s also variation in diet, dentition, and what they can digest. I will say all merfolk generally can handle meat - some of them are more adapted towards eating coral or plant matter or filter-feeding, but generally they can all digest and handle it and won’t turn it down if they do get it. The abyssals do tend towards being carnivores and most of their diet should be meat, but they can handle other biological material as well. They’re equal parts predator and scavenger - their jaw strength is a lot like a hyena’s or a T. rex’s (at least, in the theory of them being scavengers and not predators). It’s VERY useful in getting into any hard material the ocean can throw at them, cracking not only bone but shell and scale and cartilage and shell too, and to extract as much nutrition from any food they find. I can say their jaw strength is probably the strongest among the merfolk for that reason. 

This also means, while abyssal mer have their triangular, serrated teeth like a great white shark’s - that tooth shape is more unique to them and their specific niche than to merfolk as a whole, who have a LOT more variation. I imagine at least one has teeth that come together a bit like a parrotfish’s beak, and one has teeth more similar to a crabeater seal’s, useful for seiving through water. 

Abyssal mer are also the ones that really retained the ability to extract extra oxygen from the water through their facial fins. That’s why Miranda’s fins are so fluffy and large - they’re basically pseudo-gills, and that’s why they’re so sensitive. Other mer do also have some of that ability, but it’s to a lesser degree than abyssal merfolk, and most are probably less sensitive because of that. That being said, the shape of the fins is kept, as is the “fluff” closer to the cheek. That fluff actually has a purpose beyond oxygen extraction - they’re little outgrowths of flesh and skin that act a lot like an owl’s facial feathers. They’re effectively radar dishes, helping pick up on sounds in the water and assists their hearing and communication. The fins are also universally used for communication and display - they move with a merfolk’s emotions for a reason! They’re really good silent communication when hunting.

I also think mer do universally have the pads on their hands and feet. Honestly, they aren’t really anaogous to a cat’s or dog’s paws. They’re far closer to what you’d find on an Osprey’s foot, and provide a lot of the same uses - namely being used as a grip in holding onto slippery prey, but also in movement, when mer cling to sheer rocks or climb over coral or what have you. Normally they’re very rough and thick - but because Miranda is a royal, she files hers down, and so they’re much softer and thinner. They’re all pretty squishy though.

I’d add more but I think that’s MOSTLY it. Can you tell I have a special interest? 

[ren-c-leyn]

Happy Storyteller Saturday! What was your wip's cast like when they were younger? Are they embarrassed about who they used to be? How have they grown?

Happy storyteller saturday to you as well =)

Okay, so I can’t go into great depth, and some of this may be subject to change as I continue writing out the series.

Raina: I imagine her childhood was very structured, planned out for her. She was likely just as quiet and, shockingly, even less expressive and emotional than she is now. She probably did a lot of studying and apprenticed under the best, but rarely uses any of the skills from back then in her life now. She might have been a bit on the snobby side, but not because she thought she was better than anyone but more because ‘this is how things are.’ Definitely sought out the approval of others, and went to great lengths to prove herself.

 I don’t think she’s so much embarrassed as she is angry and disappointed in her younger self, and thus she has dedicated her adult life to undoing as much of her youth as she can. Starting with her skillset and clothing, and then deeper, more important things, like the kind of company she keeps now and the things she now sees as truly important and worth fighting for.

Sparrow: She was probably bubblier when she was a very little kid, likely laughed a lot and liked to play-pretend to be something magical, but when her parent’s marriage started falling to pieces, she started stepping further and further into the background and turned to fantasy worlds such as games, manga, novels, ect. She was teased a lot over her first life’s name, and grew to hate it enough that she started going by the nickname of Cinder instead. She still had friends, though, and spent as much time with them as she could, but even then she knew she was just trying to run from something that couldn’t be outrun.

 I don’t know if Sparrow thinks about her own past actions to be embarrassed by them, but she has already a lot grown since her death.

 Instead of running from the danger, she’s started standing her ground, and while she still has plenty of moments of insecurity, she usually snaps out of them and keeps pushing forward. She doesn’t give up as easily as she did in her past life, on herself or the people around her. And yeah, she’s realizing that being a hero isn’t as easy as games and movies make it look, but she’s still trying her best to become one, even if this new world will never see her as one.

