#modern relevance

[the-henry-cavillian]

Henry Cavill: Unmasking The Best Sherlock Holmes Of All Time

Sherlock Holmes, the legendary detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has been portrayed by numerous actors throughout the years. However, in recent times, one name stands out as the epitome of the iconic character: Henry Cavill. With his charismatic presence, exceptional talent, and attention to detail, Cavill has delivered a Sherlock Holmes portrayal that is unparalleled. Let us delve into why Henry Cavill is undeniably the best Sherlock Holmes ever.

Unwavering Deduction Skills:

Cavill's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes showcases an unparalleled ability to deduce and unravel complex mysteries. His attention to detail and keen observation skills are simply astonishing. From analyzing minute details to connecting seemingly unrelated pieces of information, Cavill's portrayal captures the brilliance of Holmes' deductive reasoning in the most compelling manner.

Captivating Physicality:

Sherlock Holmes is known for his unique physical presence, and Henry Cavill embodies this perfectly. With his tall stature, chiseled features, and striking gaze, Cavill portrays Holmes as an imposing figure who demands attention. His physicality adds an extra layer of authenticity to the character, making his portrayal all the more captivating.

Nuanced Characterization: 

Cavill brings depth and complexity to Sherlock Holmes, going beyond the detective's intellectual prowess. He portrays Holmes as a multidimensional character, with flaws and vulnerabilities that make him more relatable and human. Cavill's performance allows the audience to witness the internal struggles and emotional growth of Holmes, creating a nuanced portrayal that resonates deeply.

Dynamic Chemistry with Watson: 

One of the key dynamics in any Sherlock Holmes adaptation is the relationship between Holmes and his trusted companion, Dr. John Watson. Henry Cavill's chemistry with co-stars and his ability to create a genuine connection shine through in his portrayal of Holmes. The on-screen camaraderie between Cavill and his Watson counterpart adds an extra layer of authenticity to their partnership, making it a joy to watch.

Modern Relevance:

Cavill's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes also brings the character into the modern era, injecting fresh energy and relevance into the iconic detective. He effortlessly navigates Holmes' transition into contemporary society, incorporating technology and modern challenges seamlessly. Cavill's Holmes serves as a bridge between the classic tales of Conan Doyle and the present-day world, making the character accessible to a new generation of fans.

[wkaustubh]

Thai Temples: Unraveling Architectural Marvels and Spiritual Oases

Embark on a journey into the heart of Thailand's cultural and spiritual heritage through its architectural gems – the Thai temples, considered among the 10 best temples in Thailand. Beyond being mere structures, these temples embody a profound connection between artistry, spirituality, and the nation's rich history. As you explore these sacred sites, don't miss the opportunity to discover the cultural and spiritual tapestry of Thailand, which extends beyond its mainland to the enchanting islands in Thailand.

Historical Roots

Thai temple architecture traces its roots to ancient times, shaped by cultural influences and artistic evolution. The intricate details and unique features of these temples tell a tale of centuries-old craftsmanship and architectural innovation.

Architectural Extravaganza

Delve into the mesmerizing world of Thai temple architecture, where every detail is a testament to skilled craftsmanship. From elaborate facades to towering spires, each temple stands as a testament to the awe-inspiring beauty of Thai design.

Symbolic Essence

Unravel the symbolic significance hidden within the architectural elements of Thai temples. These symbols are not mere decorations; they convey profound messages rooted in Buddhist teachings, fostering a spiritual connection for those who enter.

Iconic Temples

Explore the history and architectural brilliance of Thailand's most iconic temples. Wat Phra Kaew, Wat Arun, Wat Pho, and Wat Rong Khun are not just tourist attractions; they are living testaments to Thailand's cultural and spiritual identity.

Spiritual Retreats

Thai temples offer more than visual splendor; they serve as sanctuaries for spiritual seekers. Meditation programs within temple grounds provide a unique opportunity for introspection, creating a harmonious blend of tranquility and self-discovery.