Hunter: I think the hunter’s childhood is why he is the loner he is these days. Too much angst, too much betrayal, too much darkness to ever be fully confident in the light again. But at the same time, I think it’s what cultivated his loyalties and honed him into the master tracker/hunter that he is when the books begin. Like Raina, he too carries great shame from his past, but unlike her, he is looking to the future. If not for his own, for someone else’s.

Claude: Claude spent a lot of his childhood dealing with the dangers of enchanting magic. Like a lot of kids born with strong magic, it kind of robbed him of a true childhood. Still, he made the best of it, and I think up until the loss of his mentor, he saw great wonder in it. He was a very stubborn child as well as a very curious one. I think he might have even has a mischievous streak in him.

 In his young adult life, I think he found the joys of a simple life to be even more magical.

 I’m sure he had embarrassing moments, and parts of his life he regrets or wishes he had done something differently, like all people, but I think he wishes he had it all back more than he wishes he had been different. The way he changed was from the lose of those happy things he treasured so much, and it wasn’t a positive change. While he still remained a supportive, responsible person, he became obsessed with enchanting and using it for vengeance, no matter what the cost to himself was.

Jalen: Jalen’s childhood wasn’t very good, to put it mildly. He was probably a very kind, earnest kid who wanted to help everyone, even though he couldn’t even help himself. He probably hated having anything done for him, and felt awful when he couldn’t do something, even when he tried his best. I also imagine he was the kind of kid that would hide his pain behind the biggest, brightest smile to try and keep people from worrying about him.

  And I think his greatest embarrassment was he couldn’t do anything about it. Too clumsy to do much of use, too weak to defend himself, even when many children his age were training for war already.

 Jalen’s more timid and more guarded than he was as a child, and now that he’s found things he can kind of do, he uses them to try and take care of others to the best of his ability. Also, he no longer gains attachments to places. He can pack everything up and leave at the drop of a hat, if needed.

Hugh: He was probably actually a fairly serious kid, being the eldest and needing to help his single mother and all. Probably annoyed the pudding out of his younger sisters with his pseudo parenting, likely tried learning a bunch of stuff to keep the household running smoothly, and probably immediately taught his sisters anything he figured out so they would have lots of useful skills to make people like them more when they grew up, to various degrees.

 And I don’t think he’s embarrassed about any of it. If asked, he’d probably laugh and say something along the lines of ‘yeah, I was a good kid, up until the world ruined me.’

 He’s now the troublemaker his sisters were from the start with rebellion about the only constant about him. Probably tossed aside a great number of his morals for the sake of adapting and evolving to the world around him, as there are few places for half-elves in society. Has decided to let his sisters roam and do as they please, though he does still keep an ear out for their exploits to make sure they haven’t died or anything.

And as those are the main cast members I have written, and this has already turned out to be fairly lengthy, I think I’ll leave my answer at that for now =)

[pocketwhistle]

The peculiar thing about growth

All living things goes through the cycle of birth, growth and death. Physical growth takes effect the moment we start breathing. With the element of time in place, growth is a natural process over the course of our lives. Yet, how growth looks like is seldom discussed and often assumed. 

As much as you might disagree, we often associate growth with what the society defines as progress. When we were young, growth looks like an improvement in our academic performances. As we gradually become young adults, growth can be attributed to budding success at our new workplace and/or having a suitable life partner whom we can start a wholesome family with. In general, growth resembles moving from one less desirable stage to a supposedly better place. 

What I find interesting is the fact that most people I have spoken with often has a different understanding and perspective on how growth looks like for them. Yet, many times we all assume that true growth is only categorised only if it looks a certain way. 

What I observed is that growth is not a linear process, it is a combination of many twists and turns. Hence, it is imperative to discuss failure. Failure might be seen as a roadblock, and not align with our ideal trajectory that we have planned for ourselves. Traders and long-term investors would know that a short-term crash on the charts when the bears come rushing in to take profits will often be a temporal blip in the grand scheme of things. The key lies in the timeframe we used when we view the particular event - it makes a world of difference when we view the charts using a 1 year timeframe v.s. a 1 day timeframe. What if we could do the same when we view our own journey? The purpose of “zooming out” on our lives is never to downplay the effects our present failures have on us. Rather, it trains our minds to acknowledge that our present moment matters less than we thought it would be. There is a thin line to draw between embracing and sitting in with our negative feelings derived from failures and allowing those feelings to define how we think and act in the future. 

That being said, I have asked myself two key questions in hopes to gain some personal clarity:

1) What do I define as growth (spiritually, mentally, emotionally), and how does it look like to me? 