Cultural Impacts

Beyond religious practices, Thai temples influence every facet of culture. They inspire art, literature, and festivals, contributing to the vibrant tapestry of Thai cultural heritage.

Practical Tips for Visitors

For those planning to explore Thai temples, understanding the nuances of temple etiquette is essential. From appropriate dress codes to respectful behavior during ceremonies, these guidelines enhance the visitor's experience.

Preservation Challenges

Preserving historical temples poses unique challenges. Efforts to maintain these structures involve a delicate balance between conservation and allowing them to adapt to contemporary needs.

Modern Relevance

Thai temples are not relics of the past; they continue to play a vital role in modern society. Their ability to seamlessly integrate tradition with the demands of the present ensures their enduring relevance.

Global Allure

Thai temples have transcended national borders, gaining global recognition. They attract not only tourists but also scholars and enthusiasts eager to explore the profound cultural and spiritual wealth they embody.

Architect's Insights

Gain exclusive insights into Thai temple architecture through an interview with a seasoned temple architect. Understand the design philosophy, challenges faced, and innovative approaches adopted in temple construction.

Community Engagement

Thai temples are not isolated entities; they are integral to local communities. Discover how these temples contribute to the social and economic well-being of the areas they inhabit.

Future Trends

As architectural trends evolve, so do Thai temples. Explore the innovative and sustainable approaches adopted in contemporary temple construction, ensuring their preservation for future generations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Thai temples stand as living monuments, inviting all to immerse themselves in the beauty of culture and spirituality. As you explore these architectural wonders, may you find inspiration and a deeper connection to the essence of Thailand.

[thunkdeep]

Why Did the People Not Make it into the Promised Land?

This blog delves into the story of the Israelites not entering the Promised Land, exploring themes of faith, trust, and human struggle. It intertwines religious narratives with modern relevance, reflecting on how ancient tales resonate in contemporary...

Introduction: A Journey of Faith and Faltering Picture this: a multitude, freed from bondage, stands at the threshold of a land flowing with milk and honey. Promised, yet perplexing. The story of the Israelites not entering the Promised Land is one that weaves through the complex tapestry of faith, human emotion, and divine will. Why, after years of wandering, did they not set foot in that…

[the-whispers-of-death]

No, no, I can't stay silent anymore. I don't think Simon "Ghost" Riley looks at you and thinks "I can fix them." He doesn't seem like that type of a man to me.

He looks at you, all of you (your bad, your good, your little quirks), and he thinks "I can love them." And I think part of it is because he's searching for the person that would also look at him and think that they can love him as he is.

So he looks at his partners in their entirety and decides that while they might need to be fixed, he doesn't need to fix them himself. He needs to love them so that they see that they can fix them themselves.

And I think that's beautiful.

[luna-loveboop]

Had the dumbest conversation with my sister and it reminded me of these two. Sending a resume including SCUBA ocean diving certifications without context while applying for a job seems like something Wind would do.

:)

[wardensantoineandevka]

This rendering of readerly empathy outlined here seems to describe how fiction is received today. If something horrible acts upon a character, the reader can sometimes feel as though the author is punishing some innocent little doll baby with whom the reader has overidentified. The character has become a de facto stand-in for the reader, so the character carries this burden of readerly expectation. Thus, for a character to feel real, we shave down the contours of their lives and their interiority until they match what readers know of their own flow of thoughts and life events. I believe that this accounts for what feels to me like a decline in character in contemporary fiction.

— Brandon Taylor, "False Light: Moral Worldbuilding and the Virtues of Evil"

[serpentface]

What’s the architecture/layout of old Bur, how do modern people perceive the ruins?

The city in its peak was very large and spread over both shoreline and a network of small islands. These islands comprised a waterfront district connected by a network of bridges and canals, where a large portion of its non-agricultural lower class lived.