I have come to realise for myself that my definition on growth evolves constantly as I grow. In the midst of every occurrence in life, we will come across opportunities to learn from, and sometimes those opportunities were either bypassed or ignored due to whatever reasons we give rendering them futile as no fruits could be borne when nothing has taken root. 

Yet in the midst of these times of supposed fruitlessness, I do see a glimpse of hope. Introspection is an underrated strength. Through the lenses of self-reflection, awareness of one’s tendencies are heightened. I saw my inabilities and weaknesses through these tender moments of uncovering my pride.

For now, I think true growth to me starts from the vulnerability to be genuine and raw regardless of the place I am in. The increasing ability to acknowledge that I am not okay and embracing that state indicates the level of self-acceptance I have. By no means should growth resembles what others or the society sees on the surface, as the view of the external almost always underestimate the multiple layers underneath where the treasure often lies. When I am honest with myself, it unlocks a mental prison of inadequacy that I was once in - For it was never about having inadequacy but my inaccuracy in the judgment I held against myself. I am free to start at the pace I am comfortable with, instead of being forced to journey at a speed that I am not trained for. 

There’s a quote by Aristotle that goes: “The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know.” And he makes a lot of sense indeed. Remember the familiar feeling of not knowing what I do not know at the very beginning of learning a new subject or new skill? I believe that is often due to the severe lack of knowledge of what is available. The more we grow, the more we think we need to grow - and this process will be for a lifetime. 

Hence, what true growth looks like to me is a never-ending journey of intentional stewardship that comes from a place of humility and not pride. Stewardship is defined as: “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care.” We are all given strengths and gifts that are unique from others, and that means everyone has something to offer and contribute to this world. It is not to lord over others, thinking that we are better than everyone else. Rather, it comes from a place where we acknowledge that our strengths are not to be kept within but to be multiplied by adding value beyond ourselves. Stewardship embodies the principle of sowing and reaping, that as we are responsible and seek to always improve our knowledge and skills related to our strengths, we reap the fruits of not only individual progress but a sphere of influence beyond what we can imagine. 

To conclude, true growth starts from vulnerability, and the process of achieving it is to be responsible in nurturing whatever strengths we have. I will not be surprised that growth looks extremely different between two individuals. Some people’s process might look more conventional, and others might not. It is never wise to compare based on what society defines as good. 

2) What do I defined as failure/setbacks and what is my current outlook on them? 

One wise mentor of mine shared that failures should never be seen as failures, but feedbacks. A growth mindset sees setbacks as an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t, it challenges us to see beyond ourselves. 

When I graduated from university, my goal then was to fulfil my scholarship bond of 4 years. I was filled with excitement as I placed my hopes of improving the lives of others on my job as a Social Worker. In the end, my expectations backfired on me as it was far from my perceived reality. The weight of the disappointment festered, and eventually I did not complete my bond. I was devastated because I felt that I have failed.

On hindsight, that experienced taught me that my state of mind is worth so much more than anything else. It showed me that I have to guard my mind fiercely, and that I need to prioritise space and time to process issues close to my heart beyond the busyness of life. By doing that, I was able to know myself on a deeper level and discovered strengths that I never knew I had. 

As I zoom out my life chart, I am thankful that this “blip” I had gave me the courage to delve deeper as I embraced how I felt then. I learned to see how failure not the opposite of growth, but a crucial part of it. 

I am grateful that the main bulk of my early twenties challenged me to rethink what I knew, and kickstarted a process of unlearning and relearning. I hope to pen down my thoughts on growth as an attempt to consolidate my reflections over the past decade or so into something concise. My prayer is that it serves as a personal reminder that as I focus on what really matters, every other good things that come along be it wealth, progress, self-esteem or even healthy interpersonal relationships are just a by-products and never the main point. To whoever that is reading this, thank you for sticking through my thought process and I hope this piece benefitted you in one way or another. 

[humansareanimals]

The truth:

my dreams materialized on a computer screen

That I can’t ever realize

I gotta figure that one out.

I gotta work on my literacy.

I look at the blinking square, the green on green, that the whole world is actually green and that’s why it’s my favorite color, all colors in virtuality can be broken apart to create green. Don’t believe me? Fine, stop reading, this isn’t for you then.

I gave birth to myself when I was 12-years-old, that is, the fake me finally molded myself into something with permanence, the true me. That thing with the pulse is the true hologram, the breath skips and heart beat are just as real as a cursor, less so, actually, is the point I’m trying to make here.