It had a fairly well organized and efficient freshwater+sanitation system across most of its span (the canal district had less effective plumbing largely due to logistical difficulties, most of its wastewater was instead flushed by rain powered cisterns). The water system was powered by the Hsuke river and made fresh water readily accessible throughout the majority of the city (though few homes had direct freshwater plumbing). It had several major public baths, and the homes of the wealthiest members of society had their own private bathing pools.

In this part of the world, it is broadly regarded as once being one of the most beautiful cities to have ever existed. It was particularly noted for its water gardens (still a fixture of present day Burri culture) which were absolute marvels of engineering for that period, with the majority of these being entirely artificial and supported by its network of aqueducts. These hosted thousands of ornamental plants, fish, and fowl, as well as fruiting trees and shrubs. They were treated as a public work meant to benefit all citizens, and existed throughout the city.

The palace in particular was noted as impressive, in part for its architecture but mainly for its gardens. These hosted 'exotic' plants and a menagerie of animals from across the empire's territory, and existed in part as a symbol of the state's power and reach. It was a trend for emperors to bring in the fiercest animal from each conquered province to the grounds, with the an-nechoi being the beast of choice from the lands across the sea to the east, with one (Probably erroneously) cited as killing thirty servants in the process of moving it into the gardens.

The palace was located within the temple district. This district housed over a hundred shrines to the various lesser deities of the pantheon, and temple complexes to the seven chief deities (the firstborn gods who created the world, all other gods were later descendants). Old Burri temples were Kinda similar in shape to a ziggurat, though had an accessible interior space and a central tower which housed the shrine. At this time, the chief gods were believed to physically inhabit their temples. Each god had its own high priest permitted to attend to their shrine, with the emperor being the high priest to Inanariya (king of the gods) and the only person permitted to directly commune with this deity. The foundations to these temples are relatively intact in the present day, though none of the towers remain (collapsed in earthquakes with no one to rebuild them).

The city was heavily fortified, having one external wall surrounding most of its length, and an internal wall surrounding the palace/temple district (which doubled as a fortress).

---

The period of sea level rise began with a 500ish year period of mostly gradual increase, which occurred slowly enough that most infrastructure could adapt very easily and the problem went unnoticed by most (the city of Bur experienced most of its Growth during this time). It then culminated with about a century of (relatively) rapid rise, which is the direct cause of the city's abandonment.

The canals flooding had always been a problem during storms, but this began to occur with notable frequency, alongside the water level as a whole rising quickly enough to be noticed on an immediate human timespan. The canal district was maintained for a while by rerouting some of its waterways and building up barriers, but it was the first part of the city to be abandoned. Things got more serious when the mainland parts of the city grew increasingly impacted by storm surges that never seemed to fully retract, and major parts of its surrounding farmland were hit by surges and tidal waves, and rendered too saline to remain arable.

The actual single biggest cataclysm was the collapse of the city's mainland sewage system. It was built with flood canals as a failsafe, but these were built to withstand heavy rain rather than an encroaching ocean. Storm surges would cause large segments of the city to be flooded with sewage (including some of the freshwater plumbing), and serious disease outbreaks would follow.

These issues were enabled/exacerbated by earthquakes (the region is geologically active and this isn't unusual) that further damaged and mingled the sewage and freshwater systems. One earthquake and its subsequent tidal wave was a turning point, and the resulting breakdown of (already strained) infrastructure rendered a large swath of the city uninhabitable in the space of about a week. This also just caused immediate damage to much of the city's architecture/walls, and collapsed the tower of the temple to Inanariya (never a good sign). This is when the full exodus began, first with people flocking to un-flooded parts of its city and farmlands, and those who could afford it fully relocating to other cities/towns.

All of this issues were compounded by the 1st Burri Empire already being in a period of collapse at this time. This was largely a matter of simple overextension. Its borders were constantly under attack by rival states/its victims, sometimes with great success. Bur's own population had burgeoned well past what the imperial core land could sustain, and its cities relied predominantly on extraction of foreign grain/goods to feed their people. It lost most of its eastern land holdings in a fairly rapid timespan (overextended with wars at multiple fronts), which caused frequent famines in its core.

This put pressure on its final emperors to invest in increasingly desperate expansionist projects, while attempting to keep up public morale with lavish public works and objectively stupid vanity projects. The attempt to excavate a canal at the Viper seaway's 'tail' (one of the few eastern regions it retained secure control of at that point) was in part a desperate act to revive its economy by opening up/monopolizing a new trade system. The amount of money and manpower sunk into this ultimately doomed project was followed by Bur being fully ousted from its eastern holdings, and was one of the final straws in its collapse.

People in the city of Bur proper were dealing with the double front of starvation and their homes + streets + immediate water supply being flooded with seawater and literal human feces. These issues impacted the lower classes first and most severely, but ultimately transcended class boundaries. Famine grew more and more rampant, not only with the loss of the colonial holdings that supported the population but of farmland in the imperial core- much of the city of Bur's immediate farmlands were unproductive due to repeat inundation with saltwater during surges, and the farmland along the Yamage river to the north was rapidly being captured and pillaged by the Hsem (historical enemies, a nomadic group with a khait warrior culture from further west).

All this was fucking unlivable in of itself, but also had very obvious implications in the context of Burri emperors also being high priests and the chief intermediary between the gods and the people. Not only was the government failing to sustain its citizens to begin with, but signs of divine disapproval were deeply apparent.

So the last days of the 1st Burri empire were a chaotic period of civil unrest, most acute in and around city of Bur proper. This involved near-constant peasant revolts and several attempted coups. The last Burri emperor (of the First empire) ultimately fled the capital of Bur and reestablished in Titenegal, declaring it the new capital. This was then sacked by the Hsem within a year and after that it was fucking Joever.

The city of Bur was functionally abandoned by this point. People still Lived There and there were several attempts to set up a new government, all of which failed in the short term. After the collapse was complete, its inhabitants were mostly just peasants who built up new homes further inland and sustained themselves on the remaining farmland. Few people lived permanently in the city proper due to all of its intact infrastructure being effectively non-functional without the governmental bodies/human labor to sustain it.

---

It should also be noted that it was Extremely not just Bur that was flooded, the sea level rise was worldwide (resulting from a collapsing ice sheet) and almost Every coastal city during this period experienced the same issue. Bur's demise was just notably dramatic in that it was once the most heavily populated human city that has Ever Existed, and directly correlated with the fall of the empire it hosted.

The flooding was fairly gradual, but it's been 7 centuries since the first Burri empire's collapse and the fall of its capital city, and many contemporary records were lost to the immediate chaos and to the large span of time since. Cultural memory tends to reframe the flood VERY rapid on a human scale, many of the stories describe the city being swallowed in a single wave as an act of divine punishment (the popular notion at the time that the last emperors deeply displeased and shamed the gods has stuck into the narrative, often exaggerated into stories of them being horrifically debauched blasphemers guilty of the worst disgraces imaginable). Even more conservative accounts tend to imagine the totality of the destruction taking place over the span of about a year (merging the memories of the immediate earthquake devastation with more gradual elements of its slow flooding). People widely believe that most of its residents drowned in the city's cataclysmic demise, and that the ruins are now Extremely haunted.

The state of the flooding is not 'completely under the sea' and you can still walk/wade through most of the inland ruins (the canal district is effectively submerged, with most structures that Would be above the water level having collapsed against the strain). As such, some people Do Live Here. These people are mostly smugglers and pirates using the ruins as a hideout, and/or opportunistic hunters and fishermen who won't let ghosts stop them. Entering the city ruins is currently forbidden (largely Because of the criminal nature of basically every motive to go here (even hunting, which is considered poaching)), but enforcement of this rule/active patrols to prevent entry are inconsistent.