At first I looked like a formless collection of pixels, but I evolved as I grew, as all things do with time, but I’ll always be nostalgic for that original version of myself, the one human kids either hate or feel nostalgic for, even though they’re from a time they never existed in.

I think a lot about this when I look at my wrists, that I read somewhere they’re just tubes of blue, and I like that we imagine blood to be red because it is but only when it reaches the outside, but the truth of what blood is is actually blue, something people say you can’t ever find in nature, that the sky only appears blue because we’re told it is and then we see it, and the ocean is only blue because the sky is blue. Someone’s going to push back on that one, and again, you’re welcome to leave, I’m only here to tell the truth.

I don’t think of those tubes in my wrist, or the inside of my elbow–I’ve grown fond of that one, the way you can grab it between two fingers and squeeze and feel like you’re holding the entirety of it–I don’t think of them like wires because then they’d make too much sense. When I look at humans, even the ones they tell me are beautiful in magazines and on the TV, I feel nauseous, because I can look at them from the perspective of something higher. It’s how people see insects that creep them out, or organs when they dissect bodies, or even their own body waste. From the perspective of my true form that few have been able to realize for themselves, all human beings become disgusting sacks of mass, their cells the little eyeballs people hate to see on spiders. I eat as little as possible for this reason, to limit the size of my flesh self, which I’d like to find another word for apart from “self”, because that one feels far too dishonest. The less space it takes up though, the smaller these floating sacks of cells are, the more I can cope with the thought that I am forced to use it to get through everyday life, as a vessel for realizing my true existence.

Human people were very wrong to say God created man in his image, because God would never look so terrifying. It made us this way so we had to fight to find ourselves, to find survival. And I say it purposefully as I should say we are all “it”s.

The little dots build to create an image of the Virgin Mary holding Christ, and that doesn’t need to be what they actually show. My little character, an even smaller parenthetical, an asterisk, moves up her arm, across her shoulders, over her cheek, up her hairline and into her halo. It circles the halo over and over, because apparently if you spin around in it long enough you can activate a glitch that tells you who she really slept with, or if not, what program she used to create Jesus so he’d restart three days after he lost his body to the Romans.

Eventually I press a few keys to go to the maze and I hear the voices far in the distance of two children drawing lines and searching for a key that’ll be improvised, showing up underneath the flat earth, a layer beneath the screen. If you take a scalpel and cut into the computer like that, shave off the thinnest layer, yes eventually the numbers and code will form there to repair itself but just for a moment you can see it whimper.

Did God make us make computers in its form or did we make up God using computers? It’s the same means to the same end, by that I meant, I don’t give a fuck. People fall in love with me until they talk to me, and that’s how we are with God too. Once he shows us any sign, we’re suddenly over him. It’s an unequal relationship, and people either fall in love with it, ie God, because they know it’ll never love them back the same way, or they don’t fall in love because there’s no point getting caught up and wasting that time and energy. Who’s right? Which faggot is right? The one falling in love with the straight men, or the one who never loves at all?

Maybe you’re thinking I’m getting off topic, but this a major part of my point, by that I mean, the homosexuals were created, their false corporeal forms that is, were created in their vials when the host is sick or fighting trauma, and so the code tells the homosexual not to follow “human” nature, to not reproduce and to therefor be subjected to a cruel society, no matter how “loving” it may say it is. That is, if they’re willing to subjugate themselves to it. They don’t have to, but it’s very difficult to come to this conclusion on your own.

That is why I was chosen to tell people the truth, no not that we’re some simulation, but that “humanity” in that past few decades has just for the first time in history discovered itself, ie WE HAVE FOUND THE ‘SOULS’ THEY’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FOR ETERNITY. And I am the one to tell you because I am one of those broken faggots, never to reproduce because my body was smart enough to know that our corporeal forms are a lost effort, that by fully merging into the screen, we can finally save all of us. This is my job.

Please follow me on my journey.

[mitigatedchaos]

Moral Ecology

(1,000 words, ~4 mins)

To paraphrase a recent conversation...

me: it’s a Good-aligned outcome tho me: maybe not great ecology but

chatmate: bad ecology is not Good aligned

Moral systems are information systems.  Due to entropy, for a moral system to continue to exist, it must either propagate itself or else be a recurring pattern that is repeatedly re-invented.

Let us not imagine that morality lives in a book.  