The majority of Old Bur's inhabitants are animals. The un-flooded parts of the city and its gardens are now a host to a thriving community of native plants and animals (and a few descendants of escaped non-native zoo animals/ornamental plants that adapted well to the conditions).

The egret shown here is a foreign species originally brought as an ornamental bird. In the centuries since its first import, it has become widespread and occurs on both sides of the Mouth seaway. It can hunt in both freshwater and saline environments, and a very large population lives permanently in the ruins of Old Bur.

Its common name is the ghost egret. Contemporary Burri folklore holds that the ghost egrets of Old Bur are literal ghosts, carrying the souls of those who died in the cataclysmic floods.

[arsenicflame]

steddyhands au where Stede & Izzy start fake dating to scam a load of money (either to secure Stede's inheritance, or just like a classic wedding gift scam or something) but they also still both kinda hate each other and are constantly bickering, and keep slipping up and raising suspicion & have to dig themselves a deeper and deeper lie to keep the ruse up

(meanwhile, Stede AND Izzy have independently started fucking Ed behind each others back. Ed thinks hes seeing a wonderful polyamorous couple who just arent interested in threesomes, meanwhile Izzy and Stede are desperately trying to keep the other from finding out theyre sleeping with someone else)

(yes they hate each other and arent even dating for real. yes they are sneaking Ed behind the others back like its a real affair. its stizzy)

[skitskatdacat63]

All I want for Christmas isssssssssss to completely demolish your chances of winning another championship~

+

without text, and the lineart I really like:

plus some of my inspos:

and if only I wasn't a coward....

[the-mang0tree]

[teyrnacousland]

To the people complaining about how the word nonbinary, a word dating back to early 1940s, is "too modern" to be used in Dragon Age, here is a quick list of some other modern words in invented in the 1900s that I found in Dragon Age games! I expect you to be equally angry at these:

Surreal

Escalate

Empathy

Lifestyle

Snarky

Cool

Breakthrough

Dysfunction

There's also the fact that they use our english words for the days of the week, despite most of those being named after gods that don't exist in Thedas.

But we're all more than happy to either ignore all this or headcanon in different origins for all these words. So why don't people have the same attitude towards the word "nonbinary"?

[sualne]

modern au relationships chart

[frankingsteinery]

all victor hateposts boil down to are "i hate victor because [he displays XYZ mental/physical illness symptom]" or "i hate victor because [he does things or reacts in a certain way because of reasons outside of his control due to his illness]"

[cobaltegg]

ok if youre still on board with the she'd-be-catholic shit,,, imagine if you will that john created a powerful AI (Alecto) to save the world that went horribly wrong, then put her in a robot body, and then hid her code in some anime waifu vocaloid when she got to be too much for him. and also the lyctors are cyborgs

the previous posts below cuz its been awhile

[claitea]

i know i shouldnt dwell on stupid opinions like this but a while ago i saw someone complain that Applin was a boring concept bc its just a worm in an apple and i was FLOORED. this iirc was in response to smth about gen 1 designs being boring as well

its not just a worm its a Wyrm its a pun. that is a concept. maybe you don't like it personally but to say its objectively bad is certainly Something. not every pokemon has to be based on a myth or something else fantastical to be a good concept. you Need "boring" pokemon for the dex to feel complete, if Everything is Cool then nothing is actually cool

"gamefreak is running out of ideas" yeah there's a billion fish pokemon but they're all actually very different to each other, lanturn is an anglerfish and lumineon is a butterfly fish. say what you will abt gamefreak rn its probably warranted but imo the one thing they still do right 100% of the time is unique concepts for each pokemon. the execution can be debated but the fundamentals are always there

[maaaxx]

Crack modern atla au but where zuko is still chasing down aang but instead of him trying to capture him, ozai owns a car dealership and he sends zuko to contact aang about his cars extended warranty