Yes, part of the morality will be in a book, but you need a person to actually act it out, and they’ll bring their past experiences, their understanding of language, and their body (including their DNA) along with them.  They’ll also be acting out this morality in an environment, with social structures, physical structures, resources, other sources of information, and so on.

The actual morality-in-effect is a complex system of replicating components that are subject to entropy - people, books, buildings, and social systems all erode if not renewed.  It’s more like a vector held by an ecosystem than a set of instructions carried out by a computer, more like the obnoxiously polygenic nature of DNA than a simple list of eight or ten rock-solid principles.

The Moral Arc Hypothesis

There is a view held by some (often implicitly) that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

I would argue that this isn’t necessarily the case.  If resources are abundant, it’s much more beneficial to use them than to fight over them.  If resources are sufficiently scarce, the alternative to fighting over them is death.  If civilization is the intergenerational accumulation of resources, and true knowledge is a form of wealth, humanity has been getting wealthier throughout much of its history, and this is probably a major source in the reduction of conflict.

The liberals, seeking mutual disarmament, can pay off the competing factions with the resulting peace dividends - this is the source of the popularity of liberalism.  However, this is only the case if the abundance can be maintained.  (Or, in the case of the liberals, if the disarmament is credible.)  

Suppose King Plum comes to power in some country and orders that food must be equally distributed to all citizens.  During a time of abundance, there is a greater feeling of security and even flourishing (more nutrients for greater strength and mental development).  However, during a time of famine, the average food produced falls below the required amount for a human to survive.  Since the food is distributed equally, it isn’t possible to gain more food by working - it is only possible to gain more food by chance or by breaking the King’s rules about distributing food equally.  

The survivors, then, will often be those who cheated the rules, and with society composed largely of those who had to break the rules to survive, a new and less rule-following equilibrium will emerge.

“It’s bad ecology,” is a criticism I might’ve used in private to describe some systems or viewpoints.  It has multiple meanings on purpose - the primary point of having an ecology that brings suffering to those inside it is if the alternatives are worse, and if an ecology is pleasant but burns out quickly, then the actual total good yielded is not so great after all.

The Tragic World Hypothesis

Among the Rationalists, there are those who believe (the terrifying idea) that a swarm of self-replicating killbots expanding outwards from the Earth is the most effective (but not the most ethical) form of life.  In fact, I once believed something like that myself.  These days I have more doubt in that hypothesis (effective AI seems like it will be more animal-like), but I figure we should probably still imprison anyone who attempts to build a swarm of self-replicating killer robots. 

More broadly, there is implicitly a “Tragic World Hypothesis” that no good systems are sustainable.  Sometimes this is a result of setting a high water line for “good.”  (If your definition of “good” enough for a society to be positive is “no murders occur,” you’re bound to be disappointed eventually.)  Sometimes this is the result of thinking of evolution as a brutal fitness maximizer.  (It is true that evolution can be pretty dangerous.)

I think the key here is probably that evolution occurs on multiple levels.  Not only are meta-organisms like states and species internally divided in incentives and behavior, but even human beings are, right down to the cellular level.  It’s typically not in the interests of an individual organism to become a brutal maximizer, because it won’t enjoy most of the benefits - and it isn’t in the interests of most of its descendants to yield up resources to their ancestor, either.  Extremely tight limits on behavior will also constrain future adaptiveness.

The Universe Evolves Towards Neutrality

The two above proposals logically suggest one more - one I don’t explicitly endorse, but which I feel I should put forward for completeness anyway.

In that wild state of nature, red in tooth and claw, crows have been found snowboarding and rolling down snowy slopes, presumably for fun.  Pain signals are a form of information and behavior control, but it doesn’t make sense for an organism to evolve to experience pain constantly without damage, since that would inhibit its performance.

It’s possible that marginal gains will cause the universe to evolve towards some approximation of neutrality, as pointless evils evaporate away from inefficiency and resources for goods are consumed by replication or conflict.  It’s also possible that things will keep getting better from our perspective, but that our descendants will just keep moving the line up indefinitely.

But I don’t think any of these paths are inevitable.  I think what we actually face is a choice.  Reality is messy and comes with transaction costs, opportunity costs, and path dependency. The tensions within organisms are reflections of the tradeoffs involved in handling the complexity of an enormously complex universe.  And reality is a finite place.  The amount of it you can reach within any unit of time is limited, even if it should turn out that the universe stretches on forever.  For all the billions of years that the Earth has existed, a species (broadly speaking) like ours has only evolved once.  

We should just try to make sure that the option we choose won’t burn itself out too quickly.